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Sex in the City: Women's Sex Lives, Up Close and Very Personal

March 30, 2001 -- Ladies, start your engines. Whether you're using vibrators or sex toys -- or doing it the old-fashioned way -- a sizable percentage of you are choosing to be masters of your domain, as comedian Jerry Seinfeld once put it.

You are an "autoerotic single," and you're not alone. Nearly one-quarter of women under age 60 are choosing the do-it-yourself approach, says Edward O. Laumann, PhD, a University of Chicago sociologist. Laumann headed the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey.

This slice-of-life look at American sexual attitudes and behavior is "a holistic overview of how people conduct their sexual lives ... the most comprehensive study in recent years," he tells WebMD.

Laumann and colleagues sat down with more than 3,000 men and women -- all between the ages of 18 and 59 -- and asked some pretty personal questions -- all in complete privacy, he says.

How many partners did you have in the last year? Did those partners have partners? How frequently did you have partnered sex? How frequently did you engage in autoerotic sex or masturbation? How often did you go to venues of erotic stimulation -- nude bars, watching X-rated movies, phone sex -- anything that involved more impersonal sexual stimulation (even if it was with a partner)?

From those interviews, Laumann has captured a pretty interesting picture of what we're doing behind closed doors. He has published the results from the 1992 study in his new book, Sex, Love, and Health: Private Choices and Public Policies.

He found that women's sexual expression can be wedged into four categories:

• Fifty-four percent are "comfortable monogamists," women who maintain mutually monogamous relationships. About 31% have partnered sex more than once a week, and few use other means of achieving sexual satisfaction. "They don't do it very often, and it seems to be where most people end up," Laumann says. Among those who stay married after the big 5-0, only 25% of women report being satisfied. "They're with old men now -- the same partners they've had for 30 years."
• Five percent are "moderate polygamists," with multiple partners during the previous year; their primary partners also had multiple partners. In addition to having partnered sex -- more than once a week for about a fourth of them -- they also engaged in masturbation and other erotic stimulation. As for the multiple partners, it's "stressful," Laumann tells WebMD. "It creates a competitive situation. And there's someone demanding your attention ... there's the problem of managing and coordinating all of that."
• Eighteen percent are "enthusiastic co-habitors," almost all of whom have mutually monogamous relationships with high levels of sex. Mostly in their 20s, almost all have partnered sex more than once a week and more than half also use "other means of achieving sexual satisfaction" -- e.g., masturbation. "Basically, the whole relationship turns on sexual transactions," Laumann says. "If it goes badly, they break up. If it goes very well, they move on to marriage."
• Twenty-three percent are "autoerotic singles," all of whom masturbate and do so more than any of the other three classes. They rarely have partnered sex more than once a week and have the least amount of partnered sex among the four classes of women.