Norms and Sanctions for Talking About Sex: Women’s Sexual Communication with Friends

Sexual communication with close friends plays a role in how women interpret and navigate their sexual experiences across the lifespan. However, women often must contend with conflicting scripts that simultaneously encourage and discourage sexual exploration and satisfaction, even when communicating with close friends. Sexual communication norms between friends dictate what topics are acceptable and how often they can be discussed. While most social norms research focuses on sexual behaviors, little has explored communication norms, particularly amongst women. This study provides an in-depth exploration of women’s sexual communication norms, including how often they talk to friends about sex, how much they want to talk about sex, and whether they think this kind of communication should be normalized. We also explored the social sanctions that motivate these norms and the underlying rationales for those sanctions. A quantitative survey of 608 women age 20–77 was conducted in the U.S. Results suggest that sex is discussed relatively infrequently amongst women, though most want this communication to be more frequent and normalized. Across all sex-related topics, women reported wanting to talk more to their friends about them than they currently do (t(607) = -34.99, p < .001. However, participants anticipated an average of three social sanctions for bringing up sex-related topics to their friends, and believed these sanctions are justified because sex-talk can be immoral, disgusting, and taboo.