Millennials Not Having Sex

Millennials Not Having Sex

Science | Some Millennials Are Not Having Sex. But a Vast Majority Are.
Some Millennials Are Not Having Sex. But a Vast Majority Are.
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“Everyone is drinking, peering into their screens and swiping on the faces of strangers they may have sex with later that evening.”
That portrayal of app-abetted, casual-sex-having millennials in the wild, from a 2015 Vanity Fair article by the journalist Nancy Jo Sales, is far from unusual. Hookup culture and the smartphone apps that make it easy to find partners are commonly portrayed as having fueled a rise in promiscuity among young adults.
But a study published this week said this sex-charged picture was not a reality for a significant percentage of young millennials.
The study, published Tuesday in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, found that more young people are living sexless existences than their counterparts born in the 1960s did at the same age.
To be clear, this does not mean that the vast majority of young millennials are having less sex than young people of previous generations did. It simply means that the portion of people born in the early 1990s who are not having sex is larger than a similar cohort from decades earlier.
“People are still getting it on,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Jean Twenge , a psychology professor at San Diego State University.
She noted that overintepretation by the public and the news media was a common problem with studies like hers.
“Just like it’s not true that millennials are all promiscuous people who are on Tinder all the time, it’s also not true that all millennials are sexless and just watching porn in their moms’ basements,” she said.
Dr. Justin R. Garcia, an evolutionary biologist and sex researcher at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, seconded that point, saying that while the increase in young adults who are sexually inactive was compelling and statistically significant, there was a broader takeaway.
“The data also shows that 85 percent of young people in their sample are sexually active in the last 12 months,” he said. “The vast majority of American youth are sexually active, and that’s the reality we need to take seriously.”
The paper, part of a series of three reports that Dr. Twenge and her colleagues have published or plan to publish about young people’s sexual behavior, relied on the General Social Survey , a nationally representative survey of American adults that has been taken regularly since 1972. (The researchers used annual and biennial surveys taken from 1989 to 2014.)
It found that about 6 percent of young adults — defined as being between the ages of 20 and 24 — who were born between 1965 and 1969 reported having no sexual partners after age 18. By contrast, 15 percent of young adults born between 1990 and 1994 reported having no sexual partners after turning 18.
The increase in sexual inactivity was far more notable among women than men, and was only significant for those without a college education, the paper said. The phenomenon was not observed among survey participants who had attended college.
The trend of more sexless lives was also nonexistent among black Americans, according to the paper, which did not break out information about other racial groups. The trend was “larger and significant” among those who attended religious services; it was present but “not significant” among those who did not.
The paper’s findings were echoed by the national Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and released in June, which found that the number of sexually active high schoolers had decreased from 1991 to 2015.
Dr. Twenge’s study acknowledges several of its own limitations, including that participants might have varied interpretations of the phrase “had sex with.”
“It is possible that earlier generations counted any sexual activity as sex,” the study says, “thus increasing their counts of partners, whereas younger generations, perhaps influenced by abstinence-focused education and purity pledges, may see sex as including only vaginal-penile penetration, thus leading them to report lower numbers of sexual partners.”
But it calls that possibility “unlikely,” citing a paper about the changing sexual habits of first-year university students at a school in Sydney, Australia.
The survey data includes homosexual sex, Dr. Twenge said. She said that reports of same-sex activity have become more common than in earlier eras.
The paper discusses some factors that Dr. Twenge thinks might be responsible for the rise in sexual inactivity, including the slowed development of adolescents, an increase in abstinence-only sex education and the unequal outcomes created by new technology such as Tinder.
But she acknowledged that “we can’t say for sure” that any of those causes were at play in the data revealed by the paper.
Dr. Garcia said that it was important to “think critically about the claims we’re making and the available data on patterns of sexual behavior over time,” citing media headlines that sought to investigate what the paper revealed about hookup behavior or casual sexual behavior.
“The methodology of the paper, which was sound, looked at generalized sexual behavior. It doesn’t really say anything about whether its relationship sex or casual sex,” he said. “Some of those inferences that are being made are hypotheses, and the data doesn’t really allow one to clearly answer some of those questions.”

