The Sex Diaries Project: What 1,500 Bedroom Diaries Can Teach Us About Sex

Jan 27, 2012 - Jessica Bennett - The Daily Beast

What the not-so-private sex diaries of 1,500 Americans can teach us about relationships, love—and ourselves. Jessica Bennett on the new book The Sex Diaries ProjectArianne Cohen has learned a few things from poring over the sex diaries of 1,500 people.

For starters: relationships are a lot like careers. Sure, some of us work 9 to 5—but others stay home in pajamas all day, eating crackers in bed. It can get messy.

Second: Men and women aren’t all that different. (In fact, Cohen had trouble telling their diaries apart.) Except, perhaps, when it comes to one topic: porn. Men watch it. A lot.

Lastly—but perhaps most important—it turns out that what we think we know about American relationships and what we actually know are two wildly different notions. And what’s really going on is a lot less conventional than we might have imagined.

“There’s so much variation in how people do relationships,” says Cohen, a former magazine editor whose new book, The Sex Diaries Project: What We’re Saying About What We’re Doing, hits shelves next week. “We live in a society where there’s this idea that you’re either in a long-term relationship or taking steps to get there. But if you read diaries, what you find is, that’s not what a lot of people are doing.”
The full piece at The Daily Beast.

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