Socioeconomic, Anthropomorphic, and Demographic Predictors of Adult Sexual Activity in the United States: Data from the National Survey of Family Growth. A Comment

Michael Eisenberg, my son and lead author of this article [1], has sent me copies of the articles that he has taken a hand in writing. After quickly reading through this article I thought it might be interesting to a friend of mine who teaches at a local private school. One of his responsibilities, in addition to teaching physics, is being a counselor and advisor to around 10–15 students every year. As you can imagine, one topic that seems to be in the forefront of their minds, he tells me, is sex—who is doing it and how often. That seems to be, real or imagined, one of their measures of success. I read through it, and thought that this would be something he could use to answer the questions he is occasionally asked by his advisees. What prompted me to write this letter though was what he related to me when I asked him about the article. This summarizes what he said: “The article was quite interesting. One thing that struck me as I was reading it, and your son made passing reference to it, is that measuring sexual activity is imprecise. Whether it is poor memory, exaggeration, or understatement, themere act ofmeasuring seemed to distort the results.” The imperfections of measuring other components of sexuality such as overall function or interest have also been noted [2,3]. It was surprising that even an objective item, such as monthly frequency, may also be difficult to measure, and as noted in the last paper, what even constitutes having “had sex” [4]. My friend continued, “Where had I seen that before? It is in the unit I teach each year on quantum physics, and it is the famous Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle, where that act of trying to measure a quantum particle distorts either its true velocity or position.” With a view to this, and noting Michael’s last name, perhaps from now on, the imprecision of measuring sexual activity should be referred to as “The Eisenberg Uncertainty Principle.”