Millennials, sex and honesty

Research shows we’re having less sex, but maybe we are just more honest than previous generations

This month, Jimmy Kimmel, the talk show host whose favourite comic bits always seem to involve embarrassing ordinary people, one-upped himself.

Having heard in the news that millennials are responsible for a decline in canned tuna sales because they don’t own can openers, he had one of the show’s employees take to the sidewalk and ask a series of young-looking passersby to open a tin of tuna with a conventional can opener. Canned tuna consumption is down more than 40 per cent over the past three decades and the tuna companies believe the reason is because millennials don’t want go to the trouble of opening a can. The vice president of StarKist said “a lot of millennials don’t even own can openers.”

You will totally believe what happened next. No one on the street, save one person, successfully opened the can of solid white albacore. And like true millennials, none of them seemed to care that they’d failed at the task. The segment went viral, lending proof to the young-peopledon’t-own-can-openers-theory. (For the record, I own two of them, but I’m left-handed, so I’m also hopeless.)

Now let me switch gears to another piece of news about millennials that appears to be completely unrelated to the above. We also learned this month that not only are millennials allegedly tuna-deprived; we’re sexdeprived too. We might send plenty of illicit photos and have progressive ideas about sex, but research suggests that when it comes to actually having it, we aren’t. That is, we are apparently a lot less active between the sheets than young people of previous generations.

According to a story in Global News this week by Laura Hensley, a reporter who spoke with Dr. Lori Brotto, director at the University of British Columbia’s Sexual Health Laboratory, Canadians in general are having less sex than they used to. But this trend may be especially prominent among younger people.

Hensley cites a recent American study indicating there may be higher rates of sexual inactivity among millennials than there were among young people of previous generations. And this notion isn’t new, not by a long shot.

Earlier this year, the Huffington Post published a story about millennial sex “on the decline” citing similar research. So did Politico in a story called “Too Much Netflix, Not Enough Chill: Why Young Americans are Having Less Sex.” Maxim wrote about young peoples’ inactive sex lives last year and the Washington Post did so the year before.

Theories to explain the sexless millennial phenomenon are just as numerous. They range from the souldeadening effect of current dating apps, to heightened fear of STIs and sexual assault, to general social awkwardness, to economic realities (if you’re broke and you live with your parents you may have a harder time taking somebody out for a date and bringing them home afterwards).

What, finally, does this have to do with canned tuna fish on Jimmy Kimmel? Simple. While all of the theories listed above might have merit I wonder if we’re failing to consider another one: what if millennials aren’t having significantly less sex than previous generations? What if we’re just the first generation to be willing to admit it? What if we simply

“Why would an overly confident, optimistic demographic whose pastime is sharing personal information on the internet, feel ashamed divulging information to researchers?”

have less shame than previous generations?

No one in the Kimmel segment appears embarrassed about not being able to open that can on the street. And why would they be? Millennials are, according to the Pew Research Center, “confident” and “upbeat.” Our economic reality may be dim, but our personal outlook is generally sunny. Why would we let something like failing at a silly can opener challenge get us down?

And more to the point, why are we so unabashed about performing a task we probably will fail at on camera? More critically, where’s the control group — all those baby boomers Jimmy Kimmel’s producers stopped to open cans of tuna? How do we know they’d succeed? How do we know they’d even be willing to try? Similarly, where sex is concerned, why would an overly confident, optimistic demographic whose pastime is sharing personal information on the internet, feel ashamed divulging information to researchers?

Old-fashioned ideas about masculinity and virility are collapsing all around us. Historically, young men had a hundred reasons to lie about how much sex they were having. Maybe today, finally, they have a reason, and the security, to tell the truth.