LONDON — Regardless of what extremists would have the world believe, it doesn’t appear to be going to hell in a hand basket; at least not sexually. Not according to the results presented by the first-ever globally comprehensive study of sexual behavior.According to the study’s British researchers, rumors that people are giving up their virginity younger than ever are unfounded. Likewise, claims that married people have sex less often than their unmarried friends are also untrue. Best of all, especially for those unmarried friends, is that there does not appear to be a firm connection between how often a person has sex — or with how many people — and the transmission of STDs.
Professor Kaye Wellings of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicines, and an assortment of professional colleagues, looked over published studies about sexual behavior conducted during the past decade in 59 countries, as well as governmental data, before writing the final draft of their study and submitting it to the British medical journal The Lancet.
The researchers and experts on sexuality hope that the study will be helpful to professionals who need solid and reliable information for developing effective programs regarding sexual health throughout the planet. As of now, many policies and programs rely upon stereotypes and myths about sexual conduct, as opposed to real world research.
Wellings admits that she and her comrades even had some of their cherished personal opinions challenged by the survey’s results, which included self-reports. Among them was an expectation that they would find rampant promiscuity in regions of Africa, where STDs including HIV/AIDS are rampant. The truth was otherwise, with multiple sexual partners being reported in industrialized nations where STDs are far less common. Although initial logic may suggest that the more partners one has sexually, the more likely one is to contract an STD, Wellings believes that the evidence points to two more insidious culprits: poverty and lack of education. She believes that it is this due which leads to decreased use of condoms, lack of understanding about their value, and ignorance surrounding how STDs are transmitted and protected against.
In fact, the survey provided researchers with data suggesting that African men and women are far less sexually active than expected. Only two-thirds of those involved in the study reported recent sexual activity, compared to three-quarters of men and women involved with the study but located in developed countries.
Among other popular sex myths blown out of the waterbed by the study is the belief that sexual activity in the young is beginning earlier than ever. What Wellings and her associates found instead was that in nearly every region of the world, reporters listed their first sexual encounter most often as happening in their late teens, from 15 to 19-years-old, with men more likely to begin exploring partnered sex later than women. They did find, however, that some areas varied from others. For instance, in the United Kingdom, men reported their first partnered sexual activity beginning at about 16 1/2 years of age, and women reporting theirs to have begun at 17 1/2 years of age. Indonesian men, on the other hand, waited until they were 24 1/2 years old, with Indonesian women reporting their first shared sexual contact taking place when they were 18 1/2 years old.
Married sex got a PR boost from the study, as well, with the idea that marriage is the cure to sex taking a big blow. Instead, the researchers found that married couples engage in sexual activity more frequently than singles. This is of additional interest, given that more and more people worldwide are delaying marriage until later in life. While the academics agreed that this meant more unmarried people are having sex before marriage, they did not conclude that it meant they were engaging in riskier behavior while doing so. In fact, depending on their circumstances, married women were found to be at a greater risk for harm than single women.
Dr. Paul van Look, director of Reproductive Health and Research at the World Health Organization, explains that, “A single woman is more able to negotiate safe sex in certain circumstances than a married woman.” Examples include Asia and Africa, where husbands who frequent prostitutes and do not use condoms place their faithful and unsuspecting wives at risk of infection.
By contrast, more developed nations saw a greater equality between the number of partners that men and women each enjoyed, although the rate of STD risk was not higher than that found in nations were higher numbers of lovers are more obviously gender-related. Women and men in Australia, Britain, France, and the United States, for instance, report more equal numbers of sexual partners. Not so in countries including Haiti, Cameroon, and Kenya, where men often have multiple partners while women have only one — and STDs are a major concern.
In Wellings’ opinion, this information has incredible public health and policy making implications.
“In countries where women are beholden to their male partners, they are likely not to have the power to request condom use, and they probably won’t know about their husbands’ transgressions,” she points out.
Even with the information that this study has provided to policy makers, the answers are not simple. “There are very different economic, religious, and social rules governing sexual conduct across the world,” she explains — and those in charge will both be affected by those rules as well as need to work around and within them.
