In one major Canadian study, one-third of adults said they had not had sex with a partner in the previous year
The questions sociologist and sex researcher Tina Fetner gets asked most often are: How often are people having sex? What’s ‘normal’? Am I getting as much as the average person?
When she set out, pre-pandemic, to explore how much and what kind of sex adult Canadians are actually having, one third — 32 per cent — of those who responded to her sweeping 2018 survey said they had not had sex with a partner in the previous year.
Among those who were having sex, a number reported that their most recent sexual encounter fell into a grey area of “unenthusiastic” consent.
The sex wasn’t necessarily non-consensual. Rather, “someone wasn’t as into it as their sexual partner,” said Fetner, author of Sex in Canada: The Who, Why, When and How of Getting Down Up North. When invited to fill in a box to explain why, “a lot of people were, like, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t feel like it, but I didn’t want to hurt my partner’s feelings,’” Fetner said. “Or, ‘I wasn’t feeling it because I was really busy,’ or, ‘This was the only time we could fit it in our schedules.’
“Some people are having sex because they feel they should.”
Fetner hasn’t collected data since her delve into what Canadians think and do sexually, information Canada has been far more prudish about collecting compared to other nations. It’s not clear how, or if, living through the worst of COVID’s waves changed sex and intimacy.
An exclusive Leger poll for Postmedia conducted in mid-January found that while a quarter (27 per cent) of adult respondents said they engage in sexual activity at least once a week, and 32 per cent have sex at least once a month, one in seven engage less than once a month (14 per cent) or not at all (15 per cent).
We have to hold down jobs, bring up children … have friends, make food, tidy the house … Where is the actual time (to have sex)?
Anniki Sommerville, podcaster
As stress decreased over subsequent phases of the pandemic, so did desire. Sex activity increased in the summer months of June to August 2020, when restrictions were at their lowest. But the increase in sexual activity was reported among those without a live-in partner. Those with a live-in partner saw a decrease in sexual activity, a drop that could be down to couples working from home and not benefiting from that age-old maxim, “distance makes the heart grow fonder,” the researchers said.
… You have all kinds of reasons to have a period of time where the sex life is reduced or non-existent.
Tina Fetner, sex researcher
It’s normal for otherwise sexually active people to experience points in time when frequency fizzles, Fetner said. While the celibate 30 per cent “I didn’t have sex in the last year” statistic might sound surprising, “maybe you have a year when your health is bad,” Fetner said. “Maybe you have a year when your partner’s health is bad.
“Maybe you have a year where you’re very busy, you’re grieving, or your relationship crumbles or stumbles. You have divorce, you have widowhood — you have all kinds of reasons to have a period of time where the sex life is reduced or non-existent.”
Twenty-one per cent, or one in five, in Fetner’s study hadn’t had sex with another person during the past year even though they’d engaged in sex before then. Eleven per cent had never had sex. Norms around virginity are changing, Fetner wrote. While “chastity before marriage” is still prized among evangelic Christians and other cultures, “the stigma associated with virginity has reversed course, making it socially awkward to be a virgin past a certain age.”
Young women still face a double standard. “That is, whereas their male peers are lauded for having sex (and lots of it), they themselves can expect some level of disapproval if they follow suit,” Fetner wrote.
Still, only 17 per cent of “virgins” were saving themselves for marriage. Some hadn’t yet found a partner, were too shy to have sex or wanted to wait until they fell in love.
People tend to have the most sex when they’re young, Fetner said. As bodies age, sex drives wane. But older people do have sex (more than a third of people aged 70 and older told Fetner they’d had partnered sex within the last month). The survey challenged other tropes, such as singles have more sex than marrieds — the reverse was true — or that kid-less couples have more sex than couples with kids at home — also not true.
From other research in the field, we know that people are viewing online pornography, a lot …
Tina Fetner
Overall, while ideas around sex, such as the morality of premarital sex or taboos against certain activities, may have changed in the last century, the sex lives of Canadians tend to fall in line with “traditional, restrictive morals,” Fetner reports in Sex in Canada.
Generally, Canadians are having sex with a long-term partner. Older norms remain influential, Fetner wrote: Marriage, monogamy, parenthood. Few (six per cent of her sample of 2,303 Canadians aged 18 to 90) in her survey reported being in “open” relationships. Sixty-two per cent of the 1,578 respondents to the Leger sex poll were in a committed relationship of some kind, primarily married. People with a post-secondary education tend to have a more “expansive” repertoire than their high school-graduate counterparts, Fetner found. Liberals and conservatives also differ in partnered sexual activities, as do those with different religious affiliations.
Overall, levels of sexual pleasure were reasonably high among participants to her anonymous, online sex survey, though it’s not clear whether it was higher or lower than before the sexual revolution, again owing to a dearth of Canadian data. Three in four who were having sex were happy with their sex lives, across all age groups. Respondents to the Leger survey also seemed mostly content: 73 per cent said they were “very” (42 per cent) or “somewhat” (31 per cent) sexually satisfied.
Canadians enjoy a more liberal sexual culture than Americans, among other features that make us different. The average Canadian engages in a little more sex, and a bit more variety, than the average American, Fetner said. In addition to having more secure reproductive rights, the U.S. has a higher proportion of evangelical Christians, pulling sexual behaviours into a more conservative trend.
“The second big difference is, of course, our francophone population,” Fetner said. French-speaking Canadians tend to engage in sexual activities more often than anglophones, her survey found.
Like other researchers, she documented a notable gender gap in orgasms. Women in heterosexual couples have fewer than their male partners, mostly because “what went on in bed typically centred on the penis rather than the clitoris,” Fetner reported. Among other findings: “Faking it” is more the exception than the rule. Canadians generally don’t have a problem with casual, no-strings-attached hookups.
While Fetner has “huge regrets” that she didn’t ask about porn, “from other research in the field, we know that people are viewing online pornography, a lot, and other researchers have deeper theories about the way it is having negative impacts on our imagination of what sex can be,” she said.
Fetner quotes anthropologist Gayle Rubin who wrote that, culturally, “sexual acts are burdened with an excess of significance.” They’re also way more private, and while the social awkwardness may not be as deep-seated as past generations, there’s still a lot of apprehension about bringing up sex and sexual activity as a topic of conversation, Fetner said.
“We don’t know, because we’re not supposed to ask, and because we’re not supposed to ask, we get really super curious about it. Because it’s a secret.”
National Post