The awesome sexuality educator and activist Heather Corinna, recently interviewed by Chloe @ Feministing, is conducting a survey on attitudes toward, and experiences of, casual sex. The survey is web-based, anonymous, and takes about 20-40 minutes to complete (depending on the speed of your computer and how much you want to write in the open-ended questions). Anyone over the age of sixteen who has ever had a sexual experience involving another person (so anything other than masturbation) is encouraged to respond.

Heather Corinna is trying to gather information on multigenerational attitudes toward casual (not in the context of a commited relationship) sex and how those who engage in casual sexual encounters feel about those experiences. The current media panic about young adult “hook up” culture focuses almost exclusively on heterosexual white women and assumes that casual sexual encounters are threatening to young women’s sexual pleasure and ability to form (if desired) more lasting relationships. Corinna hopes to provide a more nuanced perspective of the actual practice of casual sex without the burden of these moralistic assumptions. As Corinna herself writes:

There’s a lot of buzz right now about “hooking up,” the newest term for casual sex, though casual sex isn’t new at all — nor does it only belong to the current generation, despite often being presented that way. Unlike a lot of the buzz out there, I’m not interested in telling anyone how to have sex or in presenting any one kind of sex as the one ” best way.” I’m just looking for what’s real, both in sexual attitudes and personal experiences.

Rather, I’m doing this study to try and gather data on multigenerational experiences and attitudes with/about casual sex so as to discover and present a more diverse, realistic and non-prescriptive picture of people’s sex lives and ideas about sex. The data will ideally be used for publication, but your answers are completely anonymous and will only be used anonymously.

Since the study will be most informative if the respondants are drawn from a diversity of political, cultural, generational, etc., background, I encourage you to take the survey and pass it along to anyone you feel comfortable introducing the project to. Yes, this includes your socially conservative grandmother, your teenage brother, or your Church pastor.