For all the talk of hookup culture, you’d think that people are getting down and dirty on the regular. But the proportion of U.S. adults not having sex reached a record high in 2018, and 20-something men are among the most celibate.
Related: “Coddled” Millennials are terrified to lose their virginity, psychologist says
The news comes from the latest General Social Survey data, which found that 23 percent of adult Americans — nearly a quarter — hadn’t had sex within the past year. Furthermore, the percentage of celibate 18-to-29-year-olds people more than doubled between 2008 and 2009, while the percentage of celibate 18-to-30-year-old men nearly tripled. In fact, 28 percent of 20-something men reported a year-long dry spell, compared to just 18 percent of women in the same age group.
Stunning chart: the share of men under 30 who aren't having sex has nearly tripled in the past decade https://t.co/0aazxCijYP pic.twitter.com/HVVmffy7Jc
— Christopher Ingraham (@_cingraham) March 29, 2019
San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge, author of iGen: Why Today’s Super-Connected Kids Are Growing Up Less Rebellious, More Tolerant, Less Happy — and Completely Unprepared for Adulthood, has some theories for this startling trend.
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For starters, Twenge says, people are finding stable relationships later in life. “There are more people in their twenties who don’t have a live-in partner,” she tells The Washington Post. “So, under those circumstances, I think less sex is going to happen.”
Related: What’s it like to be in a gay, sexless relationship for two years? (Hint: It kinda sucks)
There’s also the boomerang effect: AS of 2014, 35 percent of adult men under 34 were still living with their parents. “When you’re living at home, it’s probably harder to bring sexual partners into your bedroom,” the professor notes.
And as much as our iPhones have given us access to Grindr, Scruff, and a slew of other hookups apps, the instantaneous access to social media and streaming video is also distracting us from other nocturnal activities. “There are a lot more things to do at 10 o’clock at night now than there were 20 years ago,” says Twenge. And to think there was a time when “Netflix and chill” was code for sex…
Brian
Duh, it’s the economy. Young people are STILL in the 2008 recession. It never went away. All of the economic measures showing that the recession ended are actually measures of the already-wealthy. For people too young to have accumulated wealth, they entered the recession and stayed there. Despite the many absurd think-pieces asserting that millennials are killing the diamond industry, people can’t seem to understand the reality we live in. Young people are delaying everything – paying for school, renting a home, buying a home, diamonds, marriage, sex, EVERYTHING – because the economy is garbage.
Kangol
The economy was far worse when I was younger, AIDS was still a danger, and younger people were having a lot more sex. There also was no PrEP. But places and spaces for gay sex were far more numerous. We’re in a very sex-phobic moment, despite the widespread availability of pornography, sexual imagery, and so on. Public sex is frowned on, private gay sex venues have decreased, and the heteronormative ethos of monogamy has taken hold. It’s one thing to delay car purchases, buying a home or jewelry, avoid marriage, etc.but gay sex with another consenting adult is more economical than anything else (even condoms are not especially expensive & are free in many venues), and will not result in a child, which is a lifetime investment/expenditure.
YouNeverKnow
I think gays in the 80s and 90s were having too much promiscuous sex and there was no moderation. Everything was way in excess back then. Finally the younger generation wake up and say they are not going to do the stupid things the older gays have done. Sex should be in moderation and in fact you can direct your sex energy to achieve greater things instead of watching disgusting porn daily. I really think the younger generation is much smarter than gays in their 50s and 60s who remain unrepentant of their wrongdoings.
Rock-N-RollHS
@ YouNeverKnow lol. It’s ok to love your penis you little born-again. I can’t wait to burn in HELL!!! Unrepentant and Proud!!! Burn baby burn, disco inferno here I come!
sfhairy
There is no recession for people in their 20s. What BS are you spewing? The expectation of people in their 20s is to be paid like they’ve been in their chosen industry for 20 years. I lived with four roommates in SF in my 20s, cause that was the city I wanted to live in. While in my 20s, my salary in my field started at $25k, by the time I hit 30, I was making $80k. I can tell you now, that my direct reports who are in their 20s, start at $95k, doing what I did for $25k.
dwes09
“I really think the younger generation is much smarter than gays in their 50s and 60s who remain unrepentant of their wrongdoings.”
