Suppose you wanted to know about race differences in sexual behavior, how would you find out? Well, you could ask people, and if self-reports are accurate and don’t have some bias by race, you might get at the truth. However, self-reports is prone to certain biases, and perhaps especially so for sexual matters. Is there another way? Well, you could record people in their homes having sex, like various government agencies are perhaps trying to do with Smart TVs and gaming consoles. But suppose you aren’t that unethical, what remaining options are there? Well, you could ask women who have sex with a lot of men of varying races, that is, prostitutes. That’s what we did in a new study just published.
- Francis, G. & Kirkegaard, E. O. W. (2023). Racial Differences in Sexuality: A Sex Worker Survey. Mankind Quarterly.
Racial differences in sexuality are difficult to study due to the privacy of sexual intercourse and the questionable validity of self-reports. We use a novel method to study racial differences: surveying sex workers. We surveyed 129 American female sex workers. We asked them to rate the ethnicities with whom they had had intercourse on thirteen traits and behaviors for five different racial groups: Blacks, Hispanics, Whites, East Asians, Indians, and Jews. The largest reported differences between Blacks and Whites include Blacks having larger penises (d = 1.23, p < .001), that they preferred buttocks over breasts (d = 2.38), and that they preferred doggy-style over missionary (d = 1.42, p < .001). Compared to Blacks, Whites were rated as being particularly interested in kinky sex (d = 0.70, p < .001) and kissing (d = 0.85, p < .001) as well as being faster to ejaculate (d = 0.97, p < .001). Keywords: Sexual behavior, Race differences, Prostitutes, Stereotypes, Sex workers.
We were able to survey ~130 female sex workers using online recruitment from Prolific. We then asked them which of a list of ethnic groups, they had had sex with. And then we asked them a variety of questions about the men in each ethnic group. Here’s how many clients they had had:
Some workers in our survey were not having sex with clients because they were cam girls, strippers, or dominatrices. Their responses were then discarded, so that we only used data from the women who had had sex with at least one person from the ethnic groups they were rating. Here’s the questions we asked:
Here’s the penis size ratings:
I don’t think Rushton would be surprised by these. Side from the shock factor, penis size is evolutionarily interesting because it varies a lot between primates relative to brain size. This seems related to the harem vs. free love pattern of the species. Chimpanzees have big penises (free love) and gorillas (harem) have small penises.
Here’s how much each ethnicity is into kissing:
This replicates prior research that kissing during sex is a particularly European thing.
What about kinky sex?
Again, a much more European thing.
Who likes blowjobs?
Blacks in particular, as well as Europeans are into blowjobs, but not much East Asians or Indians.
What about relative preference for boobs vs. butts?
Unsurprisingly, Blacks and Latinos were much more into butts relative to the other groups. If you have heard any pop music or seen twerking, you won’t be surprised.
Similarly, preferences for doggy style vs. missionary position:
This mirrors the findings about boobs vs. butts as well as the relative preference for kissing (in part), which is possible in missionary but not doggy style.
What about overall performance in bed?
Sex workers were particularly impressed by Blacks in bed, probably also because they are slower to ejaculate (results not shown here). Sex workers do not think that East Asians or Indians do well in bed.
Finally, who did they prefer as clients?
European men get the highest overall score, Indians the lowest. Though Blacks were somewhat impolite, perhaps their greater sexual prowess made up for this, and sex workers are OK with them as clients. This somewhat contradicts stereotypes, because sex workers often report “no blacks” on their profiles. Not sure what to make of this. Most of the sample of sex workers were White, so perhaps that’s why Whites are the most preferred. But when we analyzed the results from only the non-White sex workers, the results were the same. There’s more in the paper, such as whether results were robust to looking only at results from sex workers with a lot of experience, but the results were basically the same.
Overall, the study provided some intriguing data for future thinking about race differences in sexuality. For instance, Black men really like blowjobs, but Black women don’t like giving them. This would then perhaps explain Blacks preference for White women as partners (or Hispanics). Mainly Whites (Europeans) were into kissing, but perhaps just because they were less concerned with labial herpes or getting a viral infection? Who knows. Preference for missionary position would seem to go along with preference for kissing, but East Asians like missionary relative to doggy style, but they don’t like kissing so much, so it’s a bit mysterious. Maybe Aella can survey some of her followers and dig into these differences. There’s not a lot of evolutionary theory on these differences, so we hope that people will start theorizing based on these results.
