100 Fun Interesting Sex Facts

Tired of polite chitchat about Laura Ashley's latest range of curtains?
Pepper your conversation with these tasty titbits...

• There are more 20 year old virgins per capita now than there were in the late '50s.

• Men and women are both more likely to have their first orgasm on their lonesome.

• You wouldn't know it from watching Sex And The City, but most women have had fewer than five sex partners.

• Gay men buy more than 10 times more CDs than straight men.

• Encourage Mum and Dad to get passionate: older people who have regular sex keep their physical and mental health longer.

• Who'd have thought? According to a recent US study, the country with the highest rate of sexual satisfaction in the world is the Ukraine.

• Wood blocks, lemon rinds and sea sponges were all used as barrier birth control methods in times gone by.

• Excellently, there are nearly 150 new pornographic movies released every week.

• According to a 1996 study, homophobic men are more likely to show a higher rate of arousal when shown gay porn than men with more tolerant attitudes towards homosexuals.

• Circumcision among Christians became widespread after it was claimed to reduce instance of “self-abuse”.

• Perhaps you should have made greater use of Mum's Tupperware evening... A woman peaks sexually in her mid-thirties; men, sadly, are over the hill by the time they're 20.

• A condom will last about a month inside a wallet before the friction makes it more likely to break during use.

• In Thailand, free vasectomies are performed on the King's birthday.

• A British doctor once claimed that Olympic athletes performed better if they had sex 90-minutes before their event.

• Thirty per cent of men suffer from premature ejaculation.

• Murder She Wrote's Angela Lansbury let her then 13 year old daughter travel with Charles Manson and his “family”. She lost her virginity to him.

• Learned men believed well into the 20th century that masturbation caused epilepsy.

• Pop artist Andy Warhol claimed to have encountered a man who was blessed with two penises. The producers of quasi-porn epic Caligula claim their similar double-donged orgy jockey was also the real McCoy.

• US basketball champion Wilt “The Stilt” Chamberlain claims that he had sex with over 20,000 women during his lifetime. Wilt was born in 1936 and died in '99. Assuming he started at 15 and rooted up until the day he died, he'd have to have had eight different women a week, every week. Which is unlikely.

• According to porn trade mag Adult Video News, Americans spent an estimated 10 billion dollars on hardcore videos, Net porn, sex mags, strip clubs and pornographic cable TV in 1999 – that's more than all of Hollywood's US box-office receipts combined.

• Most blokes chalk up fewer than 10 sexual conquests in their whole life.

• Early condom prototypes include those made from fish skin, sheep intestines, goat bladders and curiously seed pods.

• By the end of last year, porn starlet Sharon Kane had starred in 810 flicks, the highest amount for any living actress.

• Legendary actor John Holmes had a total career output of 2,274 films, including such classics as Let Me Count The Lays and Whore Of The Worlds. Holmes died from complications of AIDS in March 1988.

• Five per cent of blokes admit to self-pleasuring twice daily.

• The average amount of ejaculate is about one tablespoon, or 10 cubic centimetres. Which is reportedly how bands like Lovin' Spoonfuls and 10CC got their names.

• Christ, a humpback whale's erect member is 10-feet long!

• In the US, white women make up 97 per cent of all breast job recipients.

• Man-starch is laden with proteins and trace minerals and only contains 15 to 25 calories per serving.

• John Lennon's first sexual experience was being fondled by a man he didn't know at the age of 12.

• During much of the 20th century, electroshock and radiation therapy, castration and even lobotomies were common “treatments” for homosexuality. One Dr Walter J. Freeman would lobotomise homosexuals at public events – as many as 25 a day – often with an unsterilised ice-pick.

• It's much easier for a woman to catch a sexually transmitted disease through unprotected sex than a man.

• Sixty seven per cent of men prefer women who shave their pubic hair.

• It is illegal for a woman in Texas to own more than six sex toys.

• Hit the libraries – smart women are kinkier. University graduates give more oral sex than their less-educated sisters - and women with Masters degrees are twice as likely to want a one-night stand than those with humble bachelors degrees.

• People lie in the bedroom more than any other room in the house.

