Debby Herbenick is a sex educator, sex advice columnist, author, research scientist, children's book author, blogger, television personality, professor, and human sexuality expert in the media. Dr. Herbenick is a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health and was lead investigator of the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.
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Rosemary Pennington: There’s a lot of bad information out there about sex. Fueled in part by sociocultural framings of certain behaviors and by the way media portrays particular sex acts. If you couple that with something that sex is just something people are just uncomfortable talking about it can be hard to find good information. Enter sex research; the focus of this episode of Stats and Stories where we explore the statistics behind the stories behind the statistics. I’m Rosemary Pennington. Stats and Stories is a production of Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film as well as the American Statistical Association. Joining me in the studio is regular panelist John Bailer, Chair of Miami’s Statistics Department. Richard Campbell of Media, Journalism and Film is away today. Our guest today is Debby Herbenick. Herbenick is the Director at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion and a professor at Indiana University, as well as a sexual health educator at the Kinsey Institute. She’s also the author of numerous studies on sexual behavior and the author or co-author of a number of books including Because It Feels Good: A Woman’s Guide to Sexual Pleasure and Satisfaction, the I Love You More Book, and The Coregasm Workout. Debbie, thank you so much for being here today.
Debby Herbenick: Thank you for having me.
Pennington: I guess I’m just going to start off by asking you how sex research became your calling?
Herbenick: It became my calling because I didn’t know anything about sex, and I had taken a job at a research assistant at the Kinsey Institute right out of undergrad because I had a background in childhood and adolescent development and they were doing a study, at the time, on child and adolescent sexual development. So, I came as a newly minted undergrad to work on that, got there, and thought wow. Everything I thought I knew was wrong, and I didn’t think I knew that much anyway, and this is a great place to learn.
John Bailer: So, when you started this investigation, this new area of research for you, what were some of the things you had to learn to get up to speed to do these investigations.
Herbenick: Well luckily I was a very junior research assistant on the project, so I was doing a lot of different behind the scenes kinds of things, so that exposed me to reading a lot of books. The Kinsey Institute has a fantastic library and art collection and I would sometimes use my lunch hours to volunteer in the collections and read letters to and from Albert Kinsey, so I got a lot of background on cultural ignorance, as well as how researchers were addressing that ignorance decades earlier, and then of course I was around people both at he Kinsey Institute and outside of the Institute at IU, Indiana University, to see how people were answering those big questions. So, the Kinsey Institute is very small and there are probably ten times as many researchers outside of IU, outside of Kinsey compared to inside. So, it’s just a great place to be and to soak up information.
Pennington: You mentioned the fact that you don’t know a lot when you started working at Kinsey and it seems like that’s something that comes up a lot in conversations about sex. In a classroom space and outside a classroom space people feel like they don’t know as much as they would like, what do you think contributes to that?
Herbenick: You know in the US we have such a puritanical history about everything, and that influences how we approach bodies and sexuality. So certainly, in the United States it’s still common for many people to have not been raised with accurate words about their genitals. And I teach college level human sexuality classes at IU and in the first week or two when we get to genital anatomy and I say okay everybody take out some paper, work in groups, before we start the lecture we do some diagram drawing and I say draw a diagram of a vulva and label these parts, and they all say what’s a vulva? And they’re 18 and 20 and 24 and they feel some shame sometimes and embarrassment around not knowing that, and I tell them you should not feel ashamed or embarrassed about this because this is our culture, right? But at the same time some of us are changing that and like my two-year-old knows what a vulva is. And some of us are raised them with inaccurate words, so you know we have that cultural shame we have religious and family traditions, and we happen to be a culture where people more easily talk about the sensational aspects of sex [inaudible] we have endless images on Instagram on movies in porn, but its really the more vulnerable intimate and accurate conversations about sex that we’re at a loss for.
Bailer: That seems like a really hard problem to study. I mean if there’s cultural ignorance, there’s probably inhibitions in responding. So how do you study this? Have there been changes in the trend of cultural ignorance over time? How do you investigate these questions?
