No sex, please … we're college graduates

American Demographics, Feb, 1998 by John Student

The average adult reports having sex about once a week. But 1 in 5 Americans has been celibate for at least a year, and 1 in 20 engages in sex at least every other day.

American Demographics: Why are we so fascinated with sex?

Professor Student: Because sex embellishes most of life. It sells everything from newspapers to toothpaste. The pursuit of it has humbled heads of state, terminated promising careers, and brought fame and shame to lots of ordinary people. Americans may be obsessed with sex. But they are also full of misunderstanding about sexual activity because few representative surveys have asked them about their own sexual habits. Sex has not been the topic of many surveys, so not much is actually known about who does what with whom, and how often.

Even surveys that might include sexual activity miss most of it. In 1965, the Americans' Use of Time Study asked 2,000 adults to fill out diaries that listed everything they did for a week, and how long they spent doing it. The closest reference to sex came from one man who reported "sleeping with a friend" Sex has been mentioned more often in subsequent waves of this survey, but the reported diary activity averages less than ten minutes a week. Either a lot of activity goes unreported or these respondents are exceptionally lonely.

How do you know these diary estimates are too low?

Because more accurate data on the sexual activity of the American public have been collected by social scientists at the University of Chicago. Their most concentrated effort was Sex in America, based on a 1992 study totally dedicated to the topic. That work established that Americans are relatively inactive. But the national average in the 1992 study was about one sexual episode a week, lasting about half an hour.

The university's General Social Survey (GSS) database on sexual activity has grown to nearly 10,000 respondents since 1989, or about three times larger than the 1992 study. The GSS is a very rich and reliable source on the demographics and trends surrounding American sexual activity.

What does the GSS show for adults as a whole?

The data confirm that overall sexual activity is relatively infrequent, with an average of 58 episodes per year, or slightly more than one a week. Yet there was a 5 percent increase in sexual activity in 1996, compared with earlier years. This seems to run contrary to a number of trends, including the gradual aging of the U.S. population, longer work weeks, and the growing presence of distractions like the Internet.

Like wealth, sex is not distributed equally across the population. The GSS shows that about 15 percent of adults engage in half of all sexual activity, and that 42 percent of adults engage in 85 percent of all sex. Sex appears to be distributed more unequally than money, because 20 percent of Americans possess half of the wealth. But sex is more equitably shared than wine, 85 percent of which is consumed by 15 percent of the public.

Part of the reason for this inequity is that about 1 in 5 U.S. adults says he or she did not engage in any sex the previous year. Only 1 in 20 Americans has sex three or more times a week, so that this group claims about 30 percent of all sexual activity. Perhaps these are also the people who tell us about their sex lives on TV talk shows.

Don't men overreport their sex lives, while women underreport them out of modesty?

Men do report more sexual frequency than women, but not because men are more driven or boastful about their prowess. It's because of demographics. Widows and older women without partners dominate the 20 percent who are inactive. Among married people, the frequency reports of husbands and wives (not in the same couples) are within one episode per year--58.6 for married men and 57.9 for married women. And if other differences between men and women are statistically controlled (such as sexual preference, age, and educational attainment), married women actually report a slightly higher frequency than men.

While married men and women agree on frequency, other surveys have shown that men are likely to report having more lifetime sexual partners. This seems to be due to the different cognitive strategies, or "rules," that men and women use to count up their former lovers.

How active are older people? If there's snow on the roof, can there still be fire in the hearth?

Sexual activity does decline with age, but the declines are not regular, and they differ notably for men and women. The average frequency of sex stays steady throughout the 20s and mid-30s, but it falls nearly 20 percent among those aged 35 to 44. It drops another 25 percent for those aged 45 to 54, and another 25 percent for those aged 55 to 64. But the steepest declines happen after age 65. Sexual activity among those aged 65 to 74 is more than 60 percent lower than it is among 55-to-64-year-olds, and there is another drop of 50 percent for those aged 75 and older.

Some of the age-related changes are even more pronounced when other factors are taken into account. For example, the rates for people aged 18 to 24 go up almost 15 percent when controlled for marital status and other factors.