One of these days we need to study the "real adult" part

As you may have noticed this blog is named "Real Adult Sex." And if you've been reading for very long you've probably noticed the way I often regret the way grown men and women resort to methods and outlooks they learned in adolescence. And one of these days I really do need to articulate what's involved in the transition from perfectly fine-in-it's-time adolescent sex to real adult sex.

For now I'd just like to mention one of the many, many reasons why we wind up stuck believing there's no such thing as real adult sex, that the only thing we have to look forward to as we age is more legal (for those who can marry) or more routine or more boring or less and less frequent... but maybe (though it's never quite clear) somehow a little more fulfilling in some... unfathomable way.

So why don't we have a better grasp of the, well, *realities* of real adult sex? Could be that nearly everything we "officially" know about sex -- what we know from outside our direct or anecdotally-related experience -- we learn from college students.

Huh?

Yeah, check out this post from non-sex blogger Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly

LAB RATS....What is it they say about college students? That they're the white lab rats of the social sciences? Eszter Hargittai, noting yet another report based on a study of a small number of college students, complains about this:

There are several fields that base a good chunk of their empirical research on studies of students. This is usually done due to convenience. And perhaps regarding some questions, age and educational level do not matter. But the issue is rarely addressed directly. In many instances it seems problematic to assume that a bunch of 20-year-olds in college are representative of the entire rest of the population. So why write it up that way then?

....This is one of my biggest pet peeves when it comes to certain types of scholarship. And I do mean scholarship. Because it is not just the journalistic reports that make the leap. The academic articles themselves use that kind of language.

To make it even worse, the particular study she highlights is about sexual response in men. What are the odds that any conclusions about sex based on a study of 20-year-olds would be applicable to other age groups as well? [emphasis mine --fl]

Read Drum's entire post here.

I don't object to studying "captive populations" like college students (if you're in academia) or business executives (if you're a business consultant.) But I do think that caution is advised. So much of our subjective sex lives happen somewhere between the beginning of high-school and the end of college, and so much of that subjective experience is... more, um, memorable than it is fulfilling, that also basing the official "what we know" about sex on that demographic is highly problematic. Most of us are ready for adulthood by age 21 (the way we're ready to read at age six or seven, but "ready for" isn't the same thing as "doing it with skill and confidence") but meanwhile we *are* adults up to 80 years after our 21st birthday! Why not put a little more work into understanding that part?