August 22, 2016
Some Millennials Are Not Having Sex. But a Vast Majority Are.
“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 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.)