sexandsensibilities.com

Family, health and religion/spiritual, work, food — these are the things that most Filipinos equate with “bliss” according to the new Philippine Happiness Index survey done by the National Statistical Coordination Board (NSCB).

Sex ranked low on the list, and came in only slightly higher than cultural activities (?!?!), prompting others to conclude that sex is not important to most Filipinos in achieving happiness.

That’s interesting considering that there are four babies born every minute in the Philippines — the 12th most populous country in the world and the one with highest fertility rate in the whole South East Asia region. For a country that doesn’t rank sex as a source of happiness, there sure is a lot of it going around.

Dr. Romulo Virola, Secretary General of NSCB also found it “quite surprising” that sex — which came in at 14th place —  was not an important source of happiness. Among 19 other happiness indicators, sex ranked among the five least important.

Other interesting findings of the study:

• The biggest disparity in the rankings were on sex life: men found that having a sex life was the  10th most important with a rating of 8.2 (or 10th least important) but women found it 18th most important (or second least important) with a rating of 6.8 on a scale of 1 to 10.
• Women found love life only 10th most important with a rating of 8.2, but men deemed it 6th most important with a rating of 8.7.

So men and women find having a love life almost equally important, but more men think that a sex life is important to achieving orgasmic happiness rather than women. Well, that wasn’t hard to figure out.

In the Mabuhay Magazine December 2010 issue which features the same story, they posit that it’s not the quantity of sex, but the quality that one gets that pushes the score down. In the article entitled, “Food, yes. Sex, some other time”, they start off with the pointed (pun intended) question: Are Filipino men lousy lovers?

Are they? What do you think?