Average Sex

In case you need to know what everyone else in America is doing before you take a dive into the sexual unknown.

Rape. One woman is raped in the United States every nine minutes.

Man versus machine. According to research by Masters and Johnson, the average woman using an electric vibrator can keep going for an hour or more and have as many as 50 orgasms During regular sex only about one woman in six has multiple orgasms.

What the unfaithful spouse’s spouse would do about it. Sixteen percent of the husbands and 9 percent of the wives in a survey say that they’d demand a divorce if they found their mates were being unfaithful. Fifty-two percent of the couples would talk it over. Twelve percent of the husbands and 11 percent of the wives say they’d try to forgive it, but none of the husbands and only 2 percent of the wives say they’d ignore it. Twenty-eight percent say they don’t know what they’d do. The majority of those surveyed said they felt that, among their friends, unfaithfulness of husband or wife would cause a divorce.

Replacing what’s lost. It takes the average man 30 to 40 hours to replace all the sperm and semen from an ejaculation.

By the numbers, now. An average ejaculation squirts a quarter-ounce of semen in about six bursts and lasts ten seconds. On the average, a quarter-ounce of semen contains about 500 million sperm. The average man squirts out about 18 quarts of semen in a lifetime, containing nearly 1.5 trillion sperm.

Who cohabits. On the average, one bachelor in five lives with a woman before he’s 30. How often does living together lead to marriage? About one time in three, according to two sociologists who surveyed 2,510 males aged 20 to 30. “Living together” was defined as cohabitating for six months or more. Most men who do it do it only once. A third said that they had lived with more than one woman.

High-school dropouts, the survey showed, are more likely than college students to live together, blacks are more likely than whites, and men in big cities are twice as likely as those in small towns are.

In a survey of college students who had cohabitated, 57 percent said that they had neglected to tell their parents about their new living style. Ninety-one percent of the women and 75 percent of the men said that their parents would disapprove.

Incidentally, here’s how a sociologist phrases the question:

“Are you now living, or have you ever lived, with someone in a cohabitant relationship?”

How it works in Florida. The average unmarried man and woman living together have had more sexual partners than the average married couple. On the average, unmarried men and women who live together also are less satisfied with their sex experiences than are married couples and are more likely to have engaged in group sex. On the average, the unmarried women had their first sex experiences at a younger age than did the married women, and the unmarried men were less satisfied with their first sex experiences than were the married men. All that was found in a study of 50 married couples and 50 unmarried couples living together in Florida.

Roommates whose clothes you can’t borrow. By graduation, 30 percent to 40 percent of all college students have lived with someone of the opposite sex. In surveys 80 percent said they would if they had the chance. At the University of Texas, 36 percent cohabit. Even at a commuter college like City College of New York, one in five shares quarters with a member of the opposite sex.

Gay at an early age. One-third of male homosexuals know they are gay by their thirteenth birthday, and nine out of ten by their seventeenth. For 58 percent, the first sex experience is homosexual.

Energetic lesbians. The average young lesbian has had at least as much sex with men, let alone women, as the average heterosexual woman of the same age has had. She also masturbates more. When the average lesbian passes her early twenties, that changes and. she tends to stick to women more.

Artificial insemination. In an average year in America, 10,000 children are conceived through sperm transplants. In 10 percent to 20 percent of the instances, sperm that has been frozen, stored, and then thawed, is used. But, according to Dr. Armand M. Karow, Jr., a consultant to the sperm bank at the Medical College of Georgia, only one man in seven has sperm capable of surviving the freezing process in sufficient numbers to result in a pregnancy. The use of artificial insemination, whether the sperm is fresh or frozen, results in the birth of six boys to every four girls, Karow says.

In a University of Arkansas study of more than 1,000 children who were conceived through artificial insemination using thawed sperm, fewer than 1 percent suffered from birth defects, compared with 6 percent in the population at large. Moreover, there were fewer than 6 percent miscarriages, half the normal amount.

Nice people don’t do it. On the average, an incestuous mating costs the off-spring about 20 IQ points.

Sex in infancy. Sex differences show up in humans at a very young age. Researchers have found, that the average three-week-old boy puts something in his mouth(a rattle or his fist) an average of 36.8 times every eight hours while a girl does it 30.6 times. At three months, girls are doing it 116.2 times per eight-hour period and boys 61.2 times.

Should you cheat on your spouse? Never, said two-thirds of the respondents in a 1978 Gallup Poll. The proportion believing that cheating is “always wrong” was 52 percent among people 18 to 29 years old, 61 percent among those 30 to 49, and 77 percent among folks 50 or older. It was 53 percent among people with a college background, 66 percent among those who went to high school, and 80 percent among those who went no farther than grade school. It was 71 percent for Protestants and 64 percent for Catholics, 7 4 percent among people who go to church, and 53 percent among people who don’t. Altogether, 60 percent of men and 69 percent of women said that it was always wrong.

