Behavior: Now for the Truth About Americans and Sex

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— Americans are largely monogamous. The vast majority (83%) have one or zero sexual partners a year. Over a lifetime, a typical man has six partners; a woman, two.

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— Married couples have the most sex and are the most likely to have orgasms when they do. Nearly 40% of married people say they have sex twice a week, compared with 25% for singles.

— Most Americans don't go in for the kinky stuff. Asked to rank their favorite sex acts, almost everybody (96%) found vaginal sex "very or somewhat appealing." Oral sex ranked a distant third, after an activity that many may not have realized was a sex act: "Watching partner undress."

— Adultery is the exception in America, not the rule. Nearly 75% of married men and 85% of married women say they have never been unfaithful.

— There are a lot fewer active homosexuals in America than the oft-repeated 1 in 10. Only 2.7% of men and 1.3% of women report that they had homosexual sex in the past year.

The full results of the new survey are scheduled to be published next week as The Social Organization of Sexuality (University of Chicago; $49.95), a thick, scientific tome co-authored by Laumann, two Chicago colleagues — Robert Michael and Stuart Michaels — and John Gagnon, a sociologist from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. A thinner companion volume, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey (Little, Brown; $22.95), written with New York Times science reporter Gina Kolata, will be in bookstores this week.

But when the subject is sex, who wants to wait for the full results? Even before the news broke last week, critics and pundits were happy to put their spin on the study.

"It doesn't ring true," insisted Jackie Collins, author of The Bitch, The Stud and other potboilers. "Where are the deviants? Where are the flashers? Where are the sex maniacs I see on TV every day?"

"I'm delighted to hear that all this talk about rampant infidelity was wildly inflated," declared postfeminist writer Camille Paglia. "But if they're saying the sexual revolution never happened, that's ridiculous."

"Positively, outrageously stupid and unbelievable," growled Penthouse publisher Bob Guccione. "I would say five partners a year is the average for men."

"Totally predictable," deadpanned Erica Jong, author of the 1973 sex fantasy Fear of Flying. "Americans are more interested in money than sex."

"Our Puritan roots are deep," said Playboy founder Hugh Hefner, striking a philosophical note. "We're fascinated by sex and afraid of it."

"Two partners? I mean, come on!" sneered Cosmopolitan editor Helen Gurley Brown. "We advise our Cosmo girls that when people ask how many partners you've had, the correct answer is always three, though there may have been more."

Europeans seemed less surprised — one way or the other — by the results of the survey. The low numbers tend to confirm the Continental caricature of Americans as flashy and bold onscreen but prone to paralysis in bed. Besides, the findings were pretty much in line with recent studies conducted in England and France that also found low rates of homosexuality and high rates of marital fidelity. (The French will be gratified by what a comparison of these surveys shows: that the average Frenchman and -woman has sex about twice as often as Americans do.)

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