Eureka! The Oral Sex Gods have spoken (OK, maybe just the Center for Disease Control and Prevention), and it turns out that science is on the side of sex again. According to data they pulled between 2011 and 2013 from roughly 9,000 people, those who have their bachelor's degrees or a higher level of education are more likely to go downtown than those less educated.
Education = Open minds = Better sex
It's not clear whether or not this is correlated with intelligence (plenty of brilliant, open-minded people don't go to college), but I suspect it is. The CDC summed it up this way:
"Among both women and men aged 22–44, oral sex was reported more often among those with a bachelor’s degree or higher (91.5% of women and 91.7% of men) than among those with no high school diploma or General Educational Development high school equivalency diploma (GED) (72.6% of women and 80.2% of men)."
The same is actually true for anal sex, though this understandably only holds up with heterosexual women:
"Anal sex was reported by a lower percentage of women aged 22–44 with no high school diploma or GED (24.4%) compared with other education groups; however, this same pattern by education was not seen for men.
This is a pretty fascinating correlation, and though the CDC doesn't postulate why more educated people are more likely to try taboo or potentially "gross" sexual activities, we can make a few assumptions:
- Educated people are typically exposed to more media and literature, which crushes things they had been conditioned to believe.
- Educated people are typically instructed in critical thinking and understanding their own biases.
- People who embark on higher education might be more willing to try to new things.
Regardless of the reason, there's one thing I know for sure: Next time a dude refuses to go down on me, I have all the support I need to give him a hard pass. Ain't nobody got time for that.