Where Americans Get Their Ideas About Other People's Sex Lives

If thinking you get less sex than your peers makes you unhappy, it might be a good idea to reassess your ideas about how much sex your peers have. Discussion of sexual activity with casual acquaintainces and neighbors, of course, violates strong social taboo, and even with close friends the topic is usually off limits.

Nationally circulated magazines such as Cosmopolitan, Men's Health, Vogue, and the AARP (American Association of Retired Persons) Magazine regularly publish their non-scientific surveys of reader sex lives. And, of course, millions of American men and women get impressions of how other people have sex, most of them entirely unrealistic, from porn.

Self-Esteem and Sexual Satisfaction

But does Dr. Wadsworth's novel interpretation of data from the General Social Survey really tell us why anyone should care about how much sex a neighbor may or may not be getting? The answers of another widely quoted study suggest that sexual satisfaction may be at least in part a matter of self-esteem.

A May 2012 study published in the online journal LiveScience concluded that women in their 20's who are involved with men who are "into" porn were significantly less happy with their relationships. University of Florida clinical psychology intern Destin Stewart and University of Tennessee Dawn Sczymanski recruited 308 women aged 18 to 29 attending university to fill out an online questionnaire about their current partner's online porn use and their satisfaction with the relationship. All of the women in the study were heterosexual and most were white.

While comments from the participants about porn ranged from "scathing" to "mildly positive," there was a clear trend in the data showing that women partnered with men who watched more pornography were less satisfied with their relationships than women partnered with men who watched less. But this widely reported finding was just part of what Stewart and Sczymanski concluded from their study.

The women who were partnered with porn-watching men also reported significantly lower self-esteem, and it's likely that the longer they stayed in relationships with men who watched porn, the lower their self-esteem became. As Stewart told a LiveScience reporter, "You might be more dissatisfied knowing that your husband of 10 years is looking at pornography versus your 18-year-old boyfriend where you have no idea what he looks at on his computer." But what does this tell us about the more recent General Social Survey results?

Not Everyone Who Has a Limited Sex Life Is Unhappy as a Result

Not everyone who thinks neighbors may be getting more sex is unhappy about it. For that matter, not everyone who has no sex life at all is unhappy. Frequency of sexual intercourse is one factor in satisfaction with life in general--and the better you feel about yourself as a human being, the less difference deprivation in any single aspect of life makes in your general happiness.