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    2010 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior

    Peter Paul Reubens

    It’s been sixty years since Alfred Kinsey’s groundbreaking reports, separate ones on male and female sexuality, opened the lid on the hidden sexual lives of Americans.  It caused discomfort in many circles, but allowed for discussions that were off-limits in social circles, and probably even academic circles.

    On October 1, a new was report was published in the Journal of Sexual Medicine, 130 pages of graphs and interpretations of data, plus commentaries on the information gleaned.  It’s the most comprehensive survey since a similar, but smaller one, in 1994.

    The survey was conducted from March to May of 2009 by the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University, Alfred Kinsey’s alma mater, and home to his study.  The interviews were conducted in person, and included 5,865 participants from ages 14 to 94.

    Unlike the 1994 study, it included questions on condom use; the study was funded by Church & Dwight Co. Inc., maker of Trojan brand sexual health products, and conducted by Michael Reese and three others from  the Center for Sexual Health Promotion, and Stephanie Sanders of the Kinsey Institute. 

    There are some interesting results, including these teasers.  You’ll read a section that has to do with sexual perceptions; in this case, the difference noted when men and women were asked if they had experienced orgasm in their most recent sexual event.  85% of men reported that their partners had achieved orgasm, as opposed to the 64% of women who reported experiencing them.  I just thought I’d point out the…er…perceptual variations by males; 21% may not be enormous, but it’s significant, nonetheless.  Please feel free to write your own jokes; I’ll desist for now, but it will cost me. 

    • There is enormous variability in the sexual repertoires of U.S. adults, with more than 40 combinations of sexual activity described at adults’ most recent sexual event.
    • Many older adults continue to have active pleasurable sex lives, reporting a range of different behaviors and partner types, however adults over the age of 40 have the lowest rates of condom use. Although these individuals may not be as concerned about pregnancy, this suggests the need to enhance education efforts for older individuals regarding STI risks and prevention.
    • About 85% of men report that their partner had an orgasm at the most recent sexual event; this compares to the 64% of women who report having had an orgasm at their most recent sexual event. (A difference that is too large to be accounted for by some of the men having had male partners at their most recent event.)
    • Men are more likely to orgasm when sex includes vaginal intercourse; women are more likely to orgasm when they engage in a variety of sex acts and when oral sex or vaginal intercourse is included.
    • While about 7% of adult women and 8% of men identify as gay, lesbian or bisexual, the proportion of individuals in the U.S. who have had same-gender sexual interactions at some point in their lives is higher.
    • At any given point in time, most U.S. adolescents are not engaging in partnered sexual behavior. While 40% of 17 year-old males reported vaginal intercourse in the past year, only 27% reported the same in the past 90 days.
    • Adults using a condom for intercourse were just as likely to rate the sexual extent positively in terms of arousal, pleasure and orgasm than when having intercourse without one.

     Please note that safe sex with condom use is practiced at higher rates among blacks and Hispanics than other groups; I’d imagine that is counter-intuitive among the public at large.

         Here is the Master Chart; it’s pretty interesting.  You can click on the site’s main page to find interpretations and comments on the report by luminaries in the field.   

    I was interested in the numbers on masturbation; how high they are, and that the numbers only decline much after aged 60 or so. 

    What do you see?  What surprises you?  Are you glad to know these things about your fellow humans’ sexuality?  Is it peculiarly American that the subject is still a source of embarrassment or shame for so many?  I know my eyes went blink-blink just considering so many sexual variants…

     

    Cross-posted at FDL/The Seminal

     

     

     

     

     

    Comments

    Good to know Church & Dwight's got money for this kind of R&D.


    It does say something good about condom use, I'd think.  Good way to spend some profits, even if does give them some marketing demographics along the way.  ;o)


    Church & Dwight does a lot more than condoms.  At home pregnancy test kits for one, nasal saline spray.  They own Arm & Hammer, so that means they're in the baking soda business too.  Etc.  Etc.

    I have no idea why they'd choose to fund a study like this -- which doesn't really have much to do with their bottom line -- rather than a PR-building study on, say, something that relates to breast cancer or testicular cancer -- or artery clogging fat.   

    But no.  Just more corporate waste.

     


    I don't consider sexual health a waste at all, and it was arguably a needed study waiting for a sponsor.  I'm sure the information can be used by professionals in a variety of ways; as the authors point out, the data has changed signicantly from just twenty years ago, and it's good to know how, and speculated on why.

