We have two new reports especially for the sex nerds in the audience, so if data and stats get you all revved up don’t touch that mouse. Many readers will find the OkTrends Blog post especially interesting, as it dishes on sexual activities by age and interest, while dropping tasty stats on how often female Americans in the dating pool want to have sex, who thinks contraception is ‘morally wrong’ by age and state, and much more. It’s also interesting to see how a post inspired by unrealistic male expectations in dating and sex became a post about how kinky and sexually adventurous women become as they get older. (Read: hey old dude, that 19-year-old babe isn’t going to do anything deliciously nasty to, for, or with you. Not even on you.) I also want to give mad props to the awesome javascript slider widgets throughout the post where we can toggle data results on charts and maps of the US — that’s just so fucking cool and fun. First up is The Case For An Older Woman, snip:
(…) As you can see, a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger women. Meanwhile his upper acceptable limit hovers only a token amount above his own age. a man, as he gets older, searches for relatively younger and younger womenThe median 31 year-old guy, for example, sets his allowable match age range from 22 to 35—nine years younger, but only four years older, than himself. This skewed mindset worsens with age; the median 42 year-old will accept a woman up to fifteen years younger, but no more than three years older.
A man’s bias toward younger women becomes even more evident when we overlay his stated preferences with his actual messaging habits. (…)
(…) Articles touting a woman’s mid-thirties “sexual peak” have stalked the pages of Cosmo since time immemorial, but these articles typically cite clinical testosterone/estrogen/progesterone studies and attempt to make the leap to “sexual peak” from there—if they bother to cite any data at all. I, on the other hand, can make my claim by looking at a woman’s stated preferences:
[data/image] This is a nationwide “age progression” of American women, a normalized heat map similar to the ones you saw above, but with an added geographical component. By moving the slider you can watch how attitudes become more sex-positive as the population gets older.
This older-women-are-more-sexual pattern repeats across almost every proposition. Here are a few more data sets just as sparklines (computed, like the map above, for our sample set of 100,000 women). Again, these are just a handful of examples; whether we ask about bondage or kissing, women are the most sexual in their thirties.
[data/image] Researching this post, I also came upon an interesting complementary pair of graphs illustrating sexual dominance preferences. Younger men want to be dominated. Older women are generally interested in doing just that.
[data/image] In addition their lack of physical inhibitions, older women have much healthier attitudes in two other areas of sexual concern: STD testing and contraception. (…read more, blog.okcupid.com)
The OkCupid post touches on casual sex, specifically in regard to women and aging, such as with this graphic:
At the same time (last night), I came across this thick and crunchy data slam of premarital sex statistics, From shame to game in one hundred years: An economic model of the rise in premarital sex and its de-stigmatisation. It is tinged with judgement but still fascinating:
(…) The great sociologist William Ogburn (1964) suggested that a large part of social change was a reaction to technological progress. Our research presents a mechanism where socialisation, by parents and institutions such as the church or state, is determined by the technological environment that people live in. While a simpler model that focused only on technological advances in contraception could generate the rise in premarital sex without an appeal to the socialisation process, it would miss the dramatic changes in sexual norms that history convincingly documents. For example, 69% of all criminal cases in New Haven between 1710 and 1750 were for premarital sex. Such crimes could be punished by fines, public whippings, and jail terms. This begs the question of why such draconian measures were initially adopted and then abandoned by parents, churches and states. An answer is provided here. (…read more, voxeu.org)
Regarding the OKCupid study, it seems to be avoiding a crucial point. When it comes to actual dating (as opposed to a strictly sexual relationship) it doesn’t take into account what the immediate goals of a 20-something male might be versus a 30-something female. As a 20-something hetero man who has always been attracted to older women, I have found that the large majority of 30-something females are only interested in dating someone who is interested in children (a generalization, of course, but one based on my own amateur data-gathering). Meanwhile, most of the men I know, despite wanting serious relationships, are not yet considering children. For all the reasons the study gives for men to date older women, it stayed far away from that important little detail.
I couldn’t be more in favor of younger men dating older women, and even more, for the shedding of all the outdated societal stereotypes/expectations regarding age and gender, I just think OKCupid’s “scientists” may have intentionally left out that consideration.
“This skewed mindset worsens with age” … a bit sexist? Flip the genders and what would the reaction of your readers be?
Your opinion is just that, I will defend your right to it with my life. I have mine and I am appalled.
Still luvya.
mmmm… Tasty post, thanks for the brain-gasm fodder.