Young people constantly have sex? Truth Is Different

As part of Ipso's long research on the wrong perceptions that will emerge in a new book, “The dangers of the perception” have been asked to people in Britain and the United States to think how often people 18-29 in their country had sexual relations in the past four weeks.

The average thinking about young people in both countries is that they had had sex 14 times in the last month. But the actual number is only five in Britain and four in the United States, according to detailed surveys of sexual behavior.

Older people think that young people have sex every day about 180 times a year compared to the most common reality of about 50 times. But this is not the most remarkable mistake in our thinking. Men are even worse when they consider the sexual life of young women, both in the United States and Britain.

Men believe that young girls perform an extraordinary amount of sex - 22 times a month in Britain and 23 times a month in the United States. Such assumptions would be the equivalent of the average youth having sex each week, plus two or three times on a special day each month. In reality, it's about five times.

The survival of our species depends on sex. Unlike many other human behaviors, where we can get better ideas of social norms from observation, sex mostly occurs behind closed doors (and genders that are available for general vision is not a fully accurate representation of the rate).