In the late 1940s and early 1950s, when pioneer researcher Alfred Kinsey published his exhaustive -- but anecdotally based -- research on Americans' sex lives, he was bitterly attacked from all sides. In 1966, when William Masters and Virginia Johnson described what they saw of the human body's sexual responses in the laboratory, they were inundated with hate mail, the "drop dead" letters surpassing others at a rate of 9 to 1. Over the last quarter century, American attitudes have softened a bit and research on sexual habits has continued. Even so, given the earlier controversies, no one seemed willing to underwrite a project that would fully illuminate Americans' sexual behaviors and attitudes.
Until now. For the first time in history, a truly scientific nationwide survey reveals what really happens in America's bedrooms. Sex in America, designed by academics at the University of Chicago's National Opinion Research Center, asked 210 pages' worth of questions of 3,432 Americans and emerged with a portrait that is comforting about the romance that exists in stable relationships, myth-busting when it comes to the sex lives of single men and women, alarming when it comes to the amount of sex that is forced on women and uniquely revealing about the likely size of the gay population. Among the major findings:
Fidelity reigns. Fully 83 percent of Americans had sex with one person or had no sex partners in the past year, and half of Americans have had only one partner in the past five years.
Most Americans have sexual intercourse six or seven times a month.
Married people and couples living together have the most sex -- 40 percent of marrieds and 56 percent of those living together have intercourse twice a week or more -- and they enjoy their sex lives more than singles who live alone.
More than a fifth of women -- 22 percent -- have been forced to perform sexual acts.
The researchers grappled with the explosive question of how large the gay population is; they found that just 2.8 percent of men and 1.4 percent of women say they are gay. When the question is broader, 10.1 percent of men and 8.6 percent of women either identify themselves as gay, say they have had a sexual experience with someone of the same gender or claim to have some physical attraction to members of the same sex.
The researchers believe, based on what they have learned about American sexual practices, that there will not be a widespread breakout of AIDS in the heterosexual population.
Generally, Americans are doing less with each other sexually than the images gleaned from popular culture would imply -- and when they do have sex, it's pretty conventional. "Overall, the numbers are reassuring and positive," says project leader Bob Michael, dean of the University of Chicago's Harris School of Public Policy, who thinks the survey proves that society is not going to hell in a handbasket after all. John Gagnon, a sociologist and longtime sex researcher from the State University of New York at Stony Brook who collaborated in the survey, is more circumspect. "You could read the numbers and think, `Gee, this is terrific; no one's doing anything!'" he points out. "Or you could say, `This is really terrible. Everyone's so repressed!'"
Whatever the interpretation, the survey has been a long time in coming. It was originally proposed in 1987 by the National Institutes of Health to help scientists fight AIDS. But Congress killed funding for it in 1991 after conservatives caught wind of its intimate questions. It re-emerged after private foundations agreed to back a less ambitious effort.
In fact, though Sex in America is subtitled "A Definitive Survey," the authors emphasize that they have only scratched the surface of what there is to learn about sexual man and woman. The survey is just the most visible product of a cadre of sex researchers who now are trying to fill the gaping holes in our understanding of human sexuality. Slowly, they are starting to piece together answers to questions like: How does an orgasm happen? How much do cultural norms influence what we do in bed? What's normal and what's not? Answers to those questions could prove crucial in crafting policies to address very real tragedies like rape, AIDS and unwanted pregnancy.
THE PLEASURES OF THE BODY Today, as in Aristotle's time three centuries before Jesus, scientists know more about sexual functioning in animals than in humans. Aristotle founded sex research in the Western world when he began documenting the sex practices of various animals. But even a rudimentary understanding of the human body's sexual workings was postponed for another 1,700 years or so under strict religious codes that decreed sexual pleasure of any kind -- even in marital relationships -- inherently evil. Later, the medical community made its contribution to keeping the study of sexuality a taboo by declaring that sexual pleasure was a disease. In a 1758 treatise, Swiss physician Simon Andre Tissot gave rise to the notorious conviction that masturbating causes blindness. In the 1800s, Elizabeth Osgood Willard argued that orgasm was more debilitating to the system than a hard day's work, and sex just for pleasure was certain to ruin the body's parenting capabilities. Even in this century, Freud advised that women should receive physical pleasure only from the vagina; any clitorally induced pleasure revealed unresolved psychological problems.
Perhaps the most enduring mystery of the body is the experience of orgasm. Masters and Johnson outlined a simple cycle of genital stimulation leading to arousal and eventual orgasm and described many of the things that happen during orgasm: the fast breathing, the muscular contractions, the dilated pupils, that wacky toe curl. The Sex in America survey found 75 percent of American men and 29 percent of American women experience orgasm virtually every time they have intercourse. That's not terribly startling.
More interesting are the results of new studies that focus on the physiology of orgasm. Many experts say men and women are capable of having much more sexual pleasure than they might suspect. (In a truly astounding case, researchers in one lab found a man who had 17 orgasms in an hour and a woman who had 134.) Other studies are challenging the notion that the secret to orgasm lies in the genitals. Rutgers University researchers Beverly Whipple and Barry Komisaruk found that victims of spinal- cord injuries whose nerve pathways from the genitals have been severed often develop hypersensitive areas elsewhere on their body that, when stroked, will bring them to orgasm. They also looked at healthy women and found that the right caressing of the back, the neck, the hands or other favored spot would bring them to orgasm as well.
Together with therapist Gina Ogden, Whipple and Komisaruk took it a step further and discovered that women can indeed reach full-blown orgasm through fantasy alone, with no body stimulation whatsoever. Nobody knows for sure why different stimulations trigger ecstasy. But Komisaruk hypothesizes that orgasm is a matter of the brain recruiting increasing numbers of sensory neurons to fire simultaneously until a threshold is crossed and ecstasy is unleashed.
Not only is orgasm the peak of physical pleasure, it may have significant health benefits that mirror some of the salutary effects of exercise. Orgasm acts as a powerful pain-relief agent, and some studies suggest it bolsters immune functioning. The typical orgasm will boost the body's T3 and T4 lymphocyte cells -- the cells that fight off foreign invaders -- by up to 20 percent. In an ongoing study, Ohio University gynecologist Dudley Chapman has followed the progress of women with breast cancer and finds that the frequency of orgasm might aid their health progress; the more climaxes they have, the healthier they are. He discounts the idea that the beneficial impact of orgasm is due to the general love and support given the cancer victims by their lov
