Sexual Definitions

I have conducted three studies on students’ sexual definitions. Hilary Randall conducted a study for her Honours thesis in which we asked university students about their definitions of the terms having sex, sexual partner, and unfaithful. Students were asked to indicate which from a list of 18 sexual behaviours they would include in their definition of each of the three terms. We found that significantly more behaviours were included in students’ unfaithful definition than were included in the sexual partner definition and significantly more behaviours were included in the sexual partner definition than in the having sex definition. For example, less than 25% of participants considered oral genital behaviour to be having sex. However, more than 60% thought that the giver or receiver of oral sex was a sexual partner, and more than 97% considered oral sex to be unfaithful. Similarly, while masturbating to orgasm in the presence of another was considered to be having sex by less than 4% of participants, 34% reported that this behaviour was sufficient to consider that person a sexual partner and 95% considered it to be unfaithful. Students were more likely to include a behaviour in their definitions if orgasm occurred than if orgasm did not occur. There were no significant gender differences. Multiple regression analyses revealed that older and less sexually experienced students reported a broader definition of sexual partner than did younger and more sexually experienced students. These results have implications for both sex research and for sexual health promotion. These results have been published in The Canadian Journal of Human Sexuality.

Joel Henderson, one of my Honours students, and Kristina Hobson, one of my basic research students, extended this research by examining the definitions of abstinence of 289 university students. We found that the majority of students included activities that did not involve genital stimulation in their definition of sexual abstinence but not in their definition of sex.  Conversely, most students did not include bidirectional sexual stimulation (penile-vaginal intercourse or penile-anal intercoursre) in their definitions of sexual abstinence but did include them in their definitions of having sex. Students were quite mixed in whether activities involving unidirectional genital stimulation (e.g., oral sex, genital fondling) constituted abstinence, having sex, or neither abstinence nor having sex. However, they were more likely to see these behaviours as abstinent than as having sex. Male participants who were more involved with their religion and sexually conservative, less sexually experienced, and who had not received sexual health education at home were more likely to define bidirectional genital stimulation and less likely to define no genital stimulation and unidirecitonal sexual stimulation as sexual abstinence. A manuscript describing these results has been published in the Archives of Sexual  Behavior.

Using data collected by Lindsay Walsh, one of my Honours students, my doctoral student Krystelle Shaughnessy and I extended the definitions research to online sexual activity by examining the definitions of cybersex provided by 292 undergraduate students.We found that overall, OSAs are not considered having sex, although online activities with a partner were most likely to be considered having sex . About one-quarter (24%) of students said that they had engaged in cybersex. These students were most likely to report having engaged in OSA with a partner (e.g., sharing sexual fantasies online); relatively few students who  reported only non-arousal OSA (e.g., seeking sexual information online) or only solitary-arousal (e.g., viewing pornography online) OSA experience reported that they had engaged in cybersex. We also analyzed students definitions to the open-ended question What is cybersex? We found that students’ definitions reflected one of two broad conceptualizations of cybersex, and these did not differ for male and female students. Some definitions emphasized the reciprocal and process nature of the interaction (i.e., that it involved two people) and that it often involved masturbation in response to the direction of another person. Others emphasized the individual outcome of the interaction (that is being sexual arousal) and described masturbation as self-directed. The majority of participants indicated that cybersex was an interactive, real-time activity. However, students varied considerably in whethery they included  self-stimulation, sexual arousal, the use of imagination, visual stimuli, and  describing sexual activities in their definition of cybersex. Few students included solitary-arousal activities in their definitions of cybersex. This work has been published in the International Journal of Sexual Health.

Here are our publications based on this work:

            Shaughnessy, S., & Byers, E. S. (2011). What Is cybersex?: Heterosexual                 students’ definitions. International Journal of Sexual Health, 23(2), 79-89.               DOI: 10.1080/19317611.2010.546945