What Sources of Sexual Knowledge Correlate with Actual Knowledge?

by lisa, Nov 8, 2009, at 10:34am

The D.C. Council’s Committee on Health released a report after surveying D.C. high school students about sex education (discovered via Feministing). One of their questions was about the source of sexual health information. The pie chart below shows that students name, in order, their parents or guardians, health workers, teachers, friends, and boyfriends or girlfriends as the most common sources of information.

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I asked a similar question in a study I did with college students, though I asked about knowledge about the clitoris specifically (more on that below). The figure below shows that the college students in my sample rated their friends, secondary school teachers, books, their sexual partners, and the mass media as their most important sources. Men also reported that pornography was an important source of knowledge. Very few students counted parents among their most valued sources. (Significance indicators are for sex difference.)

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My co-authors and I were interested in how those sources correlated with actual knowledge, specifically knowledge about the clitoris. And so we gave them a test and compared their scores to their reported sources of knowledge. The table below is a regression showing which sources of knowledge were most predictive of a high score on the actual test. The findings were interesting: only two sources predicted significantly higher scores on the test: media (for men and women) and self-exploration (for women).

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So, only one of the most frequently used sources of information, media, actually translated into real knowledge. Tapping into the rest–friends, secondary school teachers, books, their sexual partners–did not predict actual knowledge. Ironically, the best source of information for women, their own bodies, was among the least often cited source of information for women, beating out only pornography and parents.

This puts the D.C. study into some perspective. The high school students in that study reported that their parents or guardians, health workers, teachers, friends, and boyfriends or girlfriends were sources of sexual information, but that doesn’t mean that they are. And my findings suggest that they very well may not be.

Also see my findings (from the same paper) on the correlation (or lack thereof) between knowledge about the clitoris and orgasm for women.

The paper, titled “The Incidental Orgasm: The Presence of Clitoral Knowledge and the Absence of Orgasm for Women,” was co-authored with Emily Kremer and Jessica Brown and published in Women & Health (2005). If you’d like a copy, feel free to request one at socimages@contexts.org.

Comments

Vettekaas 11:20 am on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply

Thank you for this (and for the citation of the paper which will be my morning coffee reading tomorrow!)

I was shocked and saddened a few months ago when talking to a heterosexual female friend who was saying that she often simulated orgasm with guys. When I asked why she doesn’t tell them that they aren’t giving her pleasure, she said that she doesn’t want to hurt the guy’s pride, and that he would get upset and want to keep on trying if he knew that she didn’t have an orgasm. I then wondered HOW a woman can fake an orgasm, when the muscle contractions involved are so rapid, powerful and involuntary…. apparently the men she has slept with don’t notice the difference…

What does the fact that there are women who don’t dare to tell their partners that they are not climaxing say about our culture and sex education?

I sometimes tend to fall into the stereotype that it’s so easy to be a heterosexual, but it seems like it is quite tough to be a sexually active heterosexual female! Don’t fake pleasure… you DESERVE it just as much as your male partners!
- Beelzebub 2:27 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  And don’t you think this lack of honest communication concerning pleasure lead to even more lost orgasms? It sounds like it would be a neverending cycle.
- karinova 5:12 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  I’m surprised that it’s news to you that women fake orgasms.* I have yet to speak to a heterosexual woman who hasn’t, at least a few times in her 20s, and it’s apparent that some men, at least, absolutely can’t tell the difference.
  
  I suppose it’s worth noting, though, that from the chickchats I’ve had over the years, most women aren’t faking orgasms because the don’t think they deserve them. Here’s how it seems to happen: lots of women are fine with not actually having an orgasm every single time. Sometimes sex itself is plenty fun, and an orgasm is a bonus. Or not even relevant, frankly. (”I’m so high up, and the view is so awesome from here that I’m not even interested in going to the summit!”) But if your partner doesn’t know/get/believe that, sex can go on and on, crossing over into tedious, or even uncomfortable, unless he gets some obvious signal. (Sadly, some men just don’t pay attention, and some women are uncomfortable speaking up. Hence, the Big Fake Orgasm.) And as a girlfriend once put it, “I’d rather fake an O than associate sex and boredom.”
  
