By Joan Bakewell
When it comes to sex lessons, only the practical really matters. Certainly there is sex education expressed in a whole vocabulary that never gets mentioned in bed: ovulation, vagina, erectile tissue, menstrual flow. That's the theory, the basic essentials reinforced with diagrams, biological models and discreet questions behind teenage embarrassment. Then there's the informal education of sex mags and girlie magazines: Boys tend to browse over the glossy pictures, the greater the anatomical detail the better; girls veer towards advice columns and articles: "How will I know when I have an orgasm?" "What if he wants oral sex?" After that, it's trial and error. Possibly for the rest of your life.
Anything more is open to speculation and surveys. The latest global survey hit an eager public recently, and covers nearly 300,000 people in 29 countries. It comes up with, as all surveys do, findings that match the times. Thus did the Kinsey reports of 1948 and 1953 discover there was a lot more sex happening than had previously been supposed, that masturbation was widespread and premarital was sex pretty common. It reinforced and endorsed the post-war impulses to enjoy and own up to pleasures previously denied. Sex was suddenly something you could discuss. Social awareness gave an air of respectability to human curiosity and prurience.
Later, in the mid-60s, there was Masters and Johnson, practicing sex therapists, whose Human Sexual Response (Bantam Books, 1980) was a bestseller and did much to debunk the prevailing myth that homosexuality was an illness. It came too late, though, for the mathematical genius Alan Turing, inventor of the computer, who in the mid-50s had been subjected to hideous hormone treatment to "correct" his sexuality. Then, coinciding with the high tide of feminism in the mid-70s, came The Hite Report (Seven Stories Press, 2003), whose author Shere Hite discovered that women were not getting the sexual satisfaction they believed could be theirs and that, in fact, traditional sex -- defined as foreplay, penetration and male orgasm -- was itself sexist.
Decades pass, and social change brings to Western countries greater equality between the sexes. We see it in the two-career families, in young dads who change diapers and do the cooking, and women who manage companies and hedge funds. And now we see it in bed. The Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviors finds that those in gender-equal relationships enjoy the best sex and are more likely to have fulfilling sex lives in their later years.
More on sexual satisfaction in Western countries >
