Overall frequency distribution: women vs men
The gap between the sexes is the first thing you see. In the NSSHB 2021 data, 43.5% of women say they haven't masturbated in the past year, against 24.2% of men. At the other end, 9.9% of men report doing it almost daily and 0.5% of women do. That isn't a quirk of one survey. Decades of sexual behaviour research find the same gap, wave after wave, though how much of it is behaviour and how much is what people are willing to tell an interviewer is still argued over.
| Frequency | Total population | Men | Women |
|---|---|---|---|
| Almost every day | 5.0% | 9.9% | 0.5% |
| 2 to 3 times per week | 10.2% | 17.1% | 4.0% |
| Once a week | 6.5% | 8.9% | 4.3% |
| A few times per month | 14.6% | 16.1% | 13.3% |
| Once a month | 8.0% | 6.4% | 9.5% |
| A few times in the past year | 21.1% | 17.2% | 24.6% |
| Not at all in past year | 34.3% | 24.2% | 43.5% |
How frequency changes with age
Both sexes are most likely to report masturbating in their twenties, and women's curve climbs less steeply and comes down more gently, easing with age. One detail cuts against the assumption that women's sex lives are mostly partnered: for adolescents and for adults over 70, solo masturbation is more common than any partnered sexual activity, according to the 2010 NSSHB.
Among the over-70s, 28% of men and 12% of women had masturbated in the past month. Twelve percent is one older woman in eight, which is a long way from the assumption that the behaviour stops with age, and it's a figure that almost nobody carries in their head because almost nobody asks.
What "typical" actually looks like for women
Rare or never. The two most common answers among women in the NSSHB 2021 sample are "not at all in the past year" (43.5%) and "a few times in the past year" (24.6%), and between them they cover 68% of women. Only 4.5% report several times a week or daily. Plot it and the curve piles up at zero with a long thin tail to the right, which is the opposite of the picture most people carry around.
So a woman who rarely or never masturbates is in the majority, and a woman who does so regularly is in a small but well-documented minority. Neither is a finding about health. Frequency at either end means nothing clinically unless it's causing distress or getting in the way of a relationship or daily life.
How relationship context affects frequency
For women, having more sex tends to go with masturbating more, not less. The 2017 Archives of Sexual Behavior study of 15,738 adults found masturbation tended to go alongside partnered sex for women rather than stand in for it, though the link was modest and depended on how content people were with the sex they were having. In the NSSHB 2021 data, women who wanted partnered sex much more often than they were getting it were 3.89 times more likely to report higher masturbation frequency, so unmet desire raises the number too.
Men mostly run the other way, masturbating more when partnered sex is scarce. Read together, the two patterns mean a woman's frequency usually says something about how sexually engaged she is overall, and very little about whether a partner is available.
Clinical threshold
There isn't one for frequency alone. A diagnosis of compulsive sexual behaviour needs real distress, physical injury or serious interference with work or relationships, and how often you masturbate is not on that list. Everything from never to daily sits inside the documented population range, and no point on it is a problem in itself.
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