From the Green Room: Gettin' Busy in the USA

The Society of Professional Journalists Award Winner for Criticism, Anneli Rufus, has put together a piece for Tina Brown’s Daily Beast blog site that demographically dissects the frequency with which people engage in sexual activity. Using published research findings, everything from the National Opinion Research Center/University of Chicago study, “American Sexual Behavior: Trends, Socio-Demographic Differences, and Risk Behavior” to Trojan’s “2010 Pleasure Study” (yes, condom companies DO conduct research), Ms. Rufus finds some surprising revelations about the nature and regularity of getting some. For example: approximately half of Americans say they have sex at least once a week, a fact suggesting that in addition to uncovering patterns about the way we sexually relate, she has found that about 50 percent of U.S. citizens…are liars.  

Miami: Move here, get someThere are other interesting factoids to be found: Miami residents are 59 percent more sexually active than people who live in Minneapolis St.-St. Paul. Startling, when you consider that the residents of any city in Minnesota would be 59 percent more likely to want to do anything physical just to keep warm. I know I certainly have, in an amorous August moment, heard the excuse, “It’s too humid,” but apparently Florida is hot…in every definition of the word. Teenage girls, it seems, are 6.5 percent more sexually active than teenage boys. Well, where were they when I was in High School?   

Children whose parents read to them less than once a week are 33 percent more likely to be sexually active when they become teenagers Read this, get some?than children of parents who read to them at least once a week. Given the plethora of anxious parents worried about the increase in teen pregnancies, this should do wonders for sales of “Goodnight Moon.”

Rufus also discovered that men have 16 percent more sex than women do. With this finding, one could conceivably draw the conclusion that, other than with each other, men are more likely to want to have sex with themselves. Although, men over age 70 are reportedly 215 percent more likely to get some, which doesn’t mean that women aren’t also more likely, they just don’t remember having it.  

There are other astonishing disclosures in Ms. Rufus’ piece, such as that artists and poets have 233 times more lovers than those who aren’t artists or poets, and that African Americans have 8.2 percent more sex than Caucasians. Which means Maya Angelou must be getting her freak on regularly.

I guess now we know what she meant by “Still I rise…”