Millennials: why aren’t they having sex?
I am young and single, living in London, working and partying hard, said Kate Lloyd in The Times. There’s just one thing missing from this Sex and the City- style existence: the sex. Like most of my friends, I haven’t got laid in months. And “we’re not alone”. New statistics from the US suggest this is an international phenomenon: millennials – those born between the early 1980s and 2000 – are having much less sex than previous generations. About 15% of young adults are not having regular sex, compared to 6% in the 1960s. We are more likely to remain virgins into early adulthood, we have fewer partners and we marry later; in fact, controlled for age and social attitudes, we are the most celibate generation since the 1920s.
This is the exact opposite of what sociologists expected to happen, said The Washington Post. Dating apps such as Tinder have made it quick and easy to find a sexual partner, simply by swiping right on your smartphone. Yet it is the youngest millennials – those who came of age when smartphones were ubiquitous – who seem most wary of sex. They have grown up communicating via screens, and this appears to have left them nervous of real-life interaction. Far from making romantic connections easier, dating apps effectively exclude a large swathe of the population: those of only average appearance. Qualities such as charm or wit, which can be so seductive in person, don’t show up on a Tinder profile. Many plainer people, for whom a steady relationship provides the best hope of regular sex, are being effectively cut out of the market.
The internet isn’t entirely to blame, said Tess Owen on Vice. The “sad millennial reality that record numbers of twentysomethings live with their parents” surely has something to do with it. But the deeper truth is that “millennials have been scared off sex”, said Daisy Buchanan in The Guardian. Ours is a deeply anxious generation, “frightened of our own flesh”. We are afraid of STDS and unwanted pregnancies, afraid of the brutal sex we have seen online, afraid that our own bodies don’t measure up. We “urgently need another sexual revolution” if we are not to remain trapped “behind glass”.