Who's Having Anal Sex? Study Compares Anal Sex Rates in 20 Cities.
Does your city have a lot of anal sex?
Over the past forty years, since pornographic films became commonplace, America has been going through a sexual renaissance of sorts. Sexual acts that we once thought were taboo have suddenly become more commonplace.
Since the 1980s, people have become more comfortable exploring different avenues of sexuality. This becomes obvious when we look at the stunning rise in the popularity of polyamorous relationships. Sure, the sixties had their swingers and the seventies had their boogie nights.
But there’s been a demonstrable rise in sexual behaviors outside the ultra-vanilla Christian norm of heterosexual missionary sex within the framework of marriage, usually for procreation.
A 2005 study found that between 1995 and 2004, the number of average sex partners increased in Seattle from 7 to 8. They also noted a significant rise in the number of people having anal sex.
A 2007 study found that during the 1990s, threesomes, anal sex, having sex with more partners, as well as engaging in more varied sexual activities, all increased. This study found that between 1993 and 2000, the number of women having heterosexual anal sex increased by 7% while the number of men increased by 18%.
Threesomes jumped a colossal 19% for women and 32% for men.
From the nineties to the 2000s, and especially through the 2010s, human sexuality flourished in a wide variety of ways. The Supreme Court's decision to grant equal access to marriage for LGBTQ people, combined with decades of activism colliding with social media, has influenced a stunning increase in the acceptance of LGBTQ persons.
Pew Research has shown time and again that even Republican attitudes toward same-sex marriage have relaxed, with 44% of Republicans supporting it in 2019. In 2014, a Pew Research poll found that 61% of Republicans between the ages of 18 and 29 favored same-sex marriage. And Democrats’ support for same-sex marriage has risen from 43% in 2004 to 75% in 2019.
People are exploring the various ways to connect with one another and have sensual experiences without limits. We’re opening our minds to the different avenues of making ourselves feel good and ways to explore one another’s bodies in new and unique ways.
A 2017 study by Kristen Hess and her colleagues investigated the prevalence of heterosexual anal sex again, this time in twenty major metropolitan areas, dissecting the data to help us understand our sexual behaviors.
Overall, 35% of men and 30% of women reported having anal sex within the past year. This is a towering number. In years past, somewhere around 1/3rd of people reported having anal sex at least once in their entire lifetimes.
The people in this 2017 study are the people who are doing it regularly. It seems people in the inner cities and major metropolitan areas are more sexually liberal than those in the rural countryside. This shouldn’t come as a surprise—our sex lives match our politics.
Note: if you’re looking for kinkier sex, consider moving to a larger city.
In order of who had the most to who had the least anal sex, the cities analyzed were as follows:
New York
San Francisco
San Juan, Puerto Rico
Seattle
Detroit
Miami
Baltimore
Atlanta
Philadelphia
Boston
Newark, New Jersey
Houston
Nassau, Bahamas
San Diego
New Orleans
Chicago
Los Angeles
Washington, D.C.
Dallas
Denver
The differences between men and women and the differences between cities were also uncovered. Men in New York City had the most anal sex out of everybody (48%), followed closely by men in San Francisco (46%).
Except for three cities, men had more anal sex than women across the board. Those three cities are Philadelphia, Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles, all cities where women had markedly more anal sex than men did.
In Philadelphia, 41% of women reported having anal sex within the past year, while only 37% of men reported the same.
In Washington, D.C., 36% of women reported having anal sex, compared to only 25% of men.
In Los Angeles, 30% of women reported doing it in the booty in the past year, compared with only 27% of men.
In total, women had the most heterosexual anal sex in Philadelphia, San Francisco, and Washington, D.C.
The study compared these rates to see who was doing what and, as often happens in science, it attempted to uncover HIV risk among different populations. While this is a valiant cause that I wholeheartedly support, I sense there’s more to the story.
I’m fairly certain this framing sometimes has to do with funding. Grants and government funds are hard to come by, and this is especially true for programs that focus on sexuality, rather than disease treatment, in our still very sex-shy society.
Our federal government allots zero dollars per year to sex education funding and a paltry $110 million per year to sexual risk avoidance.
It’s yet another aspect of our American lives where the liberal and vibrant majority in the inner cities are controlled by a frigid and stifling majority in the rural areas. It’s also another place where the views of an extremist religious minority have been imposed on the rest of us.
And that might be the big takeaway here: that a wide array of dating, love, romance, and yes, sexuality is happening in the inner cities. So if you’re a fan of alternative relationship styles and different types of relationships, and you live in a rural area or a Deep Red state, consider moving to a larger metropolitan area.
And we should really figure out a way to get more sexual health funding.
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