Australia is the second-most promiscuous country on Earth, but the urge to stay on top is declining, researchers looking at a portion of the population have found.
The World Population Review, which drew from two longitudinal surveys, found Australians between 25 and 44 years of age had, on average, 13.3 lifetime sexual partners.
Australia was only beaten by Türkiye, which averaged 14.5.
The average number of lifetime sexual partners was nine.
The meta-analysis cited 2021 data from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention, America’s public health agency, which surveyed opposite-sex partners only.
Bedbible Research Centre, which was cited in the meta-analysis, noted the longitudinal data should be taken with some caveats.
The report noted the data was based on self-reporting, which opened it up to “social desirability bias”.
‘Glued to our phones’
University of Southern Queensland clinical psychologist Daniel Brown said while the number of lifetime partners in the survey group was high, Australians were having less sex than they used to.
“I think society, at the moment, we’re all glued to our phones,” he said.
“We seem to be very busy all the time so we’re not having as much sex as we can.”
The Connections Psychology director said 30 years ago Australians on average had sex twice per week, but were now down to 1.5 times per week according to the Australian Study of Health and Relationships.
Dr Brown said younger generations were starting to have their first sexual encounters later in life.
He said one “paradox” in the data was that as countries become more open and liberal, people tended to abstain from sex longer.
Dr Brown said this was not necessarily a bad thing.
“With the freedom of liberalism it means we don’t feel pressured to do anything we don’t necessarily want,” Dr Brown said.
“We have open meaningful discussions about consent and we have less pregnant teens overall, as compared to places like the US, which still has abstinence-only programs which is very problematic in terms of increasing sexual health overall.”
