Bloomberg View.
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. And when they do hook up, in most cases they have the kind of sex that Bill Clinton memorably refused to recognize as such: according to a recent study by Arielle Kuperberg of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, only a minority of U.S. college undergraduates say they had penetrative sex during their most recent hook-up.
It's tempting to see this as harmless. After all, an early sexual initiation increases the risk of teen pregnancies (which are quickly becoming less common) and abortions, and it may lead to riskier and less happy sex lives later on as well as high risk of sexually transmitted diseases. Let kids study and avoid cumbersome, disruptive relationships — the reasons most often cited by millennials when they are asked about their low sexual activity levels — until the reproductive urge finally catches up with them at a more mature age.
It's also nice that young women are reportedly happier with their early sexual encounters: The continued prominence of alcohol-induced sexual encounters and date rape on college campuses notwithstanding, there's less unreported sexual violence and reluctant acquiescence because women are more confident than ever before — and because porn is an easy way for young men to channel those fantasies. There's also less stigma attached to having premarital sex.
The growing acceptance of sex under any circumstances and in any form is a rather paradoxical companion to the lower sexual activity, Twenge points out in her paper. Perhaps, she suggests, this is evidence of a "rising individualism wherein individuals hold permissive attitudes about a variety of behaviors while also feeling less pressure to conform in their own behavior." That sounds healthy, too — but the formation of families has long been a matter of social norm as well as individual choice. In a 1972 paper, Gudmund Hernes described the "social pressure to marry" as self-evident: "We all know this pressure increases with the increase in the percent of a cohort already married."
Bergen's paper makes for slightly comical reading today: It's rife with 20th-century stereotypes about singles being invited to parties less often as they get older because they can be a threat to existing couples, or about a popular culture that describes a woman as a "spinster or even reject" unless she marries by a certain age. Millennials' rejection of this kind of social conformity is the current mainstream, but it's too early to say whether the disappearance of the "social pressure to marry" will be good for birth rates. Even now, they are higher in countries with traditional, collectivist cultures, where the pressure hasn't disappeared.
The current sexual culture also has different rejection mechanisms that are perhaps more cruel than the old-school ones. Twenge wrote:
