Women in the United States rarely talk about sex with their close female friends, even though women generally wish those conversations happened more often and tend to see them as helpful, according to new research published in The Journal of Sex Research.
Many women anticipate that raising topics they avoid would make friends uncomfortable, with smaller shares expecting to be judged or seen as weird or gross. These findings suggest that unspoken social rules and fears of negative reactions continue to surround how women discuss their sexual lives, even within their closest friendships.
Social Norms and the Double Standards of Sex Talk
Peer sexual communication refers to the conversations friends have with one another about sex-related matters, ranging from birth control and sexually transmitted infections to sexual pleasure, fantasies, and relationship difficulties. For many women, close female friends serve as a primary sounding board for making sense of sexual experiences, seeking advice, and finding emotional support without the risk of romantic rejection. At the same time, these conversations are shaped by social norms, which are the unwritten rules of behavior within a group that dictate what actions or topics of conversation are acceptable or off-limits.
Women navigating conversations about sex often contend with a cultural double standard that rewards men for sexual activity while stigmatizing women for the same behaviors, alongside stereotypes portraying women, particularly as they age, as uninterested in sex. Even within close female friendships, women encounter mixed messages that both encourage sexual agency and penalize openness. This pattern aligns with an earlier study of young women, which indicated that conflicting social expectations that simultaneously celebrate sexual exploration and stigmatize female sexual activity can produce ambivalence, confusion, and shame even during consensual encounters.
When women do talk with their friends about sex, their discussions tend to stay within safe boundaries, focusing on pregnancy prevention, disease protection, or general emotional reassurance rather than specific sexual acts or pleasure. In a 2018 study of adult women conducted by Katrina L. Pariera, the lead author of the new paper, supportive and emotionally expressive conversations with female friends were associated with higher sexual self-confidence and self-esteem, while information-focused communication was associated with greater awareness of safer sex methods, although both types of communication were also linked to overestimating how much peers approved of risky sexual behavior.
Most prior research on social norms has examined perceived norms, which reflect what an individual guesses a broad group of peers does or approves of, rather than collective norms, which represent the actual behavioral patterns shared within a specific social circle such as close friends. Norms are maintained through social sanctions, the negative social reactions people anticipate facing if they break a group rule, and these sanctions are supported by underlying rationales, which are the moral or practical justifications for why a rule exists.
To examine how these collective norms, sanctions, and rationales operate across adulthood, Pariera, an associate professor of communication at San Diego State University, and her colleagues Aliyah Blasband and Maggie Job studied women’s sexual communication habits and attitudes with their close female friends.
“Sexual communication is necessary to good sexual health and wellbeing, but talk about sex is stigmatized, especially for women,” Pariera told PsyPost. “Many women turn to their close friends to talk about sex, because our friends can be great at giving support and advice. Through this communication our friends convey, often subtly, what is normal, typical and acceptable. I really wanted to understand all of this more deeply – what kinds of sex-related topics are women discussing, avoiding, and, more interestingly, why are women hesitant to bring up so many of these topics with their friends?”
Designing the Survey and Studying Women Across Adulthood
Because few studies had measured sexual communication norms among friends, the researchers first conducted two preliminary pilot studies using the online research platform Prolific to build and refine their survey questions. In the first pilot study, 40 women aged 18 and older completed an open-ended questionnaire about which sexual topics were acceptable or unacceptable to discuss with female friends, what penalties they expected for bringing up uncommon topics, why friends might react negatively, and what benefits came from these talks. Participants reported that birth control and feminine health were the most acceptable topics, whereas specific sex acts, graphic details, and oversharing were discouraged, and they expressed a widespread desire to normalize talking about sex alongside fears of judgment, disgust, and internal sexual shame.
Drawing on those open-ended responses, the authors created a draft survey for a second pilot study that added scales measuring perceived benefits, the desire to change existing norms, and internal sexual shame. After testing this draft with 60 women on Prolific and interviewing three women in their 20s and 30s, the team removed several unselected or confusing items and replaced clinical terms such as “low libido” and “cunnilingus” with everyday phrases like “low sex drive” and “getting oral sex.”
The main study was preregistered on AsPredicted.org in February 2025, and data were collected in November 2025 from U.S. women aged 18 or older who spoke with at least one female friend weekly. To minimize selection bias, the recruitment notice stated that the study examined communication with friends and included sensitive topics, without mentioning sex. Out of 625 women recruited through Prolific, the researchers excluded eight who failed an attention check, six who finished in less than 30% of the median completion time, and three who pasted spam links into the open-ended response, leaving a final sample of 608 women aged 20 to 77, with an average age of 45.09 years.
