on sex

(keyboard keys typing) - my name's hillary, and i make a lot of videos about sex. sometimes it can bedifficult to find research because really who's giving us this data,

on sex, and are they telling the truth? i sat down with a datascientist named seth who's been studying whatwe can learn about people's sex lives from their online activity.

- you're a data scientist, right? - yeah. - so, tell everyone what that means. - as a data scientist i look through thousands, hundreds of thousands, even millions of data points, and try to notice patterns in them to learn about human behavior, to learn about what people really want,

and what people are really doing. it's putting together everybody's anonymous aggregate data. - so, when i googlesomething about my sex life, you don't know that i did it. - i definitely do not know that. - so, what has he learned? well, it seems like a lot of people lie, and the data doesn't always match up.

- the first thing i learnedis that americans lie about how much sex they have. american men say they use 1.6billion condoms every year in heterosexual sexual encounters. women say they use only1.1 billion condoms every year in heterosexualsexual encounters. who's telling the truth, men or women? neither. only about 600 million condoms

are sold every year in the united states. so actually there are far fewer condoms actually used in the unitedstates than people claim. i estimate putting all thedifferent data sources together, that american are only having sex about 30 times per year on average, which is about once every 12 days. - what else can internet searches teach us about our sex lives?

well, unsurprisingly there's a difference between what men and womenare searching for online. - i think the internet datais pretty shocking here. men make more searches about their penis than any other body part by far. more than their heart, lungs, liver, nose, ears, throat, and brain combined. for every 100 searches menmake about their penis, they make about fiveabout their own brain,

so that can kinda tell you the relative priorities of men. - men are obsessed andanxious about their dicks. fair enough. what are women thinking? - well, not about their partner's penises. women have nearly as many questions about their vaginas as manhave about their penises. i'd say the equivalent ofthe small penis to the man

would be the smelly vagina to the woman. there are tons and tonsof searches into this, and how to make it smell better, and concerns about what it smells like. and again, this is anotherthing where you don't see this normally. a lot of people, whenthey make these searches, like you just look at a lotof message boards and stuff. and it's from a lot of younger girls,

and they're like, "i'm never gonna tell anyone, "like this is so embarrassing. "i feel like my vagina smells like fish, "or it smells like onions, "or it smells like ammoniaor vinegar, or garlic." one thing that i hopecomes out of this data is there's definitely room for improvement in how we think about andhow we talk about sex.

- so, if women are searching to find out more about their vaginal odor, and their male partners are searching to find out more about their vaginal odor, while it's much easier for them to do that perhaps separately online, a better solution might be forthem to just talk about it. - well, i think that's a great point. i think in general this whole data

is kinda shows us thatthere's a whole lot of not talking going on, where people are, you know, things that should beconversations with your partner instead are questions on the internet. - in the end, sethsuggests that this is all pretty good news. - you think of the twomain facts that i found, the one fact is that americans are having

a lot less sex than they say they have, and kind of a shockinglylittle amount of sex, despite most peopleenjoying sex quite a bit, and the second fact around sex is that people have overwhelming insecurity and anxiety around sex. and perhaps if we lowered the anxiety, we'd have more sex. maybe if we all worried less about sex,

we'd have more of it. ("purple and gold")