When the only connections in bed are wireless

Last year, Japanese sleep scientists studied the influence of electronic media, including TV, computers and PDAs on more than 5,800 Japanese people. About half said they thought they were not getting enough sleep because they were up using the Internet or watching TV. As it turned out, the actual amount of sleep between users and non-users did not vary much, but users perceived a lack of sleep quality and sleep amount. This perception was aggravated on nights before work days.

If you think you’re tired and stressed, sex is not going to be a must-do item.

All this news may lead you to think that we are too busy, too tired, too distracted and too desirous of flat-screen TVs to have sex, and that even if we are having sex there’s an outside chance our gonads are so fried by our constant connectedness they’re making sperm look more like the Hunchback of Notre Dame than sleek cruise missiles.

Seeking distraction?
Not so fast, says sexologist Bob Berkowitz, a co-author of the new book “He’s Just Not Up for It Anymore: Why Men Stop Having Sex, and What You Can Do About It.”

It is not so much that we are victims of the machines as it is that we often “allow ourselves to be distracted by technology. Whether it is computers or BlackBerries or TVs in the bedroom, sometimes I think we are choosing to be distracted. It’s almost like ‘Let’s watch TV so we do not have to talk.’”

Technology, Berkowitz points out, is neither good nor bad. As Sexploration has stated before, as in a recent column about connection in virtual worlds, there are ways technology can positively influence sex. “If you are connecting with a significant other via a cell pone or BlackBerry or laptop, that could be a good thing to do,” Berkowitz says.

True, we can be distracted by any number of things, like reading a book. There’s the old cliché of the man reading the sports page over breakfast and ignoring his wife. Plug “PDA” into that scenario and it doesn’t sound much different.

Yet we often feel beholden to our technology. This month’s Solutions Research Group survey found that 63 percent of Americans agree with the statement “I’m the kind of person who likes to be in touch all the time.”

One person quoted in the study’s summary told this story:

“A couple of years ago I was in Asia traveling around and my wife and I went to Cambodia and the area that we were in [had] NO ACCESS. So we went for four days and that was tough and when we got back to Hong Kong my wife knew I needed to sync up with my BlackBerry. So I am sitting on the train from the airport headed back to the city ... and I’ve got a flood, a flood of e-mails. And it’s just you are used to a certain type of access and efficiency so you can run your lifestyle the way you want to, then all of a sudden it’s been taken away — like someone taking away your driver's license.”

Wife. Exotic vacation. E-mail? This is why every gadget comes with an “off” button.

Brian Alexander is the author of the new book “America Unzipped: In Search of Sex and Satisfaction.”

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