[How often do you have sex? How long for? Where and when, and do
threesomes figure? Meet the man who has studied our sex lives in intimate
detail - and has now written an eye-popping new book]
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Professor
Sir David Spiegelhalter has been investigating the works of numerous
sexologists
in his quest to separate fact from fiction Photo: REX FEATURES
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A
quick look at the bookshelf nearest Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter’s desk
gives you plenty of clues as to the academic’s recent field of endeavour. He
laughs as he declares that some of them “are really lurid”. So it would seem;
on a swift recce I note How Big is Big, Sexual behaviour in Britain,
With the Hand, The X-Rated Bible and a Victorian Guide to Sex,
alongside more familiar tomes by Alfred Kinsey and Shere Hite. Spiegelhalter
admits “My Amazon recommendation list is a complete disgrace!” If I didn’t know
better, I would think this was the study of a dedicated sexologist, rather than
that of an eminent statistician trying to sift through and elucidate what’s
valid, or not, in sex researchers’ data. Because that’s the task the Professor
has set himself in his new book Sex by Numbers: to scrutinise the
surveyors of sex and their methodology and see what truths we can really take
away from their work – if any.
His
area of study has been so recherché that some of it has had to be conducted
under supervision. When Spiegelhalter was looking in to the work of US social
scientist Katherine Bement Davis (who researched the sex lives of several
thousand women) in the Cambridge University Library, he discovered that
although it was published in 1929, “It’s still treated as a real top shelf
book. You have to order it and you’re not allowed to take it out of the room…
they’ve never changed its classification.”
On
first meeting, it’s fair to say Spiegelhalter appears a somewhat unlikely
figure to spend many months sifting through the output and conclusions of
sexuality’s great, and often wildly eccentric, pioneers. He has the measured,
slightly abstracted manner of the career academic, not to mention the cluttered
study, and, as Winston Professor of the Public Understanding of Risk at
Cambridge University, he is more likely to be seen explaining why flying is
still, statistically speaking, a safe way to travel, than discussing the ins
and outs of physical intimacy. One of the first admissions he makes to me is,
“I am a bit pedantic,” but then who wants anything less in a statistician?
However, when the Wellcome
Collection planned this year’s major exhibition, The Institute of Sexology,
which explores the work of pioneering sexologists, the curators talked to
Spiegelhalter’s publishers about a tie-in book, to “cut through the confusion
and explore the truth” behind their rhetoric and numbers.
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Professor Sir David Spiegelhalter pictured with some of his
research
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Spiegelhalter
warms to his theme, explaining that, “The statistics of sex is a particularly
challenging area, because it’s private, it’s secret, we don’t know what’s going
on… we cannot directly observe the things we’re interested in. So, if we’re
interested in sexual behaviour, we have to make inferences, either by asking
people by surveys and doing our best to make sure that’s accurate, or by
inferring what behaviour there is by things we can measure: like how many
babies or born, or how many abortions there are, or how many people get
diseases.” Accuracy being the Professor’s key theme. He has even created his
own star system in the book for the methodology used to gather data on sex. 4* ratings are
those rare numbers we can assume to be reliable, such as the stats around
births, marriages and divorces and anything which people are
legally obliged to register. 3* stats are only “reasonably accurate”, because
they rely on those questioned telling you the truth. Even with tried and tested
systems for eliciting honest answers, you can’t guarantee all the people will
be honest all of the time. 2* data can “be out by quite a long way”, often
because the person conducting the research isn’t truly objective, while those
questioned about their sexual habits aren’t representative of the population as
a whole. 1* numbers are quite simply “unreliable” and a zero rating is awarded
to anything that’s obviously made up, like the 18th century physician
Samuel-August Tissot’s eye-boggling assertion that losing one ounce of sperm is
more debilitating than losing 40 ounces of blood.
Several
other Goliaths of sexual research are felled by Spiegelhalter’s ratings.
