"THE PLEASURE IS MOMENTARY, THE POSITION RIDICULOUS, AND THE EXPENSE DAMNABLE" (via Governor Breck)

This stupid sex myth (India Knight, 4/03/05, Times of London)

One of the more curious effects of living in this peculiar, sex-saturated age is the belief, widely held, that everybody else is having sex all the time. More, that everybody else is having particularly amazing sex all the time with a varied and interesting number of partners, in a fabulous number of ways, and in a series of photogenic settings.

If you read nothing but red-tops and gossip magazines, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Britain was — cor! — one seething orgiastic mass, at it hammer and tongs 24 hours a day. If you read magazines for teenage girls, you’d form much the same opinion and conclude, in a panicky teenage way, that you were the odd one out, the freak, the country’s lone virgin, and that this must be remedied.

Which is how it becomes possible, presumably, for one quarter of 14-year-old girls to claim, as they did in a survey by Bliss magazine last month, that they’ve had an average of three lovers in their lives. Sixty per cent of them said they were drunk at the time. Nice.

They’ve been had, those 14-year-olds, in more ways than one, because when it comes to grown-up sex, the reality is so far removed from the feverish fantasy that it bears only the merest relation to it.

Far from being at it all the time with a broad selection of dishy strangers, it turns out that we are sweetly, soberly monogamous and rather touchingly old-fashioned instead. According to a survey of 11,000 adults aged between 16 and 44 published last week in The Lancet, white men average six sexual partners in their lifetimes, black Caribbean men nine, black African men nine, Indian men two, and Pakistani men one.

White women have, on average, five sexual partners, black Caribbean women have four, black African women have three and Indian and Pakistani women have one.

One of the more revealing conversations I ever took part in was several years after college with a group of fraternity brothers as one after another "confessed" to leaving school with his virginity intact or nearly so.

Posted by Orrin Judd at April 8, 2005 6:27 AM