There are some new numbers out from the US National Survey of Sexual Health and Sexual Behaviour. This, of course, means another great opportunity for Will Saletan to make a fool out of himself. Not just him of course, the whole thing is coated with euphemism from top to bottom. Note, for example, the title of the survey–this is a survey of sexual practices not sexual health but it has to be called what it is because the scientists responsible wouldn't want to have to admit to themselves that the primary reason for reading a study like this is prurient curiosity. (Relevant disclosure, I plead guilty, guilty, guilty.)
The other fascinating shift here is the way the survey refers to "men" and "women" throughout rather than "males" and "females". It does this even when age clearly indicates that the subjects are boys and girls. This tells us something about the degree to which science has been influenced by political correctness: "male" and "female" are objective facts whereas "man" and "woman" are now socially flexible terms.
While I'm at it, the Center for Sexual Health Promotion have put out a publication of articles analyzing the data. Funding for that publication was provided by a condom manufacturer. This, pardon me while I pick my jaw off the ground, didn't strike anyone at the Center as a conflict-of-interest problem! It didn't strike them even as they concluded that condom use needs to be further promoted. That is the same ethics the give-away advertorial publications in my neighbourhood use (and scientists wonder why people don't trust them as much as they used to).
The numbers are also interesting in themselves. The chart is here below, if you click on it you will be able to see it larger. (You can also open this link to get a more easily readable version.)
The key place to start is the second double-column of the first row. This deals with masturbation practices of 16-17 year olds. And you will see that Seventy-five per cent of 16-17 year old boys report masturbating at least once in the twelve months before the survey was taken. Now, to take those numbers at face value, you have to seriously believe that twenty-five percent of 16-17 year old boys made it through twelve months without masturbating even once and that is ludicrous.
Surveys of all sorts try to create an atmosphere where we won't feel any social pressure or shame. That is, where we won't decide to tell the person asking questions that we do or don't do such a thing because we hope to impress them and also that we won't deny being a member of the grey party because we are ashamed of it. There is a powerful limit on these things when the survey is about something such as sexual practices because we have a powerful need to impress ourselves with what sort of person we are sexually. And we will do this even though it means denying the effect of powerful needs reinforced by tens of thousands of years of evolution—only those people who reproduced got to pass on genes—so we will not triumph over them by a simple act of will.
Thus twenty-five percent of 16-17 year old boys will claim, quite possibly lying to even themselves as they do so, that they have not masturbated even once in the last twelve months.
So the survey results don't tell us about what people actually do so much as what they tell us what they would like to believe about themselves and what they would like to have others believe about themselves. The numbers are important anyway—what people want to think about themselves and have others think about them is important and some of the numbers are really interesting.
Sex is not the only thing people lie about. We lie about income and savings for very similar reasons. But researchers can compensate with income because there is separate data about salaries available from all sorts of sources. With sex there is no separate data. What we do have, and this is fascinating, is the contrasting reports of males and females and here we see an important and significant shift. The numbers in this graph match up pretty well. In the past, males, especially younger males, tended to report far more experience than was really plausible given what the females said. Or, alternatively, the females were up to a lot more than they admitted. Or a little of both. (You can still see the discrepancy if you compare what males 30 and older claim as compared to women in the same age range.)
A digression, at this point there is always some geek who thinks he understands stats who will leap in to say that the discrepancy doesn't mean someone is lying and will then offer a long argument about how Suzie, who really gets around, can raise the number for females generally. Get ten or twenty Suzies into the mix and no discrepancy. The problem with saying that is the sample size. The whole point of using a sample of a certain size is to make there are also Georges who really get around. Funnily enough, smug male geeks always seem to forget about about George who used to be "friends" with their girlfriend.
Anyway, the thing is that the sexual self images of younger males and females line up pretty well here and that is a significant new development. One of the more interesting, to stick with the youngsters a little while longer, is what 14-15 year olds report about oral sex. We can see that 12 percent of males report receiving oral sex from a female and, if we slide over to the other side of that double column, we can see that exactly 12 percent of females report performing oral sex on a man. That tells us that attitudes are lining up. In past years there tended to be a significantly larger number of males who reported receiving than females reported giving.
Attitudes, however, is all we can be certain of. At least 12 percent would like us to think they have done or have received. That means, lest we forget, that 88 percent either have not or would not like others to see them as the sort who would. I wouldn't sit around waiting for the rush of journalists rushing to their keyboards to report that the much ballyhooed explosion of teenage oral sex was just a fantasy.
There is also a small, but significant gap between what women claim to have received versus what men report giving. That gap grows up to age twenty five and then it evens out. Again, it's about attitudes here. Women want to see themselves as getting their share but in practice it may not be that way. Part of the gap may be explained by by male selfishness but I bet a lot of it is explained by female reluctance too; we should allow for girls and young women who want to avoid situations where they have less control.
