Image via WikipediaHe is a church-going teetotaller who has neither been to jail nor served in the military, according to a new survey of more than 7000 people. He also represents an estimated 1.1 million American men and 800,000 women aged 25 to 45 who have never had sex.
The study, led by urologist Michael Eisenberg of the University of California, San Francisco, will appear in an upcoming issue of the Journal of Sexual Medicine.
His team's survey found that 13.9 per cent of men and 8.9 per cent of women said they have never had sex.
Men and women who attended church at least once a week were respectively 5 and 3.9 times more likely to be virgins than those who attended church less often. Virgins of both sexes were slightly less likely to have swigged a beer in the last year, compared to non-virgins. And women with college degrees were 5.4 times more likely to be virgins than women who never got their Bachelor's.
Men who attended the military or spent time behind bars were slightly less likely to be 40-year-old virgins than those not exposed to such discipline. "We used incarceration or military service as surrogate markers for exposure to violence or aggressive behaviour," Eisenberg's team writes.
This may be true for prison, but people join the military for reason other than aggressive tendencies. "The entire reason for the low rate of virgins with military experience is likely less clear than simply those with violent or risk taking tendencies," they add. {Read on}
