How Long Do You Go? Ctd

According to Harry Fisch, author of The New Naked: The Ultimate Sex Education for Grown-Ups, the average hetero “sex session” lasts less than eight minutes:

There have been studies in which couples consented to be scientifically observed having sex, and one of the observers timed each session with a stopwatch to make a fairly accurate assessment about the length of the coupling. Not surprisingly, there is an extremely large variation in the time it takes a couple to have sex, ranging from the excessively short (about two minutes or less, which famed sex researcher Alfred Kinsey dryly noted was a “frequent source of marital conflict”) to the “Are you done yet?” (over forty minutes).

An astonishing 45 percent of men finish the sex act too quickly, which is to say, within Kinsey’s conflicted two minutes. That’s pretty speedy. Way too speedy for the average woman to be able to have an orgasm through vaginal penetration alone. At least five minutes, and more like seven, is usually what’s needed for a woman to be able to achieve orgasm. And even though the average length of the average inter-vaginal sex session is about 7.3 minutes, that’s still not particularly long, especially for women who usually take much longer than men to become aroused enough to have an orgasm.

But Alice Robb cautions readers not to conclude that the discrepancy “simply represents more evidence of a male-dominated society’s inherent pleasure inequality”:

As it happens, men may be more bothered by it than women.

For a 2004 paper in the Journal of Sex Research, University of New Brunswick researchers S. Andrea Miller and E. Sandra Byers interviewed 152 heterosexual couples on their “actual and desired duration of foreplay and of intercourse.” Their subjects spanned a wide range of ages—21 to 77 years old—and relationship type—from 6-month to 50-year partnerships. Miller and Byers found that men reported a much longer ideal duration than did their partners.

It’s true that for both sexes, the “ideal” length of both foreplay and intercourse was much longer than the actual. But the New Brunswick results at least suggest that the men are not happy with this status quo.

Previous Dish on sexy time here.