Why More Young Adults Aren't Having Sex?

 Why More Young Adults Aren't Having Sex?

 

There are: In a new paper, we find that twice as many 20 to 24-year-olds born in the 1990s (15%) have not had sex since turning 18, compared to only 6% of 10- to 24-year-olds born in the late 1960s. The same pattern appeared in a more comprehensive analysis including adults of all ages that more precisely controlled for age. In a Washington Post article covering the study, young people mentioned a variety of reasons for not having sex, from doing other things to just not wanting to take the risk of a messy sexual relationship.
I can hear the collective reaction: Whaaaa? With all of the sex pervading the culture, how can this be? But this isn’t the only study to find this pattern – teens are also less likely to have sex now. In data from a biannual survey done by the Centers for Disease Control, 41% of high school students in 2015 had had sex, down from 54% in 1991.
The next question is why: Why are more Millennials and iGen putting off sex? The why question is always tough to answer in data like this: You can see what changes at the same time that might be related, but it’s virtually impossible to say for sure if it’s the cause. Correlation (or co-occurence) is not causation. But there is one sure-fire rule here: If something doesn’t change in the right direction, then it can’t be the cause.
That immediately rules out one of the explanations I keep hearing. In the Washington Post article, several experts theorized that young people today are too busy working and studying to have sex. But that isn’t true: In fact, teens and young adults in their early 20s are less likely to be working than they were 10 years ago. High school students in the 2010s spent less time on homework than their predecessors in the early 1990s, and several studies have found that college students in recent years study less than their counterparts in earlier decades – earlier decades when young adults were much more likely to be getting it on. Somehow Boomers and GenX’ers found the time for both.
That might be because they were not on their phones all the time. That’s another possible cause of the decline of sex: Young people (and possibly all of us) are so busy texting, watching YouTube videos, using Snapchat filters, and so on that they’re not having sex. More precisely, if these online forms of communication have replaced getting together in person, there are fewer opportunities to have sex. Or sex just isn’t as attractive when there are so many other ways to entertain yourself. Sometimes when you say you want to “Netflix and Chill” (a recent euphemism for sex), you might want to actually Netflix and Chill.
Or watch some porn. Pornography has become incredibly accessible, and for some young people watching it might be enough. Others might find actual sex disappointing after watching so much porn. In a recent cover story in Time magazine, several young men said they cannot perform sexually with real women because only porn excites them.
There’s another possibility: Millennials and iGen are growing up more slowly. The average age at first marriage and first birth has been going up for awhile now. GenX’ers had sex earlier than Boomers and Silents but married and had kids later. Now, late Millennials and iGen are putting off everything. Sex is joining the late to adulthood party. That could be situational: More Millennials live with their parents, not a sexy situation.
This is an interesting dilemma: We live in an era when premarital sex is more acceptable than ever, part of a wide-ranging theme of more individualism. That’s the primary focus of my book Generation Me: Each generation becomes more focused on the self and less on following social rules. In that system, premarital sex is fine: If it feels good, do it. There’s a corollary, though: It’s also fine to not do it. Individualism also means the freedom to not have sex.
There’s a related trend here: Millennials and iGen are, at least physically, the safest generation in modern times, and possibly in history. Deaths from homicides and car accidents are at the lowest levels they’ve been in decades. Individualism (combined with economic pressures and birth control) means fewer children per family, and that means a generation brought up to be very, very careful. If that caution extends to sex, putting off sexuality might be attractive. That’s particularly true due to iGen’s recent tendency to emphasize not just physical safety but emotional safety -- which is, for example, the impetus behind recent college campus trends such as safe spaces and trigger warnings. iGen in particular does not want to get hurt, and sexual relationships are messy things.
So is this trend toward later sex good or bad? I’d love to hear what you think. I can see both sides: Waiting until you are ready to have sex is always a good idea. But, especially when you’re in your early 20s, sex is one of the best parts of life. Enjoy it now, before your energy starts to fade and family and career pressures mount. Netflix can wait.


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