American women from the Millennial generation are less interested in sex than their mothers were. A new study shows that Millennial women wait longer before having sexual intercourse than any generation in the last 60 years.
Researchers cannot explain why these women are delaying sex, but they suspect that some factors may play a role. Millennials are notoriously for being a highly individualistic generation, but they are also known to postpone major adulthood milestones such as owning a home or getting married.
Lead author Prof. Jean Twenge who even wrote a book about the Me-generation aka the Millennials explained that this generation takes longer to grow into adulthood. Her study found that many people born in the 1980s and 1990s reported not having sex for years or at all.
But in Millennial women’s case, abstinence is even more widespread. About 5.4 Millennial women admitted they are abstinent. By contrast, just 2.3 women in their mothers’ generation also known as the Gen X said that.
Twenge’s team interpreted abstinence as being either virgin or not having sex since age 18. So, study authors factored out people who were abstinent for at most a year or lacked a sex partner at the moment of the survey.
The study also focused more on the Millennials in the 20 to 24 age bracket, and compared their sexual behavior to that of the people born in the 60s. In the Millennial group, 15 percent said they had no sexual partners, while in the Gen X group just 6 percent said that.
The latest study involved 27,000 participants.
The trend was recorded in underage groups as well. Last year, a survey found that nearly 60 percent of high school students were virgins. In 1991, only 46 percent acknowledged that.
However, the latest study found that Millennial women experienced the most significant shift in sexual behavior among all sex and age groups. Only 1.9 percent of Millennial men said they had no sexual partners, a slight change from the 1.7 percent in the Gen X.
Study authors believe that Millennial women have a higher ‘erotic plasticity’ or the ability to adapt their sexual behavior to social norms than men.
The findings were published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior.
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