This research was conducted by an independent research company, Nonfiction Research. This study was a 100% self-funded passion project. 

Nonfiction explores the hidden parts of American life through immersive research. Their researchers have sat beside patients in hospitals, inmates in prison, and have interviewed Atlanta rappers while rollerblading. Nonfiction’s findings have been featured by ABC News, Axios, MSNBC, Fox News, and FastCompany. Their work has inspired public service campaigns, a division at Disney, new flavors of Doritos, and a Megan Thee Stallion song.

Read more of Nonfiction’s research here: https://www.nonfiction.co/

The research for Desire Codes was conducted from May 2024 to November 2024. It consisted of in-depth interviews with Americans, expert interviews, a long-form qualitative survey, and a nationwide quantitative study. 

The nationwide survey was conducted with Americans over the age of 18 and weighted to reflect the US census. This helps us ensure a nationally representative sample across age, ethnicity, geography, gender, sexual orientation, and income. Adhering to standard practices for quantitative representation, Nonfiction collected 1,029 survey responses. 

The one-on-one interviews were conducted with the same audience. This qualitative sample was curated to reflect a broad range of gender, ethnicity, sexual orientations, sexual experience, and preferences. Expert interviews included sex therapists, sex workers, celibacy coaches, and online kink community moderators. 

We arrived at these classifications by asking people a simple question: “Imagine you are going to be intimate with someone new. That person received an index card with notes on how to please you. What would you want written on that card?” 

From those answers we looked for patterns in types/modes of sex; looking for patterns in motivations, turn-ons, warmups, dynamics, what they were seeking from the sex, expressions, and techniques. We used those to create archetypes that aimed to expand the sexual menus of Americans. 

These types will come in at different levels because people answer the question at different levels — they conceive of “what makes great sex” in different ways. Some people think most about what happens before the sex, others about power dynamics between the partners, and some people focus on a specific collection of techniques. Sex is many different things to different people and we wanted to allow space for that. 

The margin of error tells you just how close the results of your survey are to representing the total audience. The lower the margin of error, the closer your results are to representing your audience. In the case of this study, 1,075 people took our survey, out of an estimated 334.9 million Americans in 2023. We’ll spare you the mathematics, but that gives us a margin of error of 3%.

We recorded data from Americans who identified as pansexual, asexual, and (separately) nonbinary and you will see their stories included in this work. But, each of these identifications was so small as to be less than half of our margin of error, so we were not able to show statistical differences in these populations without risking misrepresenting their views. We’re excited to do future work on more specific populations. 

There are a million places we could send you, but here are some resources we love.

NYT: What Sex Therapists Wish You Knew: The New York Times asked nearly a dozen experts in sex and intimacy for the advice they repeat again and again. 

The Hite Reports on Female & Male Sexuality: Two landmark studies on human sexuality conducted by Shere Hite, a researcher and sex educator whose work challenged conventional understandings of female and male desire. 

“The Erotic Mind” by Jack Morin 

A Billion Wicked Thoughts: What the Internet Tells Us About Sexual Relationships. 

OMG YES: Research-based strategies for improving female sexual pleasure 

Beducated: Beducated brings pleasure-based sex education right to your bedroom. Access 100+ online courses from the world’s top experts.

Make Love Not Porn: Cindy Gallop’s site offers an alternative to to hardcore porn with a user-generated, human-curated social sex platform 

Wheel of Foreplay: A game created during lockdown to help people have more sex while suck at home

If you’re curious to learn more about consent and how to approach consent when using Desire Codes we’ve gone deeper into that here.