According to Seth Stephens-Davidowitz,, a PhD economist and Contributing Op-Ed Writer for the New York Times—people are not having nearly as much sex as they claim they are. He bases this on a careful analysis of data, including the General Social Survey’s statistics. These include data collected from by heterosexual males that they participate in 63 sex acts per year and use condoms 23% of the time or a total of 1.6 billion a year. In contrast, heterosexual women say they average 55 sex acts a year using condoms about 16% of the time, which comes to 1.1 billion condoms. Since fewer than 600 million condoms are sold annually, both men and women are inflating their numbers for sexual encounters. It’s also possible they are exaggerating how often they have unprotected sex.
Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz also conducted online searches to examine what people are saying about their sex lives or lack of sex. Among the unmarried but dating, key words like sex starved, lack of sex, no sex, too tired for sex, not interested in sex—get thousands of hits every month. What is interesting is that more women express frustration with the lack of sex and intimacy in their relationships. Among the married, complaining about a lack of sex is more equally shared by husbands and wives.
On Google, not having sex is a chief complaint among both groups and comes up much more frequently than issues like having a partner who doesn’t want to talk or having an unhappy marriage. In other words, people are not having the frequency of sex that they say they are. According to an overall analysis of data, Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz found that on average Americans have sex 30 times per year.
Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz also used Google to try to determine why people don’t have more sex—after all, it’s fun and free (more or less). The reason that stood out should not surprise anyone—stress gets in the way. However, it’s not just the stress of things like careers, family life, money concerns, and issues with health—it involves feelings of insecurity about their bodies, their sexual performance and their ability to satisfy their partners. Both men and women struggle with these and often, their fears are unfounded as their partners would be happy just to have more sex and intimacy with them just as they are. Mr. Stephens-Davidowitz’s conclusion is that if we worried less about having sex, we would have much more of it.
If you want to read his piece on the New York Times, click here
