How Long Should Sex Last?

If you were to believe all of the sex talk spewed out in romantic comedies, you’d think that humans have an awfully pitiful sex life. Nobody is ever good-looking enough, other people are always jerks and nobody is ever satisfied until the stars align and two crazy kids manage to find each other in the midst of all of the rotten other folks in the world.

Okay, I’m not saying some of this isn’t correct, but it is entirely misleading and can definitely warp people’s minds. That it is all done under the guise of humour is another frightening thing. Turning out the biggest dating and relationship fears into the butt of jokes can definitely cause folks much fear and misunderstandings.

I can’t say the sex world doesn’t do some of this too. Another type of sex cinema, obviously porn, can definitely distort sexual perceptions as well. It is all-too-easy to skew to look at porn and want to emulate the actions we see on screen because they are hot and sexy! But are they realistic? Well, rarely.

Sex-time stereotypes

There is one significant aspect of sex that both rom-coms and porn skew perceptions equally, but in very different ways. In mainstreams films we always hear about how guys are done and orgasm in very short amounts of time and this leads women to complain about how short sex was and they are subsequently left unsatisfied. On the other end of the spectrum is porn featuring marathon sessions of acrobatic sex that would probably leave mere mortals with multiple injuries. The complaints coming from women this time would be more like “just finish and get off me please this is too much!”

Why is there no middle ground? Why does each form depict such opposite views of how long sex should last? It isn’t as if we don’t have some information—collected data and informal, personal research—that shows that the average length of time of intercourse in heterosexual sex is about 5 minutes. Surely there are folks who can’t last that long and others who do surpass it, but there you have it folks, that’s the average duration of sex.

Time to change our ideas?

So, why do each of these genres distort our reality so much? Well, marketing and marketing. In the case of romantic comedies, the characters have to have some tension, some challenge to overcome that also supplies humour. Short sex isn’t the main challenge, it is a background, secondary character issue that the main characters want to avoid as they pursue their magical connection.

Porn’s portrayal of sex that goes on forever is all about giving the viewer more and more titillation to ensure further purchases. The more they show, the more they are going to entice viewers with the idea they will get more of the same the next time they watch another of the company’s DVDs or clips online. Curiously, companies still do this despite the widely-accepted knowledge that porn viewers like small clips and scan through larger scenes looking for exactly what they want. I think the idea is if they throw it all in...everyone will be satisfied.

The long and the short of long and short sex is that reality proves we function somewhere right in the middle!