San Franciscans Not Having Much Sex, Survey Claims

Does San Francisco have a headache?

​A survey released today by the folks at Trojan condoms claims San Franciscans are behind in the bedroom department, getting out-shagged by denizens of 9 of 10 large American cities hit up by pollsters.

But before you get up in arms about the supposed indomitable sexual tendencies of our fair city, heed the words of one of the city's foremost experts on all things sexual. Ted McIlvenna took one look at Trojans' survey and uttered a word not associated with sex but excretion: "Bullshit."

According to the survey -- a combination of five-minute phone calls of 1,000 Americans with a professed error ratio of 3.1 percent and 150 online surveys with an error margin of an astronomical 8 percent -- San Franciscans average 72 trysts per year. The average number determined by the poll is 82. Only Minneapolis came lower than San Francisco with 64; Miami far and away led the pack with 102.

Are these San Francisco members underemployed?

​McIlvenna, the president of San Francisco's Institute for Advanced Study of Human Sexuality, was ready to throw out the results of the survey based on its methodology alone. So they've got 1,150 phone and online respondents to a five-minute poll? "I have 90,000 surveys," he said -- and his organization has done them here, in Miami, and a hell of a lot in Minneapolis. And his McIlvenna's exhaustive profiles of respondents' sexual history; it takes about 2,000 hours for a trained professional to complete every 100 of them.

The results: San Franciscans have about as much sex as people elsewhere. But -- and this is a very big but -- there's a lot more sex being had in San Francisco, proportionally, than most anywhere else. How's that?

San Francisco sex: Brokeback or just broken?

​ "San Francisco is everyone's favorite city to come to -- and they engage in more sex," says McIlvenna. "Nobody's bothering you if you're fucking your brains out in San Francisco. There are all kinds of call girl services, but the tourists coming in don't hire call girls. They say 'Let's go out and use the residents.'"

Get that line ready for a brochure, stat.

Interestingly, nowhere on Trojans' 47-page executive summary is the term "sex" defined. McIlvenna, by the way, boasts "the world's largest collection of sexual materials" -- so his idea of sex may be broader than the folks taking and responding to the survey.

"If you go to a club and have a daisy chain with 35 people, are they counting that?" he asks.

And, if so, how many times are they counting it? If there is an operating definition of sex, it doesn't seem to have made it into the Trojans' survey released to the media. Alas -- did the escapades of Bill Clinton teach us nothing?

"This is all just sociological bullshit," concludes McIlvenna. Actually, it's more like marketing bullshit, but that's beside the point.

San Franciscans -- carry on.

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