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On Thursday, March 13, 2008 the long-awaited Newsvine Masturbation Survey was released. As described in the original article the genesis of the idea came from a survey of reader fetishes that had been done by Celestina. Life got in the way and it took me much longer to actually post the survey than I had originally envisioned.
If you have taken the survey, or if you take a moment to take it now, you will notice that I used SurveyMonkey.com. My main reason for doing so, aside from the fact that I already had a paid professional subscription to the site, was that its survey engine is much more robust than the polling that can be done on Newsvine itself. For my serious surveys I always use SurveyMonkey. One thing that I definitely wanted the masturbation survey to be was serious.
Let's take a look at the results from just a few of the questions.
Demographics
To date (6/2/09) 200 people have taken the survey in whole or in part. Of those 66.5% found the survey through Newsvine, 30.0% through a search engine, and 3.5% through a link sent to them by email.
Not too surprisingly, 70% of respondents are male, 30% female.
The predominant age range of respondents has been 36-45, with the second highest being 46-55.
For sexual preference 79.5% report that they are straight, 17% report bisexual, and 3.5% report gay.
The Questions
The first question asked on the survey was "How often do you masturbate?"
The overwhelming majority (53.5%) answered "At least once a week"
The next highest response was 34.8% with "At least once a day"
When filtered by gender, 55.5% of males and 48.3% of females answered "At least once a week" and 40.1% of males and 22.4% of females answered "At least once a day."
In describing their attitude about masturbation, 66.7% of respondents said they were "pretty open about it." One of the respondents said, "I don't talk about it seriously much, but I'll joke around with friends. Only twice have friends and I told each other we actually do."
Most respondents report their first masturbation experience happening in their preteen years. Some reported as early as age 4 or 5 with most saying somewhere around 10-12. Most reported their first orgasm in their late preteen years or early teens, one respondent said "Around age 13, when I mastered technique."
Most respondents (78%) report that their masturbation technique has changed between their early experiences with it and now. Some of the significant developments include the discovery of sex toys and also learning to take time with it. As one respondent said, "It's not the destination, it's the journey." Other developments included "switching from humping to direct contact" and "learning to do it with my left hand."
Most respondents (33.1%) say their typical masturbation sessions lasts 5-10 minutes, with nearly as many (28.7%) saying their typical sessions last 10-20 minutes. On the low end, 7.2% say their sessions last under 5 minutes. On the high end 6.6% say their sessions last an hour or more. One respondent said, "One thing I miss about being single is the free time and privacy to have long masturbation sessions. I never timed them but I'd guess they lasted 30-60 minutes. Now, I need to be quick."
The overwhelming majority (58.8%) say they mostly masturbate at night. One respondent said, "I have a great night's sleep after I orgasm." The most common place to masturbate was in the bedroom (56.4%) followed by the bathroom (20.6%).
When asked if they had ever been accidentally caught while masturbating, 41.8% said "Yes" and 58.2% said "No."
There are many more questions to cover, so stay tuned for Part 2 of this series.