Kinsey’s blockbuster studies only merit a 2 and the Professor says, almost
mournfully, that although in some ways he admires Kinsey “his stats are pretty
ropey”. Spiegelhalter’s eyes light up with mischief when he recounts how three
renowned US statisticians of the 1950s, including John Tukey, tried to take
Kinsey to task when Sexual Behaviour in the Human Male was published in
1948. However, the sexologist refused to answer any questions at all until all
three men had taken his detailed questionnaire on their sex lives. As one
author’s revenge on three pedants, it takes some beating. Spiegelhalter shakes
his head in bemusement and says: “These statisticians are my absolute heroes.
It’s extraordinary what they had to go through.”
There
are even sterner reprimands for the data in The Hite Report (since much
of it gleaned via women’s groups and interested bodies), which scores a dodgy
1. But, happily for the UK’s national bedroom stats, NATSAL, the British
National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, scores a respectable 3,
due to the care taken to have a properly random selection of respondents, a
home visiting system and ensured confidentiality. The Professor applauds the
“huge effort to elicit accurate answers about behaviours that might be
considered rather transgressive.” He cites the fact that, “masturbation wasn’t
in the 1990 survey. It was included only in the last two surveys,” making me
reflect how the late Philip Larkin might have written a poem on the topic:
“Onanism began in 2001, between the Kubrick film and Facebook fun.”
“Probably
the question about how many sexual partners you’ve had is the one that attracts
most attention, because the difference in response between men and women shows
they can’t both be right,” Spiegelhalter admits. Quite so. Blokes seem to brag
a bit, while we females tend to forget a few inconvenient truths. Furthermore,
in one enlightening experiment, when women were wired up to fake lie detectors,
their answers on the question were a far closer match to the men’s. The
Professor points out that some of the disparity will also come down to any
given individual’s personal definition of “sex”. Bill Clinton declared of Monica Lewinsky
he “did not have sexual relations with that woman” and a 1999 survey from
Indiana University showed 40 per cent of respondents believed, like the
President, oral pleasure didn’t constitute sex. However, NATSAL would disagree:
for the purposes of its research, oral engagement is very much part of sex. You
begin to see how finickity this sex terrain gets in terms of reliable data.
Even
so, Spiegelhalter believes that the three NATSAL surveys, 1990-2012 show some
clear trends. We Brits do experience a 7-year itch (when relationships are most
likely to break up) and, startlingly, established couples are having less sex
than we were when the first survey was conducted. Some people point the finger
at social media as our iPads get taken to the bedroom and passion neglected,
but the figures don’t disclose the “why”. We are far more tolerant across all
age groups on the question of same sex relationships than we were two decades
ago. However, we are much less accepting of infidelity – or, as Spiegelhalter
tactfully terms it, “extra-dyadic sex.” He he has no intention of being
judgmental about the sexual behaviour of others (unless coercion is involved)
believing it’s not the statisticians job to observe behaviour, not comment on
morality. He warns against the temptation of making simplistic causal links,
which might lead to overly simplistic remedies “with unintended
consequences".
Indeed,
Spiegelhalter’s entire life’s work is tilted at steering politicians and the
public away from bad data and unfounded deductions. He tells me “Britain has
got a fantastic reputation” in statistics and that the subject is “only going
to become more and more important… I feel rather strongly that part of our education
of everybody should be able to help us know how many statistics are constructed
and the manipulations that can be done to them.” Quite so: particularly when we
have a General Election
on the near horizon. With a Knighthood awarded in 2014 for
services to statistics, I think we can rely on Sir David to gently steer us in
the right direction. As I gather my possessions to leave his study, with its
tranquil view of the Cam, I can’t resist asking if he would ever offer up the
intimate details of his own life to a stray researcher? No!” he says
emphatically, “Mind your own business”. Before relenting a little, “Not unless
it was a proper official confidential survey.” I leave with a fantasy cage
fight in my head: Professor David Spiegelhalter vs Professor Alfred Kinsey. And
I’m putting my fantasy wager on the British don to come out on top.
The
average energy expenditure by young people during sex is 85 Kcal - the
equivalent of a couple of Jaffa Cakes.
The
average heterosexual couple reports having sex three times a month between the
ages of 16 and 44 - this has decreased from five times a month over the last 20
years. The
proportion of men who claim to have successfully self-felated…