    It's valuable to chart trends, for instance: now nursing homes can get that it's commom for 80-year-old men to at least need or want to masturbate; or to be a bit forward about their sexual needs.  The ignorance of that is common in nursing homes, I've discovered, and they often haven't developed any strategies to deal with it.

    Reminding 40 and 50-year olds that as a group, they're prone to practicing unprotected sex would be really useful, IMO; or knowing at what ages kids are becoming sexually active, and how.


    I'm sorry Stardust.  I think there are more important health issues and more useful studies that C&D could've built their street cred on.  But apparently they guessed right that this would get their name around. 


    No need to be sorry, anna am!  Good grief, I'm not saying I'm right, I'm just saying I think sexual health's an important issue.  If you've lost friends or family to other health issues, you'll no doubt feel those diseases are more important.  For people who have lost loved ones to AIDS, for instance, this info could potentially help.

     


    P.S.  I don't think nursing homes have been in the dark about 80 year men needing and wanting to masturbate.  LOL.  I think they're the last people who've been in the dark about that. 


    New brochures based on the study:  Golden Times Manor, where we provide the raincoats!  LOL!


    Excellent, stardust.  Almost lost my coffee on that one. 


    "I think there are more important health issues and more useful studies" This is wrong. As stated in one of the studies based on the NSSHB, 30% of health care costs is related to sexuality (see p. 248 of the connected volume of the JSM). One would be hard-pressed to find a subject more important to study in depth than sexual health. Great blog Stardust.

    Thank you, Mein Herr.  Some of it is hard to read for the Slightly Squeamish, like myself, but better to know, than to not know.


    Oh Obey has a statistic.  I tremble in my sensible shoes.


    What's with the attitude? I think having a healthy sexual life is very important to most people and, for this reason, important to public policy and medical practice. I thought its importance was pretty self-evident, but since it wasn't to you, I offered... evidence. If this won't, what will convince you?


    Speaking of attitude, if your intention wasn't to put me in my place from on high, then please do enlighten me as to what your comment was meant to do. 

    I make a simple point that there are other health issues I think might be more worth the corporate money C&D threw into this study, and you come in to proclaim as if by lordly fiat, "you are wrong."  Nothing could be more important.  Now you come in with stuff and nonsense about the self-evident importance of healthy sex-lives, as if I'm against healthy sex-lives in some way.

    Make your points however you like, Obey.  And play pot calls the kettle black however you like.  I remain unconvinced that the C&D study is monumental in its importance. 

    And it seems to me, if getting to the bottom of those "sexually related" conditions that are eating up 30% of our healthcare dollars is what makes Church & Dwight's study so vital to our well-being, and to you, a far simpler way to get to the bottom of our ills would have been to break that 30% of healthcare dollars down into the conditions that money is actually being used to treat.  It seems to me that knowing how much of the 30% went into treating sexually transmitted disease, and how much into treating erectile dysfunction and female sexual dysfunction, or into the treatment of infertility and sex hormone deficiency -- not to mention into the costs of contraception -- would possibly be even more useful to public health professionals than the stats on how many adolescents are getting head in their parents' SUVs.  

    But that's just me.   And, for the record, it's not that I think the C&D study is worthless.  It's fine.  I'd simply be more impressed with their philanthropy if they'd thrown their money into medical research for some of our more serious diseases that are begging for cures.  But again that's just me. 

    And would you mind providing a link to p. 248 of the JMY of the NXXXPPPQQQ or whatever the heck it was?  I know the sound of all those letters is so terribly impressive, but a simple link that people like me could follow would, I think, be more useful.   Thanks.


    NSSHB is the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior; JSM is the Journal of Sexual Medicine, which journal published the report.  If you click on the link that says in red 'a new repoDownloart was published', it takes you to the report's site, then you can click on a red button at the right that says 'Download Papers from the NSSHB'.

    I confess Obey read more of it than I did.  He can answer for his part, but for mine, I'd say that info on sexual practices can be used for prevention of disease, not just finding cures for disease, and when it's so, it's a very good use of money.  If you think of the study as just a peek-a-boo show, then I could see your point better.


    Thanks stardust.  But I'm not the one attaching importance to the statistic.  If Obey is, and is going to use figures to make an argument, he should link to them.  Beyond that, I'd rather not spend anymore time on this non-issue that, for some reason, you and Obey seem hellbent on elevating to an issue of pressing significance. 

