“It’s a lot more like family Sunday dinner than people think”: Community, pleasure, and other motivations for group sex
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Group sex (i.e., sex involving four or more simultaneous partners) is a prevalent but stigmatized sexual behaviour. People assume that group sex centers around self-focused pleasure/physical gratification and that accordingly, this must be the primary motivation people have for engaging in group sex. Yet emerging research on group sex, as well as broader sexuality research and theory, suggests that group sex motivations are multifaceted and, for many, tied to community and belonging. In the present study, we focus on people’s reasons for engaging in group sex. We recruited twenty participants of diverse genders, sexual identities/orientations, ages (≥18 years), abilities, and group sex communities for individual interviews in southwestern British Columbia. We found that participants had engaged in group sex for a plurality of reasons, including their desire for novelty, sexual exploration, spirituality, and their upbringing. Importantly, many were motivated to have group sex by their belonging and acceptance in communities of like-minded individuals that embraced sex-positive principles and values. Pleasure was also an important motivator and was described in multifaceted ways and was intertwined with sexual empowerment, emotional vulnerability, and feelings of connection and intimacy. These findings shed light on an understudied aspect of group sex – that is, why people have it – and challenge the assumption that group sex is entirely motivated by self-focused desire for physical pleasure/gratification. Instead, they highlight how group sex motivation can be multifaceted and community focused.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.011 | 0.006 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.002 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.005 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".