Generational and gender differences in sexual life in St. Petersburg and urban Finland

Abstract

This article is to our knowledge the first empirical comparison of sexual behavior in Eastern and Western Europe. The timing of some sexual life events, sexual behavior patterns, and sexual satisfaction will be compared on the basis of survey data and sexual autobiographies from urban Finland and St. Petersburg (former Leningrad) in Russia. We were interested in the impact of the so-called sexual revolution taking place in public life in different decades - in Western Europe and Finland in the 1960s. in Russia in the late 1980s. We assumed that this difference would appear as country differences in "traditional” vs. “liberated” sexual behavior, and especially in the sexual satisfaction of women. This hypothesis proved generally to be true, but with several important modifications. The sexual behavior and attitudes in St. Petersburg are shown to have liberalized about 15 years later than in Finnish towns. While the sexual behavior of men and women has become almost similar in Finland, the trend towards equalization of sexual life is not as clear in Russia. Divorce and parallel relationships are more common in Russia, while the number of sexual partners and overall sexual satisfaction is higher in Finland. Country, gender, and generation are the main independent variables of the statistical elaborations. The biographical material is used for exemplifying and interpretative purposes.