Survey of school students in Japan finds girls enjoy sex less than boys

A recent survey of 1,000 boys and girls in Japan aged between 17 and 19 revealed that only about a quarter had sexual experience, though more girls did than boys, but girls had more negative impressions of sex than their male counterparts.

The survey was conducted by the Nippon Foundation, which put up a detailed write-up with graphs on its multilingual online journal, nippon.com.

Overall, 23.6% of the respondents had sexual experience. A breakdown by gender found a 5% gap with 26.2% of girls and 21.2% of boys. When asked about what age they had their first sexual experience, the most common age for girls was 17 (30.6%), while for boys, it was 18 (28.3%).

The image each gender held of sex greatly differed. Boys had more positive attitudes, with 66.7% saying they felt it was “enjoyable,” 40.8% saying “happy,” and 39.1% thought it “fun.” In contrast, girls showed that they had a less positive image with only 33.7% answering “enjoyable,” 25.4% saying “happy,” and 12.9% “fun.” Instead, they had more negative impressions than boys, being more likely to see it as “gross,” “unpleasant,” and “painful.”

This is not such a shock. Teen sex is often an uncertain and exploratory experience, and the male partner may not understand his own body enough, let alone how to provide pleasure to the female involved in the act.

The disparity between boys and girls in terms of sexual experience is relatively small. We were more surprised that the overall figure is less than a quarter, but the younger ages must be pulling it down. We would be more interested to know what the number is when isolated by age groups, such as for 16-19 or 17-19. Unfortunately, the only age data is on age of first sexual experience, so we can’t do an accurate calculation without knowing the numbers surveyed for the respective age groups.

The places where kids are learning about sex diverges, indicating that boys are more likely to talk about sex with peers or discover sex online. Around half of boys said they had learned about sex from friends or adult websites, but the most common response from girls was the more benign “school lessons.”