Nobody Has Sex Any More, Basically, Says Study

(Photo by Chris Bethell. Usual disclaimer: these are posed models and they didn’t just actually have sex)

Vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile, vile vile vile millennials bluntly refuse to have as much sex as young people were having 20 years ago (during what will go down as human history’s “ecstasy and Liam Gallagher” period) according to a new study of over 27,000 Americans.

Psychologists at the San Diego State University psychology department found, on average, adults were having nine fewer annual instances of what scientists call “fuck time” than two decades ago, with a marked slide in occurrences of – again, scientific definition coming up “spunk o’clock” happening among adults in their fifties and adults with school-aged children. Co-habiting couples in general saw 16 less dicks or tits coming at them every year compared to mid-90s figures.

“These data show a major reversal from previous decades in terms of marriage and sex,” lead author Jean Twenge said. “In the 1990s, married people had sex more times per year than never-married people, but by the mid-2000s that reversed, with the never-married having more sex.”

And, of course, vile millennials – with their iPhones; the millennials, with their frothy coffees, with their app start-ups, these vile millennials, with their brunch, with their Instagram, the millennials, with their banking apps, with their hygge books, these cosy millennials, with their pegging and their intersectional feminism, these horrid millennials, with their pugs and their Ubers and their delivery food and their Kickstarters; millennials, with their modern things, those horrid, horrid millennials, not a hope among them – vile millennials are doing their bit to not fuck, too.

“Despite their reputation for hooking up, millennials and the generation after them (known as iGen or Generation Z) are actually having sex less often than their parents and grandparents did when they were young,” Twenge said. “That’s partially because fewer iGen’ers and Millennials have steady partners.”

“One [possible factor] is the ‘failure to launch’ thing,” co-author Ryne Sherman told The Guardian, citing the paper’s findings:  “Much of this decline is due to the lower marriage rate in recent years, as married individuals have sex more consistently than unmarried individuals (a similar trend appears for living together). In addition, those with steady partners are having sex less frequently.” Basically: none of us can fuck nasty any more because we all still have to live at our parents’ houses, and it’s hard to really get lubed up and ready to go when two 55-year-olds are watching Coronation Street episodes with the sound really turned up next door while eating an entire roast dinner for the 15th consecutive night in a row.

Here are some other findings: people in their twenties generally had sex more than 80 times per year (score!), although that dipped to 60 times a year at the age of 45 and 20 times per year at 65, at which point what is really the point any more. If you really want to maths it: “For each year of age after the peak in sexual frequency at 25, participants reported having sex 1.18 fewer times per year. Put another way, individuals over age 25 have sex 96.8 percent as often as the previous year (so with each year of age after 25, the number of sex acts per year declined by 3.2 percent.)” 

How will this study affect you – actual you, waking up with a groggy head in an unfamiliar bed as the low early March Sunday sun floods through the curtains, that Tinder match you texted at 1AM saying “you should come out!” lying next to you, prone and nude and gargling in a blissful post-coital slumber, battery on 6 percent, which you know from experience now is not quite enough to get an Uber and be confident your phone won’t die before it turns up, so you’re going to have to bus it, and your nose hurts and your mouth hurts and your entire body feels sore, and your head hurts, and you have a condom stuck to your back, and you feel fundamentally quite empty inside, and thirsty too, but mainly empty, a sort of to-the-bones feeling of unfulfillment? Hard to say. Probably won’t affect it much at all.

@joelgolby

More stuff about sex:

The Sex Workers Telling Their Own Stories Through Art

What, to You, Constitutes ‘Bad’ Sex?

Porn Is Teaching Us How to Do Sex