Herbenick: So, I think it’s actually easier to study if you have expertise and background on it than many people think. So many people do think wow we’re so embarrassed, who would ever tell you about their sex lives? But what we find is that those of us who have been trained and we come equipped with a truly nonjudgmental approach, and we’re very open and we’re very comfortable talking about these things, but we actually find the opposite. If you give people some confidence and comfort, and they have a space to share with you what’s going on in their lives, or what they wonder about, and they know it’s this really safe space where somebody is not going to judge them, they just pour out with their stories. And for many of them they will say I’ve never told anyone this before, I could never tell anyone this before, and that gives them something. When we do those interview-based studies, which isn’t all of what we do, but it’s some of what we do, I find it really satisfying in that regard because our participants seem to get so much out of it.
Pennington: I know you were involved with a very large national survey, could you talk a little bit about that? I know you just talked about doing these smaller, more intimate interviews but maybe you could talk about to do this big national survey in the US?
Herbenick: Absolutely, so I’m the lead investigator of what’s called the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, or the NSHSB, and it’s been going on for more than a decade, and we’ve done seven waves of data collection, so it’s really the nation’s only US nationally represented survey of sex in the US. There was one before us in the early 1990s that was very well done from Chicago, out of the University of Chicago, and we’ve been very happy to carry that torch along. So we look at thigs like trends in sexual behaviors, who doing what, what types of sexual behaviors people find appealing or not appealing, we look at relationships and marriages, and intimacy and connection, we look at what people like about sex, orgasms, pleasure… so I could go on and on but the point is we do these seven waves of data collection, the questions change every time, and I absolutely love digging into these changes and these feelings people have. You asked about methods, and in this case what’s nice about this is not only is it a nationally representative study, so it does its best to reflect the US population, but because the data collection is internet based we also get around some challenges that we do have with face to face interviews, as that sometimes there are certain topics that people will be more likely to reveal over internet based surveys.
Bailer: What kind of response rates do you get for these types of surveys?
Herbenick: Our response rates vary depending on how out there the topic is. But it’s typically like 55-60% which is pretty common for these kinds of surveys.
Pennington: Is there anything over the more than a decade that you’ve been doing this that you have found surprising or particularly interesting that’s emerged from all of this?
Herbenick: Yeah… um… [Laughter]
Bailer: That sounds like a softball, up into the net, Debby slam it home.
Herbenick: I mean, I do think that there are some things I find challenging. So, I think that we have seen some sexual behaviors becoming more aggressive in the past decade. That’s hard for me to see, especially as a parent with small kinds, and thinking long term about maybe their adolescence or their adulthood. We have some data on the types of topics that are not covered or are not covered well in school-based sexuality education. And considering we are still grappling in this country with particularly high rates of HIV acquisition among teenagers and young adults, particularly gay and bisexual men, or men who are having sex with men. We see almost no respondents saying that their schools talked to them about safer sex between two men, or safer sex between two women, which isn’t as often linked to HIV, but is still important to people understanding their sexual lives. So, we don’t see much conversation about pleasure, and sex education. So, when sex education occurs at all adolescents and young adults generally say what was covered well was things like sexually transmitted infections, birth control and abstinence, and not much beyond that.
Bailer: I thought your study was really very interesting and you did very complex methods using these probabilities sampling methods, and doing appropriates weights to upweight the population value, I thought that was very nice. I was curious about some of the predictors of the behaviors. You have these general estimates, but I know that it’s a much harder question to think about stratifying by certain subgroups. In some of your presentations you talk about where there’s certain education patterns- where you don’t talk about sex, where sex is treated as abnormal in different parts of the country, you might see different rates of sexually transmitted disease. I’m curious about the predictors of the behaviors. So, to follow up on Rosemary’s comment about interesting results, are there particularly interesting patterns you’ve seen over time and interesting predictors of such patterns? Herbenick: So, every study- and we publish a couple dozen a year, is a little different, so we look at lots of different kinds of predictors. We don’t look as much at things like regional differences because in large part even though there are some regional things that are interesting like in the US if you look at any of the STI charts from the Center for Disease Control, there’s always a well defined trend in where the STIs and HIV are, which is in the Bible Belt, so they’re there. We don’t do a lot of regional things with things like sex education or even behavior, in part because there’s a lot of variability within those areas. So, for example where I live in Bloomington Indiana is enormously different than towns 20-30 minutes or an hour away. So, for me even though I know there’s a lot of people who do that type of work, especially in epidemiology, the regional stuff is a little less interesting to me. I tend to be more interested in people’s like more proximal predictors. So, for instance the person that they’re having sex with, I care about how they feel about that person. So, as an example we found in one study that women were more likely to use a condom with someone they didn’t love or they weren’t sure they loved, or they weren’t sure how that person felt about them. So, I think that’s such an adaptive behavior, right? You’re not sure about these feelings, or you’re pretty sure they don’t have strong positive feelings for you, so you’re going to use a condom which is a very wise thing to do. So, there’s very proximal behaviors about like where you had sex, who the person was, feelings; that’s sort of my bag.
