WHERE DO YOU carry your condoms? Most Hong Kong men slip the sex protection sheathes into their shoes, making them unique. No other identifiable nationality or group does this, says Dr Judith Mackay, author of The Penguin Atlas Of Human Sexual Behaviour.
Published this week, the book takes an extraordinary and unprejudiced look at sexuality and sexual practices around the world. Some of the facts revealed are startling - every day 240 million people have sex, resulting in 400,000 additional people on the planet.
It is, says Mackay, the 'universal experience'. Yet the myriad aspects of sexual practices and their sweep through history, across every society, has never been the subject of proper global research - until now.
Famous for her campaigns to enlighten people and governments about the dangers of nicotine, Mackay has for just as long been vigorously telling people about sex and sexual health - broadcasting on sex on RTHK and writing an advice column in the South China Morning Post in the 1970s and 1980s. Her broadcasts on the issue were frank, sensible and eliminated medical jargon. This book does the same. 'I took on the sexuality book thinking that gathering data to collate the atlas would be simple,' says Mackay. That was the start of five frustrating years as she tried to trace facts and figures that few societies seemed to record.
'I wanted to put together data from across the spectrum,' she explains. 'I wanted to write and explain the intensely personal aspects of sex and its enormous economic and political impact. It isn't meant for just clinicians and anthropologists, but also for young people wanting to learn more about their bodies.' Mackay laughs. 'It was enormously complicated to collect the data,' she adds. Work on her latest book began in 1985 when she was talking to executives at Penguin about her earlier State Of Health Atlas. 'I told them I didn't know much about sex, but knew a lot about compiling an atlas,' she explains.
Mackay, who has been happily married since 1967, now knows an awful lot about sex, as will anyone who studies the fact-packed, attractively designed pages. 'One problem I had was how to make the subject cheerful, which sounds bizarre,' she says. 'Much of the data was negative.' A Hong Kong resident for 33 years, she knows her stuff, having been a senior health adviser to the World Health Organisation and to many governments, including China. She says she would like to see the sexology atlas, which goes on sale at Dymocks bookshops ($175) this week, in every school library.