SAN FRANCISCO -- Cybersex, it turns out, is not so steamy after all.
In what is being billed as the first major "click-and-tell" poll about online sex, Internet users poured cold water on feverish speculation about their hot-and-heavy, high-tech love lives.
"What catches our interest is the scandal -- pedophiles going online, compulsive sex addicts," said Al Cooper, the California sex researcher who wrote the survey. "But we found that the vast majority of people simply use it for recreation, like watching Baywatch."
The poll results, posted Tuesday on the MSNBC site, asked people about their "online sexual behavior": what they look at, who they talk to, and what they get out of it all.
More than 13,500 people responded, anonymously answering 47 questions ranging from age, career, and sexual orientation to what sort of cybersex thrilled them most.
Cooper, the clinical director of the San Jose Marital Services and Sexuality Center in San Jose, California, said about 9,000 responses were deemed usable -- still by far the largest such poll ever conducted.
The answers, however, showed that while sex sites and pornography remain an important factor driving consumer use of the Internet, the more shadowy realms of cyberspace are not as seamy as some people may have feared.
Relevant Knowledge found that 9.6 million users, or about 15 percent of all Web users, logged on to the 10 most popular cybersex sites in April, but they aren't necessarily spending a lot of time there.
Cooper's survey found that more than 90 percent of respondents spent less than 10 hours per week on cybersex. Overall, he said, about 8 percent of the respondents could be considered "cybersex compulsives," a rate of sex addiction only slightly higher than the population at large.
One interesting tidbit the survey revealed was that a growing number of women are turning to the Internet to explore their sexuality. While men generally outnumber women on cybersex sites by five to one, Cooper said more and more women are logging on.
"I call it the 'triple A' of the Internet -- access, affordability, anonymity," Cooper said. "It is a great place to go to try different things, where you can be safe."
Cooper noted some differences in what kinds of cybersex men and women seek.
"Men are usually more visual. Women want some kind of interaction," Cooper said. "But their presence on the Net shows that women aren't really as alienated [from cybersex] as some people might think."
The survey also found that one in five people admitted to viewing cybersex sites while at work, and that almost three out of four said they kept secret from others the amount of time they spend on online sexual pursuits.
Fibbing over the Internet is also common, the poll found, with 60 percent saying they had lied about their age and 40 percent saying they had lied about their race. But "gender bending" was much less pervasive -- only 5 percent of respondents said they had switched sexes online.
Some experts have questioned the validity of Cooper's findings, noting that the self-selecting nature of the respondents meant it was not as scientifically useful as a true, random poll.
Editors at MSNBC have said they posted the survey for fun, and not to obtain hard scientific results.
