I spent months interviewing people about their sex lives. This is what I learned

A friend of mine moved to the UK recently, and tells me English men are bad at foreplay. It’s a culture shock. She’s Spanish, and insists that oral sex is – for a Spaniard – second nature. Whereas English men rarely attempt it, and when they do, she wishes they would stop.

Does where you are born determine how you will have sex? Perhaps this seems like a stupid question. We tend to see sex as being unlearned and instinctive; something humans around the world do in a relatively similar way – with slight adjustments according to taste and sexuality. There is no global “oral sex satisfaction” survey I can find to verify what my friend told me. If you try to define the sexual character of a whole ­country, you will resort to stereotypes. “Continental people have sex lives; the English have hot-water bottles,” the Hungarian-born George Mikes wrote in 1946. This is a sweeping generalisation, but I can’t entirely dismiss it.

Intrigued by the idea that people around the world might have sex differently, I have spent months asking couples in various countries what they do in bed. Some interviews were much harder to secure than others, which in itself was telling. Finding a French couple who would talk to me about their sex life took two days, but I spent weeks trying to track down Japanese people who would talk openly about the subject. A contact forwarded me a particularly blunt text from her Japanese mother: “Japanese couples don’t have sex after marriage or having children. They don’t want to talk about it, either.” Unlike my friend’s indictment of English foreplay, there is plenty of data to back this up. Half of Japanese marriages are sexless, and 22% of women find sex “too much hassle” to bother with, according to 2023 data from the Japan Family Planning Association. This summer, the government will launch its own dating app, in a bid to coax people into bed to boost the birthrate.

Most developed countries report an uptick in sexlessness in the last decade, so what is happening in Japan mirrors a global trend. But other sexual differences between nations are so marked, they are impossible to ignore. In Australia, for example, there is a National Disability Insurance Scheme, which pays for sex workers to visit citizens with disabilities at home and have sex with them, at the taxpayer’s expense. Your sex life is defined, in a very real way, by your country’s legal system. This is painfully apparent to LGBTQ+ people living in the many countries worldwide where homosexuality is still an offence – 77, according to the UN. I spoke to a gay couple in Lagos, who have been evicted from their shared flat because their relationship was discovered. They now have nowhere safe to meet, so they rarely have sex.

I also noticed stranger, less well documented differences. A couple in Reykjavík told me that it is typical to use a website called Íslendingabók before you get serious with someone in Iceland, to check whether you are related. The population is so small that people use the site to prevent accidental incest. A man in China told me that most flirting in his native Hefei happens inside cyberbars, where sexual interaction is entirely virtual. It is perfectly normal never to have met your “girlfriend” in the flesh.

The nine interviews in this series resist stereotypes – the couple we ended up interviewing in Japan have sex twice a week – and they are not meant to be representative of the views and sexual practices of a whole nation. But I do think these couples shed some light on the politics of their country. As the psychotherapist Esther Perel has pointed out, sex is a portal topic. You might start by talking about outdoors sex, or cybersex, but you end up talking about religion, or gender equality, or loneliness. We think of our individual sexual quirks as being deeply personal, but even your most secret fantasies are not entirely your own. They are shaped by the specific laws and taboos of the country in which you live. All this is to say: it’s not entirely my fault if I am bad in bed.