Let’s face it, human sexuality is complicated.

Let’s face it, human sexuality is complicated. There are probably as many different sexual peccadilloes as there are flavours of food – and like our culinary tastes, our preferences vary from country to country, individual to individual, and day to day.

For this reason, trying to describe the “normal” sex life is something of a fool’s errand; the variety is so great that a single statistic is never going to capture how most people feel. So BBC Future has looked at the data to try to get an idea of the full spread of the sexual spectrum – from how much we actually want sex to what we really do between the sheets.

Needless to say, this comes with some serious caveats. Surveys of sexual behaviour are unreliable: given that talking about sex can still be taboo, participants may not reveal the whole truth, or, conversely, they may feel the need to embellish their answers with bravado. These statistics aren’t the gospel truth, but should be read more as a general indication, given the evidence to date, of the range of sex lives in the 21st Century.