Every so often, when quite bored, I do a survey on Twitter.
This week, in a particularly deep depressive trough, I decided to ask people at what age they lost their virginity. It’s not a hugely interesting question, but there is always a curiousity about such things and I was bored.
I left it to the people of Twitter to defined “virginity”, given that some respondents are straight, some are gay and some are bisexual. I had a few responsese from people who gave me two ages, one for when they first slept with a man and one for when they first slept with a woman. Show offs. I asked them to provide a single date, which they then did. Because they aren’t really show offs.
I could and should have made the question much more interesting by asking people for their age, gender, sexual orientation, etc. That way I could have made some facile sweeping generalisations, like they do in the press. Oh well. A missed opportunity.
I’d like to hope that everyone responded honestly. With one or two of the people who claimed they had lost their virginity quite late (27) I wanted to ask “Really?” but it’s impossible to do so without causing offence, so I didn’t.
Overall, people lost their virginity slightly later than I’d expected. Maybe this is because we’re bombarded with hysterical tabloid headlines that give the impression that everyone is having drug-fuelled menage-a-troises aged 13. Or maybe it’s because my Twitter followers are mostly pallid, middle-glass geeks whose sexual development was lagging behind the national average. I lost my virginity when I was 20, which seemed very late at the time. I was shy. I still am.
So, onto the results. 159 people responded, which is fairly good, although what the other 5500 followers of mine were doing that prevented them from taking part, I don’t know. Probably having sex.
I can’t work out how to get it all in a graph because I’m crap at Microsoft Word. The first figure is the age at which people lost their virginity. The second figure is the number of people who lost their virginity at that age.
12: 1
13: 4
14: 12
15: 25
16: 24
17: 35
18: 22
19: 14
20: 10
21: 7
22: 0
23: 2
24: 1
25: 1
26: 0
27: 1
The lovely Scott has provided a bar graph:
Sophie Scott has also provided a graph:
And Mullies has added a pie chart:
Now I should do something more interesting with my time. I won’t.
