Citizens of the world disagree on innumerable things: the creation of life on Earth, what extinguished the dinosaurs, whether the climate is changing and the proper placement of silverware in formal table settings. One thing about which almost everyone agrees, though, is that sex is integral to human existence.
In some places, sex is more than integral — it’s enjoyed; even celebrated. The curious minds at adult app store Lazeeva set out to determine which cities worldwide best exemplified joie de vivre of the sexual variety. The result is a report titled “The Most Sex-Positive Cities in the World.”
Paris, Rio de Janeiro and London top Lazeeva’s list. All three received high marks for the 10 factors the study … well, studied. Among those factors were LGBT-friendliness (London ranked first worldwide), libido of the citizenry, porn consumption, adult entertainment options and swingers culture. Rio scored 10 out of a possible 10 points for sexual satisfaction and sexual adventurousness.
Rounding out the top 10: Los Angeles, Berlin, New York City, Sao Paulo (Brazil), Las Vegas, Ibiza Town (Spain) and Amsterdam. San Francisco, Barcelona, Montreal, Miami and Toronto weren’t far behind.
The study produced some interesting — and often surprising — results, but the process wasn’t easy, the Lazeeva team indicated.
“To try and quantify exactly how sexual a city is, a multitude of factors and a huge amount of data is needed from millions of people,” the team noted in the study’s abstract. “Because of the resistance to the topic, this process was especially difficult in certain locations. We began by researching ten factors over 200 cities from around the world, before creating a final list of 100 where the full data was available.”
While some categories of investigation were what one might expect to find in any demographic study, others revealed an uncommon depth of reasoning behind the project.
“We believe that to be truly sexually liberated, a city needs to have good access to modern contraception, a positive attitude to the LGBT community and equal rights for everyone,” the research team wrote. “To recognise this, cities were also given a score for these factors. Once we’d researched the ten factors and calculated the ranking, we added on something fun to end with: what term was most searched for on porn sites in each city.”
The study’s data was obtained from a survey of more than 450,000 adults ages 18 to 70, plus sexual health data from reports produced by departments of health in each country, the UN’s World Health Organization and the World Bank. Lazeeva factored in anonymous data from users of its app store as well as data provided by content partners in order to rank porn consumption.
A table listing all of the results is here.
