A Sex Poll (1973)

Since its first issue in 1953, Playboy magazine has been trumpeting the triumph of the sexual revolution. Still, no matter how many times Editor Hugh Hefner interred American puritanism in innumerable installments of the Playboy Philosophy, he could never prove that the national libido has been unshackled.

Consequently, Hefner turned toward the somewhat surer ground of statistics, and through the Playboy Foundation,* funded the most wide-ranging U.S. poll since Alfred Kinsey's famous studies of Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior in the Human Female in 1953. Playboy's findings: over the past 25 years "there have been dramatic increases in the frequency with which most Americans engage in various sexual activities and in the number of persons who include formerly rare or forbidden techniques in their sexual repertoires."

The proof behind this jubilant conclusion came from a survey of 2,026 people in 24 urban areas, a sampling that Playboy asserts roughly matches the entire American population in most demographic characteristics. The Playboy sampling does not exactly match Kinsey's, which was much larger, being based on 12,240 interviews. Unlike Kinsey, Playboy interviewed some blacks and did not include rural subjects or those without high school diplomas.

Playboy, however, was careful to adjust statistically for these differences.

The survey consisted of a questionnaire with more than 1,000 items compiled by the Research Guild, Inc. of Chicago. All of this cost the Playboy Foundation $125,000, and the magazine is now mining the research for a series of detailed reports by Morion Hunt, which will appear in the next five issues of Playboy. Hunt, who has written books on extramarital sex, crime and divorce, supplemented the pollsters' work with 200 lengthy interviews of his own for a book-length treatment of the survey to be published next spring. In the October issue of Playboy, Hunt summarizes the statistics that point to a newly sensual America:

-- Premarital sex now occurs more frequently and sooner than it did in Kinsey's day. About three-quarters of Playboy's single women under 25 had had intercourse, while only one-third of Kinsey's made that claim. Among the youngest group of married women queried by Playboy (ages 18 to 24), 80% had lost their virginity before marriage.

More than half the Playboy men with some college education had had premarital coitus by the age of 17; Kinsey's group were only half as precocious.

-- Women are having more orgasms --Playboy's single females achieve three times the rate of orgasms as Kinsey's.

Moreover, the married women claiming they always or almost always had orgasms increased from 45% to 53%.

-- Young wives are much more likely to have affairs. Extramarital coitus among married women under 25 is up from less than 10% to 24%. Women, concludes Playboy, are approaching the under-25 male infidelity rate of 32%.

-- Oral sex is on the increase. The incidence has increased by 50% since Kinsey. Now, according to the Playboy survey, 80% of America's singles between 25 and 34, as well as 90% of married persons under 25, had "practiced cunnilingus or fellatio, or both, in the past year."

-- Heterosexual anal intercourse is much more widely practiced, particularly among younger people. Kinsey did not find enough occurrences to deal with it statistically. Playboy maintains that "a quarter of all females and more than a quarter of all males in our total sample had experienced [heterosexual] anal intercourse at least once, and nearly a quarter of married couples under 35 had used it at least once in the past year."

Generally, however, kinkiness is not on the rampage. Sadism and masochism are still marginal phenomena, as are spouse swapping and group sex.

-- Homosexuality, although it has increased in visibility, has apparently not become more common. Perhaps 25% of American males have had at least one homosexual experience, a percentage Playboy finds comparable to Kinsey's. But much of the homosexual experience in both polls is adolescent experiment, and the percentage of older males who are exclusively homosexual appears to be slightly smaller than in Kinsey's sampling.

As carefully gathered--and judiciously sifted--as the Playboy statistics are, some members of the sex-research and polling professions took issue with the survey on the grounds that it was not conducted by social scientists specifically trained for the task and that sex polling inevitably attracts people willing to talk about their sex lives, people who therefore are likely to be more sexually active and unreserved in the first place. Playboy, however, gathered its subjects together without telling them in advance that they would be answering a poll. And to Paul Gebhard, director of the Kinsey Institute, the new sex survey looked "pretty good." Gebhard praised the quality of Research Guild's work and observed: "The figures they're getting agree with our research, and they're in line with pre-existing trends toward more liberal activity."

* A nonprofit organization that uses funds from the parent magazine to promote the corporate philosophy through grants in such areas as sex research and education, prison and drug-law reform.

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