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.... "So how," I recently absent-mindedly said to my wife, the world-class retailer of books for kids, while trying to work on an article about strategies to prevent skin cancer, "would you sell the idea that doing skin self-examinations is a very important thing to do on a regular basis, and that it might even save their lives one day?"
.... "Easy," she said as she always does, prompting me to wonder for the thousandth time why everything that seems so hard to me is so easy for her, although also as always, I couldn’t figure out the answer, which simply left |
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me muttering that I just don’t understand women, something every male reading this will no doubt relate to.
.... "Easy? How is it easy?" I continued, still having no idea where this was going to go.
.... "With sex," she replied without looking up and continuing to do what it is that women do when men can’t see what they’re doing – running the universe, I think.
.... "What do you mean "with sex?", I asked cautiously. "Sex has nothing to do with skin," at which point my wife looked up from her universe-running tasks and shot me one of those "how did I marry such a dumb twit" looks I regularly get when once again I reveal just how dumb I really can be.
.... "Not to make too fine a point of this," she calmly replied, "because you’re the famous doctor (I think I detected a sneer when she said this but I decided to ignore it) and hot-shot columnist (ditto!) and I’m not, but it seems to me that if you can make doing something – anything - seem sexy, not just a chore, you’ll probably persuade lots more people, especially young ones, to do it. Remember what you were like when you were young?"
.... Actually, no, I don’t remember, or at least I choose not to remember back that far, but that reluctance didn’t affect the fact that it was clear to me that my |
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wife had hit the proverbial nail on the head yet again (although I didn’t, of course, tell her because her ego – and more to the point, mine – couldn’t handle another of her triumphs). But right she is, as witness a recent study that determined that way more people enjoy skin exams when they get them done by a partner than if they do the skin self-examinations themselves, and no, by "partner" I don’t think they meant a business associate or a bridge buddy.
.... To be fair, this study didn’t really deal with skin and sex, but it easily could have. You see, this study involved people who had previously had therapy for a malignant melanoma (the most severe and deadly form of skin cancer) and for whom it’s absolutely vital to do regular skin self-examinations so that they might pick up the first hint that the malignancy is returning. Among such people, the researchers found, there is much more "confidence" in doing skin self-examinations if they’re taught to do the exams "along with a partner".
So where does the sex come in, you ask? As my wife would say, "Easy." You see, confidence breeds co-operation, by which I mean that if you have confidence in your skills, you’re much more likely to do what you’re supposed to do than if you lack that confi |
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