Within the final sample, 79.0% of participants identified as straight, 14.4% as bisexual, 3.1% as gay or lesbian, and 2.1% as another sexual orientation; 57.1% identified as White, 9.9% as Black, 5.1% as Asian, 3.6% as Latino or Latinx, and 22.9% did not report their race or ethnicity. Nearly two-thirds (65.2%) were in a steady relationship lasting more than a year, 28.6% were not dating, and participants spoke weekly with an average of 3.09 female friends.
Participants rated how often they discussed 17 sexual topics with their female friends and how often they thought those topics should be discussed on a 4-point scale from 1 (Never) to 4 (Often), and evaluated seven potential benefits and five statements on normalizing sexual communication on 5-point scales from 1 (Strongly Disagree) to 5 (Strongly Agree). They then selected which of 12 social sanctions they anticipated for bringing up topics they never discussed, rated nine possible rationales for those sanctions, and answered an open-ended question explaining why their friends might react negatively.
The Gap Between Actual and Desired Conversations
Overall, the results indicated that sexual conversations among female friends occurred infrequently, with a composite average score of 1.82 out of 4 across the 17 topics, and took place primarily face-to-face or over video chat (82.1%) rather than via text messaging (10.8%) or phone calls (7.1%). The most commonly discussed topics were how often they have sex (discussed by 67.5% of participants, with an average score of 2.27), birth control (65.7%, average of 2.28), and sex that was good (65.5%, average of 2.19), whereas the least discussed were anal sex (26.6%, average of 1.37), pornography (31.0%, average of 1.48), masturbation (33.0%, average of 1.55), and sexually transmitted infections (35.3%, average of 1.59).
Across every single one of the 17 topics, paired statistical tests showed a reliable gap between actual and desired communication, with women wanting to discuss each topic more often than they currently did (an overall desired average of 2.77 out of 4). The highest desired frequency scores appeared for birth control (3.35), condoms (3.15), sexually transmitted infections (3.09), sexual problems (3.05), and low sex drive (3.05).
The finding that women infrequently discuss sex with their friends stands in tension with a 2020 daily diary study of female college students co-authored by Pariera, which found that young women engaged in sexual communication an average of 13 times per week, mostly with friends and in casual tones, despite underestimating how often they talked about sex. That earlier study tracked daily interactions among college students aged 19 to 21, whereas the new study surveyed adult women across a much wider age span of 20 to 77 about their general communication habits across 17 specific topics. If women tend to underestimate their own sex talk, retrospective ratings like those in the new survey could understate how often these conversations happen.
Participants in the new survey generally viewed talking about sex with female friends as beneficial, with an overall average score of 3.44 out of 5, and expressed strong support for normalizing these conversations, averaging 4.18 out of 5. The highest-rated benefits were feeling less alone (3.56), getting help addressing problems (3.54), learning what is typical (3.51), and growing closer to friends (3.49), while support for normalization was highest for making it acceptable to admit to enjoying sex (4.29), to admit to not enjoying sex (4.29), and to talk about sexual problems (4.25).
In the authors’ reading, the fact that women valued learning what is typical and knowing whether they are doing things the right way (3.22) suggests that even when seeking comfort and validation, women still look to their friends as a benchmark to judge whether their own private sexual behaviors fit within group norms.
Why Women Hold Back: Fears of Discomfort, Disgust, and Judgment
When asked what would happen if they brought up a sexual topic they never discussed, 78.6% of the participants expected at least one negative reaction from their friends, selecting an average of 3.07 sanctions out of 12 options, while only 21.4% anticipated no sanctions at all. The most common expected sanction was making a friend uncomfortable (60.2%), followed by fears that a friend would judge them (29.9%), think they were weird (28.5%), look at them weird (27.0%), think they were gross (22.7%), or think they were too sexual (17.4%).
On the quantitative scale measuring rationales for why friends would react negatively (averaging 2.21 out of 5 overall), the highest-rated rationales involved disgust and explicitness, though even these averaged at or below the scale’s neutral point of 3. Specifically, participants gave the highest ratings to statements that the conversation would be too graphic (2.98), make the friend feel gross (2.78), or put a bad image in their head (2.58). The researchers propose that because disgust tends to fade with repeated exposure, avoiding sex talk may create a self-reinforcing cycle that keeps the topic feeling visceral and uncomfortable.
