To More Sex in 2022!
New Study Finds Adolescents & Adults Having A Lot Less Sex
This is going to be my last Sex On Wednesday of the year. I’m taking some time off and eagerly awaiting symbolic fresh start of a new year. My family celebrated New Year’s Eve of last year with a cake that said “f**k off 2020.” This year has certainly had brighter spots than the one before. We got a new president. Vaccines arrived and got shot into arms. We leave the house sometimes and see family and friends in person. The kids go to school, in person. And the holidays should be slightly more festive—Christmas presents won’t be opened on zoom and we will have a New Year’s Eve celebration with friends (all of whom will stick a q-tip up their noses before coming through the door, I promise). But it’s still been challenging for so many people and we’re ending it with a new variant that is making us question the safety of all of the things we just started doing again. If I were going to get a cake this year, I think I might tone down the message just a touch but the theme would be similar. Do you think “so long 2021, we’re not sorry to see you go” is too long to fit on a cake?
We’re Having Less Sex (And It’s Not the Pandemic)
Americans—teenagers and adults alike—are having less sex and we can’t even blame it on the pandemic. Researchers compared findings from the 2018 National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB) to results from 2009, which was the first year of that study. They found that the rate of partnered sex of all kinds from penis-in-vagina sex to mutual masturbation was down for both adolescents and adults and that adolescents were even masturbating less than in the past.
The NSSHB is a nationally representative probability survey of adolescents and adults in the United States conducted by researchers at Indiana University. It began in 2009 and collected data six additional times between 2012 and 2018. The NSSHB is unique for the detailed questions it asks about sexual behavior which allows the researchers to understand what they call the “sexual repertoire” of Americans.
For this article, researchers wanted to confirm the less-sex-trend that other studies have found and the media has hyped. The authors hypothesized that while they would find less penile-vaginal intercourse (PVI) in 2018 than in 2009, they would find that other kinds of sex such as oral and anal sex had increased. In essence, they thought that the decline in PVI could be explained by the increase in other feel-good behaviors.
That is not, however, what they found.
While the first half of the hypothesis was correct—Americans are having less PVI—the second half was not. We’re not doing different sex things, we’re just not doing sex. In fact, the people who were not having PVI were also less likely to be having other kinds of sex.
Among adults 18 to 49:
72% reported having PVI at least once in 2018 compared to 77% in 2009
62% reported receiving oral sex at least once in 2018 compared to 67% in 2009
60% reported giving oral sex at least once in 2018 compared to 65% in 2009
34% reported masturbating with a partner at least once in 2018 compared to 42% in 2009
17% reported having anal intercourse at least once in 2018 compared to 20% in 2009
Among adolescents 14 to 17:
11% reported having PVI at least once in 2018 compared to 21% in 2009
10% reported receiving oral sex at least once in 2018 compared to 21% in 2009
8% reported giving oral sex at least once in 2018 compared to 17% in 2009
7% reported masturbating with a partner at least once in 2018 compared to 12% in 2009
2% reported having anal intercourse at least once in 2018 compared to 4% in 2009
40% reported masturbating alone at least once in 2018 compared to 56% in 2009
Surveys like this one are important in telling us what people are doing but they are insufficient in telling us why. The authors note that this survey was limited to sexual behavior and didn’t ask questions about other aspects of our lives from mental and physical health to political stress, perceived racism, or media usage all of which have been posited as reasons for our changing sex lives. The years between these two waves of data also included expanded understandings of sexual orientation and gender identity and new discussions around the #metoo movement and consent which may have contributed to changing attitudes toward sex and sexual behavior.
Surveys like this one also can’t tell us how people feel about the changes in their sex lives. I believe there has to be a connection between the decrease in sex and the increase in anxiety and depression that has been noted especially among young people. Of course, we need different kinds of research to confirm that connection and figure out which direction it goes in. Are we depressed because we’re having less sex or are we having less sex because we’re depressed? Both?
While researchers work to answer these questions on a population level, we as individuals could decide to step up our game in 2022 and see if more sex leads to a better year.
Ranking of America’s Most Sinful Cities Seems Unfair
‘Tis the season for ranked lists. As the year draws to a close, content creators in every sector want to tell us the best and worst things that happened in 2021 whether that’s the 10 best food trends, the 25 worst movies, or the 8 best cities to live in.
