快猫短视频

You spearheaded the UK鈥檚 first large-scale survey of sexual attitudes and behaviours in 1986. What prompted this?
The emergence of the AIDS epidemic legitimised studying sex in the mid-1980s. There was a growing demand for accurate information to inform predictions of how big the epidemic was going to be. There was a lot of scepticism about the projections, which varied widely because researchers were operating in the dark without proper data on how many sexual partners people had, the numbers of sexually active gay men, and the dynamics of transmission. There were existing studies of sex workers and gay men but there was a great deal of nervousness about collecting data from the general population.

The UK鈥檚 prime minister, Margaret Thatcher, blocked public funding for the survey in 1989. Why?
Our understanding is that she thought the questions were too intrusive, and that these were private areas of people鈥檚 lives that they shouldn鈥檛 be asked about. It鈥檚 interesting that she was a scientist because she seems to have arrived at the conclusion that we would not be able to get accurate answers, despite our having done an enormous amount of preliminary work to show that we could, and published the methodology in Nature. It鈥檚 rather wonderful to know that the second and third surveys have had public funding, and the discourse has moved on.

The first (NATSAL) was the largest study of sexual behaviours since the work of . Aside from AIDS projections, why do we need scientifically conducted sex surveys?
It鈥檚 relevant to so many aspects of people鈥檚 lives. Knowing at what age people first have sex, for example, is important for deciding at what age you introduce sex education at school. The data has been used in the planning of contraceptive and sexual health services.

Knowing about how behaviour varies in populations has a normalising effect. It shows people what proportion of the population are like them. It鈥檚 also relevant to people鈥檚 pleasure and quality of life.

How do you get accurate answers when you are asking people about intimate details of their sex lives, such as the use of prostitutes?
We have to be careful about how we design the questions, so that the language is acceptable to people and understood by them. We found that people preferred and understood biological, anatomical words rather than the vernacular. We don鈥檛 ask about people鈥檚 sexual identities but about their sexual behaviours. Research shows people are much more likely to disclose their true behaviours if they don鈥檛 have to say them directly to an interviewer, so we use self-completion methods.

Why, in most surveys, do men claim to have more heterosexual partners than women? For example, the average number of partners in the second NATSAL was 12.7 for men and 6.5 for women.
We interviewed people aged 16 to 44 for that study but we know that people in the survey had partners outside that age range. The men in the sample will sometimes have split up from partners close to their own age, and will often then go on to have younger partners, whereas the women in the upper part of the age sample will either stop having sex or often will have partners who are older than 44. Also people with very large numbers of partners, such as women in the sex industry, may sometimes be under-represented in the survey. Plus it鈥檚 socially acceptable for men to report lots of partners and less okay for women. Maybe this leads men to round up and women to round down.

The differences reported by men and women are less marked in our work than in other surveys because we are careful about definitions and data collection. When we adjusted for age mixing and assumptions about groups like sex workers being left out, we found the differences were greatly diminished.

Kinsey, working in the US in the 1940s and 50s, found that around 10 per cent of men were exclusively or predominantly homosexual, whereas your last survey found only 5.4 per cent of men reported having had homosexual partners. What do you think of his work?
Kinsey made a huge contribution because his surveys were the first attempt to gather data on a large scale about sex, at a time when there was so little public discourse about contraception, childbirth and anything to do with sex. He broke that taboo and that was tremendously important, but his actual numbers were not true population estimates because of how he recruited participants. Prisoners, male prostitutes and those willing to discuss taboo subjects were over-represented in his studies.

Why is it so important to get a representative sample in sex surveys?
People who volunteer to take part in sex surveys tend to have more active sex lives than average. This is particularly the case in teenage magazine surveys, with those who respond often being those who have had sex. If you believe those surveys you would think most people have sex before they reach 16, for example, when in fact it鈥檚 a minority. I think it鈥檚 really important that young people are not misled about what is really going on.

鈥淧eople who volunteer for sex surveys tend to have more active sex lives鈥�

What do you think about the way your survey results are communicated to the public?
If people just read what gets printed in the press, they will imagine everybody is having lots of sex with lots of people all the time. The reality is a little more prosaic. Among married couples the average is about once a week. Information like this can be reassuring to people. Our results have been used for all sorts of policy reasons and are widely cited by scientists, which is great but it鈥檚 also really nice when they are of use to the public.

Could accurate sex surveys be useful for combating HIV and other sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in the developing world?
There is often as much or more taboo about talking about sex and reporting sex acts in many developing societies as there was in the UK 30 years ago. Because of literacy and technological problems, surveys in developing countries are often still done face to face and in clinical settings, and researchers have commented they have trouble getting accurate data. We did some work with young people in Zimbabwe, and found inaccuracies in reporting, such as people saying they had never had sex and that they were pregnant, for example. Our group did trials showing that once you develop self-completion methods you get more accurate reporting.

The third NATSAL is now under way with 15,000 participants. How does it differ to the surveys carried out in 1990 and 2000?
We are moving from a primary focus on STIs and HIV to looking at sexual health as something that is construed in a more positive light as part of general well-being. I鈥檓 interested in the relationship between physical and sexual health. This time the age range will be 16 to 74, recognising that sex is an important part of many people鈥檚 lives long beyond their reproductive lifespans.

We want to get a better understanding of sexual function and satisfaction, taking into account the nature of relationships, and to find out the extent to which people are distressed by their desire for more or less sex. We are also going to measure testosterone levels in saliva samples in both men and women to examine possible links with libido, pleasure and different sexual behaviours.