Television as Birth Control?

India has a problem - too many people. This is what tends to happen when people have sex too often. Unfortunately, people tend to have sex frequently because (1) it's usually pleasurable, (2) it doesn't require the sort of specialized equipment needed for most sports (unless you count the mirrors and the trapeeze), and (3) they don't have anything else to do. And there are other reasons: 80 year-old Omar Mohammed has 24 children - 13 boys and 11 girls - and says it's God's will ("This is His command. It's not my doing, it's His doing").

According to this article I spotted a few weeks ago (the source of the little vignette on studly octogenarian Omar Mohammed cited above), on the occasion of World Population Day, the Indian Minister of Health and Welfare offered a novel plan to help cut down on sex and, thus, on the burgeoning population: Bring electricity to every Indian village so that people will watch television until late at night and, thus, be too tired to make babies.

Well...

It's a novel plan, but I'm not sure it will work as advertised. For one thing, you'd have to make sure that the TV sets aren't located in the bedroom, to prevent people from having sex during commercials. You'd have to be sure that the cable or satellite TV channels available to those sets didn't include things like Playboy TV, Spice Channel, or other channels bringing hard- or soft-core pornography (which would sort of defeat the purpose). You'd have to make sure that the sets featured really good sleep-inducing channels instead - like the Golf Channel, the Bowling Channel, and anything featuring Oprah Winfrey. And you'd have to be sure that the Food Network ... uh ... never mind.

If the goal is really to reduce population by cutting down on sex, it seems to me that there are easier, cheaper ways to do it than by going to the expense of bringing television to remote Indian villages. One might be by encouraging marriage, as anecdotal information indicates that married couples have sex far less frequently after the first month (okay, first week). Another might be by providing other distractions, like bars and golf courses (for the men) and shoe stores and evening Tupperware parties (for the women). Viagra-shaped placebos could be widely distributed. Etc.

All I know is that, at my age, I'm not worried about cutting down on sex...I'm trying to remember why I was interested in it in the first place.

What was I talking about, again?

Have a good day. Watch more TV.

More thoughts tomorrow.

Bilbo