Thank you for downloading the more or less podcast. We are your guide to the numbers all

around us in the news and in life, and I'm Tim Harvin.

Today we're talking about sex. It's an act of great biological and cultural importance,

and I'm told it can also be quite fun.

Loyal listener Dr Melissa Taren-Tola emailed us from Tokyo. She said she'd read some shocking

statistics about sex in Japan and in the United States, and she wanted us to take a look.

I found this study which says almost 50% of Japanese couples are sexless, which seems quite

high to me. But then that got me wondering, is that actually that unusual?

So then I looked at American sex rates and I had the reverse kind of shock. There's

no way that Americans in their 20s partner or unpartner to have sex 80 times a year, especially

the unpartnered people. How do they maintain more than once a week sex? And then there's

the statistic about the Americans over 70. 25% of partnered women in their 70s have sex

four more times per week. Dang.

Well who better to probe deeply into these carnal claims than friend of the show Dr.

Marina Adshade from the Vancouver School of Economics? She's been taking a look at the

studies quoted in the articles that Melissa sent us. First, the claim that 50% of Japanese

couples, that's actually married couples, are sexless.

I mean, we do have cliches about how much sex people have in a marriage, but all of the

data suggests that married people have more sex than single people. So if it were, in

fact, true that 50% of married couples were sexless, that would be really very surprisingly

high number. But there's a number of issues here. In that data set that the listener kindly

sent is that the question is in the last four weeks. So it's not that this is married

...