10 Charts About Sex

April 19th, 2011 by Christian Rudder

This was one of the first infographics ever made:

Later remembered as "the map that made a nation cry", it depicts Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia in 1812. The wide tan swath shows his Grande Armée, almost half a million strong, marching East to Moscow; the black trickle shows the few who straggled back. It's an elegant fusion of geography, time, and temperature into a single statement of military disaster.

Of course, using modern tools of analysis, like circles and the color blue, we can get an even clearer picture of history:

It is our goal today to create graphics of similar concision and power, but about something more useful than war—sex.

All the data below, even the most personal stuff, has been gleaned from real user activity on OkCupid. Some of it our users have told us outright by answering match questions; some of it we've had to learn from observation.

Other than the unifying theme, sex, there's no big point or thesis to this post: just comparisons, correlations, and quirky trends.

Chart #1

We found this by crossing the match questions Do you like to exercise? and Is it difficult for you to have an orgasm?, and, as you can see, women who don't like working out report twice the orgasm problems of women who do.

Chart #2

Here, we took a single question—Is your ideal sex rough or gentle?—and scraped people's profile text for the words that most correlated to each answer. Here are word clouds for women and men in their 20s.

The text is basically Hot Topic versus, I dunno, Burberry. But beyond the words the interesting thing is how men's and women's preferences change with age:

This dataset only includes single people, of course, but I was still very surprised at how many old men like it rough. Looks like I'm going to have to rethink a cherished part of my worldview.

Chart #3

The odds shown in this chart, and the others like it later in the post, are odds "in favor"—in this case, odds in favor of being into giving oral sex. The higher a group's odds, the more into it they are.

Since so much sexual slang involves meat—"hot dog," "sausage," "burger," "beef injection," "another beef injection," and so on—I thought this would be a fine occasion to point out that there are plenty of veggie alternatives:

Vegetarian-Friendly Sex Slang
Peeling the banana.
Tossing the salad.
Squeezing the melons.
Zeroing in on a grown man's nuts and nutsack.
Putting Monsanto in yoursanto.
Ordering the split pea soup.
Sorry, that's got ham.

Cornholing others.

Charts #4 & #5

Frequent tweeters have shorter real-life relationships than everyone else, probably via some bit.ly hack. Unfortunately, we have no way to tell who's dumping who here; whether the twitterati are more annoying or just more flighty than everyone else. There is also this:

If someone tweets every day, it's 2-to-1 that they're #ingthemselves just as often. Like the "shorter relationships" thing, this is true across all age and gender groups.

Chart #6:

In the Bible, in between the part where Reuben kills a he-goat so he can dip some clothes in the blood of the he-goat and where Judah tries to give Tamar a goat but decides maybe she should be burned to death instead, God kills a man named Onan because Onan intentionally spills his seed on the ground.

(1) Thou shalt not whack off. (2) Mo goats mo problems.

Life lessons! From the Iron Age!

Charts #7 & #8

This bubble chart, plotting body type, sex drive, and self-confidence, is dynamic—you can use the slider at the bottom change it. As you can see as you move the control from left to right, a woman's sexuality peaks in her twenties, holds more or less steady for twenty years, and then falls to the floor. And while sex drive waxes and wanes, self-confidence steadily grows.

Remember, the women themselves select their body-descriptions; the bubbles show the size of each group. Though many of the words are just a shade of meaning apart, there are dramatic differences in the traits of the people who choose them. Go through the animation and compare full-figured to curvy or skinny to thin.

It's particularly interesting to isolate skinny—a deprecating way to say something generally considered positive (being thin)—and curvy—an empowering way to say something generally considered negative (being heavy). Here are those bubbles' complete paths across the graph:

Curvy women pass skinny ones in self-confidence at age 29 and never look back. They also consistently have the highest sex drive among the groups. Curvy, as a word, has the strongest sensual overtones of all our self-descriptions. So we're getting a little insight into the real-world implications of a label.

This is the "complete path" plot for men:

Things to notice: (1) almost no men choose curvy or full-figured as self-descriptions, so those words aren't plotted here; (2) men of all body types have roughly the same peak sex drive; (3) and the thing that matters most for guys is simply to not be overweight. The other four body types are clustered relatively together at most ages.

Chart #9

For this chart, we took our own data and mixed it with a little outside stuff: college tuitions from U.S. News & World Report.

Generally speaking, the more your parents are paying for your education, the more horny you are. If only Freud were still around to help us understand; instead we have psychology majors, those Adidas shower sandals, and darkness.

