Captain Moonlight's Notebook: French beat British in telephone sex

I HESITATE to comment one way or the other and I don't know whether to admit surprise. But readers might like to know that sexually the French consider themselves to be growing more adventurous. Evidence of their sexual preferences came last week with the publication of a survey by the National Institute for Health and Medical Research.

We may be in for similar startling revelations here. The French research mirrors a comparable survey of sexual habits in Britain that is being financed by the Wellcome Trust at a cost of pounds 1m. The trust took over the project from the Government when an outraged Margaret Thatcher clobbered it in 1989.

The French study exposes the myth that the British are rather more prone to homosexual activity than the French. Remember Edith Cresson, the French Prime Minister, estimating that 25 per cent of British men were homosexual? It was 'a fact of civilisation' that Anglo-Saxons preferred that sort of sex, unlike Latins, she said.

The French results said that about 4 per cent of French males engaged in regular homosexual activity, a figure exactly comparable with Britain.

Now for the details. (Readers of a sensitive disposition should perhaps move on to the next paragraph.) Fellatio and cunnilingus are commonplace among French men and women, especially between the ages of 25 and 34 - 90 per cent indulge, the survey found. This compared with about half their age group 20 years ago. Masturbation is on the increase - more so among men than women. Furthermore, prostitutes are playing a smaller role in French life. Only 5 per cent of males visited one compared with 25 per cent 20 years ago, when the last survey was conducted. The age at which sex first took place has dropped by only a few months, and is still 17 years for boys and 18 for girls. Both sexes are copulating on average twice a week and taking longer about it; women say the encounter usually lasts 25 minutes and men say 31 minutes. There is no explanation for the six-minute difference.

I tell you this because in September we shall be presented with our own Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles. Julia Field, research director of the project, said her doctors and social scientists were writing the last chapters. She would not give details.

She did say the French and British surveys overlapped and that the findings were 'very similar'. A key difference: the French were interviewed by telephone and were able to complete theirs more quickly. Interviewers also asked more personal questions than would be acceptable in Britain. The British survey involved face-to-face interviews of 19,000 people but respondents were left alone to write answers to the more intimate questions.

'What we will have in September is the nitty-gritty,' a spokeswoman for the Wellcome Trust said. 'You know. What we do, when and where.'