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Published in Vogue, March 2010. Copyright Rachel Hills 2010.

When it comes to the subject of sex, it seems that everyone is doing it more often and better than you.

“Next month, it will be two years since I’ve had sex,” my friend Monica declared as we walked home from a party one night. “And I haven’t kissed anyone in one year.”

Needless to say, I was surprised; so surprised that I still remember the exchange two and a half years later. For one, there was the out-of-nowhere factor. For another (and you’ll have to trust me on this one, since you don’t know Monica), she was the last person I would have expected to say such a thing.

Monica is pretty and outgoing, with the charismatic pull of someone who‘s always up for an adventure, outrageous conversation or new idea. When we were younger, she made badges reading “five dollar pash” and wore them out to clubs. I knew she hadn’t had any serious boyfriends in the time we‘d been friends, but no sex at all? It defied belief.

But most of all, what surprised me about Monica’s confession was that it so completely contradicted the messages we usually hear about sex – and especially about the sex lives of young, attractive, single people. It wasn’t that my own sex life was lifted straight from the pages of a tabloid or glossy magazine – far from it – it was that until that moment, I had assumed that everyone else’s was.

Like most assumptions, it seemed kind of stupid once I started to think about it, but it’s one I’m not alone in making. The idea that everyone but you is having amazing, effortless sex with whomever they want whenever they want it one of the most powerful sexual misconceptions in our culture, says Dr Sheree Conrad, sex researcher and co-author of Sexual Intelligence.

“Popular culture communicates a set of myths about sexuality that are so ubiquitous we hardly notice them. These myths become ingrained in people’s thinking, in the form of unexamined assumptions about the function of sex, how we should behave sexually and what is ‘normal’ or ‘abnormal’,” explains Conrad. “If we took television or the movies as our guide, the conclusion would be inescapable: just about everyone is getting more sex – and better sex – than we are.”

The reality, it seems, is less glamorous. Bettina Anrdt’s The Sex Diaries caused a ruckus this year when it suggested that many Australian couples were caught in a sexual stalemate. Young singles don’t fare any better. The Online College Social Life Survey, an academic study of 7000 US college students, found that the average young person ‘hooks up’ with seven people over four years at university. Less than half of these incidents lead to intercourse – or less than one sex partner each year. Sure, it’s not saving yourself for marriage, but it’s much less frequent and more fleeting than what we usually hear about.

To date, no comparable studies have been conducted in Australia, but my own work in the area – as a journalist and now as a researcher myself – suggests similar patterns. “There’s an assumption that if you’re single, you’re out having sex all the time,” says Gigi, 25. “I don’t think that’s entirely accurate, based on the experiences of my friends and myself.” Renae, 22, agrees. “The frequency of drunken house party and nightclub encounters is quite low,” she admits. “The most promiscuous of my friends would have four of these encounters in a year. Others would have none.”

So why do we assume otherwise? Partly it’s the lack of information about what other people are really up to. “Everyone is fascinated by those articles that say people do it 2.5 times a week, but really they tell us very little. There’s a huge curiosity and wondering about what other people are doing,” explains Arndt.

And while sex may make up an increasing portion of our conversations in these post-Sex and the City days, it’s only with our very nearest and dearest that we are truly frank. Outside these relationships, conversations about sex tend to be drowned in generalities and innuendo, more about cementing one’s public persona – or just earning a laugh – than about real emotional intimacy. And given only a little information to work with, there’s a tendency for us to assume more rather than less.

“It used to be that sex was so secret, so hidden, and so private that people felt completely unprepared and anxious that they wouldn’t know what to do and would somehow do it wrong,” says sexologist Leonore Tiefer, author of Sex Is Not A Natural Act & Other Essays. “Now, sex is so not-secret, so not-hidden, and so not-private that people feel anxious that they can’t possibly measure up to what they think is the ‘normal’ standard of sexual life.”

Patrice, 29, has been with the same man for the better part of a decade, but they didn’t have sex for the first three years of their relationship – and not by her choice. That’s behind them now, but she remembers her years of involuntary celibacy as difficult. “I’d hear funny stories about my friends having sex and I got jealous. It felt like everyone but me was doing it,” she says. The situation played havoc with her self-esteem. “I felt that I wasn’t attractive, that I was worthless, and I needed someone to show me that I wasn’t, that I was attractive and I was sexy.”

