Australia was the fifth-most sexually promiscuous industrial nation

British more promiscuous than Australians | World News | News.com.au

British more promiscuous than Australians

December 01, 2008 12:01am

Sex
How about it? ... British men and women outrank Australians in the casual sex league.

* Brits among world's most promiscuous bunch
* Outrank Australians by far
* Cities with the sexiest women

IT may come as a shock to many Aussies who have long regarded the Poms as a sexually conservative bunch, but British men and women have been found to be the most promiscuous of any big Western nation.

In a study measuring one-night stands, total numbers of partners and attitudes to casual sex, Britain outdid Australia, the US, France, The Netherlands, Italy and Germany when it came to promiscuity.

Britain's The Sunday Times reported that lead researcher David Schmitt from Bradley University in Illinois found that an increasing willingness by society to accept sexual promiscuity among women may be behind Britain's high ranking.
He said cultural developments meant women were now as able to engage in no-strings sex as men and they might even be becoming more promiscuous than their male counterparts.

"Historically, we have repressed women's short-term mating and there are all sorts of double standards out there where men's short-term mating was sort of acceptable but women's wasn't," the professor of psychology said.

The study was conducted by asking more than 14,000 people in 48 countries to fill in anonymous questionnaires.

Respondents were asked about numbers of partners and one-night stands, and their attitudes were assessed by asking them how many people they expected to sleep with over the next five years and how comfortable they were with the idea of casual sex.

The country with the highest rating was Finland. Taiwan came lowest.

Britain was placed 11th overall, behind countries such as Latvia, Croatia and Slovenia but it was highest among the major Western industrial nations.

Australia was the fifth-most sexually promiscuous industrial nation, ahead of the US in sixth spot.