Lesbians most likely to fantasise about a roll in the hay: sex survey
Rebecca Davis highlights some of the more surprising results of the 2017 Sunday Times Lifestyle Sex Survey
When it comes to the phrase "lesbian sex", there have historically been two major categories of response.
Option A: those words make you salivate like a schoolboy, because you are picturing the long-haired, long-nailed women of straight porn going at it hammer and tongs for a man's benefit.
Option B: you fall into the Queen Victoria camp. In an almost certainly untrue story, the monarch is said to have denied the possibility of lesbian sex with the words: "Women do not do such things."
Sorry, Vic: as the recent Sunday Times Lifestyle Sex Survey* shows, women certainly do do such things. Just not very often. The majority of lesbians surveyed said they were having sex "every few months".
In this, as in many other spheres of life, they are overshadowed by their gay male compatriots - the majority of whom claim to be getting it on two to three times a week. Not only do gay men get all the positive stereotypes (snappy dressers, wonderful pals, great dancers), they also get all the sex.
An astonishing 15% of lesbians surveyed by the Sunday Times answered that the main thing they think about during sex is themselves
Not that I'm bitter, I should clarify - I'm too busy being obsessed with myself. An astonishing 15% of lesbians surveyed by the Sunday Times answered that the main thing they think about during sex is themselves.
This is a higher proportion than gay men, straight women and straight men. In fact, it's a higher proportion than straight men and gay men put together.
Society may ignore gay women, but we're doing our best to make up for that ourselves. Lesbians love a DIY project, as the stereotype goes.
Speaking of stereotypes: it's officially time to do away with the notion of lesbians as an army of Andrea Dworkin clones, stomping around trying to cut pornographers' balls off.
Only 19.5% of gay women said that they "never" watch porn, slightly less than the similarly scant 21.4% of straight women. Can we officially call time on the notion of porn as a wink-wink-nudge-nudge boys' club?
As the survey shows: male or female, gay or straight, we're all watching porn. Once we acknowledge that, maybe we can raise production values, improve storylines, and cut the nails of the women playing lesbians. Please.
One of the weirder aspects of the sex survey results is that 11% of lesbians think penis size is "very important", despite the fact that they had the option to check the box "not relevant to me". Maybe they're just empathetic.
On the flipside, it made me laugh to read that 32.2% of straight men felt that the question of penis size was "not relevant to me". Keep telling yourselves that, boys.
Which fantasy do fancy the most?
• 25% of lesbians said they fantasised about a liaison with a colleague in the photocopy room
• 6.8% about sleeping with their partner’s sibling
• 15.9% about group sex
• 52.2% about an excursion to a farmyard
It would be remiss of me not to acknowledge the most alarming result when it comes to gay women. Of all the groups surveyed, lesbians were the most likely to confess that their most coveted sexual fantasy involved "an excursion to a farmyard".
In response to this slander, I can only quote Queen Victoria: "Women do not do such things".
*The Sunday Times Lifestyle Sex Survey was conducted in association with local research house Ratepop, using their proprietary chatbot technology. Over 2,000 individual South Africans answered the survey, which was hosted on Facebook Messenger. The respondent's identities were kept strictly confidential.