Were More Sex
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Were More Sex
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Heather Whipps writes about history, anthropology and health for Live Science. She received her Diploma of College Studies in Social Sciences from John Abbott College and a Bachelor of Arts in Anthropology from McGill University, both in Quebec. She has hiked with mountain gorillas in Rwanda, and is an avid athlete and watcher of sports, particularly her favorite ice hockey team, the Montreal Canadiens. Oh yeah, she hates papaya.
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Birds do it, bees do it, humans since the dawn of time have done it.
But just how much has the act really changed through the millennia and even in past decades? Are humans doing it more? Are we doing it better? Sort of, say scientists. But it's how people fess up to the truth about their sex lives that has changed the most over the years.
Humans have basically been the same anatomically for about 100,000 years—so what is safe to say is that if we enjoy it now, then so did our cave-dwelling ancestors and everyone else since, experts say.
"Just as our bodies tell us what we might like to eat, or when we should go to sleep, they lay down for us our pattern of lust ," says University of Toronto psychologist Edward Shorter. "Sex has always offered pleasure."
Sexuality has a lot to do with our biological framework, agreed Joann Rodgers, director of media relations and lecturer at Johns Hopkins Medical Institutions.
"People and indeed all animals are hard wired to seek out sex and to continue to do so," Rodgers said in a recent interview. "I imagine that is evidence that people at least like sex and even if they don't they engage in it as a biological imperative."
It is nearly impossible to tell, however, whether people enjoyed sex more 50 years ago or 50,000 years ago, said David Buss, professor of psychology at the University of Texas and author of "The Evolution of Desire: Strategies of Human Mating" (Basic Books, 2003).
There is "no reason to think that we do more now than in the past, although we are certainly more frank about it ," Buss told LiveScience .
Indeed, cultural restraints —rather than anything anatomical—have had the biggest effect on our sexual history, Shorter says.
"To be sure, what people actually experience is always a mixture of biological and social conditioning: Desire surges from the body, the mind interprets what society will accept and what not, and the rest of the signals are edited out by culture," he writes in his book, "Written in the Flesh: A History of Desire" (University of Toronto Press, 2005).
That's not to say that cultural norms keep people from exploring the taboo, but only what is admitted to openly, according to archaeologist Timothy Taylor of Great Britain's University of Bradford.
"The idea that there is a sexual line that must not be crossed but in practice often is, is far older than the story of Eve's temptation by the serpent," he writes in "The History of Sex: Four Million Years of Human Sexual Culture" (Bantam Books, 1996).
Religion especially has held powerful sway over the mind's attitude towards the body's carnal desires, most sexual psychologists agree. Men and women who lived during the pious Middle Ages were certainly affected by the fear of sin, Shorter said, though he notes there were other inhibiting factors to consider, too.
"The low priority attached to sexual pleasure by people who lived in distant times is inexplicable unless one considers the hindrances that existed in those days," Shorter writes. He points especially to the 1,000 years of misery and disease—often accompanied by some very un-sexy smells and itching—that led up to the Industrial Revolution. "After the mid-nineteenth century, these hindrances start to be removed, and the great surge towards pleasure begins."
Many historians and psychologists see the late 1800s as a kind of watershed period for sexuality in the Western world. With the industrial revolution pushing more and more people together—literally—in dense, culturally-mixed neighborhoods, attitudes towards sex became more liberal.
The liberalization of sexuality kicked into high gear by the 1960s with the advent of the birth control pill, letting women get in on the fun and act on the basis of desire as men always had, according to Shorter.
"The 1960s vastly accelerated this unhesitant willingness to grab sex for the sheer sake of physical pleasure," he said, noting that the trend of openly seeking out sex just because it feels good, rather than for procreation alone, has continued on unabated into the new millennium.
But despite the modern tendency towards sexual freedom, even today there are vast differences in attitudes across the world, experts say.
"Cultures vary tremendously in how early they start having sex, how open they are about it, and how many sexual partners they have," said Buss, noting that Swedes generally have many partners in their lifetime and the Chinese typically have few.
An informal 2005 global sex survey sponsored by the condom company Durex confirmed Buss' views. Just 3 percent of Americans polled called their sex lives "monotonous," compared to a sizable 26 percent of Indian respondents. While 53 percent of Norwegians wanted more sex than they were having (a respectable 98 times per year, on average), 81 percent of the Portuguese were quite happy with their national quota of 108 times per year.