    I did and continue to have one simple point to make.  Other than that, I didn't much care for Obey's highhandedness and sleight of hand games.  But now you've responded as his champion and interlocuter so there's an end of that too.  So, ta.  Enjoy your thread.


    LOL. Touché. Sorry if I offended you, Anna. Given your comment on the report, I was assuming you had been to the site Stardust linked to in the OP, and read the text found there. Glad we agree it's a worthwhile report, I seem to have misunderstood what you said. I'll try to state my views in a less lordly manner henceforth.

    Spare me, Obey.  You know full well I don't think the report was all that worthwhile so your glad agreement's out of place.  All I agree with is that the report's not totally worthless -- and with the fact that, now that it's done, it probably can be put to use by public health officials.  But please don't pretend you think I'm coming from the same place you are.  I'm not and you know I'm not. 


    Well maybe you'll change your mind when you actually ...read the research it's produced.

    ;0)

     


    l-O. Ta. 


    Stardust sez:  "Reminding 40 and 50-year olds that as a group, they're prone to practicing unprotected sex would be really useful, IMO;".  I didn't read the whole report about this point, so perhaps they're factoring in whether these 40-50 year olds are or aren't gittin' it on every night with different sexy partners down at the Stardust Lounge.  My first thought regarding that finding was that people in these age groups are probably more prone to being involved with similarly aged partners and in longer term relationships than a younger demographic.  Also, many of them would then have a higher statistical incidence of having recently exited a long term marriage/relationship, would have had fewer recent sexual partners, and consequently might realistically have a higher confidence that "unprotected" sex carries fewer risks.  I wonder what some more meaningful statistic, such as the rate of incidence of STDs in this age group vs other age groups would show?


    Actually, I just checked that out at the CDC's website, and unfortunately their uppermost age bracket for stds is 40+ years, but it does show a significantly lower incidence rate for this age group than all younger age groups.  I'm gonna interpret that as supporting my hypothesis.


    You may be right, but one piece I'd read about the study had it a bit different, so I googled, and it was likely this at Huffpo, and the outtake said:

    "The lowest condom usage rates were for men over 50 – and the researchers said this was worrisome. Although men in that age group are more likely to be married than males in their teens and 20s, other surveys have shown 50s-and-over to be far more open to multiple sexual partners than in the past, raising the risk for disease."

    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/10/04/sex-study-by-national-sur_n_748751.html

    It also says that some other studies have found teens to only use condoms 69% of the time.  Maybe it's getting better. 


    A long time ago, (in a galaxy far away), a woman I had been seeing for some time told me she liked that I never quizzed her about having orgasms. I suppose research is valuable, but I've never felt like conducting the studies myself. I think of Elaine May in LUV, making charts of the infrequency of Peter Falk and Jack Lemmon's lovemaking. IMO romance is better nurtured with words than numbers. And chocolate helps, too.


    I think I take your meaning, Donal, but the purpose of the study wasn't so much to make love-making better, but to explain the sorts of sexual congress that exist, to what degree, and look at sexual safety with condom use. 

    The other parts are so we know what other people are doing, and what levels of satisfaction at different ages. 


    So we don't care about love-making, we just wanna know who's zoomin' what orifices? Got it.

    While I was looking at Slate's Supreme Court article, I saw their two most popular articles are The Ass Man Cometh and The Riddle of the Sphincter. Saletan looked at this results of this survey, saw the relatively high numbers for anal sex among women, and lubed poetic about women's orgasmic satisfaction from anal sex.

    So I think there should be an additional row in the Master Chart called Develops UTI.

    Maybe time between infections explains why young men are only having sporadic vaginal intercourse.


    To your anal-sex providing women with increased orgasms, Saletan seems to have figured it out, and it's the combination, including variations, and giving men what they seem to want:

    "So why did the inclusion of anal sex bump the orgasm figure up to 94 percent? It didn't. The causality runs the other way. Women who were getting what they wanted were more likely to indulge their partners' wishes. It wasn't the anal sex that caused the orgasms. It was the orgasms that caused the anal sex."

    It's not that we don't care about love-making, it's that the study was about sexual health and condom use.  That they included orgasm figures was a surprise to me.  And that digital-clitoral sex wasn't included, either.  And I wanted the "how many times a day do your thoughts turn to sex" question posed...see if old data or tropes still hold.

