Portland has done pretty well in magazine lists, so maybe we shouldn’t complain.

We’ve been listed as among the best cities in America for riding a bike, raising a family or eating out in a restaurant.

So we probably shouldn’t be too upset about the Men’s Health magazine listing that ranks Portland in dead last place in its list of the 100 most sexually active cities.

Austin, Texas, home to a huge university, came in first, and maybe it’s hard for a place like Portland to compete, what with Maine’s oldest-in-the-nation-and-rapidly-aging population.

But looking at some of the other cities that finished ahead of us sparks our competitive spirit.

St. Petersburg, Fla.? We can’t be aging faster than them, and yet they finished 95th, five places ahead of us.

And Yonkers, N.Y.? Could there be a less sexy city? But the warehouses and factories along the Hudson somehow out-ranked Portland, finishing 98th in the survey.

We feel we should defend Portland’s reputation as a sexy place.

Could the judges have reached this conclusion if they’d watched a sunset from the Eastern Prom, or gone on a moonlight cruise of the harbor, perhaps on the ferry named “Island Romance”?

Learning the criteria Men’s Health actually did use, however, takes away some of the sting. Among the numbers the magazine crunched to come up with its ratings were the number of sexually transmitted diseases reported. Indeed.

This just may have been a contest that we didn’t want to win.

 

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