Pennington: So how do you – if someone wants to do this kind of research how would you suggest they go about their education or training? You do the smaller scale, more personal interviews, you’re managing this big survey… Someone who wants to go into this field, what do they need to be thinking about to be prepared to do this work?
Herbenick: Just good get training, right? There’s lots of possibilities for that. There are more and more sex researchers all over the world all the time, so there are more people available to you. Most schools don’t have dozens and dozens of sex researchers like we do at IU and Kinsey, but there are a few programs, and ours is one of them that now have online graduate certificates. So we have a graduate certificate in sexual and reproductive health and we now have some students who live in areas where there aren’t local sex educators and researchers, and maybe they want to work at a local clinic as an educator, or they want to go into research, so they can get that. The University of Michigan and University of Minnesota also have some online opportunities, so I think that you just want to get connected because it’s not as simple as just going out and doing research. You need to get all kinds of training in the content areas about sexual attitudes and behaviors, as well as the research methods themselves, and then get some on the ground training, and going out and doing interviews, and recruiting for surveys and learning data analysis. So, there’s a lot that goes into it, but it can be a really rewarding career.
Pennington: You’re listening to Stats and Stories and today we’re talking to Indiana University’s Debbie Herbenick about sex research. Debby I know, so for our listeners, I went to IU, did my PhD there, I’ve known Debby for a long time. we actually sort of collaborated when I was teaching a sex in the news class several years ago. And I spent a lot of time at Kinsey as well as interacting with Debby, and I know one thing that I’ve talked about a lot with you and I think some of the Kinsey people is the fact that it is easier to get support for research that looks at disfunctions in sex, rather than the more pleasurable or less dysfunctional aspects of sex. So, if you’re looking at a problem, it’s easier to make the sell and get political backing or funding than saying we want to look at how do people behave when they love someone when they’re having sex. So is there still that sort of tension as far as outside support – more support for disfunctions versus functional probably isn’t the right word…
Bailer: Healthy…
Pennington: Healthy, yeah, yeah.
Herbenick: You know, I think it really varies. I would agree that within our field most people absolutely feel that way, that it’s far easier to get funding for problematic aspects of sex. My main appointment in the IU school of public health and we have this great group of sex researchers in public health and I think I have always felt very fortunate to be in a school that supports a very holistic look at sex education and sex research and sexuality in general. Over the years I’ve benefitted from some internal grants within the school and the university to help me explore the things I want to explore. I’ve personally done a lot of research funded by corporations and by startup technology companies. I’ve been really fortunate to just somehow be contacted by or otherwise meet some individuals at these kinds of places that shared interests with me. So, some of my research has been funded by companies that make sexual enhancement products like vibrators or lubricants or arousal creams, condoms, and they had interest and I had interest and they lined up, and then we did some studies together. I think when people look at very large federal level funding, yeah, the fact of the matter is that they are going to be more interested in addressing health problems. So especially for people interested in sexual and gender minorities, there’s often been a real sense that the interest in mainly focused on HIV related work, and there’s been a lot of work in recent years, a lot of progress, actually, within these more federal levels as supporting research that gets away- well, still funding the HIV work, but is also funding work that’s around, for example, stigma and substance use. And those still might seem like problems and they are, but ultimately people are trying to understand how do you live- a lot of these researchers are really trying to envision like how do you live a happy satisfying life with friends and partners and family in the midst of some challenges.
Bailer: So, I’m curious, when you’re going through and starting to do this research you’re going through some sort of institutional review process. I was just imagining the adventures you must have with human subject’s review boards.