• The first known sex film was made way back in 1894 – a mere six years after the inception of the moving picture shows. Evidence of randy old-timers is now widely available on video compilations like What Got Grandpa Hot.

• Only 28 per cent of female cheaters ever get caught.

• According to journal General Medicine, coffee drinkers have sex more frequently and enjoy it more than non-coffee drinkers.

• Female apes practice a form of prostitution in which they offer sex in return for extra food.

• The future of sex? A Romanian doctor claims to have invented a device that can give women 16 orgasms a minute. Using electrodes placed on the buttocks and spine, weak electrical pulses lead to ecstasy. Inventor Dr Nicolae Adrian Gheorghiu boasted: “It's more effective for a woman than having 30 men.”

• The world's biggest brothel was born as prostitution flourished in late 19th-century San Francisco. In the summer of 1899 The Nymphia was erected: 450 rooms, 150 of them occupied by so-called “nymphomaniacs.”

• Penises shrink slightly after viewing or participating in a sports victory.

• A father and his adult son are most often identical in the size of their tackle.

• Hustler publisher Larry Flynt bizarrely claims that his first sexual experience was with a chicken.

• Most men come within six minutes of penetration.

• What do bulls' balls, goats' eyes, deer sperm and horn of rhino have in common? They are but some of the hundreds of things eaten by men around the globe for their alleged aphrodisiac properties.

• John F. Kennedy lost his virginity to a $3 prostitute.

• Americans spend more money at strip clubs than all forms of theatre, classical music, opera and jazz music combined.

• Fifteen per cent of priests and nuns break their vow of celibacy.

• For centuries, the Catholic Church declared that “man-on-top” was the only acceptable sex position. It's called the missionary position because missionaries were to teach it as part of their quest to “civilise” non-Christians around the world.

• Move those hips – sex can burn over 200 calories an hour.

• Spanish fly, the most famous of all supposed aphrodisiacs, is a mild poison made from dried beetles and “works” by irritating the urogenital tract. Over-consumption can lead to scarring of the uretha, or even death.

• Pregnancy test kits have reportedly been included in medical packs on the International Space Station. To date, NASA has not commented publicly. Likewise it's still unclear whether the 200-mile-high club has any members.

• The largest medically verified penis on record is 13.5 inches long and 6.25 inches around. It was documented in the early 20th century by one Dr. Robert L. Dickinson.

• Almost half of all adults urinate at least a wee bit while having sex.

• Condoms are around six times thicker than most cling wrap brands.

• A man produces three million new sperm cells every hour.

• There are scientific cases of men who measure a mere half inch when erect.

• Kinsey's data remains the most exhaustive dick-size yardstick. The average Caucasian has a penis of 6.2 inches long and 3.7 inches around. Curiously, the average African American male was found to have a penis 6.3 by 3.8 inches – a statistical difference which undermines common thinking.

• Humans and dolphins are the only species that have sex for pleasure.

• Ninety per cent of blokes were happy with their first sexual experience, compared to just 66 per cent of women.

• Married couples in their twenties have sex an average of two and a half times a week.

• In a recent survey of women who use vibrators for sexual relief, 8 out of 10 stated they do not insert the vibrator – they use it on the outside of the clitoris to achieve orgasm.

• Oscar Wilde, Chief Crazy Horse, Pope Paul II and Pope III, Alexander The Great, Sigmund Freud, Lawrence of Arabia, John Holmes, Plato, Tchaikovsky and Florence Nightingale were all either gay or bi.

• The record for the number of male orgasms in an hour stands at 16.

• Fish fake it too. Researchers from Sweden's National Board of Fisheries have found that female brown trout fake orgasms to dupe their easily fooled partners into premature ejaculation. Normally fish release their eggs and sperm at the same time.

• Women are more likely to cheat during ovulation.

• Women who smoke have, on average, twice as many sexual partners as their smoke-free sistren.

• Julia the Elder (39BC-14AD) – the daughter of Roman Emperor Augustus – is thought to have had sex with 80,000 men. Her number of conquests spiralled out of control – she was said to have had half the city's virile youths. Unsatisfied by suitors, she took to the streets and accosted male passersby for alleyway lovin'.

• The United States has more laws governing sexual behaviour than all the countries of Europe combined.