To look at Patrice, such insecurities seem crazy – she’s gorgeous, with big eyes and killer curves. But Arndt observed similar patterns in the couples she spoke to. “It was very clear to me that their yearning for sex was in large part about emotion,” she says. “It’s not about sex, the issue is about rejection. It’s about how it feels to have the person you love not want you.”

Even now, Patrice still worries that her relationship lacks “passion”, especially compared to what she suspects her friends get up to. She wishes her boyfriend was more enthusiastic and that she didn’t always have to initiate things, but she finds it difficult to talk about openly.

“When my friends are talking about sex and their relationships, I don’t want to tell them that my boyfriend doesn’t want to have sex, that I always have to initiate it. Or that he doesn’t find me attractive. I just tell them everything is normal, that he’s good in bed, that kind of thing. I keep the truth to myself.”

In the worst cases, the gap between what people experience sexually and what they think they should be experiencing can lead them to give up entirely. Says Conrad, “The one response that we found most striking when we asked people what they take away from these media portrayals was, ‘I’ll never have sex like that, so I may as well not even try.’ There can be a kind of hopelessness.”

Sex wasn’t always such a big deal – or at least it wasn’t the same brand of big deal that it is now. When once the fear was that you’d shatter your reputation, marriageability and income by getting pregnant at the wrong time (and indeed, those are still the key concerns about sex for people in many parts of the world), these days and in this culture, the potential for shame resides elsewhere. It’s about not being attractive enough, skilled enough, liberated enough, discerning enough. It’s about failing to live up to expectations, whether those expectations are your own or what you think everyone else wants or has.

“A competitive performance mentality is taking over sexual life, with people feeling they must measure up to ever higher standards of sexual attractiveness and sexual adequacy,” says Tiefer. “People feel disqualified from a ‘good sex life’ if they don’t have a perfect body, hair, teeth or skin.” There are a number of reasons for this, she explains, including the changing role of marriage “from economic necessity to companionship” and the increased part sex plays in shaping both our romantic relationships and personal identities.

Conrad puts it down to our fascination with the “quick fix”, and the belief that good sex – or Patrice’s desired “passionate relationship” – will solve all of our problems. “People are unhappy and confused for lots of reasons, and they’re told that if they looked like the people in the media and were having this fantastic effortless sex, that would solve all their problems,” she says. In this way, sex becomes something to be acquired and appropriated like any other consumer item.

Or maybe it’s just that having sex is more interesting than not having it. Over two years after that first conversation, Monica still hasn’t broken her drought. For the most part, she’s come to terms with that, but she’s still sceptical of how the media represents sex and relationships. “If you look at something like Friends or Sex and the City, they’re dating new people all the time. And I think there’s a lot of people out there for whom it’s not like that. But that wouldn’t make for interesting television. Television isn’t an accurate portrayal of real life, but that’s kind of what we all like it for.”

Ideally, the gap between representation and reality wouldn‘t matter. We’d all be comfortable in our histories and experience, safe in the knowledge that – felonies aside – one set of preferences or experiences isn’t better than another. But we live in a culture that tells us that sex reveals pretty much everything about who a person is, especially when what it might reveal is a deficiency: that we’re too slutty, a prude, incompetent, unsexy, too sexual, not sexual enough.

Says Tiefer, “The message is that you have to be sexual, you have to want to be sexual, you have to be good at being sexual, and you have to be normally sexual. Yet there’s no tradition of sexual coaching or intercourse training or masturbation training or honest feedback or places to go to get all your questions answered by a friendly expert.”

So what do the friendly experts recommend? Like the expectations themselves, Conrad says the secret is all in our heads. “The human sexual experience is controlled by what goes on in the neocortex, a highly evolved part of the brain. That means that even purely on a physical level, sexual arousal and satisfaction are controlled by what we’re thinking and feeling,” she explains.

“The people who report having the most satisfying sex lives understand that these social and emotional factors play a part and have patience. They don’t expect things to work perfectly every time or the first time and they’re more likely to stick around and build the kind of connection that makes the sex better and better.”

The good news is that, as they get a little older, a lot of women seem to come to these conclusions for ourselves. As Dawn, 43, tells me, “I tend to take it all with a large pinch of salt. you and I and most I know people don’t look like that, don’t act like that. It’s a fantasy.” Or as Tiefer might put it, we come to learn that not everything in life is “hot hot hot”. And that it‘s not is just, well, normal.