Though poll numbers and surveys offer an interesting window into the sex lives of strangers, they're still constrained by the unwillingness of people to open up about a part of their lives that's usually kept behind closed doors.
And what if we weren't bound by such social limitations? Taylor offers the promiscuous—and very laid-back—bonobo chimpanzee as a utopian example.
"Bonobos have sex most of the time ... a fairly quick, perfunctory, and relaxed activity that functions as a social cement," he writes. "But for cultural constraints, we would all behave more like bonobos. In physical terms, there is actually nothing that bonobos do that some humans do not sometimes do."
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Posted January 19, 2022
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A 2015 Gallup survey showed that Americans in 2015 were 16% more likely to approve of having a baby outside of marriage than in 2000 and 15% more likely to approve of pre-marital sex. 1
Others showed that American adults in 2000–2012 had more sexual partners, were more likely to have had casual sex, and were more accepting of most non-marital sex than in the 1970s and 1980s. Specifically, they show that the percentage of those who believed premarital sex was “not wrong at all” was 29% in the early 1970s, 42% in the 1980s and 1990s, 49% in the 2000s, and 58% between 2010 and 2012. 2
Since the mid-1960s, the sexual revolution has allowed sexual practices outside of marriage to be more rewarding, at least in certain cases. 3 The introduction of the contraceptive pill, the rise of feminism, and the legalization of abortion in the 1970s all combined to advance more liberal attitudes toward sex and promoted a growing social approval of premarital and extra-marital sexual relations that are growingly considered beneficial. 4-6
But this does not mean that people have more sex. People are just laid back about sex.
In recent years, many studies have documented a decline in sexual activity. 2, 7 For example, Twenge finds that Generation Y is on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations. In fact, her numbers show that those who identify as members of Generation Y are two-and-a-half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers in their early 20s. 8
According to an analysis of the General Social Survey, the percentage of 18-29-year-olds reporting no sex in the year preceding the survey increased from around 15% in 1990 to 23% in 2018. In addition, the average American adult went from having sex over 60 times a year 20 years ago, to around 50 times in 2018. 9
Sex frequency is measured directly by asking participants about how often they have sex with a partner in a certain timeframe. 10 Previous studies show contradictory evidence about sex frequency and pleasure. 11 Some studies show that a higher number of orgasms and more frequent sex positively correlate with greater emotional and physical fulfillment during sex. 4, 12
However, others find that men and women differ in this regard. McNulty and Fisher, for example, show that higher sex frequency is positively correlated with greater sexual satisfaction for men alone. 13 Others report on a positive correlation between sex frequency and sexual fulfillment among women in college. 14
So which couples have more sex? To test which couples show the highest sex frequency, responses from 3,207 survey participants from Germany were examined. The respondents, aged 32-46, answered a very detailed questionnaire concerning their relationships and intimate lives.
The results show that among the seven sub-groups measured, the order from those with the highest sex frequency to the lowest was as follows (Note that this is a rough estimation because it is all relative to a reference group — married people — and there is a chance that two groups ranked next to each other will not show a statistically significant difference).
1. Divorced /separated who live apart together (LAT) with a new partner
2. Never-married who live apart together (LAT)
3. Divorced/separated currently cohabiting with a new partner
4. Never-married who cohabit with their partner
5. Married individuals (who live together)
6. Divorced/separated single with no partner
7. Never-married single with no partner
This list shows that one needs to have a partner in order to show high levels of sex frequency. But once one has a partner, committing and living together reduces sex frequency significantly. The regressions account, of course, for demographic and socioeconomic variables such as age, gender , income, education , number of kids (if any), and more.
These results also address a secondary-level question that was raised previously regarding the effect of sex frequency. The results clearly show that sex frequency significantly correlates with sexual satisfaction for men and women alike. The variance accounted for by sex frequency is 22.9% for men and 21.5% for women. This means that couples who are higher on sex frequency (those living apart) are likely to be higher on sexual satisfaction. Indeed, this was also found to be the case .
Married people, in any event, have relatively less sex, close to those without a partner. This makes one think about the reasons for the decline of marriage as an institution and why people choose to forgo wedlock.
Elyakim Kislev is the author of the books Happy Singlehood and Relationships 5.0 .
