I hope to blog about this later, but it seems appropriate to mention it here too ... The New York Times just published an article in their Tuesday Science section about a study of people's reasons for having sex. They came up with 237 reasons and grouped them into four broad categories (physical reasons, goal attainment reasons, emotional reasons, and insecurity reasons). It seems to me that there's a lot of overlap here, but in any case, the reason I mention it at all is that "stress reduction" was a main subfactor of "physical reasons."

Here's a link to the study (PDF)

And a link to the NYT story 

...because public space really matters!

Elizabeth