The Harvard Independent came up with a very interesting sex survey done on Harvard students. I was talking about this with my friend David the other day and supposedly a third of Harvard students never had sex in college. Another third had one or two sexual partners. Only 10% had several sexual partners during their four years. I was pretty amazed by how low this was. I thought that most of my peers have had much more.
Does this sound like atypical college behavior? Perhaps other schools are not as chaste as Harvard...
it IS atypical college behavior. but you know what IS typical? everyone thinks that the people around them are having more sex than they actually are. so even in schools that are a lot more sexually active than us, no doubt the students think that there's like 5 times as much sexy times going on than there is. ;)
ReplyDeleteI found the original data:
ReplyDeleteThe Indy had an issue with a lot of data: http://issuu.com/harvardindependent/docs/04.22.10_sex_issue
FlyBy Blog did a follow-up: http://www.thecrimson.harvard.edu/article/2007/5/17/cheat-sheet-for-harvard-sex-facts/
From the FlyBy blog post: "UHS’s most recent data tells us that nearly half of Harvard students still haven’t done “it.""
If you're interested, here's a sex survey that MIT's school newspaper did last year:
ReplyDeletehttp://tech.mit.edu/V129/N49/survey.html
Unfortunately it doesn't directly answer the question you're asking, but it does have some other interesting statistics (the percentage of students in each dorm who have had anal sex, for example).
The main thing I got out of the MIT sex survey is that some MIT students are very sexually active, but most are not (no sex, or just one or two partners). My theory is that college students are better at talking about sex than actually having sex!
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, you'll find similar results if you look at drinking. College students tend to think their peers drink more than they actually do. Can't find the article now, though. Does anyone remember reading this?