Herbenick: Well I’m on the human subject committee. [Laughter] And I have to say it is my most satisfying faculty service I have ever done.
Bailer: Oh outstanding.
Herbenick: I think that IU and again this is s different place than most and we really don’t have the same kinds of problems that I hear about with human subjects at other universities, because again, there’s more than 100 sexuality researchers here. Whether they’re studying birds or primates or humans, our IRB staff is really used to seeing things about sex, and they really focus just on the human subjects’ issues, just on the risks and benefits, and they’re not getting sidetracked by the sex part. But what I hear from many colleagues and sometimes help them brainstorm through, are ethical issues that come up at their IRB, where their IRB is getting distracted away from the human subjects or risk benefits issues, and instead saying I don’t think you should ask about masturbation or orgasm. So, there’s a lot of redirection that needs to happen at those universities to get them to say okay, well what’s the human subjects’ issue that you’re concerned about? And then go with that rather than the sex piece. So, you’re right at so many universities and that’s really reflecting again our ignorance and cultural shaming to think that just asking about sex is going to be a risk for those humans.
Pennington: I’m going to switch gears just a little bit, you are involved in a lot of public outreach efforts. You were involved with the Kinsey Confidential podcast that IU did for a while you had the My Sex Professor blog, you’ve been on Oprah, I believe. Am I misremembering that?
Herbenick: Not Oprah, but a bunch of other shows.
Pennington: Okay, I thought it was Oprah too. And you launched the Sex Salon in Bloomington, and have given TED Talks, and for me, given what you do that seems terrifying to be so public. Why have you embraced that aspect of your identity and role as a scholar?
Herbenick: Oh, so interesting, what’s terrifying about that?
Pennington: Oh, I mean just- the idea of let’s talk about sex in this big public event, I don’t know- again maybe this is the cultural- I don’t want to talk about sex in public coming out here.
Herbenick: Well, you’re talking about sex on the podcast right now
Pennington: I am, I am. Yeah, there are four of us in this space. [Laughter]
Bailer: Who’s going to listen to this?
Pennington: But I don’t have to see anybody’s faces. [Laughter]
Herbenick: It doesn’t terrify me at all, but I also teach human sexuality, so part of my week is to get up twice a week and get in front of 60 or 80 or 100 undergraduates and talk about sex, and I’ve been doing that for 17 years, and so yeah, I think it’s not uncomfortable for me. But there was a time in my life before I did this when it would have been excruciating for me to imagine doing that because I was also raised in a home with a family where we didn’t talk about sex. So that was a change. But I love the public outreach, it’s just really important to what I do.
Pennington: I was going to say because there’s so many scholars who are doing research whether it’s in this area or not, who seem very scared to sort of step outside the academy. So that research into a more public facing space and you’ve just really embraced that in a way that I think feels unusual in the Academy.
Herbenick: I do think we’re seeing more and more people do it these days, which is exciting. In fact, even our promotion and tenure guidelines have evolved over the years. Spaces for, sometimes people call it knowledge translation or public engagement in science. So, I think that’s more of a [inaudible] thing that universities do now, and ours is one of them. So, it counts for something. But certainly, when I started it my main fear at the time was that I was still in graduate school when I was doing a lot of these public things, and I was worried about the professors taking me seriously. You know, and I do remember one professor making kind of an obnoxious comment about it at one point, but he was also somebody who was generally just kind of petty, so- [Laughter] that’s his issue, not mine. But I also had some professors that were so encouraging. I got my PhD in a department of applied health science and I remembered talking to her about it and I was worried about what people would think and she said Debby you’re getting your PhD in the department of applied health science, this is applying health sciences, this is exactly what you should be doing. And I loved that she supported me in that because it gave me a lot of confidence to just go out and do it.
Bailer: I was intrigued to find out about things like a declaration of sexual rights that the World Association for Sexual Health has been promoting. Can you talk about some of the things that might be part of a declaration of sexual rights?