Saletan's folly
What happens when we have a gap between what one sex reports giving versus what the other sex reports receiving? I suspect it's self image mostly and that is the big change. In the past, it was always men who reporting higher numbers than women. Here we have a growing equality and even a disparity the other way in an area that might shock some. What's happening here? Well, sometimes the prudes are right and I'm guessing this is one of those times.
Porn has changed women's self image by changing their ideas of normal. And thus we get the result that in some age groups twice as many females report anal sex as the males do. Is this a reflection of what is actually happening? Well, I'm sure there is more of it but, I'll be honest, I don't want to know too much.
The eye-popping discrepancy in these numbers is the gap between the 18 percent of women between the ages of 18 to 19 who claim to have been on the receiving end of anal sex as compared to the only 6 percent of males who claim to have been on the active end. The gap closes somewhat with 20 to 24 year olds where 23 percent of women claim to have received and 11 percent of men claim to have given. Now, the obvious caveat here is that while teen-aged girls tend to have partners in the same age group, they tend to move to slightly older males as they enter their twenties. So the numbers don't have to line up to make sense. On the other hand, some of those guys reporting that they were on the giving end have to be gay.
But I would be remiss if I didn't suggest that at least some of these numbers reflect what women want thought of them rather than what they really get excited about. Without getting specific about it, I suspect most males who have been in a long term sexual relationship are familiar with the phenomenon of women who do things, seemingly with enthusiasm, in the early days only to later reveal that they don't like these things much. Women don't want to think of themselves as too easy but they also want to appear open and ready to do what they believe is expected of them. Given the influence of porn, I suspect that some younger women want to think of themselves as open to the idea of anal sex because they think this is important to men.
It would be fascinating to follow the 23 percent of women in their early twenties who report having had anal sex forward over time and see how enthusiastic they are when they get into more settled relationships.
Mr. Saletan, in case you weren't part of the snickering masses laughing at him, latched onto these anal sex numbers from young women in an article he wrote at Slate a while ago with a gusto that told the whole world more about his hopes and desires than anyone, other than any current or prospective partner of his, needed to know. As if to purposely compound the humiliation, Saletan wrote a follow up piece reporting that a number of women had written to tell him how much they enjoyed this. Now, leaving aside the obvious possibility that this is the Internet and he really had no idea that they weren't having him on or even if they were really women, this sort of thing tells us a whole lot about why journalists shouldn't be allowed near stories that rely on statistics. That there are some women who like any sexual activity you can name is no surprise—Rule 36, if it exists someone has a fetish for it—but to mix up self-reported anecdotes with statistical evidence is more than laughable.
(Saletan doesn't seem to be the only male journalist with a major enthusiasm here: check out the photo Reason used to accompany their story, safe for work in most jurisdictions.)
Real-life Charles Ryders and Odette Crecys
The final thing of note is the number of heterosexuals who sometimes have sex with members of the same sex. This subject I have commented on before so I suppose I'm opening myself up to the same sort of mockery I've doled out at Saletan here. But I do think it interesting. As that reason article puts it:
By the way, notice that the researchers don't give us a breakdown of which of those above three categories people fitted into. You'd think, because it is what any honest writer would do, that they'd list the groups in order of size. You'd be wrong about that.
I just risked going blind reading the charts that accompany the study and found this additional break down. 1.8 per cent of adolescent males and 4.2 percent of adult males self identify as gay. Only two in a thousand or .2 percent of adolescent females self identify as lesbian and not many more, only .8 percent, of adult females do so.
Compare this to the number who self identify as bisexual and the contrast is fascinating, especially on the female side. 1.5 percent of adolescent males self identify as bisexual and 2.6 percent of adult males do so. That is one awfully large group, really, given how little press they get. But the female numbers will blow you away. A whopping 8.4 percent of adolescent girls self identified as bisexual and 3.6 percent of adult females did. That's a lot. Any honest writer and any honest researcher would have written the "proportion who identify themselves as bisexual, gay or lesbian".
And, as the writer at Reason notes, there are significant numbers of people who do not think of themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual yet sometimes have sex with members of the same sex. Reading the chart, this is most likely in late teens and early twenties. (And does anyone want to bet that summer camps and shared university dorm rooms aren't a bit of an impetus here?)
Okay, why do I care? Not, honestly, for the reasons you might snicker at. Girl on girl porn has never done anything for me. No, it's the academic and journalistic lack of interest that amazes me. This is one very large group. I recently blogged my way through Brideshead Revisited and I am amazed at the number of academics and reviewers who find the love between Charles and Sebastian to be simply implausible. Count newspaper articles that talk about gays or lesbians and compare them to articles that talk about bisexual activity and there is nothing. And yet the numbers above suggest that bisexual sex is more common than gay sex or lesbian sex.
