You may have seen the headlines about income inequality – the top one percent in Britain earn somewhere around 15% of all income. Cherwell’s fourth annual Sextigation has found an inequality just as yawning in Oxford’s sex scene: just four respondents out of 445 found themselves involved in 15% of all unique sexual partnerships. Nearly a quarter of all partnerships involve the top two percent of shaggers, one of whom reported 90 sexual partners at Oxford.
The new college disparities report
It was a good year to be at St Edmund Hall. Buoyed, perhaps, by their alumnus Keir Starmer making it to Downing Street, they self-reported an average of 7.1 sexual partners. But, like most group projects, this was mainly the work of two dedicated individuals, with a combined Oxford body count of 140. When they were removed, the college average was 2.4. Without them, Trinity’s 4.5 average was the highest, followed by Queen’s and LMH. But it bears remembering that these were self-reported, and a different question revealed which colleges respondents had hooked up with.
(Colleges with only one respondent are omitted)
On that metric, Keble was the most promiscuous – 16.6% of respondents had got with a Keblite (or potentially a KCFC player). Following closely was Balliol with 14.7%. One Hugh’s student spoke of a hookup refusing to go home with them because of the astronomical distance. This doesn’t quite seem to be borne out. The college was tied with Brasenose in third, proving that, whether you’re on Radcliffe Square or St Margaret’s Road, you too can find love at Park End.
But all that sex did not necessarily leave people better off. On average, people with no sexual partners at Oxford reported the highest satisfaction with their sex lives and people with one reported the lowest, but beyond that there was no correlation whatsoever between number of partners and satisfaction.
What should you study?
Most Oxford students are not very promiscuous at all. Only half of respondents reported having had multiple sexual partners at Oxford. Though we only had a couple of respondents, Maths and Computer Science came bottom of number of sexual partners, with a whopping average of 0. Computer Science, despite the potential future earnings, really does seem to be neglected: last year, Computer Science and Philosophy came in at 0.75. Other low ranking subjects include Maths (1.2), Geography (1.4), E&M (1.5), and Biochemistry (1.6). This should be particularly disappointing for the geographers, who in 2024 were one of the highest performers – either the first years have lost their way around the place or the recent grads really knew their subject was ‘where it’s at’.
By contrast, Chemistry, ArchAnth and AMES came out on top, but all were bolstered by individuals reporting far higher figures – removing these anomalies puts the subjects in low-to-average terrain. More convincingly, Earth Sciences, MML, Biology, Human Sciences and Materials Science all did well, with figures ranging from 4.5 to 5.9. No matter how cool Humanities students think they are with their tute essays and no lectures, there’s no good evidence that they’re the preferred domain of ‘the two cultures’.
(Joint honours respondents are counted in both subjects studied. Joint honours typically studied together, eg. PPE, are counted as their own subject. Subjects with only one respondent are omitted.)
Nowhere is safe
Nearly a third said they had had sex in a public place. Chaplains, shield your eyes – there were tales of sex in an organ loft, a room dedicated to a Bible clerk, on a church altar, and in quite a few chapels. Academic places were scarcely treated with more respect. Various libraries, the New College belltower, and bathrooms of academic buildings were all shagging sites as well. Wheeled desk chairs apparently present logistical troubles. On the pastoral side, parks and forests were very popular locations – the presence of a few bushes seems to provide the mirage of privacy (even if you’re going at it in university parks at midday, as one admitted).
One place that doesn’t get the blood flowing though is the nightclub. 38% of respondents “couldn’t say” which club was the best for casual sex; 12% bluntly said: “none.” If they had to pick, Oxford students would go for Bridge, with a quarter of respondents putting it as their top location, followed by Plush at 19%.
It was a particularly surreal experience for the Features Team, going over the responses in the Social Science Library, all too aware of what had gone on in its toilets. And we hate to confess, dear readers, (somewhere in) the office of this venerable publication has not remained untainted.
Partners for life?
For those who do like sex, there’s one big question: how do you keep getting it? Unless you have some miraculous pick-up talent, the answer for many is, of course, to get in a relationship. But is this all that that relationships are for? You might think so, with the endlessly cynical claims about Gen-Z having no capacity for attachment – no doubt as a part of the woke crusade against all things good and proper. But in fact, our data shows that Oxford students are serious about their commitments, and traditional in their wants.
Second-wave feminists: bad news. Despite what you might expect given the waves of secularisation and increasingly liberal social attitudes, fully 72% of our respondents said that marriage was their desired form of future relationship. (We aren’t sure how they intend to square that one with certain acts in certain college chapels…) 55% said that their main goal out of dating in Oxford was ‘finding the one’; only a meagre 7% said it was casual sex. JD Vance can sleep tight, undisturbed by nightmares of “childless cat ladies”: 63% want to have children in the future, though the proportion is bigger amongst men than women.
