According to the Daily Beast, the folks having the most sex are exactly the ones you'd expect: jazz lovers, poets, and drunk people. Or maybe they're simply the ones who are pretending to get the most action?
Anneli Rufus continues her project of applying statistics to our intimate lives with her "15 ways to tell if you're getting lucky more-or less-frequently than the rest of us." Among those getting lucky: jazz fans, who are "30 percent more sexually active than the average American." Says the psych textbook from which Rufus pulled this gem of a stat, "Liking other types of music, such as rock or rap, was unrelated to sexual activity" — but I bet liking the Insane Clown Posse has a negative correlation with you getting laid. Also sexing it up a lot are artists and poets, allegedly because their "impulsive nonconformity" and openness to "unusual experiences" is "very attractive." Or, you know, because they have a lot of time on their hands.
Actually, it's the issue of time that made me start to question all of Rufus's stats. Rufus writes that one study "found that 25 percent of African-American men claim to spend at least an hour on each of their sexual encounters, compared to 19.4 percent of white men and 15.9 percent of Hispanic men." However, sexual health educator Debby Herbenick is skeptical: "I would be surprised if that many men really spend that long having sex. People have lives." And really, most of the studies Rufus cites appear to base their data on self-reporting — so maybe jazz lovers and poets just claim to get it on a lot? Maybe as groups socially expected to be sexy, they get insecure if they're not having the requisite number of Coltrane-accompanied, William-Blake-quoting trysts per week?
One group we do believe might get more action than average: drunk people. Drinkers apparently have 20% more sex than nondrinkers, and sexologist Dr. Susan Block says alcohol "lowers your inhibitions, so people who have been drinking have sex with people they would never have sex with if they weren't drinking." No shit. Unfortunately, one of the least-laid groups also has the least access to alcohol — teenage boys, says Block, "are at the lifetime height of their sexual desire, yet people aren't that attracted to them. Generally, our society shuns the sexuality of teenage boys." There's hope, though. Kids whose parents read to them less than once a week are 33% more likely to have sex as teens. So parents of boys, put down the Harry Potter. Instead, give Junior a stack of jazz records. At the very least, he'll say he's having great sex.
Image via Tatjana Strelkova/Shutterstock.com.
Who's Having The Most Sex? [Daily Beast]
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DISCUSSION
I really can't think of anything more to say about the claims regarding the sex lives of musicians/poets/artists that hasn't already been said in the comments, but I have to say this particular sentence just made me lose what little faith I had left in the original author's point:
"teenage boys, says Block, "are at the lifetime height of their sexual desire, yet people aren't that attracted to them. Generally, our society shuns the sexuality of teenage boys."
Really? Society 'shuns' the sexuality of teenage boys? Which is probably the reason why movies like Superbad, the Van Wilder fiasco, and just about every single American Pie incarnation keep getting made, 'bro-culture' and casual misogyny run rampant and sexual double standards between girls and boys are as strong as ever among teenagers?
Because we - wait for it - shun the sexuality of teenage boys. A-ha.