Just 6 percent of generation Xers were abstinent during that same age range.
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“Many of the differences between the groups in the recent generations were also significant”.
Another unresolved issue is just what role education plays.
“There’s the possibility that technology has something to do with this”, Twenge said.
Other possibilities for the study’s findings are that young people, who face a tough job market, are putting more of their energy into their careers.
Damn, dude, isn’t one the reasons people want to be successful is so that they can have more sex?
The researchers conducted their study by analyzing people’s responses to something called the General Social Survey throughout the years.
So why are US millennial women decreasing their sexual activity, if they face less pressure than ever to tie the knot or wait until marriage to have sex?
With co-authors Jean Twenge, Ph.D., of San Diego State University, and Brooke E. Wells, Ph.D., of Widener University, Sherman aimed to determine if the shift in millennials’ behavior was a result of age or generation.
A 2014 report found that having multiple sexual partners and cohabitation before marriage decreased marital happiness after couples eventually tied the knot.
Concerns over personal safety and a media landscape saturated with reports of collegiate sexual abuse might also contribute to millennials’ sexual inactivity compared to previous generations, Twenge continued. The growing tendency to not to have sex at a young age was even more pronounced in women: 5.4% of millennial women were sexually inactive, up from the 2.3% of Generation X women at that age. But she still found the findings somewhat surprising. “Men and women became similar [in sexual behaviors] up to Generation X”, Twenge said. But this data is consistent with data the Center for Disease Control has been [gathering from teenagers] (http://www.cdc.gov/healthyyouth/data/yrbs/pdf/trends/2015_us_sexual_trend_yrbs.pdf) about potentially risky sexual behavior; despite an increase in positive attitudes about pre-marital sex, millennials and current teenagers are getting less action between the sheets.
“The idea that these kids are “left behind” by the sexual revolution is quite unusual, as if they’ve somehow been sealed in a bomb shelter and never knew it happened”, Rebecca Oas, Ph.D., the associate director of research for the Center for Family and Human Rights (C-Fam), told LifeSiteNews.
After thorough evaluation, the researchers found out that the number of young adults who said that they had not had any sexual partners since they turned 18 was much higher for proper born in the 1990s than the generation which was born in the late 1960s.
The Hartford Courant straight-up asked some millennials why they’re waiting to have sex, and the answers were pretty mind-blowing. “The term “hookup” is entirely ambiguous”, he said, and since it is “basically a nebulous term that could mean anything”, it has led to a misunderstanding of what’s actually going on today. “But if young adults forgo sex completely, they may be missing out on some of the advantages of an adult romantic relationship”. The pressure is off everyone.
Feel free to draw your own conclusions on why this might be but Twenge and her fellow researchers have a few ideas of why this might be.
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Finally, there’s the issue of safety.