And lest you think this is purely idle speculation from those dreaming of a non-existent lover, an impressive 57% of people currently in a relationship said they thought it would last ‘all my life’. Unfortunately for some, 7% admitted that their relationship wouldn’t make it past the end of this term. (If this is you, it’s time to send that ‘we need to talk’ message; don’t prolong it any further.)
Looking in from afar
Appearances are everything, and just as important as who is actually having the most sex is who everyone thinks is. In that vein, if personality isn’t exactly your top quality in a partner, you might want to head over to Balliol, Worcester, or Keble, the three most attractive colleges, according to our respondents. It bears taking with a grain of salt, though. 79% of those who said Worcester was the most attractive were from the college itself, which begs the question of whether they are particularly incestuous, or just have average Oxford levels of arrogance.
But even they were outdone for self-admiration by Lady Margaret Hall, with their 83% college representation. All the way in OX2, it’s highly likely that this result is influenced by never even catching a glimpse of someone from another college. For others, distance attracted. Of the three respondents that put Lincoln as the most attractive (0.8%), not one actually attended the college, but two went to Somerville. Maybe Lincolnites are only tolerable from afar.
When same-college respondents were removed, Balliol still came out on top, so it’s possible that there truly are some Adonises hiding on Broad Street. Equally impressive were New and St Catherine’s, neither of which had more than two respondents from their own college, but came in at second and third with 15 and 13 responses respectively. But it’s possible attractiveness brings its own issues – Balliol students had the lowest satisfaction with their sex lives, with an average of 2.7 out of five. All that glitters…
The apps: “Just try someone on and discard them”
Where can you find the top one, two, or ten percent of shaggers? Dating apps are a good bet. Only a quarter of all respondents have used the apps, but this included almost all of the top shaggers. One student who claimed 50 sexual partners in Oxford lamented that it’s “extremely easy to meet people, but sex becomes commodified … real conversations beyond the surface level are hard to find.”
That’s a common complaint: dating apps make the whole romantic experience superficial as people become commodities to browse through, with a better option always potentially being one more swipe away. 71% of students said the apps had not improved the dating experience.
But most respondents had nuanced feelings. A St Hugh’s student wrote that “dating apps are extremely superficial and overwhelm you with too much choice, encouraging people to think of each other as merely ‘options’. However, in some ways they’re a necessary evil with the lack of third spaces to find dates.”
The apps seem to be especially helpful for those seeking same-sex partners. 58% of gay and lesbian respondents had used a dating app, while only 18% of straight respondents had. 54% of gay and lesbian respondents said that the apps had improved the dating experience, while only 21% of straight respondents said the same.
While a Keble student said that “deep down, no one on Hinge wants to meet someone through Hinge, myself included,” a Lady Margaret Hall student said that she met her “boyfriend of over a year on Hinge and am embarrassingly in love with him, hate to tell ya.”
The darker side
It’s not all fun and games, though. Nearly 30% of our respondents said that they had at some point felt pressured into sex, the majority of whom (54%) were female. Another 6% said they were not sure if they had or not. This is just slightly less than the 35% of a national survey of 16-24 year-olds (and the same if you include the unsure category), suggesting Oxford is not much better than anywhere else. Additionally, 16% of respondents said they had felt pressure not to use contraception during sex.
Oxford is also not immune from what has been called ‘the phenomenon of sexual strangulation’. Unwanted behaviour, such as choking, as sexual strangulation is known, has become increasingly recognised as a national and international issue, with research finding that more than one in three Britons aged 16-34 had experienced unwanted choking during consensual sex.
Our survey, which asked about unwanted behaviour in general, found that Oxford came in below this result, but still had 21% of respondents having experience choking or slapping. A further 4% said they were not sure. Some respondents told us of dehumanising behaviour, such as damaging lip biting, being slapped in the face, and being groped whilst asleep.
Data and Methodology
Lastly, a word on the results. Cherwell’s Features team did the best it could to make our results as wide-ranging and representative as possible, but we recognise the limitations of the survey. With over 440 respondents including virtually every college and course, we cover the whole ground. But for some of these subcategories, like less-common subjects, we end up with only a few respondents in each, and hence averages are easily skewed by a single person.
We also recognise that, as a survey very clearly to do with sex and sexual activity, even despite our emphasis that we wanted respondents with or without experience, there may be a skew towards those people who have got more experience than average, as they self-select into participating. Nevertheless, of all our respondents, roughly half had had 0 or 1 sexual partners, with the other half having had two or more. There is also of course the possibility of exaggeration, underreporting, or preference-falsification. However, as our respondents were anonymous, we hope that there was little incentive to do so.
In choosing what questions out of the myriad possibilities to go for, we aimed to preserve the essence of previous iterations of this survey, in looking at the all-important numbers on how much sex people are having, but expand the scope to incorporate wider attitudes and beliefs. We did also, as one perceptive respondent noted, drop ‘the masturbation question’. Apologies for the disappointment.
