Tuesday, October 4, 2011

Largest national sex survey ever publishes highlights sexual behavior and condom use among Americans ages 14 to 94 | Psychology Today

Largest national sex survey ever publishes highlights sexual behavior and condom use among Americans ages 14 to 94 | Psychology Today

Readers of the Sexual Continuum blog may be most interested in the findings about same-sex behavior and sexual orientation. I created the graph below, which shows the percentage of individuals who identified as gay, lesbian, or bisexual by age and gender. As shown, 3.3% of males between the ages of 14 and 17 identified as gay or bisexual, whereas 8.4% of girls in the same age group identified as bisexual. The numbers increased with age for men and decreased with age for women. Similar to many previous studies, more women identified as bisexual than lesbian, whereas more men identified as gay than bisexual. Some have suggested this indicates that sexual orientation is different in men and women, as reviewed in one of my previous blog posts.