Common in popular culture these days is when you ask a grown woman if she ever kissed a girl, you often get the response, "Well once...in college." Today, a national study has found that women with their college degrees actually were less likely to have kissed a girl than their only-high-school-diploma-having counterparts.

For years, sex researchers, campus women's centers and the media have viewed college as a place where young women explore their sexuality, test boundaries, and, often, have their first, and only lesbian relationship.

Based on 13,500 responses, almost 10% of women ages 22 to 44 with a bachelor's degree said they had had a same-sex experience, compared with 15% of those with no high school diploma. Women with a high school diploma or some college, but no degree, fell in between. Six percent of college educated women reported oral sex with a same-sex partner, compared with 13% who did not complete high school.

Rea Carey, executive director of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force told the Los Angeles Times in their coverage:

"It's like a Rubik's cube of sexuality, where you turn it a different way, and the factors don't fit together. It may be that the commonly held wisdom was wrong, that people just liked to imagine women in college having sex together, or it may be that society has changed, and as more people come out publicly, in politics or on television, we are getting a clearer view of the breadth of sexuality."


The same CDC study drew headlines based on a finding that young people were waiting longer to have sex. Almost 29% of the females and 27% of the males, age 15 to 24, had had no sexual contact, an increase from 22% for both sexes in the last 2002 survey.

The study also showed that women with four or more sexual partners in their lifetime were more likely to have had a female sexual partner, compared with women who had had no male partners or women who've had only one male partner.

Anjani Chandra, a health scientist at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's National Center for Health Statistics said:

"There was speculation that it was possibly just experimentation among college girls but we didn't see anything to support that. We saw the opposite. When we look at college degreed women, they were less likely to report same-sex activity than other educational groups. Among men, there's more same sex activity among higher educated men. And for women, the highest level of same-sex activity was reported by those with less education."