Four Americans in five disapprove of mate swapping, even when it is agreed to by both partners in a marriage.

Not enough to show, thank goodness. The left breast of the average woman is a little bigger than the right breast. The average breast weighs six ounces.

Practicing. On the average, men and women who have masturbated regularly have better sex lives.

Sexy nutrition. Among other things, a man’s semen contains a little cholesterol, protein, and vitamin C.

This is straight from Masters and Johnson. When a woman gets sexually excited, her vaginal barrel lengthens from about three and a quarter inches to about four and a half inches, on the average. At cervix level it widens from about an inch and a quarter to about two and three-quarters inches. Meantime, the man’s testicles are rising in his scrotal sac.

As the woman moves into the plateau phase, the outer part of the vagina actually shrinks to grip the man’s penis. Incidentally, that’s why the experts say that the size of the penis isn’t important.

Never too young. According to Kinsey, one boy in three has partial orgasms of one kind or another before his first birthday. More than half do between the ages of 2 and 5, and four out of five do between the ages of 10 to 13. Of course, the little boys don’t ejaculate.

Does circumcision give a man more or less feeling in sex? No difference either way, according to Masters and Johnson.

False stereotypes. In separate studies researchers tested two theories that they considered sexual stereotypes.

1. Do nurses have loose, permissive attitudes about sex? The researchers compared the attitudes of nurses with the attitudes of an equal number of coeds and found no differences.
2. Does a woman turn a man off when she directly propositions him rather than making indirect advances? Prof. Clinton J. Esser of Northern Illinois University asked a number of women and men. about this. The women told him, on the average, that they had no better or worse luck propositioning men than trying to lure them into bed indirectly. The men told him that they generally complied with propositions and, for that matter, with indirect advances, too.

Keeping up the pace. The average man who has a lot of sex when young continues to have a lot when old.

Full to bursting. As the average man approaches ejaculation, his testicles swell by about 50 percent.

How they do it. Of every 100 married women in America:

• Twenty-two use the pill.
• Ten have been sterilized.
• Ten have sterilized husbands.
• Seven have husbands who use condoms.
• Six use an IUD.
• Three use a diaphragm.
• Ten use the douche, withdrawal, or some other method.
• Thirty-two don’t practice birth control.

Tying the tubes. In terms of unanticipated pregnancies, surgical sterilizations are, on the average, 100 times more effective than the next most efficient birth control method, the pill. About 1 million Americans undergo sterilization each year. Slightly more than half of them are women. About a quarter to a half of the women say that their sexual satisfaction and activity increased following sterilization. About a quarter to a half say that sex remained the same. A small fraction say that sex satisfaction deteriorated. Some sterilizations are surgically reversible, but on the average no more than 25 percent of the women who have had their tubes reconnected have conceived.

Whoops! According to the Association for Voluntary Sterilization, about two out of 1,000 vasectomies fail to achieve their purpose, and unanticipated births result.

Ain’t nature grand? When erect, the average penis points upward at an angle of 20 to 40 degrees. So does the average vagina.

VD and condoms. On the average, a kid not yet 15 is more likely to get gonorrhea than is a man or woman 50 or older. But the older person is more likely to get syphilis. You are three times more likely to get venereal disease this year than you were eight or ten years ago. Condom sales average 50 cents a year for every man, woman, and child in the United States. On the average, a condom costs little more than it did 50 years ago — about a quarter. Condom sales are increasing by 10 to 20 percent a year.

Have a pleasant Journey. Once ejaculated, sperm swim at an average speed of seven inches an hour.

Not for want of trying. The average nymphomaniac doesn’t have many orgasms.

Pant, pant. During orgasm the average person’s respiration increases to 40 a minute or more, and the heart rate thumps up to between 110 and 180 beats a minute. The blood pressure of the average man rises by 40 to 100 systolic, 20 to 50 diastolic. In the average woman it rises by 30 to 80 systolic, 20 to 40 diastolic.

Another study tested much the same thing on people who had suffered heart attacks. It found that the heart rate averaged 117 at the highest point during intercourse and stayed that high for only 10 to 15 seconds. That used up about the same amount of oxygen that you would use climbing a flight of stairs.

Good news for some men. The average small penis grows more when getting erect than the average large penis does; so the two come out pretty close to the same size.

Rebelling with your body. On the average, teenage girls who don’t get along with their parents in general and teenage boys who don’t get along with their mothers are more likely to start their sex lives early than teenagers who do get along with their parents.

And that’s not all. The average person’s toes curl when he or she is sexually aroused.