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. Doug says:

    Chart #9 seems non-linear. Have you tried a quadratic or logarithmic regression?

  2. Randy says:

    Circumcision is the reason for rough sex because of a lack of sensation. Wow dude, you are lost. I bet you thought you posted a reasoned thought too,lol.
    Don’t give advice to people on how to live their lives, we don’t care what you think. There are a host of good reasons for circumcision that have nothing to do with religion, and everything to do with health.
    I would thank my Mom right now for getting me cut. Uncircumcised penises look gross, and are not hygienic. Why do you think it’s so widespread? If you polled women on what they prefer, they would pass on the bacterial breeding ground of your uncircumcised penis. Cut the hood moms, your kids will be happy you did.

  3. Pure_Agnostic says:

    A former girlfriend told me “Vegetarians taste better”.

    Combine that with vegetarians preferring to date other vegetarians, and you see them enjoying the taste more often!

  4. Rosylips says:

    Wow did I have fun with the sex drive v self-confidence slider! I could remember back to how I viewed myself at 18 and what my sex-drive was like and track through various stages in my life up until now, aged 55 and curvy. I would say you have pretty accurate stats there :) and as always and entertaining and interesting study.

  5. Bill Shirley says:

    Re: Chart #10.
    When you’re hungry (i.e. poor) you’re less worried about looking for sex.

  6. Sam says:

    LMAO at England on this interest list thing of girls who like gentle sex. lol for real! Also the Muslims and Jews not masturbating can explain a lot. Or is it that they just have sex so many times a day that they don’t have time to masturbate? Doubt it.

    And another medal for Switzerland! Greatest country in Europe! THE END!

  7. SW says:

    Disappointed in the frequency of sex wanted finding for Ball State U. I’m just sayin’.

  8. Sam says:

    And yes! A whole article on just the oral sex questions would be THE BEST! Ahhhh CURIOSITY!! Oral sex by age, sex, race, religion, weight, height, smokers, drinkers, drugs, education level, job, income, children, pets, dating persona, political views, everything! PLEASE! thanks!!

  9. James says:

    A couple of obvious mistakes here. First, as Jessica says above, “curvy” does not equate to overweight, at least in my mind. A totally-ripped female bodybuilder, endowed by nature with large breasts &c, is curvy.

    Second, as regards the relationship between age and men liking rough sex, your chart only goes to 60, and that is NOT old.

  10. Teo says:

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

    I think the real explanation for this correlation rather lies in stress or the lack of it.

    The higher the per capita GDP, the better the living conditions in said country, the less stress people experience in day to day life. Also these countries are industrialized, work is not as physically consuming.

    Casual sex will be the last thing on the mind of someone that struggles paycheck-to-paycheck.

  11. Boola Boola says:

    So, Harvard is 4th and Yale is 1st. Take that, Cantabs! And Dartmouth isn’t even on the map … I guess the sheep are still scared in NH.

  12. BL says:

    You can’t assume the cause of the correlation. Maybe it’s having an extremely high sex drive that gives you more drive and allows you to attend better (more expensive) schools? And maybe the same goes for nations. Sex drive equates to success (and exercise in the case of an earlier graph)

  13. sundryreasons 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.”

    SIF until proven innocent.

  14. Emma says:

    Jessica – get over yourself. Nobody cares that ‘you think it’s interesting’ that you think you’re hot.

  15. Shovel says:

    The age/roughness thing, doesn’t that have more to do with the demographic of people who are NOW a given age? As in, it might not be “men tend to want more rough sex as they get older” , it might be “men who were born in the 1950’s tend to want more rough sex than men who were born in the 1980s” .. dig?

  16. Icaarus says:

    @Laeyon

    “But agnostic men, WTF is up with you?!”

    Don’t ask, don’t tell

  17. Nick says:

    Can we get some confidence intervals and p values for those findings?

  18. Nick vdK says:

    Not that picking apart the bible is a particularly productive endeavor (it’s full of weird stuff that doesn’t make much sense), but Onan wasn’t punished by God because of some anti-masturbation belief. It was because he was supposed to have sex with his dead brother’s wife so she could have offspring–as was standard practice in Hebrew society back then. Because he ‘spilled his seed’, he couldn’t get it up for his sister-in-law, which was the big no-no.

