The past decade has seen a remarkable shift toward acceptance of sexual expressions typically considered taboo, from Fifty Shades of Grey making BDSM a household word to open relationships and sex parties getting unprecedented and mostly positive mainstream media attention.
Yet, despite all this talk of kink, group sex, and polyamory — with no shortage of personal stories — we have never had any reliable data about what percentage of Americans have done these things or how many would do them, given the chance. Past studies that had asked these questions did not have representative samples, and past studies with nationally representative samples of the U.S. population had never asked about these naughtier and less common sexual behaviors.
With a new study published by Debbie Herbenick and colleagues in the journal PLOS ONE that uses a nationally representative sample of over 2,000 U.S. adults aged 18+, we no longer have to live in the dark when it comes to the prevalence and the appeal of 30+ different sexual behaviors, everything from wearing sexy lingerie to sexting to spanking.
The study itself is an absolute treasure trove of information, and is freely available online, so you are welcome to dive deep. In this post, I’m going to focus on sexual experiences involving more than two people: threesomes and group sex.
How many people have had a group sexual experience?
As you can see from the graph below, about 10% of women and 18% of men reported having had a threesome. (If you’re thinking those numbers don’t add up, they don’t have to – it’s possible that more threesomes involved two men and a woman than the other way around, or three men only.) These numbers may not be as high as the recent media coverage would have you believe, but 1 in 10 to almost 1 in five is actually quite a substantial minority of people.
The lifetime numbers for group sex — which I assume respondents interpreted as four or more people — were slightly lower: 6% of women and 12% of men.
While a nontrivial number of Americans had had threesomes and group sex at least once in their lives, however, it’s worth noting that these are not exactly a frequent occurrence in people’s lives: Fewer than 3% of both sexes had done them in the past year, and fewer than 1% in the past month. For most people, it seems, multiple-partner sex is part of sexual exploration and experimentation with specific partners or during specific life stages rather than a go-to behavior.
The age of experimentation
That certain life stages may be especially "experimental" was clear when looking at the different age groups. Among women, one age group stood out among all others: the 25- to 29-year-olds. Their recent and lifetime engagement in multiple-partner sex was notably higher than both older and younger women, and their lifetime prevalence equaled that of men (18% for threesomes; 12% for group sex).
Interestingly, despite the image of college-age youth as the wild ones, the 18- to 24-year-old women were as unlikely to have had multi-partner sex as were women over 70.
Among men, the 25- to 29-year-olds were also one of the most active age groups, but so were the younger men, and even the older age groups continued to experience threesomes and group sex at 2-3% per year well into their 70s and beyond.
All this suggests women might have a later start to this sexual exploration than men, and a shorter window of time during which they are open to it. It’s also possible that current generations of young adult women will continue to explore at higher rates than older generations even as they get older themselves, but we’d need to follow the same group of women over time to answer that question.
How many people think threesomes are hot?
Engagement in partnered sexual activities is constrained by people's ability to find willing partners-in-crime, and therefore not a great indicator of their inner desires and interests. Luckily, this study also asked participants about how appealing they found these multiple-partner sexual experiences.
On average, men found threesomes and group sex more appealing than did women. The graph below provides the exact breakdown regarding threesomes. The numbers for group sex were remarkably similar among women, whereas men were somewhat more excited about threesomes than group sex.
But, contrary to popular stereotypes, it’s not like most men were crazy about multiple-partner sex and most women were not. In fact, between 65% and 74% of men found threesomes and group sex unappealing, as did about 90% of women.
Of course, group sex comes in many different gender combinations (don’t forget there are more than two genders) and a major limitation of this study is not asking about the type of threesome people had or found appealing. Another major limitation is the entirely binary approach to gender, with no information about the behaviors and desires of transgender or gender non-binary folks.
You can find Dr. Zhana Vrangalova on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, and at her website, drzhana.com.