Here, let me correct that for you:
“I IMAGINE the younger generation is smarter…”. Unless you have some set of statistics correlating intelligence with reduction in the number of sex partners, you are simply confusing wishful thinking/dogma with reality. And given your moralistic tone and confusion between your assumptions and actual statistical realities, I suspect you are a very common poster we all are familiar with, with a new name.
GlobeTrotter
I think a lot of this has to do with the instant access to porn that has permeated the lives of this past generation. I finally decided to open up a PornHub account for the first time a few months ago and was just overwhelmed at all the porn available at the tip of the fingertip. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy sex and porn just as much as the next red-blooded American, but I couldn’t help but wonder what all this overabundance of sex and porn does to kids in this age. While growing up in the late 80’s and early 90’s, it took a few minutes to download a single porn image and you got your fix by sex chatting with other guys on bulletin boards. That is, you had to expend considerably more calories to get off as a teenager back then compared to teenagers today. If I had access to all the porn back then that I do now, I would have creamed in my pants in seconds. After a while though, it starts to have a numbing effect and it just doesn’t excite you anymore because you’ve seen it all as a teenager.
Another reason is the super politically correct times we’re living in. A few weeks ago a group of boys at a Maryland high school were disciplined and found themselves the object of angry protests for keeping a list of, wait for it….girls in their class along with their “hotness” score. Well, the girls managed to get a hold of the list and in an emotional confrontation lasting two and half hours, tearfully described how they felt humiliated, objectified, harassed and violated at being reduced to a numerical score, and how they no longer felt safe and secure in this “toxic environment of misogyny and objectification”.
Never mind the fact that boys have been making lists of all the hottest girls in the village for thousands of years now. Never mind the fact that none of the girls were harassed or prevented from duly exercising their right to participate in school activities or receive an education. Never mind the fact that creating such lists is a normal part of human sexuality – both boys and girls rank each other based on cultural standards of beauty and discuss their assessment of each among their peer groups. It’s called sexuality!
But kids today are being denied sexuality in a bid to create a society of genderless, sexless and invariably sterile individuals, where flirting and showing affection is now equated to sexual assault and women must now give explicit written consent for sexual activity. No must mean no, but some politically correct metoo groups have decided to wage war on men’s sexuality. We shouldn’t be surprised therefore that young people are less interested in sex. And we will be the ones to suffer when the working population has shrunk too small to support our pension payments.
subLime
Hear, hear!
Desertmuscle8
This will be quick; I have seen many changes in the USA’s gay culture since fairly early..I am not an
“old queen” rather the guy one can ask questions about many subjects with a broad and open minded outlook.
As a guy who is into the physicality in everyday life ie bending down and playing tennis etc, I see one scary and ever evolving for the worse its the addition of soy products in everything we eat..
I looked at a peanut butter cookie mix and the second ingedient was SOY!
SOY = ESTROGEN = MAN BOOBS AND SMALL PENISES!!!!!!!../
OH, and btw, we love GMOs in this country Asia and Europe do not!
Possibly the soy is doing damage to the libito???
sfhairy
Preach!
GayEGO
Who knows, my lifetime partner of 57 years, married 15 years, have a relationship that is based on love, sex is secondary.
Dick Gozinia
FYI – I don’t read responses that are longer than the subject article.
Rock-N-RollHS
No one is reading you either! Ain’t life grand!
MuslimSlutBox
I’m here to help. I wanna get that 28% down to nothing. Everybody cums, everybody’s happy. Especially me. No slut shaming please. Haahahahah.
AZ71
If you look at the chart, the numbers increase during time of social media technology increases. The first was in 1998 when it was about that time most households had internet at home. Gay.com was the big site for meeting guys and stuff. Ironically the celibate chart raises. Then in 2008 is when FB took off as well as the iPhone social apps. So there has to be some connection to that. I tend to think that all of a sudden you’re hit with too many options and society becomes picky. They stop seeing who is in front of them to have real relationships and they land in this “grass is greener complex” and guys might tend to just hold off for the next better thing.
sputnik53
Your right/left hand’s your best friend!
phanrepublic
ya’ll are all wrong … it’s a combination of kids who weren’t socialized (everything behind a computer, plus “mommy” home schooled me), PLUS a whole generation whose sexual experiences were completely centered around porn. Why bother sucking up to a six and a half when I can see a 10 jizz on my iPhone?
