A study published in Leisure Sciences found that people are having sex less often during the pandemic and many are experiencing a drop in the quality of their sex life. However, one in five people report having tried new sexual activities since the beginning of the pandemic.
“The widespread social restrictions put in place during the COVID-19 pandemic appear to have significantly disrupted sexual routines and the overall quality of people’s sex lives. However, even in the face of these drastic changes, it is apparent that many adults are finding creative ways to adapt their sexual lives, including in the pursuit of sex for leisure,” study authors Justin J. Lehmiller and colleagues say.
The media has suggested an upsurge in the use of sexual technology during the pandemic, seemingly prompted by the lack of opportunities for in-person sex. Lehmiller and his team sought to uncover exactly how sexual behavior has changed during the pandemic and whether technology truly is shaping the way people approach sex.
A sample of 1,559 adults completed an online survey between March 21, 2020, and April 14, 2020. Seventy-three percent of participants were from the United States and the average age was 34. The subjects reported whether their sex life had improved, stayed the same, or declined since the onset of the pandemic. They also indicated how often they had engaged in “solo masturbation, mutual masturbation, giving and receiving oral sex, vaginal intercourse, and anal intercourse” in the past year, and since the beginning of the pandemic.
Subjects were additionally presented with a 49-item checklist of sexual behaviors and asked to indicate if any of these were new behaviors they had engaged in since the start of the pandemic. Finally, subjects completed an assessment of perceived stress, a measure of general loneliness, and a measure of loneliness since the start of the pandemic.
First, 44% of the sample reported that the quality of their sex life had declined since the beginning of the pandemic and 43% said it had stayed the same. Overall, both solo and partnered sexual behaviors decreased during the pandemic, compared to subjects’ reported sexual behaviors in the past year.
While sexual behavior saw an overall decline, 20% of participants reported trying at least one new sexual activity during the pandemic. “The most common new additions,” the authors report, “included trying new sexual positions, sexting, sending nude photos, sharing sexual fantasies, watching pornography, searching for sex related information online, having cybersex, filming oneself masturbating, and acting on sexual fantasies.”
The findings pointed to several psychological motivations for adding new activities to one’s sex life. For men, sexual desire in the last two weeks and loneliness was linked to trying new sexual behaviors. For women, sexual desire in the past two weeks, sexual desire for one’s partner in the past two weeks, loneliness during the pandemic, and stress were each linked to trying new sexual behaviors.
Since the pandemic likely elicited increased stress and loneliness in participants, the authors reason that adding activities to one’s sex life might reflect “a coping mechanism for psychological distress or an intentional strategy for warding off further sexual declines.” Indeed, those who added a new sexual behavior during the pandemic were around three times more likely to indicate an improvement in their sex lives than those who did not.
“It is clear that many people’s sex lives are undergoing a revolution of sorts, in which they are expanding their sexual repertoires; however, this does not appear to be as widespread and as laser-focused on SexTech as the media suggest. In fact, the single most common new addition did not require any technology at all: trying a new sexual position,” the researchers reveal.
“Generally, only partnered activities were linked to improvements, with few technology-based activities showing any association…This suggests that while incorporating more technology into one’s sex life was common, it did not appear to have been as gratifying as in-person activities.”
The study, “Less Sex, but More Sexual Diversity: Changes in Sexual Behavior during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic”, was authored by Justin J. Lehmiller, Justin R. Garcia, Amanda N. Gesselman, and Kristen P. Mark.