    That's all I got.   ;o)


    I don't find the, "orgasms caused anal sex," explanation very compelling. I think couples are simply imitating what they see in porn flicks, which seem to have a standard rotation of positions. As far as how many times a day, how can you measure that when even news websites are brimming with provocative subjects like Katy Perry's cleavage? How can you not think of sex these days?


    I have zero knowledge of porn or how much it's watched; I would have guessed not much, but that's a biased opinion since I don't ever watch it.  As for how can we not think of sex, I ususally don't think sexual thoughts when I see tits and ass on display at Huffpo, for instance; I think of people selling themselves as sexual commodities.  And it makes me kinda sad.  What is sometimes known as the revealing veil is more attractive to me: what's left to the imagination.  I do feel a little sorry for this generation of adolescent and teenage boys growing up watching the erotic Victoria's Secrets ads on teevee; no mistaking what those ads are selling.  It's at once more open but dishonest and cheapening, IMO.  But I am no way representative of most in this culture; that's clear to me.


    Internet porn is so pervasive that a parent is very lucky indeed if "all" his or her son is watching are Victoria Secret runway shows -- not that I disagree with your premise that those shows and videos are selling product by selling serious skin, which is fundamentally cheapening to both model and viewer ... but, thus, with only more clothes, have cars and whatever been sold, however bizarre and regrettable that is. It's just that, compared to what else they're watching, it pales. 

    I feel so sad that GenX and Y boys (and the girls or boys with whom they get involved) have their first sexual experience already so jaded .... no wonder vaginal sex is down in percentage numbers for their age group, while oral and anal sex has increased. 

    While I don't regret the banishment of the messages our generation received (if you're female, you know the ones -- if you're no longer a virgin, you're a slut; why would a man marry you if he can have you without, blah, blah)  But I do genuinely regret the loss of wonder our protracted innocence allowed us to have when, however "taboo," we entered into a non-marital sexual relationship based on: a) the incredible gift of actually caring about, or at least having the illusion that we cared about, the other; and, b) exploring it all -- in wonder -- without images pre-lodged in our brains of that which, by rights, might only be of interest after decades of experience and subsequent boredom.

    Has it always been so? I wonder, wishing for our children to know wonder.   


    Guess my Victoria Secrets musings show what a sheltered geek I am; but at least with all the internet porn I'd overlooked being available, the numbers are almost incredibly low.  After the 1994 study came out, some recommendations by health organizations were made to teach 'anything but' in sex ed classes, which meant masturbation, of course;  instead, schools went with 'abstinence only' to keep their federal funding.  I remember well getting into it with the principal of our kids' school at an accountability meeting.  I was advocating for one of those two-track programs: one for kids who thought they'd be having sex (or already were), one for the 'nots'; students could even switch tracks.  He thought I was the devil incarnate.  Oh; I was, but I wanted to keep the kids safe from pregnancy and AIDS; he wanted Promise Rings.


    How can I not think of sex these days?

    Easy.

    i just think of elephants.


    Pie and the Queen.  Or Celine Dion: a real libido-crusher.


    Me too. But then I always imagine them having sex. Talk about the elephants in the room.


    Please take note: this was a reply to quinn, not to stardust. You're all so sick.


    LOL!  Thanks for clearing that up, Canuck. 


    You know, there's some of those studies about sex where the subjects let the scientists watch and there was one case which really stood out. It seems there was an old  married couple whose first encounter had been against a fence behind their old favorite drinking spot and to celebrate their fiftieth anniversary they were going to relive the experience and let the scientists record it for their research.
     Seems they began and shortly leaned against the fence and commenced with about ten minutes of the most frantic gyrations of any of the study group. Finally they collapsed and panted for quite a while 'till they got their breath back.
     With a bit more than scientific curiosity the team of researchers went to them and said that it had been truly marvelous, what was their secret that kept the act so wild and spontaneous. "Young feller", said the old man, "Fifty years ago that wasn't an electric fence".


    When will I stop laughing, Lulu?  OS,OD!


    You were expressly forbidden from thinking of elephants!  Now the whole experiment is blown.


    The data that I find most surprising is the number of men who are (or aren't) having vaginal intercourse in the 18-19 and 20-24 age ranges. They seem pretty low (53% and 63%, respectively), especially considering the question is whether they have engaged in the behavior in the last year. I have for years assumed that once men reached the age of 18, they were unstoppable sex addicts. My bad.


    Yeah; it almost looks like they were receiving oral sex from women more often than having vaginal sex.  I wonder if it might be about fear of pregnancy, or soomething to do with thinking you can't get STD's from oral sex. 

