Are young people having more or less sex than you think?

Young people have sex a lot less than people think, while men have a particularly skewed view of the sex lives of young women, a long-running Ispos study on misperceptions has revealed.

It found people in Britain and the US believed people aged 18-29 had sex 14 times a month, when detailed surveys of sexual behavior have shown the actual figure is between four and five.

Men have a particularly distorted view of the sex lives of young women, believing they have sex 23 times a month, when in reality it is around five times.

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Bobby Duffy, visiting Senior Research Fellow at King's College London, writes in The Conversation that “as with so many of our misperceptions, the explanations for this will be both how we think and what we’re told”.

“The survival of our species literally depends on sex” he says, “yet it is a hotbed of misperceptions, because unlike many other core human behaviours, where we can get a better idea of social norms from observation, sex mostly happens behind firmly closed doors”.

Given the lack of much real-life comparative information, we turn to other authoritative sources: playground or locker room chat, dubious surveys, salacious media coverage and porn.

“These provide extreme examples and dodgy anecdotes that distort our views of reality”, says Duffy.

By comparison, women claim to have had almost half the number of sexual partners as men.

“This is one of the great conundrums of sexual behaviour measurement” and is seen again and again in high quality sex surveys, says The Conversation.

There have been numerous suggestions as to why this is, from men’s use of prostitutes to how the different genders interpret the question, but the disparity between the number of sexual partners reported by men and women “can largely be explained by a tendency among men to report extreme numbers of partners, and to estimate rather than count their lifetime total”, a new study in The Journal of Sex Research finds.