You can think of the dotted best-fit line as dividing the good sex-ed values (above the line) from the bad ones (below). The line also gives us a handy sliding scale: given a 36-week school year and the average partner, every $2,000 spent on your college tuition is an extra time you could be having sex that year.

Chart #10

The correlation between sex and money is robust for colleges, but it gets even stronger when extended to entire nations.

We were amazed at this result—money seems to be a more powerful influence on sex drive than culture or even religion.

You have, for example, Portugal, Oman, Slovenia, and Taiwan within a few pixels of each other on the right side of the graph, and Syria, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala almost stacked on the left, and all of them sit along the trend line.

Speaking of Guatemala, you should Facebook-like this article. The end.

298 Responses to “10 Charts About Sex”

  1. Michael says:

    RE: Older man and rougher sex.

    I think the data may be skewed, mainly because if you’re looking for something in your 50s / 60s sex will be the main driver I suspect and thus the higher level of aggression / roughness sort of makes sense. Plus: I am pretty sure your pool size severely diminishes as age increases.

  2. Ehow says:

    Plot the oral sex statistics vs. age, please. :)

  3. Jon says:

    This was a fantastic post – everything I’d ever want: Interesting subject, engaging visualizations, unexpected results — and to top it all off, it was freakin’ hilarious! I think I may have a new favorite blog, keep it up!

  4. P `11 says:

    Alternate conclusion from Chart #9: Princeton students don’t need OKC to find partners.

  5. Nick Verdant says:

    You guys are brilliant. I love this article and can’t wait to figure out how to use this information for my own gain.

  6. Truth says:

    Old men like rough sex because it’s the only way they can feel anything after spending their whole lives circumcised and gradually losing any sense of sexual sensitivity.

    Stop mutilating your children.

  7. Jessica says:

    I think it’s interesting that the word “curvy” is equated with being heavy. I selected curvy as my body type, and I’m not overweight at all; I just have big tits and ass and a small waist, ie curvy. There are a lot of women that use “curvy” as a euphemism for fat, but there are also a lot of us that have these hyper-feminine bodies that we’re really proud of. My body type is not average by any means, but my weight is.

  8. Null says:

    Anyone notice the small correlation between rough sex and being ‘nerdy’ or ‘dork’, at least among women? Men have ‘anime’ and ‘PhD’

    I guess I’m asking for a graph exploring the kinky-geeky correlation.

  9. kelly says:

    I know these are all in good fun, but you’re ignoring the influence of geographical location in chart #9. Ivy league and other expensive schools *tend* to cluster along the coasts rather than in the bible belt/central us.

  10. Fred says:

    Older men like rough sex because those who are circumcised have lost a lot of feeling in their glans and cant feel the softer gentler friction – and thus do rougher sex thinking that women both are also crippled and that they enjoy being rubbed harder for lack of feeling in their skin (usually caused because women dont know how to properly moisturize).

    it is very strange to me also

  11. cestglenn says:

    Not sure I agree with a woman’s sexuality peaking. Women of all ages and usually much older chase me. Older, classy intelligent women are awesome to look at and make dance partners.

  12. Iain says:

    Could someone elaborate on the methods of Chart #2?

    “scraped people’s profile text for the words that most correlated to each answer”

    So somebody simply decided what words correlate with ‘rough/gentle sex’?

  13. cestglenn says:

    ‘Fit’ body type was not represented for either gender. Are so few people fit or willing to call themselves fit?

  14. Laeyon says:

    Looks like the religion vs. masturbation one didn’t say what you expected it to, as the joke doesn’t really fit the finding. Christians are as open about it as atheists. But agnostic men, WTF is up with you?!

  15. Harley says:

    Always a fascinating read, but as I’m afflicted with some mild colour blindness, some points in charts 7/8 are extremely hard to differentiate, e.g. “thin” looks almost exactly the same as “a little extra”.

  16. BA says:

    I was thinking older men like rough sex because it takes more extreme activities to get them excited due to ED.

  17. js says:

    burberry? more like bur-BORING

  18. Alex says:

    Yeah, this article was great. Super interesting and informative, but also incredibly witty. I laughed out loud several times, which I rarely do, even at “humor” websites. Well done, all around.

  19. Confucius says:

    I love infographics! Too bad you don’t have a tool for us to create our own. That would be amazing

  20. PU says:

    Alternative conclusion to Chart #9 from P’11: Princeton students just aren’t actually having enough sex to qualify. (HEY OKC, why did you really leave us out?)

  21. Amy says:

    It seems safe to assume that if you like exercise then you will be thin. It could also potentially be safe to assume that the less difficult it is for a woman to reach orgasm the more she would like sex and therefore the higher the sex drive. But if you combine charts 1 and 7 you don’t get that result.