    The new testament has some stuff about not looking at a woman lustfully, but there’s nothing against masturbation per se.

  19. James says:

    To Michael, actually, research by Sheehy and others shows that the primary driver for men in their 50s and 60 in seeking relationships is companionship and conversation rather that sex. See Sheehy’s work, Pathfinders, and works by Judith Wallerstein.

  20. Doug says:

    I agree with Mark. I think your data on older men and rough sex may show a higher percentage due to your sample size for that particular cohort. What would be interesting to see, is age-adjusted rates to see a real comparison between younger and older men. Perhaps at 5 year intervals?

  21. Shinobi says:

    The language you use when looking at data across age groups here is extent

  22. Arvin says:

    Absolutely HILARIOUS :D I love the correlation between rough sex and asshole , bored , tatoo, lame, undergrad hahahaha :D Beautiful job guys!!! Please post more of those :)

  23. Robb2058 says:

    I think the higher preference for oral in vegetarians is due to protein craving.

  24. Nige says:

    @Jessica. Spot on our lass. I have a preference for “curvy” women (and by that, I mean: tits, hips, waist , ass). In having this preference- in particular for big boobed girls, I find myself “with” (ahem) some girls who might describe themselves as being ‘curvy’ despite other peoples’ descriptions of their bodies as being ‘a little extra’ or ‘whoateallthepies’.

    I would always say that curvy women have the highest sex drive; but that’s only my [non quantified] observation, because basically when I’m in bed with a curvy girl, I’m a lot more enthusiastic than when I’m in bed with a skinny or a fat girl. And at the end of the day, one’s enthusiasm for one’s partner (or potential partner) is what feeds sexual appetite.

  25. Onychomys says:

    Just one little nitpick: something like 12% of all males are red/green colorblind. And those folks (including yours truly) have a very hard time telling apart the coloration on that national coloration in chart #10.

  26. Stephen says:

    ….great work…keep crunching those numbers and making those correlations. You folks have a very large, i.e world wide, data base. Human sexuality is a growing field. Keep in touch with the demographics over the age of 62. I did think we would hear more about the thematic issues from Hugh Hefner since his banner magazine purported to be an investigative tool….especially with his `new’ marriage.
    I will add that many of the questions you may glean info concerning sexual expression are really quite stupid and adolescent. I have refused to participate in many of them just because of their poor compositon and/or absurd choice options.

  27. Amphig0ry says:

    “Rough sex” isn’t a precise definition, and may have changed over time. So what older men mean by “rough” may not be at all what their sons mean.

  28. Eliza says:

    Why so many Jewish women against masturbating?? I thought that was the most surprising result.

  29. Tom says:

    Have you considered that perhaps what men consider “rough” has changed across generations? It seems our culture is becoming more permissive in what constitutes acceptable sexual behavior, so to a guy in his 50s giving a woman a smack on the ass at some point during coitus may be considered rough, whereas a 20-something may be thinking of rough as more along the lines of “wrap my balls in duct tape and use them as a speed bag”. Just a thought.

  30. andrew says:

    this survey doesn’t mean anything to a gay male.

  31. NYC says:

    I am wondering why people are making the statement that older men like rough sex because they have been circumcised? How are you making that correlation? It might make sense if all circumcised men of all ages liked it rough. But as a Jewish woman I can say that is NOT the case. Lol

    Also why for just older men? Are all older men circumcised? Do circumcised men enjoy gentle sex when they are younger and then switch?

    Just seems to be an opportunity for some people to use this to espouse their anti-circumcision beliefs (which of course, they are entitled to)

    ** The other non-related thing that has me curious is the whole kinky nerdy dorky connection! Please ask that one!! :)

  32. vrb1955 says:

    I never laughed so hard in my whole life after reading this crap. I can’t wait for all the know it all to turn 50!

  33. Quinn says:

    I’d be interested in seeing the oral sex chart plotted against sexual orientation. My guess is that queer people, as a whole, enjoy giving oral sex more than their straight counterparts. Additionally, based on my own experience, there may be more queer people who identify as vegetarian than straight people per capita.

