Callenge our thinking

SEXAUL ACTIVITY AND SEXAUL SATISFACTION ARE NOT THE SAME THING:

Here is part of a posting from one of my favourite bloggers Cory Silverberg from about.com.

Below he gives some insight into sexual health statistics but also about our beliefs about desire and satisfaction. Have a read.

A study published this week in the American Journal of Medicine challenges some of ways we tend to think about and talk about sex and aging, and as importantly, challenges the dominant medical frame on sexuality, which focuses on dysfunction rather than satisfaction or pleasure.
The study asked just over 800 women aged 40 to 99 to respond to surveys about their recent sexual activity, overall sexual satisfaction, and sexual desire. The women were not representative of the general population, they all came from suburb of San Diego and have been involved in a longitudinal research project called the Rancho Bernardo Study which began in 1972. So the findings shouldn't be thought of as highly generalizable, but instead as an interesting snapshot of one group of women in one place at one time.
The women were asked if they had engaged in sexual activity in the past four weeks. In this study sexual activity was described as including caressing, foreplay, masturbation, and penile-vaginal intercourse. In analyzing the data the researchers divided the women into four age groups, each with about 200 women in them. Here are some of the basic findings of the study:
50% of the women reported having had sex in the previous 4 weeks and 80% of those women were living with a partner/spouse.
40% of all respondents said that they never or almost never felt sexual desire, and 30% of women who were having sex said they felt low, very low, or no sexual desire.
64% of all respondents said they were moderately or very satisfied with their sexual relationship.
64% of women who had sex in the past 4 weeks reported being aroused most times, almost always, or always.
67% said they achieved orgasm most times, almost always, or always; women in the youngest and oldest groups reported the highest orgasm satisfaction.
These findings highlight how slippery statistics are. After all, if I chose to tell you that 40% of women over forty years old said they almost never felt sexual desire you'd probably feel bad for those women, right? But of those women 67% who were actually having sex almost always had orgasms, 64% felt aroused and were satisfied with the sex they were having. So which number matters most?
This is the problem with quantitative research; it can never answer that question. But this study does give us a lot more to think about. For example: GO HERE TO READ MORE