Does Sex Make Us Happy?

Our satisfaction in bed is not rising in relation to the public obsession with open sexuality—in fact, quite the opposite.

Ah, spring. The lark is in song, the daffodils are in bloom and "the most sexually explicit film ever" is on general release. Breaking what little ground remains unbroken by Baise-Moi and Intimacy, 9 Songs shows a couple engaged in an activity as commonplace as the weekly trip to the supermarket--but with better box office takings. And it indicates, apparently, our greater "openness" to sex, code for our greater openness to talking or writing endlessly about it. Gallons of ink are lavished on discussing films such as this, as well as Adam Thirlwell's archly titled book Politics, which is actually about sex. Sex is good copy.

Sales of erotic books and sexual manuals have quadrupled in the past decade; lap-dancing is a booming industry; sex shops are being stripped of their seediness; and the internet has become a vast reservoir of sexual images, as we all chill out, relax and enjoy. The line between erotica and pornography has all but disappeared (the best distinction, provided by a French publisher, is that erotica can be read with both hands). But there is a hollowness to the new hedonism. The louder we proclaim our sexual freedom, our casting off of repressive attitudes, our anything-goes morality, the less persuasive the claim becomes. We protest too much.

For, alongside the claimed sexual empowerment, fears are growing about sexually transmitted infections (STIs); the birth rate is falling; sexual maturation among adolescents is being compressed and distorted; and the structure of adult lives is such that we have less sex than is good for us--or at least for our happiness. The story of modern sex is too much noise in public, and not enough in private. The typical adult now probably spends more time listening to people talk about sex, reading about sex and filling in surveys about sex than on the activity itself.

Most of those surveys are pretty worthless, in any case. It is a social researcher's cliche that reported levels of sexual activity and alcohol consumption should always be halved and doubled, respectively. Some findings make good dinner-table conversation. The latest international Durex poll, for example, found that 41 per cent of Brits had spanked (or been spanked by) a sexual partner, compared to just 5 per cent of Germans. And the results contain gems such as the following: "Macedonians and Serbian Montenegrins are the most sexually satisfied, with 82 per cent not needing to fake an orgasm, followed by the Croatians, Hungarians and Italians (75 per cent)."

But at least it is something. State funding of research into sexual behaviour has been woefully inadequate, given the health risks of STIs. It is telling that Alfred Kinsey's research--now a film-worthy subject--is still cited half a century on. He may have been a pioneer of the serious study of sex, but few have followed.

One of the few recent high-quality pieces of research in the field, by David Blanchflower and Andrew Oswald, uses the US General Social Survey, with a sample size of 16,000, to assess, for the first time, the relationship between sex and happiness. Their conclusion is that "sexual activity enters strongly positively in an equation in which reported happiness is the dependent variable". Say again? "The more sex, the happier the person." So this finding falls squarely into the "academics find facts blindingly obvious to everyone else" category. But if the greatest happiness of the greatest number is a goal for society, as Richard Layard suggests in his new book Happiness: Lessons From a New Science, then sex needs to feature in the utilitarian calculus. Layard barely mentions it.

The Blanchflower-Oswald research suggests the median American has sex two to three times a month (well below the twice a week reported by US respondents to the Durex survey), and that those who have sex more often report significantly higher levels of happiness. But it also shows how many sexual partners you should have in 12 months if you want to maximize your happiness. The answer? No, not 365. One. As the two economists say, this "monogamy result ... has conservative implications".

Their research also makes use of a well-known finding by the Nobel prize-winner Danny Kahneman: in a chart of typical activities, sex ranks top of the happiness table and commuting bottom. (The research was conducted among an all-female group.) The Swiss economists Bruno Frey and Alois Stutzer recently calculated that the average two-way commute to a workplace in London now takes six hours and 20 minutes a week--an increase of 70 minutes compared to 1990. Assuming that the typical Brit is having sex perhaps once a week, the balance between the two activities speaks for itself. With such separation of home and work, few couples can take Kahlil Gibran's advice to "rest awhile in the noontide to meditate love's ecstasy".

None of which is to say that sex is the ultimate goal of human endeavour, that commuting is evil, or that the pursuit of material wealth and career success should take a back seat to bonking. But given that fewer than a third of us are happy with the amount of sex we have, is this how we want to live?

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Despite the intellectual appeal of the Blanchflower-Oswald paper and its utilitarian case for more sex within stable, monogamous relationships--one may feel that, when the value of sex is captured in equations, at least some of the magic is lost. Michel Foucault, in the first volume of his History of Sexuality series, argued that there were two "great procedures for producing the truth of sex"--the ars erotica and the scientia sexualis. "In the erotic art," he wrote, "truth is drawn from pleasure itself, understood as a practice and accumulated as an experience; pleasure is not considered ... by reference to a criterion of utility, but first and foremost in relation to itself." A degree of reserve, of secrecy, of mystique is required for the ars erotica, which stands in contrast to the pragmatism of Masters and Johnson and the empiricism of the social scientists.

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Written in 3/05 Last reviewed: 10/05

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