Pleasuring Princeton

Male undergraduates are much more likely to masturbate than their female peers, according to a recent survey on undergraduate sexual activity conducted by The Daily Princetonian. Of the roughly 1,100 undergraduate respondents, 88.8 percent of men said they masturbate, while only 52.4 percent of women said they did.

Paul Abramson, a UCLA psychology professor and an expert on human sexuality, said both biological and social factors contribute to gender discrepancies in masturbation habits.

“The long-term consequences are a lot more serious for having sex for women than for men,” he said, noting that the risk of pregnancy women face from sexual activity has led to gender differences in social conditioning. “It’s not a level playing field ... All cultures across the world have always socialized males and females differently, because the outcomes are different.”

Though it might seem that women would be more likely than men to masturbate as a safe alternative to traditional intercourse, “that would be the secondary analysis,” Abramson said.

“They’re taught of this in a parental and cultural light … that sex is riskier and more prohibited and should be avoided,” he explained. This, he added, leads to more conservative levels of all types of sexual activity for women.

Anatomy may also play a role in the discrepancies, Abramson noted. “It’s a lot more easy to find male genitals than female genitals,” he said, noting that from an evolutionary standpoint, “it’s a lot more easy to coordinate masturbation with an external male penis than with ... internal organs.”

Male participants in the survey also said they masturbated much more frequently, on average, than their female counterparts. Among the respondents who said they masturbate, roughly 23 percent of men said they did so daily, compared to only 7 percent of women.

When asked how frequently they masturbated, roughly 51 percent of male respondents who said they masturbate also said they do so several times per week, compared to 29 percent of female students who masturbate. About one-fifth of the male respondents who said they masturbate said they did so once per week, compared to 30 percent of the female respondents who said they masturbate. Eight percent of male masturbating students said they do so once per month, compared to 34 percent of female students who masturbate.

Amelia Thomson-DeVeaux ’11, head of the student group Let’s Talk Sex and editor of the feminist blog Equal Writes, said she believed the gender differences in masturbation could be partially attributed to sexual education literature for children. If you look at such books, she said, “they expect boys to want to masturbate.”

“For girls, there’s always this caveat of ‘Masturbation is great … but some people don’t want to do it,’ ” she added. “I think it’s absolutely true that women are taught to be less comfortable with their sexuality.”

Abramson said the frequency of male masturbation is partly because of the structure of the pornography industry.

“The fantasies are different, in that the porn industry is designed for and adjunct to male masturbation,” he said, noting the ties between pornography use and masturbation frequency. He also explained that women tend to be less “visually oriented” than men, a factor in the failure of recent attempts at female-geared pornography.

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The survey figures differed slightly from other reported statistics focusing on undergraduate students. In a 2002 study by Abramson, Steven Pinkerton, Laura Bogart and Heather Cecil, 98 percent of men reported having ever masturbated, a higher percentage than among Princeton men, while 44 percent of women reported having masturbated, a lower percentage than among Princeton women.

Abramson said, though, that such differences may be due to the unreliability of self-reported statistics concerning “clandestine” activities like masturbation.

“It may be also the differential pressure on the desirability of disclosing masturbation,” he said. “There’s a lot of masturbatory guilt.”