A British-based condom manufacturer has issued a survey which claims Americans have a lot more sex on the average, with more partners, and starting at an earlier age, than folk in Britain, Germany, Japan, and 24 other major industrial countries.

What this might mean:

• Despite 20 years of the Religious Right’s anti-sex tirades (or maybe at least partly because of them), U-S-of-A-ers are just as buggery-obsessed as ever.
• The Muslim fundamentalists, and other overseas moralists, are right to fear the global reach of American corporate-pop culture. As countless staid Catholic and Mormon parents in this country already know, there’s nothing to get kids to challenge tired authority systems quite like the promise of nookie. Especially when it’s seen in the context of a whole American-export cultural shtick of sugar drinks, rock n’ roll, blue jeans, the open road, big cars, etc.
• This era of U.S. supremacy in the quantity (if not necessaarily quality) of coitus coincides with U.S. supremacy (for better or for worse) in military and economic power. This puts the lie to the Right’s claims that the non-repression of lust would turn us into a weak and vulnerable nation.
• Indeed, it might justify the rival claim, made by followers of Tantric yoga and of the late psychologist Wilhelm Reich, that a healthy sex life is a sign of, and contributor to, general personal vitality and social energy.
• Of course, more sex isn’t always better sex. Included in the survey’s average of 124 matings per year per American must be plenty of awkward adolescent experiments, unsatisfying marital acts, abusive relationships, lonely hooker dalliances, premature ejaculations, preorgasmic women, unwanted conceptions, and unimaginative fantasies. The continued prosperity of sex-ed guidebooks and videos shows that the most isn’t always the best.
• Porn doesn’t necessarily lead to promiscuity–or to monogamous vitality either. The least-sexually-active country in the survey is Japan, a place teeming with strip joints and raunchy adult comic books.
• These averages, if true, are still just averages. Please don’t feel anxious or depressed if you’re currently not getting any. And don’t stay in a lousy relationship just out of the fear of involuntary chastity.

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