  I suspect that there may even be some willing suspension of disbelief on the part of the men in these cases.** Seems like the BFO is often the only “okay, that was fun, but: enough” signal men can gracefully accept (especially when they’re young). And it’s often the only signal women feel comfortable giving (especially when they’re young. Been there; glad to have left!). So in some stunted way, the BFO is a communication (but not). If that makes sense.
  
  ____
  *Didn’t you ever see that one scene from When Harry Met Sally?! I never even saw the movie, but somehow I’ve seen that one part many, many times. For a while there,you couldn’t avoid it if you tried. It still occasionally pops up even now, 20 years later. It clearly struck a chord.
  
  **Men? Any input on this? I’m extremely interested.
  - karinova 7:40 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    To clarify a bit:
    The point I’m trying to make is that from what I can tell, faking an orgasm doesn’t necessarily mean that a woman doesn’t/hasn’t enjoyed the sex. Yes, she probably wanted to end the sex. But that doesn’t always mean she didn’t enjoy it.
    
    And this may itself is probably part of the problem, the combination of:
    - reaching orgasm is the de facto end of sex;
    - if you enjoy it, you have an orgasm; and
    - if you want to stop, you’re not enjoying it.
    
    It means that if you (the woman) want to stop, you kinda need to “have an orgasm.”
    - C 7:57 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply
      
      “lots of women are fine with not actually having an orgasm every single time”
      
      Hmmm… I don’t know if that is necessarily a good thing. I think it is something they have gotten used to. Yes, sex isn’t always about the end product, but I think women should and have a right to expect an orgasm every time.
      - karinova 9:07 pm on November 8, 2009 | #
        
        Heck yeah, women have a right to expect an orgasm every time! But what I’m saying is that not all women do.
        
        For sure, sometimes they don’t for the wrong reasons. I know what you’re getting at. But my reference pool consists of women who range from relatively to extremely empowered (for lack of a better term). These women do not feel the need to conform; some of them occasionally rebel on purpose. So that’s less of an issue.
      - Bagelsan 3:53 am on November 10, 2009 | #
        
        C, if it makes you feel better (?), I’m a woman and I don’t always expect an orgasm even out of myself when I’m soloing it. And I doubt that in that situation it’s just a matter of settling for less or societal pressure, more just “well, that was nice but I’m sleepy now, I’m done” and roll over and go to sleep.
        
        If that kind of behavior hurt my hand’s feelings maybe I’d go the fake orgasm route too (or sit it down for a serious talk), but as it doesn’t I don’t. ^^
        
        Not to TMI you. :p
    - b 9:53 am on November 9, 2009 | # | Reply
      
      I’m definitely not the best at sexual communication in the world, but I’ve never had a problem saying “You know, I just don’t think an orgasm is happening for me tonight.” I’ve never faked one, and I still don’t see the point – if you’re THAT uncomfortable talking to your partner, should you really be doing things that lead to orgasm with them??
      
      And the fact that so many women do fake it, for the reasons you’ve given, just reinforces the idea that you’d only not have one if you’re not enjoying it. I’m not interested in perpetuating that myth, or in misleading my partner about what good sex means to me.
      