  34. Sam says:

    It would be swell to see some additional data points related to point #9. It seems like geography and liberalism play a big role in high-sex-drive campuses. And there could be some mention of the hyper-sexualized outlier Sarah Lawrence being a campus with a huge female population (75%, a women’s college until the 1960s) and a haven for saphhic love.

    Thanks for #7, too. A woman who learns to love her curves is more fun to be around.

  35. dam g says:

    Wow all this time and I never knew I was a vegetarian!

  36. John says:

    “If only Freud were still around to help us understand; instead we have psychology majors, those Adidas shower sandals, and darkness.” Funniest line I’ve ever read in these articles.

  37. Sarah Lawrence Alum says:

    YEAH! WE’RE NUMBER ONE!

    :D

  38. Kathrin says:

    You can’t tell about “changes with age” from the OkCupid data. For all you know, the people with low self-confidence or lack of a preference for rough sex have been that way all their lives.

  39. Dawn says:

    I think the last graph correlating nation GDP and casual sex is missing a key control. Is the person looking for a partner inside or outside their own location? I could see a story where persons from a poorer country is looking to marry and emigrate. That has happened to two aquaintances (not using this dating site) regarding person from Russia and from the DR.

    Also-can you post the results for culture and religion for comparison?

  40. NG says:

    Older men like rough sex because of their circumcisions or erectile dysfunctions?? No.

    Men *generally* like rough sex, and, on a dating site, where the point is to appear attractive, older men are less worried about whether that truth will be adversely perceived by women.

    If younger guys were more willing to be candid, their “rough” numbers would skew up.

  41. girth_brooks says:

    Jessica, I just got a boner reading your description of yourself.

  42. M says:

    That “england’ as a word was correlated with a preference for gentle sex made me laugh out loud!!!

  43. pcnyc says:

    Life’s good for those who hang with active, assertive, vegetarian shiksas; who also happen to be non-RT’ing curvy voluptuaries. Sayyy…
    p.s. The goat bit was good too, heh.

  44. Fritz says:

    I recognized the graphic of Napoleon’s march through Russia from the book by Tufte, “Visualization of Quantitative Data.” I was not expecting to find such in-depth data analysis on this site!

  45. Luuseens says:

    Wonder what software did you use for the graphs? :]

  46. wyld_phyre says:

    A note to Null…as an active member of the BDSM community, I can assure you there is a very high correlation of rough sex & geekiness.

    Also, as a 40yo fat chic, my sex drive is through the roof, yes I love giving head, and life is good! Maybe I am just too old to be here. hmmmmm

  47. Peter says:

    I am so confused by the designations!!!!
    Curvy, A few extra Pounds, Big Boned, etc. etc.
    I have had more than my share of coffee dates with morbidly obese women that use all the above terms interchangeably.
    What IS What?!?!

  48. atom says:

    Chart #3 – Vegetarians and oral sex.

    Vegetarians taste better – Vegans taste best :)

    What happens if that data is subdivided to show vegans?

    Does that hold true for people who are vegetarian for religious reasons? Hare Krishnas, Seventh Day Adventists, etc?

  49. ShyDan says:

    @Layeon

    A lot of agnostics I know were raised Catholic or Orthodox Jewish, I’d be really curious to see the breakdown both by how devout the respondents are, and by denomination.

  50. shinobi says:

    I think there is a fundamental problem in how some of this data is being interpreted. Multiple times in this article you refer to preferences “changing as they age” or “peaking” as though an individual’s preferences are changing.

    What we are actually seeing in the data are generational differences. For example regarding the question of rough sex, it could simply be that previous generations were always more into rough sex for some reason. Or more likely, that they define as “rough” things that younger generations do not, and therefore are more interested in it.

    Similarly in Charts 7&8 women of older generations may feel less confident overall than younger women due to generational differences. As current 25 year olds age their confidence levels may not change at all, we may simply see a shifting of the chart to the right. (Assuming also that they would all go back and update their OKCupid profile in 10 years.)

    While it may be true that people’s preferences may change as they age, this data does not show that, it shows the differences across age groups of various preferences. It is impossible for OKCupid to know what a 50 year old thought about rough sex when they were 25, therefore you cannot evaluate if that interest has increased. (I know you weren’t around 25 years ago, because I joined the year you started. ;-)

    Anyway, usually love your posts, but as a stats person I had to say something!