The folks at Wallet Hub, a website that offers daily free credit reports and educational content about personal finances, have gone all in on telling us who won and lost the year. In the last few weeks, they’ve put out lists of the best things to buy on Black Friday, the most fun cities, the best and worst cities for singles, and the best places to spend New Year’s Eve.
One of their lists, the 2021 Most Sinful Cities in America, caught my eye—who doesn’t like a little sin around the holidays—but after reading how they determined that Memphis, TN is the most sinful city and Irvine, CA the least, the whole thing started to seem more than a little unfair.
Working with a team of experts, most of whom are sociology professors, WalletHub attempted to quantify the seven deadly sins—anger & hatred, jealousy, excesses & vices, greed, lust, vanity, and laziness. They used violent crime statistics as a measure of anger, casinos per capita to look at greed, and share of population smoking marijuana as one measure of vice. Some of their metrics are pretty funny, like the number of tanning salons per capita as a measure of vanity. Others feel a little too judgmental, like the high school dropout rate as a function of laziness or the share of adults with gambling disorders as a sign of greed.
As a sex educator, I was originally most concerned with how they quantified lust. I don’t necessarily think lust is a sin but measuring it by the number of adult establishments per capita and google searches for porn and tinder seems to make sense. But then they added teen birth rates as a metric and my blood pressure rose. This suggests that teens having babies is a measure of their sluttiness when we know that teens having babies is more accurately a measure of the sexuality education they received, their access to birth control and abortion, and their perceived future opportunities, among lots of other factors.
This is where the list really lost me. So many of the measures come down to resources and opportunity. Sure, those adults who don’t exercise regularly or volunteer their time could be lazy, or they could be working two jobs just to make the rent. And, yes, those who give the lowest percent of their income in charitable donations might be greedy, or they might be struggling to pay their own bills. Similarly, using obesity as a sign of excess and vice ignores all of the other social determinants of health that play into a person’s physical and mental wellbeing as well as the fact that healthy food is expensive and fast food (another measure of vice according to this list) is cheap.
I know these lists are meant to be lighthearted and fun and I tried to take it in the spirit offered but I just found myself getting angry. These criteria are being used to judge personal behavior when most of them—from alcohol use to gambling to violent crimes—could be seen as a consequence of living in poverty. In fact, it should surprise no one that the median household income in the least sinful city ($105,126) is more than twice that of the median household income in the most sinful city ($41,228). Contrary to what many GOP legislators seem to believe, being poor is neither a sin nor a sign of personal weakness.
NBC Proves Once Again Just How Repressed the U.S. Is
U.S. curling fans (all 12 of them) could not view the first round of the Olympic Qualifier Event last weekend because, well, we’re a country founded by people so repressed we were kicked out of England.
Curling is a wholesome game played on ice (though not in ice skates) in which teams armed only with brooms try to get special stones (that come from an island off of Scotland) into a bullseye-like target painted on the ground. Unlike hockey, players don’t push the stone itself, instead they sweep the ice around it because physics.
It wasn’t the perplexing nature of the sport that prevented it from being viewed, however, it was one of the local sponsors, a Dutch sex toy company called Easy Toys. The company’s logo—which frankly looks more like it’s selling 1980s Holly Hobby toys than dildos—was visible from under the ice in four places. Apparently, this was too much for U.S. television audiences despite the fact that an American duo was among the 14 teams competing for the last two spots in Beijing.
On Sunday morning, the U.S. Curling Association tweeted that video of the event was not available because of “an unforeseen sponsorship conflict with the local organizing committee.” The local organizers of the event said that they had informed the World Curling Association (WCA) of the sponsors in advance, but the video boycott seemed to take everyone by surprise.
Ultimately, the WCA worked with the local sponsors and the network to resolve the issue. Some of the Easy Toys logos were covered up with “equality for all” messages—a task that involved removing layers of ice at the last minute—and NBC carried the remainder of the trials without further incident.
If only this had happened last week it could have been included in my diatribe about how screwed up our advertising standards are given that we can use sex to sell pretty much everything else but can’t actually advertise anything related to sex. Not even if your logo features nothing more offensive than two hearts drawn around an E.