      (So now you can say that you’ve talked to one heterosexual 30-year-old woman who’s never faked one – although as a teenager, I once pretended not to have had one, b/c my boyfriend didn’t realize that’s what had happened and I was too embarrassed to point it out. See also “If you can’t talk to them about it, you’re probably not ready to be doing it with them”…)
      - Alyssa 12:46 pm on November 9, 2009 | #
        
        “If you can’t talk to them about it, you’re probably not ready to be doing it with them”
        
        I know what you are going for here, but I am a woman that grew up in a sexually repressive/shaming household. Although I’ve done a lot of work to undo this repression, there is still a long way to go- I still can’t tell my husband when I don’t have an orgasm. So (while I don’t think you were targeting people like me) I fall into your group of people that shouldn’t be having sex. Thanks for being another voice in my head telling me that I should be ashamed for being who I am. (Shaming women for not being open enough is just as stressful and silencing as shaming them about sex).
      - b 12:18 pm on November 12, 2009 | #
        
        Alyssa: While I don’t think you should be ashamed of it (and never said such a thing), it is clearly an issue for you and something that you should be (and sounds like you are) working on improving. Sure, my statement was hyperbole, but if you admit it’s a problem, why is it wrong for others to state it’s a problem?
      - Alyssa 2:25 pm on November 12, 2009 | #
        
        b: Just trying to let you know how “if you can’t talk about it, you aren’t ready” comes off when read by an adult who isn’t very vocal about sex.
  - Johnni 10:42 am on November 9, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    For what it’s worth, I am a young heterosexual man who has on occasion faked orgasms. I don’t want to derail the thread talking about circumcision-related issues, but for me at least orgasm and ejaculation are often two separate and disconnected things, when I’m with a woman or by myself. There have been several times when I’ve gone soft just because I’m “finished,” whatever that means to me at the time, but it’s socially not *at all* acceptable for a guy to just “go soft” so I fake an orgasm to explain it.
    
    And for some reason oral sex often makes me orgasm without ejaculation, and sometimes without being fully erect, so that’s hard to explain to my partner. I don’t understand it myself.
John 11:44 am on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply

I would suggest that many men don’t want to be the only one having fun during sex, but don’t or can’t recognize when their partner is faking. For that reason, I feel that it’s important to be able to communicate about sex and what you like during sex, and to explore new things that you might both find fun.

With regard to the HS survey, it’s not too surprising that HS students would provide the answer that is expected to be heard. Also, why wasn’t pornography or media included? What that supposed to be part of “online”?
Bagelsan 2:45 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply

One of their questions was about the source of sexual health information.

…

My co-authors and I were interested in how those sources correlated with actual knowledge, specifically knowledge about the clitoris.

That sounds like a good way to get dramatic but inaccurate results. If you asked people how they learned about the clitoris and then tested their knowledge you’d probably get very different results than asking how they learned “sexual health information” and then switching to the clitoris for the second part.

If you asked me where I got information about “sexual health” I would say “school,” if you asked me where I got information about “sex” I would say “books, movies, and online,” and if you asked me where I got information about my clitoris I would say “myself!” None of that means I will never achieve orgasm, it just means the survey and I have different definitions of what “sexual health” is.

So it’s not really fair to say that the respondents are all out of touch with their bodies: school is great about telling you all about STDs and fallopian tubes but that isn’t the kind of information that is learned from masturbating, for example (and *is* the kind of information that is implied by the phrase “sexual health.”) But schools won’t teach you how to have a good time or how to please a partner, so switching to a topic that is more about female pleasure and less about pregnancy or genital warts is a bit inconsistent with the first survey. Of course you’ll get different results with such different questions.
- lisa 2:50 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  My mistake, Bagelsan. In my study, we DID ask them where they got information about the clitoris, not “sexual health” or “sex” more generally. I will clarify up top.
  - Bagelsan 3:55 am on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
    
    Okay, thanks. I might’ve just misread the first time anyways.
C 3:00 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply

This an area where I think our ideas about what is masculine and feminine really hurt both women and men. The erection and pleasuring a woman are so tied up in a man’s masculinity that it really does hurt their ego and pride if the woman does not have an orgasm. And it really is hard for a woman to bring it up. Not only because they don’t want to hurt the man’s ego, but because that tightrope women walk between a slut and a prude make it very difficult for a woman to talk about sex with her partner. It isn’t feminine. But then she doesn’t want to be frigid either. So she often fakes it.