• The average total amount of ejaculate in a lifetime is 53 litres.

• Living up to their name, sperm whales are sexually mature at age 0.

• Studies show that most men who visit prostitutes are married.

• Gay men rate higher than their straight brothers in terms of dissatisfaction with the size of their dicks.

• More than 70 per cent of men who earn over $60,000 a year cheat on their wives; only 16 per cent of those making $5,000 or less are unfaithful.

• Every year, 11,000 enthusiastic US citizens injure themselves while trying out bizarre sexual positions.

• During the 70s there was a spate of Thai women cutting off their drunk husband's penises and feeding them to their farm animals. So widespread was this practice that Thai men were often heard to exclaim worriedly to their mates, “I'd better get home or the wife will give the pigs a snack.”

• According to the World Health Organisation, there are approximately 100 million acts of sexual intercourse each day.

• Bad luck: the best ways for blokes to improve sexual function are to quit smoking, start exercising and lose weight.

• Science whiz Isaac Newton died a virgin at the age of 85.

• The first nipple rings appeared in Victorian Europe in the 1890s. Called “bosom rings”, saucy women often wore them joined together by a small gold chain.

• The world's largest dildo is the Men-er-Hroech of Brittany in France. Once worshipped by pagans, the monster cock stands 20m high and weighs 340 tonnes.

• At California's Centre for Marital and Sexual Studies, doctors William Hartman and Marilyn Fithian have been beavering away for 22 years studying the wonders of the orgasm. The most orgasms they recorded in an hour for a woman was 134.

• Want to know what to buy her for Christmas? Adultshop.com's top-selling vibrator is the Koala Boy.

• The longest orgasm? Masters and Johnson in 1966 cited a woman who experienced a 43-second orgasm – that's at least 25 successive contractions.

• The youngest mother on record was five years and seven months old. Lina Medina from Lima, Peru gave birth by caesarean section; a hormone imbalance made the pregnancy possible.

• In the 1948 survey Sexual Behaviour In The Human Male, sex study pioneer Kinsey records a few remarkable individuals who could achieve erection in as little as three seconds.

• Think you're quick off the mark? In Dr Kinsey & The Institute for Sex Research, Wardell B. Pomeroy cites one extraordinary lady: “(She) was capable of from 15-20 orgasms in 20 minutes... we found that in intercourse her first orgasm occurred within two to five seconds after entry.”

• The Kinsey report into human sexuality in the US from 1948 suggested that as many as 17 per cent of males from rural areas had experienced at least one romatic liaison with an animal.

• Despite what the many jokes suggest, seasoned bestiality practitioners prefer pigs to sheep. They're said to be much more willing lovers.

• Seeking to spread the safe-sex message, the people of Bogota, Colombia, paraded the world's largest condom through the city streets in 1998. The dimensions: over three metres in diameter, over 800m long and a weight of 1,360kg.

• Some practitioners of Chi Kung – the Taoist art of contolling one's body – claim that strapping huge weights to their penises and lifting them up and down is a fast track to sexual ecstasy. In 1995, a Hong Kong master named Mo Ka Wang lifted over 115kg two feet off the floor with his super-cock.

• Moroccan king Moulay Ismail had the most offspring in history – at least 342 daughters and 525 sons.

• Tonga's King Fatafehi Paulah (reigned 1770-84) claimed that it was his royal duty to deflower the nation's maidens. He added that he had never been with the same woman twice and he applied himself to his task eight to 10 times a day, every day. Skill!

• The most sex acts during a period of time by a man was by porn star John Dough. He had sex with 101 women for The World's Luckiest Man, doing 55 in one day and the other 46 two weeks later.

• Mae West once said “I do all of my best work in bed” - and right she was. In her autobiography she recalled a bloke simply named “Ted”, with whom she made love for 15 straight hours.

• The first vibrator hit the shelves in 1869 and its use was thought to aid the treatment of “female hysteria”.

• It is thought that Cleopatra used a box that could be filled with buzzing bees as a primitive vibrator.

• Deep Throat is believed to have the highest budget-to-box-office ratio in the world: 1:4, 546. The flick cost $US22,000 and racked in at least $US100 million.