This was one of the first infographics ever made:
Later remembered as "the map that made a nation cry", it depicts Napoleon's failed invasion of Russia in 1812. The wide tan swath shows his Grande Armée, almost half a million strong, marching East to Moscow; the black trickle shows the few who straggled back. It's an elegant fusion of geography, time, and temperature into a single statement of military disaster.
Of course, using modern tools of analysis, like circles and the color blue, we can get an even clearer picture of history:
It is our goal today to create graphics of similar concision and power, but about something more useful than war—sex.
All the data below, even the most personal stuff, has been gleaned from real user activity on OkCupid. Some of it our users have told us outright by answering match questions; some of it we've had to learn from observation.
Other than the unifying theme, sex, there's no big point or thesis to this post: just comparisons, correlations, and quirky trends.
Chart #1
We found this by crossing the match questions Do you like to exercise? and Is it difficult for you to have an orgasm?, and, as you can see, women who don't like working out report twice the orgasm problems of women who do.
Chart #2
Here, we took a single question—Is your ideal sex rough or gentle?—and scraped people's profile text for the words that most correlated to each answer. Here are word clouds for women and men in their 20s.
The text is basically Hot Topic versus, I dunno, Burberry. But beyond the words the interesting thing is how men's and women's preferences change with age:
This dataset only includes single people, of course, but I was still very surprised at how many old men like it rough. Looks like I'm going to have to rethink a cherished part of my worldview.
Chart #3
The odds shown in this chart, and the others like it later in the post, are odds "in favor"—in this case, odds in favor of being into giving oral sex. The higher a group's odds, the more into it they are.
Since so much sexual slang involves meat—"hot dog," "sausage," "burger," "beef injection," "another beef injection," and so on—I thought this would be a fine occasion to point out that there are plenty of veggie alternatives:
Peeling the banana.
Tossing the salad.
Squeezing the melons.
Zeroing in on a grown man's nuts and nutsack.
Putting Monsanto in yoursanto.
Ordering the split pea soup.
Sorry, that's got ham.
Cornholing others.
Charts #4 & #5
Frequent tweeters have shorter real-life relationships than everyone else, probably via some bit.ly hack. Unfortunately, we have no way to tell who's dumping who here; whether the twitterati are more annoying or just more flighty than everyone else. There is also this:
If someone tweets every day, it's 2-to-1 that they're #ingthemselves just as often. Like the "shorter relationships" thing, this is true across all age and gender groups.
Chart #6:
In the Bible, in between the part where Reuben kills a he-goat so he can dip some clothes in the blood of the he-goat and where Judah tries to give Tamar a goat but decides maybe she should be burned to death instead, God kills a man named Onan because Onan intentionally spills his seed on the ground.
(1) Thou shalt not whack off. (2) Mo goats mo problems.
Life lessons! From the Iron Age!
Charts #7 & #8
This bubble chart, plotting body type, sex drive, and self-confidence, is dynamic—you can use the slider at the bottom change it. As you can see as you move the control from left to right, a woman's sexuality peaks in her twenties, holds more or less steady for twenty years, and then falls to the floor. And while sex drive waxes and wanes, self-confidence steadily grows.
Remember, the women themselves select their body-descriptions; the bubbles show the size of each group. Though many of the words are just a shade of meaning apart, there are dramatic differences in the traits of the people who choose them. Go through the animation and compare full-figured to curvy or skinny to thin.
It's particularly interesting to isolate skinny—a deprecating way to say something generally considered positive (being thin)—and curvy—an empowering way to say something generally considered negative (being heavy). Here are those bubbles' complete paths across the graph:
Curvy women pass skinny ones in self-confidence at age 29 and never look back. They also consistently have the highest sex drive among the groups. Curvy, as a word, has the strongest sensual overtones of all our self-descriptions. So we're getting a little insight into the real-world implications of a label.
This is the "complete path" plot for men:
Things to notice: (1) almost no men choose curvy or full-figured as self-descriptions, so those words aren't plotted here; (2) men of all body types have roughly the same peak sex drive; (3) and the thing that matters most for guys is simply to not be overweight. The other four body types are clustered relatively together at most ages.