Also, women are taught it is their fault and that something is wrong with them if they don’t have an orgasm through intercourse alone. Unfortunately what we learn about sex and gender roles often hinders the female orgasm. The majority of women don’t have an orgasm through intercourse alone. Yet we are taught that that is how we are supposed to have an orgasm. So a huge majority of women think there is something wrong with them, so they fake it.

And when women don’t have orgasms, they often lose interest in sex, promoting the stereotype that women don’t like or need sex as much as men. It’s all so sad. So many women think they are dysfunctional because they just don’t know enough about their bodies.

And John is right. This hurts men as well. Imagine thinking you are in a mutually satisfying sexual relationship and either finding out you are not, or having the sex become infrequent.
- karinova 7:58 pm on November 8, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  “The majority of women don’t have an orgasm through intercourse alone. Yet we are taught that that is how we are supposed to have an orgasm.
  
  I was astonished to see, in the linked study, that 75.2% of the responding women thought that “most women will have an orgasm from penis-vagina intercourse” was true! When you look at the “orgasm with a partner” numbers, you see that 61% of the women are not reliably having orgasms with a partner (which I assume/hope includes more than just penis-vagina intercourse). So the message (that they should be having orgasms from intercourse alone) clearly gets through, despite actual experience.
b 9:55 am on November 9, 2009 | # | Reply

I feel so sorry for the partners of the men who get info from porn. I have such a hard time finding porn that I can watch, because most of it involves things that don’t look like they’d feel all that great for the woman, or that would downright HURT if they tried it on me. Porn cunnilingus is the worst. X^P
per 11:14 am on November 9, 2009 | # | Reply

Forgive me, but I suspect a little correlation/causation problem here. Not having the relevant parts I can’t say for sure, but the impression I’ve gotten is that if you already know where your clitoris is, self-exploration is way more fun — and if it’s more fun, you’re likely to do more of it, learn more from it, and consider it a more important source of information. It also seems like more sexually liberated women are more likely to know where their clitoris is and also more likely to conduct a lot of self-exploration.

Also, on the faking-orgasms front I’m with karinova — as a mostly straight man, there are times when I’m just not going to have an orgasm, and I’d prefer that neither of us have a complex about it (especially since my impression is that for both men and women, orgasm-related stress — will I have one? what if I don’t? — detracts from the experience and actually makes orgasms less likely). And for me, the correlation between whether or not I have an orgasm and how much I enjoy the sex is pretty weak if it exists at all. I think the orgasm-centrism of our thinking about sex is a little silly, to be honest (although I can’t really argue with efforts to replace male-orgasm-centrism with broader orgasm-centrism, and I recognize that comparing frequencies of orgasm is useful as an approximation of how much effort is invested in each person’s pleasure). I think it’s important to recognize and celebrate a variety of sexual needs, desires, and sources of pleasure.
- Bagelsan 4:01 am on November 10, 2009 | # | Reply
  
  Not having the relevant parts I can’t say for sure, but the impression I’ve gotten is that if you already know where your clitoris is, self-exploration is way more fun — and if it’s more fun, you’re likely to do more of it, learn more from it, and consider it a more important source of information.
  
  I get what you’re saying, I guess, but I kind of laughed at this bit. It didn’t really take me all that long to find my clitoris as a kid — there’s not really thaaat much going on down there and a ton of nerve endings is pretty good at letting you know when you’ve found something. So I don’t think a diagram, for example, would have sped up the process. (Maybe it would help *other* people find it, but once you start exploring yourself you can find things pretty quickly, it seems… leaving aside shyness and hangups of course.)
Clarisse Thorn 1:40 pm on November 9, 2009 | # | Reply

I am curious to know if you included the sexual orientation of respondents in your data. And was there any other “actual knowledge” you tested for? Knowledge of alternative sexual practices, for instance, like BDSM?
Your Monday Random-Ass Roundup: Reviewing the Hyper Bowl « PostBourgie 3:54 pm on November 9, 2009 | # | Reply

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