It’s no question that the pandemic has upended our lives in every way imaginable, but what impact did it have on our sex and masturbation habits?
While a number of stories in the media may lead you to believe that everyone is buying more sex toys and having more sex, we have evidence that those bedrooms are not actually that buzzy. Sure, many of us are spending more time at home. But we think there are some very real implications from living through these unprecedented times.
The takeaway? COVID sex and its alleged sex toy boom is an ambiguous conclusion at best. Using Lioness Vibrator product usage as our guide, we’ve observed far more convincing evidence of a significant drop-off in masturbation frequency as the year wore on relative to 2019 for the same users.
We looked at anonymous aggregate usage statistics from 1879 Lioness users who were active in 2019 and 2020 and nearly 40,000 sessions recorded from January 1, 2019 through December 12, 2020. There were 19,578 total sessions in 2019 and 19,481 total sessions in 2020*. We supplemented this data with a user survey to better understand what’s going on from a qualitative perspective.
This report is not only the world’s largest physiological data set on sexual behaviors during the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s also the world’s biggest study done on real world, in-the-bedroom-where-sex-happens sex (rather than in the confines of a research laboratory) in general!