What America was really exploring in bed this year
Source: Arya, “Bedroom Wrapped” 2025 EXT Arya “Bedroom Wrapped” 2025…
There’s something vulnerable about looking at national intimacy data. It tells the truth about what people want, not what they think they’re supposed to want.
And this year, the truth is clear: people across the country are trying to understand their bodies, their partners, and their sexual identities with more intention and less shame.
While we are a country incredibly divided on politics, I still wanted an opportunity to explore what people are interested in across the country.
Americans spent 622,960 hours on Arya in 2025. That isn’t passive scrolling. That’s active learning — the kind that builds sexual skills, relational confidence, and nervous-system literacy over time.
This is what sex education looks like when people actually choose it for themselves.
The erotic landscape of the U.S. through a sexological lens
Sexual behavior is a mix of physiology, psychology, social conditioning, attachment patterns, and cultural narratives. Arya’s data gives us a cross-section of all of those layers.
It helps us ask:
How do people soothe themselves?
How do they seek closeness?
What forms of stimulation help them regulate or connect?
Where does shame sit in their bodies — and where does pleasure?
Understanding these patterns is the cornerstone of modern sexology.
Red States: Sensation-seeking, embodied, and driven by physical curiosity
Red states show higher engagement with oral play, erotic touch, and sensation-based practices. From a sexological perspective, these interests map onto:
higher comfort with externally focused erotic stimulation
curiosity about intensity gradients (which explains the moderate interest in pain play)
a desire for experiential learning, where feedback comes from the body rather than cognitive exploration
This doesn’t indicate impulsivity or risk-seeking.
It suggests a strong somatic orientation — pleasure experienced through the body first, and processed emotionally second.
These practices are often linked to attachment styles that view touch as a primary bonding mechanism, which aligns with the cultural patterns in many red-state regions.
Blue States: Mindfulness, internal awareness, and emotional integration
Blue states, in contrast, lean toward practices rooted in:
sensory awareness
interoception (the body’s internal sense signals)
slow-touch modalities
guided or structured erotic exercises like tantra
This reflects what sexologists call a highly regulated erotic system — pleasure that is tied to presence and emotional safety. These practices support deeper parasympathetic activation (the body’s “rest-and-digest” state), which often leads to more intense and sustained pleasure responses.
In simpler terms:
Blue states approach pleasure through the nervous system.
Red states approach pleasure through the skin.
Neither is better. They’re just different pathways into the same human need.
The most surprising finding, in my opinion: Erotic openness isn’t geographically predictable
One of the most valuable insights in this report is that red communities show the strongest interest in taboo-free erotic exploration.
From a clinical standpoint, this disrupts the long-standing assumption that liberal or urban regions are automatically more sexually progressive. In practice, sexual curiosity often appears where people lack culturally validated spaces to explore it.
When desire is restricted, it doesn’t disappear — it intensifies. This is a well-documented pattern in sexology.
The data confirms it.
America’s Top 5 intimacy interests in 2025
These were the most requested practices across the country:
Oral sex
Playfulness
Sensory play
Massage
Dirty talk
Each of these aligns with core pillars of sexual wellbeing:
• Oral sex builds trust, gives partners nonverbal feedback, and heightens attachment.
• Playfulness lowers performance anxiety and increases dopamine.
• Sensory play activates the full erotic system, not just genital arousal.
• Massage supports co-regulation — partners calming each other’s nervous systems.
• Dirty talk strengthens erotic communication and clarifies desire.
These aren’t flashy trends. They’re foundational tools for healthy sexual relationships.
Regional Patterns: How culture shapes eroticism
Several themes emerge from Arya’s map:
Southern states show heightened interest in oral pleasure, which sexologists often link to relational generosity and partner-focused intimacy.
Red states lean toward simple, embodied eroticism rooted in sensation and direct touch.
Blue states gravitate to mindful eroticism, which integrates emotional attunement with physical connection.