Dating is WORK and hooking up requires SELLING yourself past the “honey i have a head ache” and “I don’t have sex on the first date” defense mechanisms. Masturbation is simply the path of least resistance.
Rock-N-RollHS
These kids are so afraid of sex and pleasure that they view Biden as a rapist and have so many genders, they wouldn’t know a vagina from a penis. But as long as they are happy!
OzJosh
Maybe it’s also how you define sex. I’m constantly amused that younger people don’t count as sex anything short of full penetration. So any kind of foreplay, mutual masturbation, oral sex, even the kinkiest and most elaborate fetish play does not count as sex. Somebody really needs to break it to them: it’s all sex, baby.
Jussie_Racist_Clown
“I did not have sexual relations with that woman”. Bill started all that. The perverse James Carville authored that meme. It’s delusional.
Heywood Jablowme
Did Bill Clinton really “start all that”? At the time I thought it must be some weird Southern (U.S.) belief that I was simply unfamiliar with (like putting “applewood smoked bacon,” whatever the fck that is, on top of everything, which I’d never heard of before the ’90s either).
If oral sex doesn’t even count as “sex” – despite “sex” being right there in the name – that would mean most gay men hardly ever have sex.
Brian
Are we sure it’s not because millennials invented celibacy?
Heywood Jablowme
I get the vague impression (would there even be a way to do a poll on this?) that way too many young gay men now “identify” as bottoms – based almost entirely on their vast experience with porn, and their almost total lack of experience with real life guys. This creates an obvious problem when there are so few tops to go around in their own age group.
Although those tops must be having a lot of fun lol. Well of course, Queerty has informed us that is “top privilege” and is Bad and must be Called Out and Shamed!
DCguy
Gee, let’s see, you graduate college with $200,000 in debt, and all job protections have been taken away and salaries are low….hmmmm, I wonder why people aren’t hittng the clubs and meeting people.
YouNeverKnow
Based on what I observe, every gay bar in the Bay Area is packed — weekends as well as weekdays — and restaurants that cater to 20-45 are crowded and hard to get a table. All I see is affluence and abundance and they spend money on real fine things. Sure, there are some homeless people on the streets and they are just druggies and lazy bums and the mentally unstable that should be “housed” in psyche wards. The reason they have less sex, if this claim is true, is because they are sensible people who choose to be in a committed relationship instead of living like a slut.
Creamsicle
Shouldn’t people in committed relationships ships be having about as much sex as people in committed relationships in the past? If anything, it’s harder to be in a committed relationship in your 20s and 30s than it was when it was common for people to get married at 18 and 20, like the GIs did.
PLAYS WELL WITH OTHERS
Not exactly what am seeing on Grindr….
Alejandro De La Garza
I believe there are several factors involved. One is definitely the economy. Since the early 1990s, the earning power of many young professionals has diminished; thanks mainly to that trickle-down bullshit conservatives keep pushing. It manifested itself in the worst way with the recent “Great Recession.” College-aged people have taken on more student debt and find themselves still living with mom and dad.
That fewer people are having sex isn’t such a bad thing. It may mean younger generations are showing more restraint, having seen what the “Sexual Revolution” of the 60s and 70s produced.
But I think the biggest contributor is the misandric vitriol spewed out by the feminist left, which says women should empower themselves, yet can claim victimhood if things don’t go so well for them. They want it both ways. Men are being told we’re inherently worthless and will die out as a species in a few millennia. I read an article recently that said the Y chromosome is good for nothing else except producing males – as if that’s a bad thing. Of course, it was written by a woman.
With all of that kind of hateful rhetoric, why should men waste their time trying to meet women and have sex? If women shouldn’t have to tolerate any kind of disrespect from men, men damn well shouldn’t have to tolerate the same kind of crap from women.