Survey research on prevalence and characteristics of vibrator users
Who uses vibrators? It’s easy to say that there isn’t one type of person who uses a vibrator, but what can research tell us about the demographics of people who use vibrators? Sadly, not much.
There is only one survey published in a peer reviewed journal and not funded by a company that has an interest in selling sex toys, and that survey mostly looked at how women use vibrators, not who the women are using them (and they didn’t look at men at all).
The people who seem to collect most of the information about who is using vibrators tends to be, not surprisingly, the people who are trying to sell us more vibrators. These surveys are always tied to some form of marketing, and the way the surveys were conducted is rarely described in detail.
Keeping that in mind, here’s what we know about who uses vibrators, as gleaned from several popular surveys from 1976 to 2005.
How common is it to use a vibrator?
The most common statistic found across surveys was that between 20-27% of people surveyed said they had used a vibrator.
Some examples of survey research include:
* In Shere Hite’s famous survey (1976), only 1% of respondents said they had ever used a vibrator
* In a 2006 Elle/MSNBC.com survey, a whopping 40% of respondents said they had used a vibrator.
* In a 1996 survey of Swedish women aged 18 to 74, an average of 19% of respondents said they had used a sex toy by themselves, and 15% said they had used a sex toy with a partner. Younger repondents were more likely to have used a sex toy, with 30% of women 25 to 34 reporting having used a sex toy.
With the exception of the Swedish survey which was of a nationally representative sample and used validated techniques, most of these surveys could not be considered scientific, or even particularly reliable. Yet it’s interesting that so many of them came up with the same general number that between 20 to 27% of people surveyed said they used vibrators.
When did you first use a vibrator?
Two surveys that have asked this got very similar results:
* 15 to 17% were under 20 years old when they first tried a vibrator
* 50% were in their 20s
* 22 to 27% were in their 30s
* 8 to 10% were 40 and older
Who uses vibrators more, men or women?
In the two surveys that compared vibrator use between men and women, women were more likely to use vibrators:
* One study found that 33% of female respondents versus 20% of male respondents used vibrators
* Another study found that the numbers were 24% for women and 21% for men.
What else about people who use vibrators?
Here are some random statistics from the surveys listed below:
* Most studies found that vibrator users were overwhelmingly white.
* Most studies found that vibrator users were predominantly in their thirties.
* According to Xandria Collection’s Toys in the Sheets survey, the most common vibrator user was a white Christian married woman, in her thirties, who votes Republican.
* According to the Durex global sex survey Australia has the highest vibrator use reported (46%) and India has the lowest (3%). The US is up there at 45%.
* Women in relationships are more likely to use a vibrator than women who are single.
From Cory Silverberg
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