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We Will Never Understand Human Sexuality If We Only Study Twenty-Year-Olds
And we’ll keep reinforcing the same dangerous, sexist narratives
How old were you when you had spectacular partnered sex for the first time?
20?
35?
50?
No shame if your answer is “not yet.” Like most human activities, fabulous sex takes practice. You have to find out what you enjoy. If it includes another person, you have to find someone who wants to do it — and can do it well.
So even though we might start having sex as teenagers, this sex is not necessarily representative of mature human sexuality. Hell, it’s not even representative of our personal sexuality.
And yet some seminal studies rely almost exclusively on undergraduate students when it comes to figuring out what’s going on in our bedrooms. Meaning we ask a bunch of kids aged 18–22 about how they make whoopie and assume their answers tell us valuable things about sexually active adults in their 40s, 50s, and beyond.
For example, one of the most famous studies in defence of women’s “coy” sexual behaviour — at last count, cited by over 350 published reports — comes exclusively from a university campus.