Did you hear? Millennials aren't having any sex.
Well, that's not entirely true. But they're certainly having less sex than the generations that came before them. That's the takeaway from a recent study explored in a viral story from the The Washington Post .
According to the new report, 15 percent of 20- to 24-year-olds have not had sex since turning 18, up from 6 percent in the early 1990s. And a study published in the same journal last year found that although millennials are more accepting of extramarital sex than earlier generations, they reported fewer sexual partners than any group since the 1960s — an average of eight, compared with 11 for boomers and 10 for Generation X. [ The Washington Post . ]
As a conservative Catholic, my instinct is to say less sex among unmarried young people is probably a good thing. Then again, as a Frenchman, I have several centuries of cultural history telling me that if you can't get laid, there must be something wrong with you.
The Post hypothesizes that millennials are too focused on their careers to do the deed. And, as the piece notes, this generation has "been called the most cautious generation — the first to grow up with car seats and bike helmets, the first not allowed to walk to school or go to the playground alone." Apparently millennials are afraid of what they call "catching feelings."
It's true. Relationships can get emotional. So better not to risk it.
But I think there's another force at work here: technology. Technology is giving people unrealistic expectations for a mate.
There is Tinder, which was quite possibly invented purely to destroy the fabric of society. This app has all but killed the art of an actual serendipitous in-person date. Don't believe me? Just read this terrifying Vanity Fair exposé .
Then there's Xbox. As the economist Erik Hurst notes , young men are spending a lot of their time playing video games. This is particularly prevalent among the growing demographic of young men without college degrees, who are frequently unemployed and unmarried. As Hurst explains, "The hours that they are not working have been replaced almost one-for-one with leisure time ... Seventy-five percent of this new leisure time falls into one category: video games. The average low-skilled, unemployed man in this group plays video games an average of 12, and sometimes upwards of 30 hours per week."
Thirty hours! How are you going to meet a partner when you're playing video games that much?
And, most importantly, there's porn. The Post interviews an 18-year-old virgin male who is not really interested in having sex, because he'd rather watch YouTube.
But isn't he curious about actual sex?
"Not really," he says. "I've seen so much of it ... There isn't really anything magical about it, right?"
Almost everything worthwhile in life requires a good education. Someone who's eaten junk food their entire life is probably unable to appreciate real good food because their taste buds and nerve responses have been so trained by sugar and saturated fats. So let me just say: Um, no, dude, there isn't anything magical about the kind of sex you see in porn. For that matter, there isn't anything magical about hookups. You know what's magical? "Catching feelings." It's astonishing that this has to be explained, but for a generation brought up saturated by porn and in a culture that devalues commitment, what else do we expect?
There's another consequence of porn use that too few people want to discuss: erectile dysfunction .
As the researcher Gary Wilson points out , regular porn consumption quite literally rewires the human brain. We become addicted to the very specific (and in many ways, very unrealistic) form of stimulation porn provides; meanwhile, other kinds of receptors atrophy. So sometimes, if a man doesn't don't get the kind of stimulation he gets from his computer screen, his brain (and therefore, his body), can't muster the proper arousal response.
So, when it comes to millennials' declining interest in sex, mostly, I blame men. I also blame technology, but mostly I blame men for letting technology do this to them. Men of a certain young and unexperienced age have never really been great at sex (he writes, three days before his 30th birthday), but it seems plausible to me that a generation of men who have been virtually emasculated by porn and video games, and shorn of intimacy by dating apps, might have led the women of their generation to conclude that making the beast with two backs is more of a chore than a fun-time activity.
There might be an opportunity in all of this. After all, in the kingdom of the blind, the one-eyed man is king. So, if there's an 18-year-old male reading this, here's my advice: Give up porn, throw your Xbox and TV in the garbage, never look at your phone for more than three seconds when you're with other people, and do 50 push-ups per day. Good luck.
The Week™ is part of Future plc, an international media group and leading digital publisher. Visit our corporate site at https://futureplc.com The Week™ is a registered trade mark. © Future US LLC, 10th floor, 1100 13th Street NW, Washington, DC 20005. All rights reserved.

