US adults less sexually active, study finds
cially men under the age of 35.
The evidence for this comes from the General Social Survey, which is conducted every other year by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. Survey participants were asked how often they’d had sex in the past year, and how many partners they’d had it with.
Responses from a nationally representative sample of nearly 10,000 men and women ages 18 to 44 were included in the study, which was recently published in the journal JAMA Network
Open.
About half of the adults surveyed between 2016 and 2018 said they had sex at least once a week. That includes 46.7% of men and 53.3% of women.
At the other end of the spectrum, 16.5% of men said they had not had sex in the previous 12 months. In the years 2000 to 2002, only 9.5% of the men who took the survey said they’d been celibate for the past year.
The younger men were, the more likely they were to abstain from sex. In 2016-2018, 30.9% of men between the ages of 18 and 24 said they hadn’t been sexually active for at least a year. That compares with 18.9% of men who were surveyed in 2000-2002.
For men between the ages of 25 and 34, the proportion who went at least a year without sex doubled from 7% in 2000-2002 to 14.1% in 2016-2018.
Men who worked part time or not at all, or who were students, were more likely to be sexually inactive than men with full-time jobs. The higher a man’s income, the less likely he was to report a yearlong dry spell.
Among men who were sexually active, the activity became less frequent over the study period. Back in 2000-2002, 51.8% of men ages 18 to 24 said they had sex at least once a week, as did 65.3% of men ages 25 to 34 and 61.1% of men ages 35 to 44. But by 2016-2018, those figures had dropped to 37.4%, 50.3% and 49.9%, respectively.
The sex lives of women were more stable, the survey data showed, with the most significant changes occurring among those