    Another way to look at that is to say if you find a full figured woman and make exercise fun for her then she might turn into a curvy woman with a high sex drive. I am reminded of the “How I met your mother” episode where Barney gives positive reinforcement to women at a gym during their weight loss so when they reach their goal they sleep with him.

  22. nashvilleoutlaw says:

    I have a few comments
    Twitter- I could see someone getting dumped for lack of anything worth talking about.. ever.. other than the pointless crap know one cares to hear about. I know everyone’s had one of those people around that seemed like everything they had to talk about and you were like “AND?? Is there a point here?” It gets old after awhile

    college tuitions- could be affected by the not so rich students having to worry more about working, paying bills and trying to balance everything = stress = lower sex drive.
    You could say the same about the Country’s, The lower the income, the closer people are to loosing what they want to have or keep = stress = lower sex drive.

  23. M says:

    Hmm, so not only does the sexy librarian stereotype apparently have some force behind it (with the grammar nerd/rough sex correlation), there are women out there who might *actually* be lying back and thinking of England? Interesting.

    Also interesting to note that women’s confidence increases with age *across the spectrum*. Do the axis-lines on that graph indicate answers self-selecting as ‘above/below average’ in the respective questions? Because if so, that means nearly all younger women think they have ‘below average’ self-confidence, nearly all older women think they have ‘above average’ self-confidence, and pretty much everybody in their prime thinks their sex drive is above average for their age!

    Also also, this has been mentioned above but it bears repeating: ‘curvy’ is NOT just a euphamism for ‘overweight’. ‘Overweight’ means ‘overweight’. ‘Curvy’ means ‘more differential between body measurements along the vertical axis than is usual’ — and that can be true of people in any weight range.

  24. Zach says:

    I wanna see how much sex people at those colleges are actually having. I bet the private ones at the top have less sex overall, thus stronger desire.

  25. Shep says:

    RE: Chart 8b

    Would ‘stocky’ and ‘muscular’ perhaps be male analogues of ‘full-figured’ and ‘curvy’?

  26. max says:

    At what age does the male sex drive peak?

  27. theresa says:

    dear okc,
    i am one of the precious few who like both sex and oatmeal AND i’m under 30. find me a man.

  28. Carey says:

    Conducting search for Swiss women who go to Sarah Lawrence in 3… 2…

  29. x says:

    agnostic men aren’t sure whether they masturbate or not

  30. A says:

    Re: chart #9 – number of times a week you’d LIKE to have sex is not necessarily the same as the number of times a week you ARE having sex. C’mon guys.

  31. John says:

    Chart 10 is actually somewhat of a proof of Maslow Hierarchy of Needs model. Where GDP is a proxy for not worrying about basic needs – thus leaving room for self fulfillment and thereby sex.

  32. gmgohio says:

    Not to be nit-picky, but I don’t really like how Chart #6’s title says “People Who CLAIM They’ve Never Masturbated.” What’s with the incredulity? For no other item are the responses qualified like that. Chart #2 doesn’t say “Portion of People who CLAIM to Prefer Rough Sex.” I think it says a lot about who you are that the idea of never masturbating is met with such cynicism!

  33. bj says:

    Interesting to plot the rough/gentle trend against the orgasm chart. normalizing for group size aside, it would suggest rougher=easier orgasm for women.

  34. PinkieB says:

    What happened to the other body types like “fit” and “athletic” and “cut”? Did they not register in large enough quantities?

    As always, love the OkTrends. Good ‘ole knowledge for the entertainment of it!

  35. PfffT! says:

    Hilarious. This graph is by far the most entertaining of any that have come before it . Thanks for the chuckles. To the person who wrote the comments/explanations beneath the charts: I hope you are a straight guy, because I want your phone number. (:

    Sincerely,
    PfffT!

    PS. Shit. I like good grammar and am a cuddly volunteer who used to be a vegetarian but who has added some meat to her diet; was very skinny as a kid but am shaped like a Barbie doll — naturally; I’m spiritual, not religious, and am 40+ yrs old; Gentle & rough describes my sexual taste and I take daily walks.
    Hmmmm…

    PPS. Pardon the grammar mistakes; your charts caused me to get a little “flustered”. (:

  36. senor pablo says:

    LOL this article just came out and some female is already shouting “curvy doesn’t mean fat!!!” Sorry to tell you, but from my experiences on here, curvy ALWAYS means fat when you meet the girl in person.

  37. LT says:

    So, while I love this article, I suspect that sampling bias and other confounds restrict generalizability beyond OKC.