I suspect the people involved have a lot do with this. They probably quite like their privacy than you. But, still, there is something going on among scientists and journalists here that smells just like denial if you ask me.
The other fascinating shift here is the way the survey refers to "men" and "women" throughout rather than "males" and "females". It does this even when age clearly indicates that the subjects are boys and girls. This tells us something about the degree to which science has been influenced by political correctness: "male" and "female" are objective facts whereas "man" and "woman" are now socially flexible terms.
While I'm at it, the Center for Sexual Health Promotion have put out a publication of articles analyzing the data. Funding for that publication was provided by a condom manufacturer. This, pardon me while I pick my jaw off the ground, didn't strike anyone at the Center as a conflict-of-interest problem! It didn't strike them even as they concluded that condom use needs to be further promoted. That is the same ethics the give-away advertorial publications in my neighbourhood use (and scientists wonder why people don't trust them as much as they used to).
The numbers are also interesting in themselves. The chart is here below, if you click on it you will be able to see it larger. (You can also open this link to get a more easily readable version.)
The key place to start is the second double-column of the first row. This deals with masturbation practices of 16-17 year olds. And you will see that Seventy-five per cent of 16-17 year old boys report masturbating at least once in the twelve months before the survey was taken. Now, to take those numbers at face value, you have to seriously believe that twenty-five percent of 16-17 year old boys made it through twelve months without masturbating even once and that is ludicrous.
Surveys of all sorts try to create an atmosphere where we won't feel any social pressure or shame. That is, where we won't decide to tell the person asking questions that we do or don't do such a thing because we hope to impress them and also that we won't deny being a member of the grey party because we are ashamed of it. There is a powerful limit on these things when the survey is about something such as sexual practices because we have a powerful need to impress ourselves with what sort of person we are sexually. And we will do this even though it means denying the effect of powerful needs reinforced by tens of thousands of years of evolution—only those people who reproduced got to pass on genes—so we will not triumph over them by a simple act of will.
Thus twenty-five percent of 16-17 year old boys will claim, quite possibly lying to even themselves as they do so, that they have not masturbated even once in the last twelve months.
So the survey results don't tell us about what people actually do so much as what they tell us what they would like to believe about themselves and what they would like to have others believe about themselves. The numbers are important anyway—what people want to think about themselves and have others think about them is important and some of the numbers are really interesting.
Sex is not the only thing people lie about. We lie about income and savings for very similar reasons. But researchers can compensate with income because there is separate data about salaries available from all sorts of sources. With sex there is no separate data. What we do have, and this is fascinating, is the contrasting reports of males and females and here we see an important and significant shift. The numbers in this graph match up pretty well. In the past, males, especially younger males, tended to report far more experience than was really plausible given what the females said. Or, alternatively, the females were up to a lot more than they admitted. Or a little of both. (You can still see the discrepancy if you compare what males 30 and older claim as compared to women in the same age range.)
A digression, at this point there is always some geek who thinks he understands stats who will leap in to say that the discrepancy doesn't mean someone is lying and will then offer a long argument about how Suzie, who really gets around, can raise the number for females generally. Get ten or twenty Suzies into the mix and no discrepancy. The problem with saying that is the sample size. The whole point of using a sample of a certain size is to make there are also Georges who really get around. Funnily enough, smug male geeks always seem to forget about about George who used to be "friends" with their girlfriend.
Anyway, the thing is that the sexual self images of younger males and females line up pretty well here and that is a significant new development. One of the more interesting, to stick with the youngsters a little while longer, is what 14-15 year olds report about oral sex. We can see that 12 percent of males report receiving oral sex from a female and, if we slide over to the other side of that double column, we can see that exactly 12 percent of females report performing oral sex on a man. That tells us that attitudes are lining up. In past years there tended to be a significantly larger number of males who reported receiving than females reported giving.
Attitudes, however, is all we can be certain of. At least 12 percent would like us to think they have done or have received. That means, lest we forget, that 88 percent either have not or would not like others to see them as the sort who would. I wouldn't sit around waiting for the rush of journalists rushing to their keyboards to report that the much ballyhooed explosion of teenage oral sex was just a fantasy.
There is also a small, but significant gap between what women claim to have received versus what men report giving. That gap grows up to age twenty five and then it evens out. Again, it's about attitudes here. Women want to see themselves as getting their share but in practice it may not be that way. Part of the gap may be explained by by male selfishness but I bet a lot of it is explained by female reluctance too; we should allow for girls and young women who want to avoid situations where they have less control.
Saletan's folly
What happens when we have a gap between what one sex reports giving versus what the other sex reports receiving? I suspect it's self image mostly and that is the big change. In the past, it was always men who reporting higher numbers than women. Here we have a growing equality and even a disparity the other way in an area that might shock some. What's happening here? Well, sometimes the prudes are right and I'm guessing this is one of those times.
