3

Sex Doesn't Actually Sell

"Sex sells" the one rule of marketing that everyone who doesn't know anything about marketing can cite. Who cares if your cars barely work or hamburgers are barely edible? Throw some double D's in the ad, and customers will line up around the block. It's like sex is such a powerful motivator that the suckers will ignore everything else as all of the blood in the critical thinking parts of their brains rushes to their genitals. It kind of makes you wonder why people go to school for marketing at all. The only book you need on the subject is two words long.

Well, unless you've seen the three decades of research, which has proven that sexy ads don't actually do anything for sales. Advertising expert John Wirtz analyzed about 80 studies done over 30 years, and found that not only does hiding your product behind a wall of seduction not help, but it actually makes people feel more negatively about the brand (specifically, it makes women feel more negatively). It doesn't matter whether the models used in the study were fully clothed or nearly nude, or how explicit they were with the innuendo.

2

Remember That Lots Of People Don't Have Sex At All

Only about 1 percent of people worldwide are asexual by orientation (which is still around 70 million people, or about double the population of Canada). But then you have all the ones who don't call themselves asexual but also never have sex. First, it's estimated that 15-20 percent of marriages are utterly sexless, whether by circumstance, mutual agreement, or otherwise. Then you have to look at age. Less than half of teenagers 16-19 are sexually active, and likewise for people over 50. And it tails off after that -- there are some 70-year-old fuckmasters out there, but they're in the minority.

The point is, when you're talking about our horny as hell society, you're really only talking about a specific group of people mostly in their 20s, 30s, and 40s. And about 12 percent of women and 14 percent of men aged 20-24 -- what Hollywood tells us are the sexiest ages -- are virgins (and are having less sex than a generation ago). Meanwhile, 40 percent of women in one study prefer masturbation to sex with a partner, while 8 percent of men prefer it. Also, a Plenty of Fish survey found that 90 percent of women would, if given the option, forego sex in favor of spending all night having a meaningful talk with their partner.

1

We Lie About It Constantly

In my youth, I was a bit more lecherous than I am today, which is to say that I am still lecherous but more tired now. But in my 20s, you could have caught me bragging about my marathon-like prowess and indomitable stamina to people who would almost surely never have a chance to find out otherwise. I'm confident I was not the only one.

Well, here's the cold reality: The average time for a dude going to town is 12 minutes. Of course, within that average is a broad range, from the 44-minute Supermen to the 33-second hyper efficient rabbitmen. To be fair, we're talking strictly penetration here. If you spend time licking mint juleps out of each other's knee pits as foreplay, that's on you and on your own time. When it comes to straight up toad-in-the-hole action, you could very well be done in half a minute. Which is probably not the best time anyone's ever had, but maybe that guy also gives really good foot massages. I don't know because he's not me. I swear.

Meanwhile, a staggering 80 percent of women have admitted to faking an orgasm. Sometimes she's just not into it, or the angle is bad, or the cat is making eye contact in a very judgmental way. The point isn't that she didn't finish, but pretended she did. Because god forbid anyone admit to each other that they didn't enjoy the sex quite as much as they were expected to, or that they don't have it as often, or desire it as much. The moment we do that, our whole society will fall apart.

There are tons of other facts about the body it's probably important to learn in the Cracked De-Textbook.

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For more, check out 24 Shocking Statistics That Change How You View Sex and 25 Bizarre Statistics About Relationships And Sex.

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