Herald Sun
by BLANCHE CLARK
The Fifty Shades of Grey movie is finally released on Thursday but since late last year this trailer and several others from the movie adaptation of E.L. James’s first best-selling erotic novel have been reawakening lustful thoughts and deviant deeds in the suburbs.
Or perhaps not?
Has the Fifty Shades of Grey trilogy really spiced up the sex lives of millions of couples around the world since it was released in 2011? Are Australians really having more great sex with more partners than ever before? And what’s polyamory and why are some people opting for open marriages rather than the secrecy of infidelity?
The Australian Study of Health and Relationships (ASHR) survey provides one of the most significant overviews of our nation’s sexual behaviour and attitudes.
The first ASHR survey was conducted a decade ago, and the findings of the second survey in November show we’re having more sexual partners, more oral sex and more sexual role-play than ever before.
But, on the flip side, those in committed heterosexual relationships are having less sex each week than they would like.
ASHR researcher Professor Juliet Richters, from the University of New South Wales’ School of Public Health and Community Medicine, says people have been keen to know if Fifty Shades of Grey has boosted the percentage of people practising BDSM (bondage and discipline, sadism and masochism).
“Before we had the result, people were saying to me, with Fifty Shades of Grey, is there a big increase in BDSM?” Richters says.
“And there isn’t. The BDSM stayed more or less flat at 2.8 per cent of the population.
“But we had a slightly different, broader question that we asked first, which was: ‘In the last 12 months have you been involved in role play or dressing up?’
“That was the practice that more than doubled in the 10 years, from 4 per cent (in 2004) to 8.3 per cent,” Richters says.
“I think that role-play is where we are picking up the Fifty Shades of Grey effect. It’s safely naughty without getting mixed up with weirdo guys with leather masks on.”
The ASHR survey of 20,094 men and women aged 16-69, via landlines and mobile phones, was conducted between October 2012 and November 2013.
Richters says both men and women are having more oral sex. A decade ago, among people aged
16-59, 79 per cent of men and 67 per cent of women had had oral sex, but now 88 per cent of men and 86 person of women have done so.
“The oral sex change is a generational change,” Richters says. “Oral sex moved with the people who came of age in the ’70s from a slightly shocking practice that the more sexually adventurous did, or sex workers did, into something that became a fairly ordinary part of what people might call foreplay.
Australian sexologist Lynda Carlyle says the world’s largest experiment on human desire, A Billion Wicked Thoughts, found the most common sexual fantasy is domination and submission.
“It is the only sexual interest that we all have in common — gay, straight, everybody,” Carlyle says. “We are talking about power roles in sexual relationships, the sense of one person having power and the other person willingly or unwillingly submitting to that power. …