Film Facts 1: Amélie - Orgasms in Paris

Any good film buff has a good grasp of world cinema, even if it's only the most mainstream of those films; so long as you've seen your Pan's Labyrinth's and Oldboy's, you don't need to worry about not having seen Bombón: El Perro or I'm A Cyborg But That's OK. That said, a must for anyone willing to don the mantle of obsessive shut-in has to have seen Jeun-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie.

"Welcome to the club, make yourself at home. There's crippling anxiety on the table, next to the coffee."

What I love almost as much as watching films, though, is taking unrelated statistics and skewing them in order to come up with interesting facts about said films. And that's where Amélie comes in. There's a particular scene amongst the endless stream of utterly adorable tales that makes up the movie where Amélie is sitting on a rooftop, asking the question "How many people are having an orgasm right now?". The answer is, apparently, fifteen.

We don't ask how she knows...

Have no fear, dear reader; I am here to put your worries aside and assist in determining whether or not this claim is actually true through the power of various statistics and a very lenient grasp on basic mathematics. To do this we need the building blocks of smartness: numbers.

Carl Gauss: Knowledge Breeder

Right, lets get started. Firstly, lets get our demographic down. Now in the film, it isn't stipulated how many people we are considering in our test group, however the line "she amuses herself with silly questions about the world below.." is spoken as she looks over the Parisian suburbs, so I am going to assume she was referring to the city of Paris. The population of the city itself is 2.2 million, but that only counts the city and not the wider urban area which, to my untrained eye, is where it looks like Amélie is currently residing in this scene; so that racks the total population up to 12.1 million people in our test group, of which 53% are male and 47% female (we'll come back to that later). For an easily visualised approximation, that's about the same as the population of Zimbabwe. 

Plus one crazy authoritarian dictator unaware of inappropriate moustache styles.

So we've got 12 million people living there, but what about tourists? The website for Paris (like, literally the city's website) says they get 28.9 million tourists a year. We'll assume these tourists stay in Paris for a week on average, it is a pretty expensive place to visit after all, so maths says there could be anything between 79'000 and 554'000 tourists in any given day in Paris, not taking into account holidays. We'll just use the median of that and call it a cool 316'000 visitors on top of out 12 million, adding a drop in the ocean to the tune of 12.4(ish) million.

The "ish": a term first coined by Blaise Pascal when writing religious prophesies.

Next, we need to find out how often people supposedly orgasm. This is a deceptively difficult statistic to find, seeing as the Google search page for "average number of orgasms" is clogged up with Cosmo articles on "How to have the best female orgasm!!11!!!3!" and so on. Thank god the Kinsey Institute has my back with statistics on frequency of intercourse as well as masturbation statistics. These are done by age group, so if we go back to our Parisian population, the average age in Paris is apparently 40 years old (our few thousand tourists won't make much difference to that). Between the 30-39 and 40-49 year old demographics, we get between 69 and 86 cases of good old-fashioned noogie per person per year. If we subtract the 314'000 people in Paris who are under the age of 14 and thus not able to consent to sex (I won't judge, mind. What happens in French schools...), we undo all of my hard work with working out tourist numbers and end up with a population of 12.102 million people humping each other a total of 937.9 million times a year. 

That's a lot of shaggen. And the kids just have to sit back and watch.

That was rather poorly chosen wording.

Have no fear, wee kiddly bobs, for we've yet to add masturbation into the mix. If we go back to the Kinsey Institute, they say that 5% of men and 11% of women have never masturbated. So if we use our 53% male and 47% female ratio from earlier and put that into our total population (including kids this time, seeing as nearly half of the population have apparently masturbated by the age of 11), that means we have 6'243'400 masturbating males and 5'186'920 masturbating females. With an approximate masturbation rate of 12 times a month (144 a year) for men and 4.7 times a month (56.4 a year) for women, that gives us just short of 1.2 billion wanks per annum. Who would have thought we were such randy buggers?

Put that hand down, Timmy. I know where it's been now.

OK, we're getting somewhere. 1.19 billion one-man-bands plus 937.9 million horizontal two-steps gives us 2.13 billion orgasms in total. Those of you following along at home with a calculator might have a completely different number because I've been rounding more sporadically than a broken belt sander making banister knobs but this is all estimates so screw you and your fancy accuracy. 

Now that we've got a total number of jizzes per annum, we need to find out how much time that's going to take up. Depending on where you look you get a range of orgasm duration for both sexes from 8 seconds to almost an entire minute. Now I'm not a pessimist, but 60 seconds seems a little long, so we'll go further to the other end of the scale and use our first wiki article of the post for this one. Men clock in at a generous 12.5 seconds and women at an envious 20 even. If Paris is having 2.13 billion hail mary's a year, then the City of Love is spending 34 billion seconds, or 569 million minutes, or 9.5 million hours, or 400'000 days jizzing every year.

The fuck, France?

How my mind feels right now.

Just to clarify, the population of Paris and it's surrounding suburbs spends more time flooping the pig in one year than the length of the reigns of the Ancient Roman Republic and the Roman Empire combined.

I...What?

These numbers cannot be unseen.

Not to be confused with The Number 23, which also cannot be unseen.

But yes, what does this mean for our dear Amélie sitting alone on that Parisian rooftop? If we took turns with one person cumming after another, then it would take over 1000 years; with two people at once, that becomes 500. If we keep folding the numbers like that (because I work far better with a completely un-mathematical visual memory) then in order for all of that jizzing to take place within one year there would have to be at least 1082 people orgasming at any given moment.

With a total urbanised area of 2'724 square kilometers and a resulting average population density of 4552 people per square kilometer, my calculations mean that the next time you visit Paris, remember that at any given second you have a 23.8% chance of being within a kilometer of a spunking Frenchman.

"Remember to bring wellies." - Ingrid Bergman