The Results Are In: How Much You Really Masturbate

On Thursday, we asked you how much you masturbate. On Friday, you learned how you stacked up against your fellow Jezebel readers.

According to the almost 20,000 people who said they were women who took our poll, almost exactly the same number of people who read the website Jezebel dot com masturbate two to three times a week versus a few times per month/monthly. Slightly fewer people said they were at it more than four times a week. Very few said they were on the few times a year/once a month schedule. Even fewer said they never masturbate.

These results would explain why an overwhelming majority of respondents said they felt the original results from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior downplayed how much women actually masturbate. Over 80 percent said they felt those numbers were low.

But the response to the men’s results was more measured. 52 percent of readers said they thought the amount men said they masturbate was too low, but 43 percent said they thought it was accurate. Very few thought men were overstating how much they wanked it.

Averaging how much you masturbate can be difficult. Habits and moods change, many readers told us. Whether a person is in a relationship can alter how much alone time they spend with their sexual organs, as can medications they’re on, like birth control or anti-depressants.

A large reason we did this poll was to show how much the demographics of who you talk can skew things and explain why your perceptions of what is “normal” – the original question FiveThirtyEight‘s piece sought to answer – can be different from someone else’s. According to Quantcast, the Jezebel readership rests predominantly in the age range of 18 to 44; the largest number of readers are between the ages of 25 to 34. Many are highly educated, having gone to college and even gotten advanced degrees. 75 percent of readers do not have kids. So on a larger more metaphysical level, this poll was a great lesson for life: You are not your world. (Kate 6:6)