    Chart 1 is probably fine (and, btw, I think it’s great) … but there are likely body-image and self-confidence issues at play here …

    Chart 2a: awesome. 2b, however, may suffer greatly from a sampling bias, or may be interpreted to mean that guys who like rough sex are more likely to be internet users, more likely to believe they need the internet to find partners, and perhaps less likely to stay in committed relationships (which, under the assumption that men become less attractive as they age, would lead to their using OKC in higher and higher proportions). In other words, across the general population this might well be completely flat.

    Charts 3,4,5: the major confound here might be regional differences. Californians are more likely to be vegetarian, use twitter, and be less sexually inhibited, e.g.

    Chart 6: the obvious question here is whether saying one is religious alters disclosure of whether one masturbates … and, yeah @Laeyon: what is with agnostics?

    Charts 7, 8: awesome! extremely interesting.

    Chart 9: I agree with @Kelly: region seems to be a far stronger predictor than tuition. What’s interesting, though, is comparing what might otherwise be equivalent (e.g. Yale (higher) v.s. Harvard and M.I.T. (lower) — perhaps admission demographics are playing a strong role here … ?)

    Chart 10: First: did you control for gender representation in these results? Secondly, rather than sex-drive (which is better expressed using the times/week metric), perhaps the better explanation for the casual sex thing is level of social trust. Switzerland and Japan — which have by far the highest proportion of users willing to go for casual sex — are perhaps also among the most orderly and homogenous.

  38. wiener says:

    Re: Chart #10

    Japanese people are looking for more casual sex than Americans!!? Holy crap, I now know where I should move out to!!

  39. LondonBrit says:

    “lies, damned lies, and statistics…” but always with wit and verve from OKC bloggers; thanks for the anal-ysis!

  40. John says:

    Sex? What’s that? I can’t get any if my life depended on it. In a few yrs, I’ll be the 40 year old virgin in the literal sense!

  41. DDF says:

    Well, I don’t know about the other “old” men, but I’m 39, about to be 40.

    Simply labeling sex as “rough” or “gentle” is one problem here. Honestly, who wants “rough” OR “gentle” sex? Perhaps these should be re-labeled as “kinky” and “traditional”.

    And I think the the reason that older men are more into it… is that it takes them that long to realize what they are missing and get their minds open in order to enjoy it.

    Funny, all the single women over 30 I know love truly rough sex.. they tend to be the crazy ones who are willing to do more extreme stuff.

    Whoever is posting about their circumcision beliefs, I feel very very sorry for you, and for the women who are going on dates with you.

  42. ihsij_x6 says:

    sex hav such an importance

  43. John says:

    It should be pointed out that God did not kill Onan for masturbating after “spilling his seed on the ground”. God had instructed Onan to inseminate some woman and he instead pulled out. God struck him dead for disobeying him.

    Classic Sunday school story. Duh!

  44. Queenmee says:

    All i can think after reading this is: Go freaking vegetarian! And if Vegans enjoy giving oral sex even more?

  45. Christine says:

    My parents pay nothing towards mine and I’m horny as fuck

  46. chris says:

    @ Laeyon=> Agnostic men just don’t know. I absolutely love charts 7 & 8, and I really want that program. I’ve seen Hans Rosling use something similar.

  47. atheistpianist says:

    Hey, I’m [slightly] going against the grain. I like rough sex and the word “classical” appears in my profile (chart #2). Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs explains Chart #10 pretty well.

  48. Meeghan says:

    In response to Michael, it does make sense that some men may like it rougher, because elderly people have an large increase in diminished sensations, so it wouldn’t be very surprising. I’m a Certified Nurse Assistant, so I’d know. If helping someone who can’t do everything for themselves shower, you notice a considerable difference reflex time in which they notice when the water’s too hot. It may seem slight to others, but if you really think about it, that slight bit of time difference could make a huge difference elsewhere, and also gets you more likely to get burned.

    It’s also possible more men were circumcised back then. Pretty much all of the circumcised guys I’ve had have almost always preferred rougher BJs, or have a much higher pain tolerance there.

    Also, guys are rougher the longer they wait to have sex. Don’t know how easy it is to get laid when you get older, because OkC hasn’t brought up the data yet.

  49. Casual sex & disposable income says:

    I think the sex vs money graph just shows that the wealthy spend more time on leisure activities.

    In addition, both money and education (by correlation) make the unforeseen consequences of casual sex a more manageable problem.

  50. Yogi says:

    All these charts are good, but how can I put these findings to some good use in finding a booty for some NSA sex?