Last night, a friend of mine shared a link on Facebook called Fat Men Are Better in Bed on his Facebook wall. It was an interesting headline, so I clicked through to the post.

The post from Gawker stated that “researchers have found that men with higher body mass indices last seven minutes longer than their slender counterparts.” Therefore, the author decided that fat men were better in bed. The author did not state who performed the study. Instead, the post referenced another post from Salon, called: “Sex researchers: size does matter“, which also made an indication that fat men were better in bed.

I was curious about these assertions, so I investigated the sources for the Salon article. It listed two sources, neither of which made that assertion that fat men were better in bed.

One source that the Salon article referred to was a Courier Mail article, which  presented information on the yearlong study performed by Researchers at Erciyes University in Kayseri. This blurb was included in the Courier Mail article:

The survey’s results found fat men could last an average of 7.3 minutes during love making, while others only lasted 1.8 minutes.

So, when I clicked through to the second source used by Salon, it was an abstract of the study everyone was referring to, called: “Insight on pathogenesis of lifelong premature ejaculation: inverse relationship between lifelong premature ejaculation and obesity”.

Ah, so now we are getting somewhere, the study that Gawker refers to actually focused on 100 men who are no strangers to premature ejaculation. Reading the post, you might think that the study was indicative of ALL men in the general population.

So, fat men who ejaculate prematurely are indicated to last an average of  5 minutes longer than lean men who also ejaculate prematurely. I didn’t see that anywhere in the Gawker post

Additionally, I noted that Gawker gave seven additional minutes of sex to fat men. That’s not what the study said. The study said that fat men (who ejaculate prematurely) last an average 7.3 minutes versus the lean men (who also ejaculate prematurely) who last only 1.8 minutes on average. Gawker gave an extra two minutes to fat men, unless you take the post literally at seven minutes of more sex for fat men . Then, this would result in an entire nine minutes more of sex than lean men.

That’s very generous of the author of the Gawker post to give fat men so much more time in bed.

So, when I made these discoveries, I posted comments as I thought about them on my friend’s Facebook page. After all, he was sharing false information and it was my duty to debunk the misinformation. I went on with a one-sided rant and made four comments over the course of about an hour, while no one else weighed in on my comments.

Instead, my friend’s friends continued to “Like” the article and probably shared it with their friends, as well.

So, I left a comment on Gawker with my concerns, but instead received a reply from a fellow reader. He told me to disregard the information, consider the source, and “enjoy the ride” as far as Gawker posts are concerned.

What I soon realized is that no one cared about whether the post in question was factual or not as they continue to share it on Facebook. It asserted that fat men were better in bed and presented false information on top of it. Now, we’ve got fat men with inflated confidence, probably aiming to use the Gawker article as a pick up line at bars.

So, perhaps I can do some good and prepare some women out there, in the event that this does happen. I’m sure that they must care. Someone must care.

If you do care, try a little experiment for me. The next time you find an interesting article – sex study related or not, do some research. Click through to the article that the article was based on, and keep doing that on each article that comes up until you find the original source. Even then, if the article is based on scientific research, you may want to even try to access that source to get accurate information.

You will be very surprised how article information tends to become garbled during regurgitation of the same information as it is passed along from one author to another.

Consider the source.