Young and undersexed
Millennials are less sexually active as young adults than previous generations were. On the surface, that looks great: They appear to be less disposed toward risky behaviors, better at saying no to unwanted encounters, more motivated to study, work and make money, which could lead to more financially secure, happier families. Yet there could be an ugly side to this that could turn what looks like increased responsibility into a demographic threat. According to a paper by Jean Twenge of San Diego State University and her colleagues Ryna Sherman and Brooke Wells, published on Tuesday in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, 15 percent of 20- to 24-year-old Americans born in the 1990s have had no sexual partners after their 18th birthday, compared with just 6 percent of people born in the 1960s at the same age. This is in line with previous research showing that those millennials who do have sex tend to have less or it and fewer partners.
But the current sexual culture comes with a cruel rejection mechanism. Twenge wrote: “While some young adults may use apps such as Tinder to
hook up with many partners, a growing minority may be excluded from this system entirely, perhaps due to the premium placed on physical appearance on dating websites.”
That, more than any kind of newly ingrained risk aversion or responsibility, may well explain the higher sexual inactivity rates. People whomight turn out to be quite attractive on a realworld date don’t even get a chance to go out with anyone because their picture on a dating app isn’t “hot.”
The perceptions of attractiveness are probably shaped by porn to a greater degree than we realize. There have been plenty of warnings about it “hijacking our sexuality,” but coun- tries have mostly chosen not to regulate it — only child pornography is universally banned.
Worried by these trends, Sweden’s Health Minister Gabriel Wikström is launching a detailed governmentfunded study of Swedes’ sex lives. Like most of the Western world, Sweden has a birthrate of less than two children per woman (propped up by much higher birth rates among the country’s growing Muslim community). Sweden might like young people to be a little more irresponsible, as they used to be in an age before Tinder and ubiquitous online porn.