To examine the reasoning behind these anticipated sanctions in greater detail, the researchers conducted a content analysis of the open-ended responses from the 469 participants who expected negative reactions and answered the prompt, sorting the written answers into six recurring themes: taboo, disgust and immorality, privacy boundaries, fear of judgment, internalized shame, and religion and culture.
Many women offered circular explanations rooted in the concept of a taboo, writing simply that sex is not something people talk about because it should not be discussed, while others noted that discussing acts like oral or anal sex would violate a romantic partner’s privacy, particularly when their friends knew their partner well. The authors noted that although many women worried their friends would judge them as “perverted,” “gross,” or “lower class,” not a single participant described having actually been judged by a friend, though the question asked about anticipated reactions rather than past experiences.
“One of the big takeaways is that women largely want to be free to talk to their friends about sex more than they currently do, but they’re afraid their friends will judge them or be uncomfortable,” Pariera explained. “Those fears may or may not be valid, but a good starting place is to talk about why the topic of sex is taboo for women. This broader meta-conversation could help test the waters for what you and your friends are okay discussing, and might help to make sense of some of our assumptions about each other.”
The Roles of Age, Religiosity, and Internalized Shame
In an exploratory analysis, the researchers also calculated correlations (where 0 means no relationship and 1 a perfect one) between the communication measures and five background characteristics: age, education, religiosity, sexual orientation, and internalized sexual shame, omitting political orientation because it overlapped strongly with religiosity.
All statistically detectable correlations were small to moderate, with none exceeding .32, and several relationships, such as those between age, education, or sexual orientation and the number of anticipated sanctions, were not statistically significant. Being younger and identifying as non-straight showed small associations with more frequent actual and desired sexual communication, higher perceived benefits, and stronger support for normalization (correlations of .18 to .31 in size).
Higher religiosity was weakly linked to wanting more frequent sexual communication (r = .22) and supporting its normalization (r = .29), yet also to agreeing more with the rationales for sanctioning sex talk (r = .31). Internalized sexual shame was moderately associated with expecting more sanctions (r = .32) and endorsing the rationales for those sanctions (r = .32). The authors suggest this pattern could mean either that women who judge themselves harshly assume others will too, or that people with greater shame spend more time contemplating negative social reactions.
“One thing that surprised me was that age played a relatively small role in how much women talk or want to talk to their friends about sex,” Pariera noted. “I personally think we tend to overemphasize generational differences, but we also need to look more at if and how aging changes the way we talk to friends about sex.”
Study Limitations and Future Directions
There are a few things to keep in mind when interpreting these findings. Because the survey asked women how they imagined their friends would react to undiscussed topics rather than observing real conversations or surveying the friends themselves, the study cannot determine whether close friends actually enforce these social sanctions or whether women are overestimating the risk of making their friends uncomfortable. In addition, because the data were collected at a single point in time, the correlational findings cannot establish whether internalized shame causes women to anticipate more judgment or whether fearing judgment from peers fosters internal shame.
Pariera also pointed out that simply talking more often is not a cure-all if the tone of those conversations remains critical. “While more open communication is almost always a good thing, communication can also be a tool for reinforcing harmful stereotypes, and creating stigma and shame,” she said. “Focusing on listening non-judgmentally is one key to good communication about taboo topics.”
The study’s scope was also restricted to U.S. women speaking with female friends they contact at least once a week, and relied on several new scales created by the authors that still require validation across other populations. The findings do not capture how sexual communication norms operate in friendships with men or non-binary peers, with less frequent acquaintances, or in other cultural contexts. The analysis also did not account for how often participants were sexually active, whether they were experiencing sexual difficulties, how long they had been with a partner, or how closely their friends knew their partner, all of which could influence what women feel comfortable sharing.
Finally, the researchers did not analyze differences across racial or ethnic groups because many participants selected multiple racial categories and 22.9% left the question blank. Future studies could examine how intersectional identities, cultural backgrounds, and communication channels such as text messaging versus in-person talks shape these norms. The authors also suggest that experimental research could test whether media campaigns modeling non-judgmental conversations, or interventions encouraging women who already feel comfortable discussing sex to initiate open conversations, can help reduce the stigma and discomfort surrounding peer sexual communication.
“I’m planning on interviewing women across the life-span to get a more in-depth understanding of what I found in this study,” Pariera added. “I want to better understand women’s experience talking to their friends about sex, particularly around their experiences with support and validation, but also judgment and silencing.”
The study, “Norms and Sanctions for Talking About Sex: Women’s Sexual Communication with Friends,” was authored by Katrina L. Pariera, Aliyah Blasband, and Maggie Job.