Doing what comes unnaturally
Michael Lewis
SEX IN AMERICA: A DEFINITIVE SURVEY by Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward 0. Laumann and Gina Kolata Little Brown, £18.99, pp. 320 If you are inclined to probabilities, the possibilities of this book are limitless. When the American woman seated beside you on the Victoria Line informs you that she is 30, single, a Conservative protestant, and a graduate of Harvard, for example, you can page into the chapter called 'Prac- tices & Preferences' and find a) that she is more likely to reach orgasm than either a Catholic or an atheist; b) that she most likely has sex seven times a month, for between 15 minutes and an hour each time; c) that she is half again more likely than a female high school drop-out to perform oral sex; and d) that she is five times more likely to find appealing the prospect of giv- ing oral sex than the idea of having her anus stimulated. What you do with this knowledge is, of course, a private matter. But once you have it it does seem difficult to ignore. In addition to a certain voyeuristic delight the book provides us — whoever `us' may be — with a reliable source in the endless public debate on American sexual mores. Apparently the authors have creat- ed the first statistically rigorous survey of its kind. The earlier sex studies conducted by Kinsey, Masters & Johnson, Shere Hite and Playboy, they say, suffered from the obvious defect that their participants were largely self-selected. These sex surveys tended to describe a highly promiscuous culture because the sort of person drawn to a sex survey was also the sort of person drawn to sex. Thus the single most impor- tant fact about Sex in America, which describes America as a boringly monoga- mous and heterosexual culture, is that four out of five randomly selected English- speaking Americans aged 18 to 59 agreed to participate.
In the end, 3,432 randomly selected Americans spent 90 minutes answering the questions, included here in an appendix, of a middle-aged white woman, selected non- randomly. It turns out that Americans of both sexes, and all races, creeds and class- es, feel most comfortable discussing. their sex lives with a middle-aged white woman. Of course only the 3,432 willing subjects know for certain whether they told the truth to the middle-aged white woman. The many checks and double-checks of veracity employed by the survey probably could be foiled by any sex addict hell bent on skew- ing the nation's sex statistics, or in deceiv- ing himself. But to anyone who has watched middle Americans waddle through shopping malls with extreme indifference to everything but the next big sale, the find- ing that a third of our fellow citizens between the ages of 18 and 59 have sex no more than a few times a year, while anoth- er third bonk just a few times a month rings true. What is more, if the subjects were lying, they found some strange ways to do it. For example, in a bracing chapter on masturbation the authors reveal that about 85 per cent of American men and 45 per cent of American women living under the same roof as their sexual partner mas- turbated last year, and that half of them felt guilty afterwards. Though Americans may lie to a middle-aged white woman about jerking off they are unlikely to lie that they DID it.
As American reviewers of this book have noted, the survey suggests that Americans don't have as much sex as they think they do. But it suggests much more than that, too. It's not possible here to summarise the book's plethora of charts and graphs, or to describe the subtle variances in American sex habits due to race, religion, age, sex, or education, or even to do justice to its intel- ligent text. But it should be said that sex in America remains an event that occurs mainly between men and women — only about 1.4 per cent of women and 2.8 per cent of men describe themselves as homo- sexual — and what they do to each other in bed now differs from what they did to each other in bed 40 years ago. To make a long story short, Americans in droves have turned to sodomy. More precisely, young Americans are far more likely than old Americans to sodomize one another. Despite many fewer years in the business, Americans in their thirties are exactly twice as likely to have experienced anal sex and a third again more likely to have had oral sex than Americans'in their fifties.
It is interesting to speculate about the consequences of this not-so-subtle shift in the American sexual focus. (The authors do not.) Has it created a whole new set of conflicts of interest between the sexes? If so, it is a neglected backwater of gender politics. And from the data here described it at least seems possible, for the general impressions one gets from it is that what women now do in bed is not what they would like to be doing. A bit less than 5 per cent of women say that they find any appeal in anal sex, for example, and yet nearly a quarter of all women under 50 have experienced it. Ouch! Similarly about one half of all women do not enjoy giving oral sex, and yet nearly 70 per cent admit- ted to having done so. Perhaps this is why one in five American women say she gets no pleasure from sex; one in three said that she 'lacked interest' in sex; one in six said she experienced pain during sex; and 22 per cent of women report being forced by men to have sex they wished they hadn't. By contrast the chief sexual difficulties for men were premature ejaculation (one in four) and anxiety about performance (one in six). Small wonder.
Oddly, American men and women both are slightly more likely to have received than to have given oral sex. None of the perhaps two dozen subgroups studied Catholics, blacks, middle-aged men, etc. boasts of having given more than they received. The authors do not address this apparent discrepancy. The explanation must be that America possesses a roving class of oral sex givers, defined as a group by no other trait, who demand no repay- ment for their efforts. We know them only by their absence.
Michael Lewis is an American
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