Can You Really Believe Research on Americans' Love Lives?

Sex is a health topic that essentially everybody is interested in. We may not discuss what we read with our friends, and certainly not our families, and probably not even with our significant others, but any kind of data about sex gets immediate and massive interest. The problem is, most of what people tell pollsters, social surveyors, reporters, their doctors, their partners, and maybe even themselves about sex is not really true.

A New York Times Op-Ed Writer Looks At The General Social Survey

A good example of how what people say about their sex lives is not reliable comes from Seth Stephens-Davidowitz, a PhD economist, formerly employed by Google, and a contributor to the New York Times.

Search engine data is a good place to get questions, but you have to go somewhere else to get answers. Stephens-Davidowitz turned to the General Social Survey to get answers on how much sex Americans are really having, how often, and with whom. Just as a disclaimer, I should note that I myself once was an analyst of the General Social Survey, until half a dozen data runs (in an era in which it was hard to get access to a mainframe capable of analyzing this huge data set and your boss expected useful results after giving you computer time) consistently showed that the best predictor of sexual behavior in the USA, according to the survey, was astrological sign.

Numbers That Don't Add Up

Every other year the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago sends out interviewers to about 5,000 randomly selected Americans. The interviewers ask hundreds of questions about life in the USA in sessions that last about 90 minutes each. Millions of responses are recorded and coded and analyzed to create the General Social Survey.

In the latest General Social Survey, both men and women were asked how often they have sex. The answers are illuminating:

• On average, heterosexual adult men reported that they engage in sexual intercourse 63 times per year.
• On average, heterosexual adult women reported that they engage in sexual intercourse 55 times per year.

Already, the data raise some awkward questions. Are women so unimpressed they just don't remember eight sessions of lovemaking every year? Are men exaggerating about how much sex they have? Are there some other activities that we really should not be exploring in detail on a family-oriented website?

See Also: The Impossible Ideal Of Male Body Image

To get at the truth, Dr Stephens-Davidowitz looked at some more data. The heterosexual men who reported having sexual intercourse 63 times a year also reported that, on average, they use condoms 23 percent of the time. The heterosexual women who reported having intercourse with men on average 55 times per year said that the men they were with used condoms 16 percent of the time. 

Who Tells The Truth About Sex, Men Or Women?

If the men were telling the truth about how often they engaged in coitus and how often they used condoms, then they had to buy 1.6 billion condoms per year. If the women were telling the truth about how often they had sex and how often they used condoms, then Americans would be buying about 970,000,000 condoms per year.

Which group was telling the truth? It turns out, neither men nor women were honest with their answers to survey questions. Sales of condoms in the US are about 600,000,000 per year. That's nearly 2/3 less than men's answers suggested and 1/3 less than what women's answers suggested. At least when asked about intercourse with barrier protection, both men and women lied about how much protected sex they have.

• In the General Social Survey, single men report using an average of 29 condoms per year. If that were true, then single men would have to be traveling to foreign countries, because they would be using more condoms than all of America's married couples combined.
• A little over 10% of women aged 19 to 44 reported that they were not pregnant, not using contraception, and sexually active. If these women were having sex as often as reported, it would be reasonable to expect 10% of these women to get pregnant in any given month. However, fewer than 1% (1 in 113, to be precise) of women in this age group get pregnant in any given month.
• Married men under 65 report that, on average, they have sex about once a week. Their wives report just a little less. There are no ways to check on the veracity of what married people who are past reproductive age report to researchers, but it seems likely that these statements are exaggerated, too.

Data from online searches also suggests that Americans exaggerate their sex lives. What can Google search data tell us about the real state of Americans' sex lives? In a recent month:

• Over 3 times as many people searched for information about 'sexless" marriages as searched for information about "unhappy" marriages.
• There were about twice as many searches for "my boyfriend won't have sex with me" as for "my girlfriend wont' have sex with me."
• About 5% of American men are homosexual, and about half of them are in the closet. The more religious the state (Kentucky, Alabama, and Louisiana, for example), the more likely a gay man is in the closet, based on porn and same-sex dating searches. Research into the frequency of lesbian relationships is not yet available.

See Also: Why Don't We Have Libido-Boosting Drugs For Women?

Looking at these and other search data, Stephens-Davidowitz concludes that Americans have sex, typically, about 30 times a year, about half as often as they say they do. The problem, he speculates, is that people spend more time worrying about sex, seeking information about sex, and covering up their desires about sex than actually having it. Men waste time finding information about how to make their penises larger (it's possible, but it's difficult and painful), while women surprisingly often search for information on penis reduction. Women, surprisingly to older Americans, do searches for "big butts" on men, and, not surprisingly, breast enhancement.

It is better to be happy with what you have and actually to use it. Doing is better than Googling when it comes to sex.