Facebook image: Dean Drobot/Shutterstock
1 Frank Newport, 'Americans Continue to Shift Left on Key Moral Issues', Gallup. http://www . gallup. com/poll/183413/americans-continue-shift-left-key-moralissues. aspx (2015).
2 Jean M. Twenge, Ryne A. Sherman, and Brooke E. Wells, 'Changes in American Adults’ Sexual Behavior and Attitudes, 1972–2012', Archives of Sexual Behavior, 44 (2015), 2273-85.
3 Shara J Weaver, and Edward S Herold, 'Casual Sex and Women: Measurement and Motivational Issues', Journal of Psychology & Human Sexuality, 12 (2000), 23-41; Catherine M Grello, Deborah P Welsh, and Melinda S Harper, 'No Strings Attached: The Nature of Casual Sex in College Students', Journal of sex research, 43 (2006), 255-67.
4 Linda Waite, and Kara Joyner, 'Emotional Satisfaction and Physical Pleasure in Sexual Unions: Time Horizon, Sexual Behavior, and Sexual Exclusivity', Journal of Marriage and Family, 63 (2001), 247-64.
5 Ted Joyce, Ruoding Tan, and Yuxiu Zhang, 'Abortion before & after Roe', Journal of health economics, 32 (2013), 804-15.
6 Tom W Smith, 'Attitudes toward Sexual Permissiveness: Trends, Correlates, and Behavioral Connections', in The John D. And Catherine T. Macarthur Foundation Series on Mental Health and Development: Studies on Successful Midlife Development. Sexuality across the Life Course, ed. by A. S. Rossi (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994), pp. 63-97; Arland Thornton, 'Changing Attitudes toward Family Issues in the United States', Journal of Marriage and the Family, 51 (1989), 873-93.
7 Jean M Twenge, Ryne A Sherman, and Brooke E Wells, 'Declines in Sexual Frequency among American Adults, 1989–2014', Archives of Sexual Behavior, 46 (2017), 2389-401.
8 Jean M Twenge, Igen: Why Today's Super-Connected Kids Are Growing up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy--and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood--and What That Means for the Rest of Us (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2017).
9 Tom W. Smith, Davern, Michael, Freese, Jeremy, and Morgan, Stephen L., 'General Social Surveys, 1972-2018 [Machine-Readable Data File]', (Chicago: NORC, 2019, 2019).
10 M Nicole Warehime, and Loretta E Bass, 'Breaking Singles Up: Sexual Satisfaction among Men and Women', International Journal of Sexual Health, 20 (2008), 247-61.
11 Edward O Laumann, John H Gagnon, Robert T Michael, and Stuart Michaels, The Social Organization of Sexuality: Sexual Practices in the United States (Chicago: University of Chicago press, 1994); Ondina Fachel Leal, and Lisa Louise Earl Castilho, 'Reproductive Culture and Sexuality', Estudos Feministas, 6 (1998), 425-37; Willy Pedersen, and Morten Blekesaune, 'Sexual Satisfaction in Young Adulthood: Cohabitation, Committed Dating or Unattached Life?', Acta Sociologica, 46 (2003), 179-93; Susan Sprecher, 'Sexual Satisfaction in Premarital Relationships: Associations with Satisfaction, Love, Commitment, and Stability', Journal of sex research, 39 (2002), 190-96.
12 Linda Waite, and Kara Joyner, 'Emotional and Physical Satisfaction with Sex in Married, Cohabiting, and Dating Sexual Unions: Do Men and Women Differ', Sex, love, and health in America: Private choices and public policies (2001), 239-69.
13 James K McNulty, and Terri D Fisher, 'Gender Differences in Response to Sexual Expectancies and Changes in Sexual Frequency: A Short-Term Longitudinal Study of Sexual Satisfaction in Newly Married Couples', Archives of Sexual Behavior, 37 (2008), 229-40.
14 J Kenneth Davidson Sr, and Linda E Hoffman, 'Sexual Fantasies and Sexual Satisfaction: An Empirical Analysis of Erotic Thought', Journal of Sex Research, 22 (1986), 184-205.
Elyakim Kislev, Ph.D. , is a faculty member at the Hebrew University and the author of Happy Singlehood: The Rising Acceptance and Celebration of Solo Living.
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Our conversations are sprinkled with slips, pauses, lies, and clues to our inner world. Here’s what we reveal when we speak, whether we mean to or not.
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