When we sat down with sexpert Dan Savage earlier this year, he told us that the surest route to better sex with our partner is having a more open dialogue about it. One spot where Americans feel comfortable doing that: the General Social Survey, which is exactly where researchers turned for data about the current state of sexual experimentation in the U.S.
After analyzing GGSS responses from the early ‘90s through 2014, psychologists Jean Twenge, Ryne Sherman and Brooke Wells found that not only has the acceptance of same-sex behavior increased, but also that the percentage of people who self-reported having a same-sex experience has increased dramatically.
The percentage of same-sex experiences for women more than doubled during the analysis period, increasing from 3.6 percent to 8.7 percent. For men, it nearly doubled, going from 4.5 percent to 8.2 percent. “The increase … appeared consistently across all age groups (up) to those in their 50s,” the researchers reported.
In addition to the correlation with age, the researchers also discovered the self-reported experimentation increased the most in the Midwest and the South.
So, can this all be written off to an increased societal acceptance of homosexuality? Not really. It’s more down to genuine experimentation. As Esquire notes, “The jump was largely driven by people partnering with both men and women, not strictly homosexual partnerships.”
America: land of the free … to experiment.
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