We are living in an arguably more sexually liberated society than ever before. People are more open about sex. Acceptance of same-sex partners is improving with gays and lesbians living more openly and states allowing same sex marriages. There's more sex and nudity on TV than ever before (<ahem>True Blood</ahem>). Does this mean we're a more sexualized society? Are people having sex more often and with more partners?
When I first dug into this data, I kept discovering more and more interesting little tidbits - so much so that I'll probably have enough for more than one post, but for now, here are some interesting findings...
It isn't too surprising that since 1972, people's view on the morality of sex before marriage has changed. It looks like the 80's ushered in the biggest shift in opinion. At the time, opinion was split 50/50 (a marked shift from 70% of people who thought it was wrong in the early 70's).
Over the last 30 years, general opinion has flipped to where the majority of people think it's now OK to have premarital sex.
(Note, the scale of "Wrongness" ranges from "Sometimes Wrong" to "Always Wrong".)
AMOUNT SEX
Now let's look at how often people are having sex. There's really not a strong trend. And if anything, the number of people who didn't have any sex in the past year looks to be increasing slightly. However, 2012 does stick out a little with a marked increase in the percentage of people who had sex in the past year. It looks like nearly everyone got some in 2012. Only 1% of survey respondents answered that they hadn't had any sex in the past year.
If more people believe it's OK to have sex before marriage and people are having sex more frequently, does that mean the number of sexual partners has increased?
The chart below shows the average number of sexual partners a person has had in their lifetime since they were 18 years old. You can see that there's a little bit of trending but on the whole, the average number of sexual partners has NOT gone up since 1990 (unfortunately, there wasn't any data before 1990, probably because the question was first introduced then).
When I saw this data, I was surprised that the number of Male Partners is higher than the number of Female Partners. My assumption was that men are more promiscuous than women (isn't that what you'd assume too?). If that were true, then the number of Female Partners should be higher than Male Partners...that's if you assume everyone is Straight though! So I took a closer look...
If you look at only people who identify as being Straight, you get a chart that looks like the one to the right. And voila! Straight men, on average have over twice as many sexual partners as Straight women!Interestingly enough, while the number of partners women have has been stable over the past 4 years, the average number of sexual partners straight men have is declining by over 20%.
However, when you look at Gay men, something crazy happens. In 2012, the average number of Male Partners increases over 300%, skyrocketing from 7 to 27 partners!! Your average Gay man in 2012 has 4 times as many Male Partners compared to Straight men (and Female Partners).
If this isn't errant data or incorrect pivot table work on my part, what could attribute to this finding? Maybe there was a lot of "celebration" as same sex marriage laws got passed!
* The dataset was limited to people Ages 25-50. For analysis on number of sexual partners, people claiming over 100 partners were eliminated as outliers.
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