If you believe what you read, Australians are a sexy lot. We have sex at a younger age and with more partners than our parents, and if we had our way, we’d like to do it more often. But how do we know all this, and what does it mean?
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The study of sexual behaviour and attitudes has fascinated society; in fact, attempts at a rational and systemic study of human sexual behaviour date back at least to the ancient Greeks.
According to The Birth of Sexology: A Brief History in Documents, the legitimate forefathers of sex research are physicians like Hippocrates and the philosophers Plato and Aristotle, who made extensive observations and offered the first elaborate theories regarding sexual responses and dysfunctions, reproduction and contraception, abortion, sex legislation and sexual ethics.
Landmark sex surveys
In modern times, Dr Alfred Kinsey’s landmark sex surveys in the late 1940s and early 1950s sparked a revolution in social awareness of human sexuality.
Kinsey went where no other researcher had been before, probing the sex lives of more than 10,000 men and women. Using in-depth, face-to-face interviews, Kinsey and colleagues asked each individual an average of 300 questions about their experiences of masturbation, petting, intercourse, martial histories, sexual outlets and homosexual relationships.
His research provided a fascinating snapshot of what people were doing behind closed doors. After all, at that time, sex was hardly something one discussed at the dinner table.