Porn has changed women's self image by changing their ideas of normal. And thus we get the result that in some age groups twice as many females report anal sex as the males do. Is this a reflection of what is actually happening? Well, I'm sure there is more of it but, I'll be honest, I don't want to know too much.
The eye-popping discrepancy in these numbers is the gap between the 18 percent of women between the ages of 18 to 19 who claim to have been on the receiving end of anal sex as compared to the only 6 percent of males who claim to have been on the active end. The gap closes somewhat with 20 to 24 year olds where 23 percent of women claim to have received and 11 percent of men claim to have given. Now, the obvious caveat here is that while teen-aged girls tend to have partners in the same age group, they tend to move to slightly older males as they enter their twenties. So the numbers don't have to line up to make sense. On the other hand, some of those guys reporting that they were on the giving end have to be gay.
But I would be remiss if I didn't suggest that at least some of these numbers reflect what women want thought of them rather than what they really get excited about. Without getting specific about it, I suspect most males who have been in a long term sexual relationship are familiar with the phenomenon of women who do things, seemingly with enthusiasm, in the early days only to later reveal that they don't like these things much. Women don't want to think of themselves as too easy but they also want to appear open and ready to do what they believe is expected of them. Given the influence of porn, I suspect that some younger women want to think of themselves as open to the idea of anal sex because they think this is important to men.
It would be fascinating to follow the 23 percent of women in their early twenties who report having had anal sex forward over time and see how enthusiastic they are when they get into more settled relationships.
Mr. Saletan, in case you weren't part of the snickering masses laughing at him, latched onto these anal sex numbers from young women in an article he wrote at Slate a while ago with a gusto that told the whole world more about his hopes and desires than anyone, other than any current or prospective partner of his, needed to know. As if to purposely compound the humiliation, Saletan wrote a follow up piece reporting that a number of women had written to tell him how much they enjoyed this. Now, leaving aside the obvious possibility that this is the Internet and he really had no idea that they weren't having him on or even if they were really women, this sort of thing tells us a whole lot about why journalists shouldn't be allowed near stories that rely on statistics. That there are some women who like any sexual activity you can name is no surprise—Rule 36, if it exists someone has a fetish for it—but to mix up self-reported anecdotes with statistical evidence is more than laughable.
(Saletan doesn't seem to be the only male journalist with a major enthusiasm here: check out the photo Reason used to accompany their story, safe for work in most jurisdictions.)
Real-life Charles Ryders and Odette Crecys
The final thing of note is the number of heterosexuals who sometimes have sex with members of the same sex. This subject I have commented on before so I suppose I'm opening myself up to the same sort of mockery I've doled out at Saletan here. But I do think it interesting. As that reason article puts it:
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.This heterosexuals having sex with other heterosexuals of the same sex phenomena is the most under-reported aspect of human sexual behaviour.
By the way, notice that the researchers don't give us a breakdown of which of those above three categories people fitted into. You'd think, because it is what any honest writer would do, that they'd list the groups in order of size. You'd be wrong about that.
I just risked going blind reading the charts that accompany the study and found this additional break down. 1.8 per cent of adolescent males and 4.2 percent of adult males self identify as gay. Only two in a thousand or .2 percent of adolescent females self identify as lesbian and not many more, only .8 percent, of adult females do so.
Compare this to the number who self identify as bisexual and the contrast is fascinating, especially on the female side. 1.5 percent of adolescent males self identify as bisexual and 2.6 percent of adult males do so. That is one awfully large group, really, given how little press they get. But the female numbers will blow you away. A whopping 8.4 percent of adolescent girls self identified as bisexual and 3.6 percent of adult females did. That's a lot. Any honest writer and any honest researcher would have written the "proportion who identify themselves as bisexual, gay or lesbian".
And, as the writer at Reason notes, there are significant numbers of people who do not think of themselves as gay, lesbian or bisexual yet sometimes have sex with members of the same sex. Reading the chart, this is most likely in late teens and early twenties. (And does anyone want to bet that summer camps and shared university dorm rooms aren't a bit of an impetus here?)
Okay, why do I care? Not, honestly, for the reasons you might snicker at. Girl on girl porn has never done anything for me. No, it's the academic and journalistic lack of interest that amazes me. This is one very large group. I recently blogged my way through Brideshead Revisited and I am amazed at the number of academics and reviewers who find the love between Charles and Sebastian to be simply implausible. Count newspaper articles that talk about gays or lesbians and compare them to articles that talk about bisexual activity and there is nothing. And yet the numbers above suggest that bisexual sex is more common than gay sex or lesbian sex.
I suspect the people involved have a lot do with this. They probably quite like their privacy than you. But, still, there is something going on among scientists and journalists here that smells just like denial if you ask me.
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