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The reason is actually pretty shocking…
Way back when, during a time that wasn’t 2017, before Tinder and Bumble and online dating , romantic relationships were a sacred thing. Not that I would personally know, considering I’ve only been alive 20-something years.
However, from stories old people tell, and just general knowledge and whatnot, we know that modern dating (and sex) is definitely not what it used to be. In fact, dating for Gen X’ers was wildly different than those before them, and not surprisingly, sex and dating for millennials is unlike anything history has ever seen. That, I would know.
According to researchers from San Diego State University, led by Professor Jean Twenge, “Millennials hold the most permissive sexual attitudes of any generation, though they chose to have sex with fewer partners than Gen X’ers did at the same age.”
So, it sounds like millennials are having the most free-spirited and least judgmental sex of any generation , however, they’re having less sex than Gen X’ers did. Interesting.
To throw in some hard stats, let’s visit a report that the CDC released last week , documenting the decline in sexual activity among teenagers: between the ages of 15 and 19, 42 percent of women and 44 percent of men reported having sex, relative to a significantly higher 51 percent of women and 60 percent of men in 1988. Wow ! Staggering!
“It’s definitely not true that millennials are having way more sex than everybody else,” Lisa Wade , a professor of sociology at Occidental College, explains . You got that right, Lisa.
But isn’t it a little odd that, despite being the most liberal generation yet, millennials are having less sex than the pessimistic, nihilistic generation before them? Yeah, I would say so, especially considering the fact that millennials have all kinds of dating apps for any kind of casual sex they could possibly hope to have.
Transactional sex ? Check. Gluten free sex ? Sure thing. Anonymous sex? There’s an app for that, too.
With all that in mind, why are millennials having less sex than previous generations? If they have so many options and all the freedom in the world to explore said options, why aren’t they super duper promiscuous? The answer as to why is still a mystery, even to experts, but Dr. Wade has a theory.
“What has definitely changed is the frame for the sexual activity,” Wade says, explaining that the umbrella term “date” has a different meaning now than it did in generations past.
Simply put, in previous generations, when two people went out on a date, nine times out of ten it meant that they were seeking a romantic relationship that they hoped would lead to marriage. Now, though, it’s very, very common for two people going out on a date to want absolutely nothing more than sex.
To illustrate, a “date” in 2017 can simply mean going to a bar together, getting obliterated, calling her by the wrong name all night, proceeding to have terrible Tinder sex , and then never speaking again. You get the idea.
Because of this change in backdrop, “the way we then choose to interact and communicate changes. Suddenly, everyone is working off of different scripts, or templates of interaction and behavior,” as VICE puts it.
“The ‘just sex’ script are both sort of very palpably present, and they have a really hard time knowing which one they’re supposed to be using with the other person, which one the other person is using, and when it might flip on them,” Wade says. “One of my students said she felt like there was no ground beneath her feet. It’s just gotten more confusing.”
Wade explains that in this new context and new form of communication, it’s a safer bet to go with the “just sex” script, because you won’t look desperate, and you’ll avoid rejection by not wanting anything more than to get all up in her panties.
“So, with everybody defaulting to using the ‘just sex’ script, or ready at a moment’s notice to flip over to the ‘just sex’ script to deny vulnerability, then that’s not gonna be very rewarding, because it requires them to pretend like they don’t care about anybody.
“People may actually care about each other and want romance, or they might not, but everyone is kind of having to perform this disinterest.”
Long story short, the problem here is that millennials feel like they need to act like they don’t care about anybody, and they act like they don’t want to actually date and have a meaningful relationship. Isn’t that sad? I think that’s really sad.
But here’s the catch – even though they act like they don’t give a single fuck about emotional connections, they actually do. Numbers don’t lie. A lot of young people are, in fact, looking for fulfilling relationships with potential life partners.
“I suspect a lot of the sex young people are having is partner seeking… so the sex isn’t really for pleasure; it’s for this other purpose of finding somebody.
“If what you’re doing is looking for a partner in a culture that expects you to have sex before expressing romantic feelings, this sex becomes part of the game you’re playing. So, you wouldn’t necessarily expect the sex to be that great, because you’re just kind of trying people out,” Wade concludes.
And so, to sum up this wildly long discussion, millennial sex is strategic, and not as mindless as it seems. The end.

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Millennials Not Having Sex

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