    But women at that age reported having vaginal sex 9 points higher than men; guess they were having it with older men?  The researchers seemed surprised, too, at the numbers you mentioned, Orlando.

    One think the survey didn't ask, and I was disppointed about, was the "how many times a day do you think about sex" question.  It was almost legendary that men were belieived to think about at some extraordinarily high rate, not so much for women.  Of course it wouldn't have fit the model of "behavior in the past year", but still... ;o)


    64% of women who reported experiencing them.


    That seems high to me.  Maybe women fake it even when they are replying to scientific surveys.


    LOL!  "...even when they are replying to scientific surveys."  Do you mean that it's been your experience, or what's been reported to you by friends, that women fake it sometimes or often?  I have heard about this on the teevee, but can't quite imagine the need for it, or that it could be simulated.

    I thought the 11 point disparity meant that a lot of men were either sure with no evidence that their partners must have had orgasms (conviction with not enough evidence), or that they were boasting.   ;o)


    This is just a fascinating post, that I never dreamed I would read here!!

    The one sentence that grabs me in all of this:

    The interviews were conducted in person, and included 5,865 participants from ages 14 to 94.

    I like those numbers, a lot.

    Frankly I forgot about the previous study; I mean Masters and Johnson got married which was hilarious at the time. hahaahah

    What is really going on, and what is reported?

    I always think of House, he does not believe one thing his patients tell him.

    I was thinking of doing a post on that.

    But the responses tell me that somehow, people decided to relate some truths.

    Really interesting!!!


    House is pretty cynical, plus they build whole episodes around the fact that he's right about people lying all the time.  I've noticed over the years that advertising seems to build ads around deceiving others, like the woman who smacks flour all oaver her face to prove that she made the biscuits, which really came from a little tube. 

    Once you get past the numbers of people who report (admit) to masturbation, maybe it's all downhill froom there.  Look at the column about the 14 to 17-year-olds reporting giving oral sex to women.  How can that be?  In what setting can they find the wherewithall to do that?  Not to be graphic, but unzipping trousers for oral sex is one thing, but how do they pull this off?  Or do they?  The honesty factor again.


    I like the neutral, friendly way you presented this, Stardust: here it is, isn't this interesting?, how does it compare to studies in the past?, how might the new statistics surprise you, X surprised me......

    I, for one, would have been surprised by the instance of oral sex -- particularly BJs -- among young teenagers had I not taught for two years at a combination Middle/High school. I was amazed by the open, casual attitude about the giving of them by hetereosexual girls as well as by gay boys. That does seem to be a generational shift  -- not only in terms of participation at a much younger age, but also in terms of candor about it. 

    Sidenote 1: I can't help laughing, Stardust, that you cross-posted this piece at "The SEMINAL" at FDL.

    Sidenote 2: I used to live across the street from a former CEO of Trojan. I was amused that, as other people offer samples of soaps or perfume in their powder rooms, he offered a filled-to-the-brim glass bowl of condoms. With that level of concentration on marketing, not a surprise, then, that throughout the findings of this report are citations of the need to use them.


    LOL on the 'Seminal'.  Blech, what an awful name!  In our house we call it The Semen Stain; it's baaaaad. 

    I was thinking again about the younger girls having reveived oral sex a bit more, trying to imagine the difficulty of mechanics of it.  Then this morning I discovered that the Fragonard painting I had pasted into this blog was gone (Gremlins in the night?) I started a whole new search on bing.  Nothing came up again for 'images of human sexuality,' ???  So i noticed i had to have my filter changed to allow more sexually explicit content.  Okey, dokey.  So I googled 'paintings of human love or sexuality'.  The first one was seventeenth century, a man kneeling before a woman in lace and velvet with her skirt up, no knickers, er...pleasuring her...decided I wasn't going to find anything I could use here, but it did answer my question...maybe.

    Yeah, that youngsters are more responsible about condom us than their parents' generation is sorry, isn't it?  "May I offer you a cup of Condom?"

     


    This blog gave me a boner.

    Does that count?

     


    LOL!!!  Count for what, Mr. Thinks-of-Elephants?  Toward the survey?  Nope.  Count for your lifetime BA?  Something else?  Did you want a Boner Prize?  None were offered.  How about some pie?  Were you hoping I/we would ask you which part provoked your...response?  Not gonna.  Money mouth


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