Phallic Friday - sex survey results

Last Sunday's newspaper had an interesting article, which I found online here. I've no idea why I can't find the link in the Australian paper that I read but it's almost word for word this article anyway.

There were some interesting results from this survey - and I noticed different online papers have taken a different slant on reporting it, which is fascinating and makes me wonder why they'd skew the article to a particular sex survey result - is it that they think their readers would be more interested in one result than another? But that's a whole other topic (and since I'm late writing this, won't be discussed here!).

The survey occurs once every decade and had a sample size of 15 000 British people. Key results are:

For people aged between 16 and 44, in the 1999/2001 survey they were averaging sex 6.3 times a month. Now, it's 4.9 times per month. There was some discussion about this being attributed to busier lives, taking work home, even having tablets and phones in bed (!) but also to the availability of porn on the Internet.

The average age for losing your virginity is also declining. For those people under the age of 25 currently, the average age for starting sex was 16. Those in the 65-74 year age group, lost their virginity at 19. In Australia, you're only just legally able to have sex at 16... in another ten years, will this figure decline? Are we, as a society, facing these sexual challenges and teaching our youth about sex in a rational, factual, un-embarrassed manner?

For women under the age of 44 years, the average number of partners was 7.7. For men this was 11.7. Another interesting statistic which to me still indicates the double standard we have in society for it to be more acceptable for men to 'sleep around' than for women. But I am glad this figure is coming closer together. That shows some changes in society.

Oh, if you click through from that article to the attitudes article, it's great. Only 3% of people refused to answer questions about their sex life, but 20% of people refuse to discuss their income. Wow - does this mean we're becoming more open about sex? (or in Britain anyway)

With changing attitudes, adultery is becoming less accepted, and one night stands becoming more accepted.

One of the doctors commenting on the article said that it was interesting that women are having sex younger, but having children later in life, which means there is a need for birth control for a longer period of time in a woman's life than ever before. Lucky there are options for this now days.

A scary statistic is that 1 in 10 women and 1 in 70 men say they have been forced to have sex against their will, and few of these people reported the crime.

I love seeing these type of articles in the mainstream newspapers. I think a good discussion about sex is always healthy! How about you? Do you like juicy discussions full of facts?