Apparently Olympic athletes in Tokyo are being given recyclable beds made from cardboard… that may not be suitable for horizontal gymnastics.

Rumors have circulated that the eco-friendly beds are designed to collapse under the weight of any more than one occupant in order to discourage sex amid rising cases of COVID-19.

American distance runner and Olympic medalist Paul Chelimo added fuel to the fire by speculating the beds were constructed for “avoiding intimacy” in a tweet over the weekend.

“Beds to be installed in Tokyo Olympic Village will be made of cardboard, this is aimed at avoiding intimacy among athletes,” Chelimo claimed. “Beds will be able to withstand the weight of a single person to avoid situations beyond sports.”

But other athletes claim that the beds are sturdy.

On Sunday, Irish gymnast Rhys McClenaghan filmed himself repeatedly jumping on a bed inside the Tokyo Olympic Village to disprove the claim.

“In today’s episode of fake news at the Olympic Games, the beds are meant to be ‘anti-sex’,” McClenaghan says as he steps on top of the bed. “They’re made out of cardboard yes, but apparently they’re meant to break at any sudden movements,” the gymnast continues as he vigorously jumps up and down.

“It’s fake. Fake news,” McClenaghan concludes[.]

Most people don’t have sex by vigorously jumping up and down, so this test seems inconclusive. Did McClenaghan attempt any lateral movements? Hopefully someone will get to the bottom of this before any athletes are injured.

For more on this topic, check out How to Pick the Best Mattress for Sex.

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Sexy Corte and I are thinking about getting a new mattress, so I’ve been doing some internet research. Obviously we want to get a good night’s sleep, but since 90% of our sex is done in bed we want to make sure that a new mattress will meet that need too. Since mattress stores are apparently fronts for mafia money-laundering, we’re likely to buy something online sight-unseen, which makes up-front research especially important. The best website I’ve found so far is Sleep Like The Dead, and they’ve even got a page that rates mattresses for sex suitability!

(You can visit the site for a description of all the rated qualities and details about each mattress type.)

This chart was a great starting point, but I immediately realized that we don’t care about “fluid, stain cleanup” or “allows fast climax”, because both factors can be easily mitigated by a mattress protector — which we use on all the beds in our house. “Allows discretion” isn’t important to us because our sex room is very private anyway. “Durable” is somewhat important, but I’m not sure I understand the ratings here — we’ve had an inner spring mattress for a long time, and haven’t experienced any durability problems. In order to take these preferences into account, I created a spreadsheet that adjusts the ratings based on custom weights for each quality. (The “weighting factor” on the right ranges from 0 to 2, with higher values indicating a greater importance to us.)

The penultimate row shows the average raw rating for each mattress type without the weighting factor, and the final row includes the weighting factor. As you can see, the Latex and Hybrid mattress types are the highest-rated both with and without our personal weighting factor. Digging a little deeper:

Latex:

  • Easier to move on
  • Bouncier
  • More durable

Hybrid:

  • Better position variety — which here means “supportive from edge to edge, easy to move on, have adequate height, and keep pressure points minimized”.
  • Better “whole bed suitable”

Other pages on the site indicate that Latex and Hybrid mattresses are similar in price, but we’ll have to do some shopping around before we can take that into consideration.

So there you have it: we’ve narrowed our mattress search down to two types! We haven’t picked a product yet, but we’re a lot closer than we were.

What kind of mattress do you have? What factors do you care about for sex suitability? Anything you love or hate? Leave a comment!

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