Someone (probably Louis CK) pointed out that even though we all obsess about sex (and being attractive to the persons with whom we long to have sex), it’s actually a very, very tiny part of one’s actual (as opposed to our wishful) life.
[Of course, any species that survives needs to have a strong drive for procreation, or they won’t leave enough offspring behind to carry on. (Just ask pandas what happens when they seemingly couldn’t care less… They are, if you hadn’t noticed, nearly extinct in the wild. Rats, rabbits, ants and cockroaches survive by being unbelievably fertile — and sneaky.]
Let’s try to do some math on this.
Have you ever tried figuring out what percent of your entire life has consisted of you actually making love (having sex) with another person?
I am not counting masturbation here because
- I don’t trust any data on this, even Masters and Johnson, so any guesses on my part would be just that
- I’m only talking about having sex with another person, either Penis-In-Vagina or any other sort of sexual activity, which I am not about to list here — use your own imagination if you want to.
- And no, I’m not going to tell you anything about my own habits or those of anybody else I know. However, if you want to tally up your OWN time doing ‘that’, feel free.
Let’s look at the high end of the spectrum of those having lots of sex first.
My guess is, based on observations of personal experience and what I’ve observed with people I knew well: that only with the very horniest newly-weds or with a couple who have just entered a super-sensual, brand-new sexual relationship, time would a couple be spending, say, as much as four hours a day actually’doing it’. Why? For one thing, sex is exhausting. Also, the tissues involved are delicate and can only take so much rubbing, no matter how well lubricated they might be. Plus the couple need to sleep, eat, wash, and most likely do something productive like going to school or work.
That very high figure for someone getting a HUGE amount of nookie is 4 hours out of 24 hours in a day, or 1/6, which is about 17% of the time. Let me repeat: that’s extraordinarily high, and from my own observations (thin walls allow one to hear… and so on) only seems to last for the first few weeks, because then they get sore, exhausted, sated, and somewhat jaded.
After that, they’d be lucky to be ‘doing it’ for an hour or two a day, which is between about 4 and 8% of the time.
But let’s compare that to the rest of their lives for this remarkably horny and lucky couple… Let’s suppose that they are 20 years old, and let’s suppose that they each had sex a few times in high school and after (college, military, working, whatever, and I’m making no assumptions about whom they are doing this with). Maybe they got laid 2 – 3 times a week from age 16, at about an hour each time (girls, feel free to scoff at my suggestion that a typical male teenager can actually last that long) plus, now that they are not living at parents’ home any more, they have had several tumultuous, sexy relationships one after the next, each time spending an average of 2 hours actively ‘doing it’ each 24-hour period, for the last two full years.
So let’s make that say 6 hours a week for 2 years plus 28 hours a week for the last 2 years – and these people are those who are towards the very far right hand end of the frequency curve distribution. I don’t know whether the distribution of ‘nookie-hours’ if graphed, is ‘normal’ or ‘skewed’one way or the other. But in any case, most people ‘get’ a lot less sex than this. In fact, when I was in high school and college, the vast majority of my (male and female) friends my age or younger were virgins. No, I’m not going to tell you what age or to whom I lost my virginity. I will keep my fond memories to myself, and hope you will do likewise.
Here’s the arithmetic:
Denominator (total hours lived) for this very lucky pair of 20-year olds: 24 hours per day time 365. days per year times 20 years old equals 175,200 hours total that they have lived so far. (D)
Numerator ( total hours having sex with another person since they were born) Assuming this very sexually active couple who have sex 6 hours a week times 104 weeks (two years from ages 16 – 18) plus 28 hours a week times 104 weeks (two more years, aged 18 – 20) equals 3,536 hours having sex, grand total, (N)
I used a calculator to divide N by D and I get about .02, or two percent of their life so far. That’s tops.Two percent of their life.
I suppose it is theoretically possible that a married couple of 60 years, at age 75, has been actively having sex a full hour every single day of their married life (since age 15). Extremely rare, I know… But for this tiny handful of extraordinarily horny, happy, healthy and lucky people, I get a grand total of 1/30 of their life, or a tad more than 3%. And I bet that you could probably hold a nice party for every single one of these lucky 75-year-old living couples — from all over the world — in the cafeteria of the elementary school nearest my house. Not sure how much standing room there would be, but this is out of our current world population of over 6 billion people. So they are outliers of outliers of outliers.
The vast majority of people would have much, much less sex than that, I predict with confidence.
Additionally: a good number of people die before losing their virginity. I have no idea what percentage do, but during the old days, it was probably well over half of them, infant mortality rates being what they were — and I’m assuming that most of those babies and children who died at very early ages from disease, murder or accidents weren’t being sexually abused during their short, sad lives… Many soldiers die in combat having had sex perhaps 0 to 6 times in their entire lives, if I can trust various memoirs I’ve read by veterans of various wars…
So that’s the far left hand end of the ‘bell-shaped’ curve: 0%.
While there are a tiny handful or two-to-three percenters out there, I would bet (if we could test it somehow) that over 99.99% of the population has sex, on average, between ZERO and TWO percent of our entire lives.
But, oh, how we obsess over ‘it’!!
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