Chart #9
For this chart, we took our own data and mixed it with a little outside stuff: college tuitions from U.S. News & World Report.
![](data:image/svg+xml,<svg xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2000/svg" width="10" height="10"><rect fill-opacity="0"/></svg>)
Generally speaking, the more your parents are paying for your education, the more horny you are. If only Freud were still around to help us understand; instead we have psychology majors, those Adidas shower sandals, and darkness.
You can think of the dotted best-fit line as dividing the good sex-ed values (above the line) from the bad ones (below). The line also gives us a handy sliding scale: given a 36-week school year and the average partner, every $2,000 spent on your college tuition is an extra time you could be having sex that year.
Chart #10
The correlation between sex and money is robust for colleges, but it gets even stronger when extended to entire nations.
$84,543 / 12%
$74,422 / 13.7%
$67,074 / 17.3%
$55,113 / 10.7%
$54,869 / 14.4%
$47,667 / 13.7%
$47,406 / 12.1%
$47,132 / 10.1%
$46,418 / 11.5%
$45,888 / 10%
$45,642 / 9.1%
$43,723 / 15.6%
$43,134 / 12.4%
$42,653 / 9.3%
$42,596 / 11%
$42,325 / 16.3%
$40,591 / 13.9%
$40,512 / 14.5%
$39,563 / 10.7%
$36,298 / 11.7%
$33,828 / 16.3%
$32,530 / 13.5%
$31,588 / 11.9%
$29,875 / 11.5%
$27,722 / 11.2%
$27,264 / 13.4%
$27,085 / 10.3%
$23,008 / 11.5%
$21,030 / 11.3%
$20,165 / 14%
$19,641 / 10.1%
$18,721 / 7.9%
$18,586 / 10.2%
$18,303 / 11.5%
$18,040 / 12.4%
$16,641 / 14.6%
$16,167 / 7.8%
$15,906 / 6.5%
$14,416 / 6.1%
$13,527 / 6.5%
$13,210 / 7.7%
$11,587 / 9%
$11,521 / 6.7%
$10,765 / 8.8%
$10,521 / 7.9%
$10,471 / 9.4%
$10,377 / 6.6%
$10,206 / 8.9%
$10,019 / 8.8%
$9,773 / 8.3%
$9,243 / 11.2%
$8,663 / 11.9%
$7,775 / 7.8%
$7,390 / 10.4%
$7,350 / 8.4%
$7,303 / 6.3%
$7,101 / 12.3%
$6,220 / 8.4%
$5,955 / 9.8%
$5,262 / 8.9%
$5,196 / 6.9%
$5,152 / 8.5%
$5,055 / 7.3%
$4,634 / 7.6%
$4,620 / 10.4%
$4,520 / 10%
$4,484 / 8.9%
$4,477 / 3%
$4,435 / 9.1%
$4,295 / 6.4%
$4,160 / 7.5%
$4,157 / 7.4%
$3,002 / 8.4%
$2,963 / 9.4%
$2,892 / 7.5%
$2,868 / 9.9%
$2,839 / 7.5%
$2,771 / 9.2%
$2,625 / 9.8%
$2,364 / 7.9%
$2,011 / 7.3%
$1,324 / 4.1%
$1,176 / 8.6%
$1,155 / 4.2%
$1,071 / 7.5%
$1,049 / 5.7%
$888 / 8.4%
$762 / 3.1%
$640 / 8.3%
$536 / 7.3%
$503 / 9%
$364 / 8%
We were amazed at this result—money seems to be a more powerful influence on sex drive than culture or even religion.
You have, for example, Portugal, Oman, Slovenia, and Taiwan within a few pixels of each other on the right side of the graph, and Syria, Sri Lanka, and Guatemala almost stacked on the left, and all of them sit along the trend line.
Speaking of Guatemala, you should Facebook-like this article. The end.
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RE: Older man and rougher sex.
