The National Center for Health Statistics on Thursday released the government’s most comprehensive survey of American sexual practices and reproductive health, delving for the first time into such sensitive areas as the prevalence of oral sex among teenagers and same-sex activity among adults.
Oral sex among teenagers has in recent years become a topic of rampant speculation and little solid data, apart from a 1995 Urban Institute study of adolescent boys. The new statistics confirm that study’s findings that oral sex is very much part of the teenage sexual repertory. According to the survey, more than half of all teenagers 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex – including nearly a quarter of those who have never had intercourse.
Among the findings in the new study, “Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures,” were the following:
Men age 30 to 44 have had a median of six to eight sexual partners in their lifetimes; women’s median was about four.
Among both men and women age 15 to 44, about two-thirds have had only one sexual partner in the past year. Ten percent of the men and 7 percent of the women have had three or more partners in that time.
About 4 percent of men and women described themselves as homosexual or bisexual, but in a finding that surprised the researchers, 14 percent of the women age 18 to 29 reported at least one sexual experience with another woman, more than twice the proportion of young men who reported such an experience.
The report offers new information about homosexuality in America. Almost 3 percent of men between 15 and 44 and 4 percent of women reported having a sexual experience with a member of the same sex within the past year, and over their lifetimes, 6 percent of men and 11 percent of women had such experiences. About 1 percent of men and 3 percent of women had had male and female sexual partners in the previous 12 months.
Nearly 6 percent of all men between 15 and 44 reported having oral sex with another man at some time in their lives, and nearly 4 percent reported having anal sex with another man.
The figures come from the 2002 National Survey of Family Growth, a survey of 12,571 men and women age 15 to 44. The survey contractor was the University of Michigan’s Institute for Social Research, which trained more than 200 female interviewers to collect the data by having the subject answer sensitive questions on a laptop computer, without revealing the answers to the interviewer.
Although the National Center for Health Statistics has periodically conducted that survey among women for 32 years, the 2002 version was the first to include both sexes and to move beyond fertility and child-bearing into broader questions of sexual behavior and sexual orientation.
“After years of provocative headlines and breathless stories based mostly on anecdote, we finally have some solid data,” said Sarah Brown, director of the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy.