The caterwauling in Tasmania over sodomy raises at least one interesting question: why is the outrage always focused on gay men, when heterosexuals not uncommonly engage in the practice, too?

In fact, on any given night in Tasmania, it is almost certainly the case that more heterosexual couples engage in sodomy than do male couples. If, as the Liberal state attorney-general, Ronald Cornish, argues, “sodomy is an unnatural act and unhealthy”, where is the chorus of commensurate outrage about what a large number of men and women do together?

Australia has not yet conducted a national random survey of sexual activity, as has been done in recent years in France and Britain. The British study of nearly 19,000 adults, the results of which were published this year, points to a situation that, in the absence of any evidence to the contrary, is likely to be very similar to that which applies in Australia. And if “No sex please, we’re British” is a deserving description, the findings of the British study may well be a rather conservative guide to sexual conduct in this country.

The British study, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, funded by the Wellcome Trust after Margaret Thatcher refused government money, was conducted in a way that allowed those surveyed to answer extremely detailed and intimate questions without jeopardising their anonymity.

It found that 6.5 percent of men and 5.9 percent of women aged 16–59 reported having anal intercourse with a person of the opposite sex in the past year, with 2.8 percent of men and 2.4 percent of women claiming to have engaged in the practice in the past month.

Note that these figures refer to all men and women aged 16–59 sampled in households throughout Britain – not just to people in relationships. The small discrepancies between men and women in the reported rates result from lower rates reported by older women compared with men. This suggests either that older women under-report anal intercourse, that men over-report it, or that the sample somehow uncovered a group of women who were multi-partnered in this activity. By comparison, only 1.1 percent of all men interviewed reported having any sexual contact with men in the past year, compared with a rate of lifetime (“ever”) male-to-male sexual experience of 6.1 percent.

Contrary to what some Tasmanian supporters of the Liberal MP Chris Miles and the anti-gay TasAlert group might believe, not all gay and bisexual men routinely engage in anal intercourse. A long-running Macquarie University study reported that only 56 percent of the men interviewed who had sex with men in the past six months had had anal intercourse. This study was expressly designed to reach gay and bisexual men. Internationally, such studies invariably report higher rates of anal intercourse than studies which randomly sample the general population. The 56 percent estimate almost certainly overstates the true rate of male-to-male anal intercourse among gay and bisexual men in the general community.

So what might all this mean for Tasmania? There are about 136,000 men aged 16–59 in Tasmania. If 1.1 percent of them are actively homosexual or bisexual, and 56 percent of these engage regularly in anal intercourse, then there might be about 840 male-to-male sodomites (as Cornish might call them) on the island.

By contrast, there are about 270,000 people aged 16–59 in the state (135,800 men and 134,200 women). If we subtract the 1,500 gay and bisexual men from this number (although this would not be completely warranted, for a considerable proportion who are bisexual may also have anal intercourse with women) then going by the British percentages, about 8,730 men and 7,920 women in Tasmania could be expected to have had anal intercourse with a person of the opposite sex in the past year. This suggests there are nearly 20 times the number of people who have had recent experience of anal intercourse with a member of the opposite sex than men who have had anal intercourse with another man. While our calculations have been for Tasmania, there is no reason to expect that they would not apply across Australia.

We can almost hear the howls of protest from across Bass Strait. “We’re not like those British!” We can also hear murmurings about the predilection of certain ethnic groups to use anal intercourse as a form of birth control – “Greek” has long been brothel slang for the practice. The British study found no evidence of any class differences in the practice, nor of any racial differences between white, black or Asian groups. (Intriguingly, only the racial group described in the report as “Other” had a higher rate.)