I think the data may be skewed, mainly because if you’re looking for something in your 50s / 60s sex will be the main driver I suspect and thus the higher level of aggression / roughness sort of makes sense. Plus: I am pretty sure your pool size severely diminishes as age increases.
Plot the oral sex statistics vs. age, please.
This was a fantastic post – everything I’d ever want: Interesting subject, engaging visualizations, unexpected results — and to top it all off, it was freakin’ hilarious! I think I may have a new favorite blog, keep it up!
Alternate conclusion from Chart #9: Princeton students don’t need OKC to find partners.
You guys are brilliant. I love this article and can’t wait to figure out how to use this information for my own gain.
Old men like rough sex because it’s the only way they can feel anything after spending their whole lives circumcised and gradually losing any sense of sexual sensitivity.
Stop mutilating your children.
I think it’s interesting that the word “curvy” is equated with being heavy. I selected curvy as my body type, and I’m not overweight at all; I just have big tits and ass and a small waist, ie curvy. There are a lot of women that use “curvy” as a euphemism for fat, but there are also a lot of us that have these hyper-feminine bodies that we’re really proud of. My body type is not average by any means, but my weight is.
Anyone notice the small correlation between rough sex and being ‘nerdy’ or ‘dork’, at least among women? Men have ‘anime’ and ‘PhD’
I guess I’m asking for a graph exploring the kinky-geeky correlation.
I know these are all in good fun, but you’re ignoring the influence of geographical location in chart #9. Ivy league and other expensive schools *tend* to cluster along the coasts rather than in the bible belt/central us.
Older men like rough sex because those who are circumcised have lost a lot of feeling in their glans and cant feel the softer gentler friction – and thus do rougher sex thinking that women both are also crippled and that they enjoy being rubbed harder for lack of feeling in their skin (usually caused because women dont know how to properly moisturize).
it is very strange to me also
Not sure I agree with a woman’s sexuality peaking. Women of all ages and usually much older chase me. Older, classy intelligent women are awesome to look at and make dance partners.
Looks like the religion vs. masturbation one didn’t say what you expected it to, as the joke doesn’t really fit the finding. Christians are as open about it as atheists. But agnostic men, WTF is up with you?!
I was thinking older men like rough sex because it takes more extreme activities to get them excited due to ED.
lol – hey some of the stats are skewed I think.
Yay for nerdy girls.
I bet some depends on what their goals are vs. there likelyness to get it’s
Cougars older women are very common, but they find sex off okc?
Old men know they can find vanilla where they have in the past?
They have just had the kids move out, and just like those that stayed married there are those that stayed vanilla, and now they can try it rough?
Oops wasn’t done
Stayed together ‘for the kids’
Granted there are generally more older men looking, but to some extent that is true across the board…. At least for sex. After all women can get it anywhere, and thus picky. (men have.to search harder… Especially for off thwart wall stuff. ) hence laies nights….. Bring the women, and thwart men wish come …
Oh amd one thing is women vs. men rough /= the big thing in many bdsm groups is bdsm /= sex, but I’ve seen many women orgasim from it’s (at least those into it)
Can you do chart #3 again with it broken down for both genders by sexual orientation? Please!
Jessica (april 19th at 10:45am), what are you doing later tonight?
i am going to go love me some dirty curvy girls from iowa st..
woooooo chubbies.
another veggie phrase.
i am going to hide my non fat dairy soy processed tofu in your woo hoo.
I’m going to study German, French, and Italian at Sarah Lawrence and then I’m moving to Switzerland to be a vegetarian.
”
Jessica says:
I think it’s interesting that the word “curvy” is equated with being heavy. I selected curvy as my body type, and I’m not overweight at all; I just have big tits
”
You got time to write on internet when you got that much?
Jessica, call me.
SEX: Do it for the children.
Show me show me show me…the chart of college tuition versus how often one gets laid…so I can choose where to go for my masters.
Chart #6 makes me think that the sample of Agnostic Men is very small.
Too many people don’t even know what ‘agnostic’ means. Men in particular.
I don’t know about being a vegetarian but I’m a guy who really enjoys giving oral sex.It’s fun and the ladies seem to enjoy it.