I prefer sex to surveys

After exhaustive research into what young men like, Bacardi has come up with the fact that most chaps prefer their bloke chums to sex. Let's not take this too seriously - for a start, what the chaps involved actually said, of course, is that they prefer their chums to their

Pretty much every health-cum-lifestyle mag in the world has weighed in with a pastime that its readers prefer to the big sweaty one, from gardening - one in four New Eden readers - to sleeping (one in three Zest readers, would you believe. That's like a serial killer reading Know Your Pet). Eating, drinking, watching telly, playing football, ironing, putting make-up on and going clubbing are all way beyond schtupping in the popularity stakes, which is why we're all very fat, yet toned, with excellent all-over foundation coverage, nicely pressed seams, a good working knowledge of underground dance tunes and, as a species, are on the point of extinction. Seriously, though, this is completely bogus, isn't it? Even taking into account that most people, by sex, mean "sex with my sex chum, whom I've been doing sex with for ages", they can't really mean this, can they?

Would any of them really cross a whole continent for some chocolate? Or abandon their spouse and children for a really nice garden? Could all the magazines on the planet, pooling their resources and doing some proper work which didn't just involve ringing their mates, come up with a single reader who would screw over their best friend for some make-up?

And all those people who claimed to prefer eating and drinking to making the two-backed beast, what exactly are they ingesting? Just how much of a grunter would you have to be to think, "Well, I could get my end away, or I could just sit here with this lovely eclair and fizzy drink"? It's got to be a joke, hasn't it - a joke or a lie, or maybe some hybrid of the two which is neither funny nor valuably deceitful. Whatever lying hounds the magazine-reading public may be, they don't come close, in annoyance stakes, to celebrities, specifically celebrities and their better-than-sex pronouncements. Is it because you can put a face to the celebrity name that they irritate so exquisitely? Or is it because whatever they claim is better than sex just happens to be what they do for a living? Martine McCutcheon and Sharon of the Corrs both insist that performing live is better than sex (at the outside, maybe it's better for them - I'm prepared to wager my mother that everyone else present would prefer to be having sex, with or without them). Stephen Hawking "is tempted" to say that making a new discovery is better than sex - "it certainly lasts longer" (yup. So does psoriasis) and Paul Ince said: "I love tackling, I really love it. It's better than sex." Madonna, in a radical departure, claims not singing, but the aerobics craze spinning to be better than sex - which is curious. Why, then, did she not call her knockers-out book Spinning, rather than Sex? Because nobody would have bought it, that's why, unless there was a written promise that it contained documentary evidence of her spinning on something very pointy. Boy George came out with the famous "cup of tea" preference, while Andrew Motion, in keeping with him being a poet and all, is credited with the following: "Fishing is much more like writing than anything else and, for reasons I find difficult to explain, the moment of catching a fish is very like sex, the actual feeling of quickening. It's a curious mixture of morality, eroticism, writerliness and beauty." To which the only answer is oh please. Why do they do it? I'm guessing here, but I think it's in order to persuade us that they're so beset by offers of nookie, and so confident that we all know it, and so comfortable in the knowledge that they've had the very best on offer, that they've become rather blas? about the whole business. Well, frankly, no - I don't believe you. Especially not you, Martine McCutcheon.

The only fleetingly convincing betterthan-sex statement came from Irvine Welsh in Trainspotting: "Take the best orgasm you've ever had, multiply it by 1,000 and you're still nowhere near [heroin]".

I'm momentarily persuaded by this, having never mainlined anything. But that's principally because even without a practical comparison, sex will always be better than heroin since it doesn't turn you into one big suppurating sore, pulsing with disease and inadequacy. Not unless you get really unlucky, any road.