Herbenick: Oh absolutely. What are there, 14 of them? I should know because I teach about this but there’s like 12 or 14 of them, and they range. They range from things like having bodily autonomy to decide when you want to have sex, who you want to have sex with, things like having some agency around your reproduction, so that can involve things like having access to condoms and other types of contraception, and also the ability to assert that you’re going to use them and that a partner would respect that. Sexual rights are about being free from sexual violence or pressure or coercion. They can include the opportunities to seek sexual fulfillment and pleasure, the rights to education. Again, even at the youngest ages, we have human rights to have access to information about our bodies and about sexual reproduction. So, they’re wide ranging and so the World Association of Sexual Health has done a great deal to further that.
Pennington: I have one final question for you that our colleague Richard Campbell would normally ask. We haven’t really talked much about media and how media influence the way we understand and respond to sex culturally. What do you think- I mean, and certainly there’s a lot of sensationalistic reporting on sex research and anything to do with sex, what do you think journalists could do to better cover sexual behavior and sexual health, and just sexual experiences to help sort of move us away from- like me not wanting to talk about sex in public, just that idea that it feels like a taboo topic?
Herbenick: Well I think a few things. One thing I wish editors especially took responsibility for and then sort of shaped the culture of their journalists, their writers if you will, would be that you only use experts for things you need an expert for. And I wish more professors and sex educators and researchers did this too. Like held the line, in other words what we get a lot of calls for are things like- I literally got a call once years ago from a friend asking for tips on having sex in unique places like on a canoe or in an igloo. That is nothing you need a researcher to weigh in on. Things like how you kiss someone on the neck. How should you blow air on somebody’s neck? I mean those are the kinds of questions that we get, I think what that does is it really cheapens expertise, right? But hat is a regular type of request and it is human nature that a lot of people really do just want to see their name in print and they feel like that means something. So, a lot of researchers and educators give in to that and give some quotes for that. Sometimes you can avoid that and still find your name as giving false quotes. There are some quotes out there on the internet that I’ve never said, and that’s happened to some colleagues too, and they’re hard to scrub off the internet. So, I think editors and writers need to hold that line, and people in our field need to do that too. I think also actually trying to fit in what really matters. I find it very difficult to get journalists or editors to write about what we actually find matters a great deal to satisfaction is that intimacy, connection and vulnerability matter a lot. Nobody wants to write about that, they want to write about how you find the g-spot. They want to write about how to blow air on somebody’s neck. And they’ll say well we want something servicey like a tangible thing we can tell people to do, but that means that we miss out on telling people the most important things that research for decades has found measures of pleasure and satisfaction. More people can employ fact checkers. Sometimes I get called at the last minute from a magazine where they’ll say well we found out in fact check that somebody’s PhD is a fake one and we need to scrub their comments form this, do you have something you can add to this section of this story because we got too far down the path with somebody that wasn’t really real.
Pennington: Oh my gosh.
Herbenick: So, there’s a lot more that we could be doing. I understand some publications have a silly bend to them and that’s fine, but you know if we were a little less silly and more sincere about sex- and sincere doesn’t have to be boring, but just genuine and sincere, I think that would go a long way to helping us feel more comfortable.
Bailer: I have to tell you I’m very impressed with your ability to communicate. In watching some of your TED Talks- I mean anybody that ties a bed to a treehouse in terms of an image in terms of an analogy- that was great. So, you know, for the listeners, that’s not meaning putting a bed in a treehouse. But so, can you talk a little bit about that analogy and what you were using to highlight with that?
Herbenick: Yeah I think that year’s TED in Bloomington was focused on the wisdom of play, I think was the theme name, so I really needed to find something about play, and for me I just sort of kept coming back to these early experiences, not sexual experiences just play experiences around treehouses and creating these other worlds for yourself, so I ended up creating that talk and connecting sex to play and exploration and adventure and openness.
Pennington: Well Debby, that’s all the time we have for this episode, thank you so much for being here.
Herbenick: Thank you so much for having me.
Bailer: Thanks Debby.
Pennington: Stats and Stories is a partnership between Miami University’s Departments of Statistics and Media, Journalism and Film and the American Statistical Association. You can follow us on Twitter, Apple podcasts, or other places you can find podcasts. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the program send your emails to statsandstories@miamioh.edu or check us out at statsandstories.net. Be sure to listen for future editions of Stats and Stories, where we explore the statistics behind the stories and the stories behind the statistics.