Religious participation also has the anticipated negative correlation with promiscuity: the most sexually adventurous Americans are least likely to attend religious services. Chi-square tests statistically significant at the. This includes 10% of unaffiliated women, and 7% of unaffiliated men. The highest levels of promiscuity naturally belong to Americans who don’t claim a denominational affiliation. Other-faith women are more likely to reside in Promiscuous America Of all survey respondents to claim a denominational affiliation, Jews are the most likely to report high promiscuity (8% of Jewish women, 6% of Jewish men). When it comes to “Other” faiths (including Muslims, Hindus, and myriad less common religions), the men behave like Christians. Still, in terms of sheer percentage points, the differences between Christians and nonbelievers are not enormous. Christians are the least likely to fall into the top 5% of the promiscuity distribution. It’s also predictable that the promiscuous are less religious than other Americans, but there are nevertheless interesting differences by denominational affiliation. They’re more likely to live in cities than in suburbs or rural areas. Many of them live in the western United States (for women, that means the intermountain west more than the west coast). They’re more likely to be political liberals than moderates or conservatives. They’re several times as likely as their less adventurous peers to have cheated on a spouse. They’re less likely to be married and more likely to be divorced. The residents of Promiscuous America are predictable in many ways. Still, top-five percentile sexual exploration remains a bit more common for men than it was in the early 1990s, near the beginning of the time series. Since then, a declining proportion of men have had 50 or more sex partners. The story is different for men, for whom promiscuity was most common in the previous decade. Additional analysis suggests that women’s increasing sexual adventurousness over the years of the time series represents a secular trend towards promiscuity. By 2016, this number was up to 7 percent. In 1990, about 3% of women had had over 15 sex partners. The data show a linear increase in the percentage of women who fall into the high side of sexual adventurousness. The figure below looks at what portion of the sample for each survey year falls into the top five percentile for the entire sample in order words, what proportion of women for each survey year had 16 or more partners. Overall, younger Americans are now having sex with fewer people than their Boomer or Gen X elders, but that’s not the case for the female promiscuous minority. Finally, my tally of sex partners ignores sexual orientation. Except where noted, the results are similar for the top-five and top-one percent of promiscuity. I also look at the top one percentile of promiscuity where there are sufficient sample sizes to do so. My examination focuses on the upper five percentiles of promiscuity in other words, the 5% of Americans who report having more sex partners than the other 95 percent. The multiple waves of data provide a sample of over 30,000 respondents and therefore enough cases to look at sexual behavior at the margins. Who are these people? In the following pages, I present a statistical portrait of Promiscuous America by using General Social Survey data collected between 19 (earlier surveys didn’t query respondents about their sexual histories). One percent of American women have had over 35 partners the comparable figure for men is 150. Five percent of women have had 16 or more partners five percent of men have had 50 or more. Although most people have had only a few partners, a few have had a multitude (indeed, I capped the maximum at 100 so a single page graph would be intelligible). The yellow bars are medians, included to provide some perspective. The distribution of promiscuity is skewed to the right: most people have only a few partners, but a few people have a whole lot. The one exception is college-educated men, whose median tally has declined over the past couple of decades (the numbers for men who didn’t complete college have stayed the same).īut medians don’t tell the whole story. These numbers have remained unchanged for decades: you have to look at people born prior to the 1940s, who came of age before the Sexual Revolution, to find lower numbers. The median American woman has had three sex partners in her lifetime. The reality isn’t monastic but is more staid than most of us think. We’re bombarded with stories of rapid-fire Tinder liaisons and meaningless college hookups. We like to think of America as sexually permissive.
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