The days of women blushing and shyly referencing their “flower” are over. Research suggests that American college-aged females talk about sex way more than they think.
The study, conducted by Katrina L. Pariera and Brianna Abraham, had 96 US college students who identify as women keeping a sexual communication diary for seven days. The students tracked factors like conversation length, tone, and who they talked to.
By the end of the study, the students had written down 1,211 diary entries. They averaged 13 instances of sexual communication per week.
“Whenever I talked to participants after they finished the study, all of them would say they were surprised at what they found when they kept their daily logs,” researcher Pariera told PsyPost. “Almost everyone thought they rarely talked about sex, but once they kept track of it daily they realized they did in fact talk about sex pretty much every day,” she explained.
Findings
The study further found that most of the conversations happen face to face, with one other person. Nearly two-thirds of the exchanges (63 percent) took place between friends, while 12.9 percent were with roommates and 7.5 percent with sexual partners.
Most of the conversations had a casual or humorous tone, and a quarter was reported to be more serious.
The most common reasons for conversation included sharing views and opinions, recapping a certain sexual experience, and gossiping about the sexual encounters of people not in the conversation.
While the study provides new information about sexual communication in young college women, the researchers hope that future research looks into other demographic groups as well.
