It was quite a few years back that I read Kingsley Amis’s Difficulties With Girls. The hero, Patrick is preoccupied with sex and is an incurable philanderer. In fact, all the men in the book are preoccupied with sex: Patrick’s  boss Simon announces he’s unable to sexually satisfy his wife; Patrick gets through boring meetings at the office by thinking about women, and hides dirty magazines in his briefcase. The novel, in spite of having a resonance of truth, is fundamentally misogynistic: Amis claims that, at root, all woman are mad – a notion I would have subscribed to at one point in my life but eschew now.

Progress marches ever on: even the luridly fertile imagination of Kingsley Amis would not have come up with this:

Two women told Moscow police they bet Tuganov $US4300 that he wouldn’t be able to satisfy them during a non-stop half day sex marathon.

The mechanic died of a heart attack minutes after winning the wager, Moscow police said.

“We called emergency services but it was too late, there was nothing they could do,” said one of the female participants who identified herself only as Alina.

Medics said he most likely died from the quantity of Viagra he had ingested.

There are 30 pills in an average 100mg bottle of Viagra.

In spite of that, reality has a little way to go to match Anthony Powell’s Pamela in his brilliant A Dance to the Music of Time; she killed herself in order to simultaneously take revenge on the husband she hated and satisfy her necrophiliac lover. I’m still waiting for these headlines.