Gasp! Today’s College Kids Aren’t Having More Sex

Martin Monto at the University of Portland, Oregon, and sociology graduate Anna Carey have looked over the numbers and concluded that college kids today aren’t getting any more sex than college kids in previous decades. This is absolutely shocking. Observe the hand-wringing over “hookup culture” from writer Tom Wolfe:

“Hooking up” was a term known in the year 2000 to almost every American child over the age of nine, but to only a relatively small percentage of their parents, who, even if they heard it, thought it was being used in the old sense of “meeting” someone. Among the children, hooking up was always a sexual experience, but the nature and extent of what they did could vary widely. Back in the twentieth century, American girls had used baseball terminology. “First base” referred to embracing and kissing; “second base” referred to groping and fondling and deep, or “French,” kissing, commonly known as “heavy petting”; “third base” referred to fellatio, usually known in polite conversation by the ambiguous term “oral sex”; and “home plate” meant conception-mode intercourse, known familiarly as “going all the way.” In the year 2000, in the era of hooking up, “first base” meant deep kissing (“tonsil hockey”), groping, and fondling; “second base” meant oral sex; “third base” meant going all the way; and “home plate” meant learning each other’s names.

Getting to home plate was relatively rare, however. The typical Filofax entry in the year 2000 by a girl who had hooked up the night before would be: “Boy with black Wu-Tang T-shirt and cargo pants: O, A, 6.” Or “Stupid cock diesel” — slang for a boy who was muscular from lifting weights — “who kept saying, ‘This is a cool deal’: TTC, 3.” The letters referred to the sexual acts performed (e.g., TTC for “that thing with the cup”), and the Arabic number indicated the degree of satisfaction on a scale of 1 to 10.

In the year 2000, girls used “score” as an active verb indicating sexual conquest, as in: “The whole thing was like very sketchy, but I scored that diesel who said he was gonna go home and caff up [drink coffee in order to stay awake and study] for the psych test.” In the twentieth century, only boys had used “score” in that fashion, as in: “I finally scored with Susan last night.” That girls were using such a locution points up one of the ironies of the relations between the sexes in the year 2000. The continuing vogue of feminism had made sexual life easier, even insouciant, for men. Women had been persuaded that they should be just as active as men when it came to sexual advances. Men were only too happy to accede to the new order, since it absolved them of all sense of responsibility, let alone chivalry.

Try to ignore the fact that part of the whinging has to do with how terrible it is that women are suddenly doing what men have always done, that feminism seems to have destroyed male responsibility, which is conflated with chivalry, etc., and focus on the worry over these little perverts, running through high school like randy monsters and exploding into college campuses to run on every base except the home plate. This has more or less become the general consensus in society: today’s kids are oversexed! But are they really?

Looking over data from the long-running, nationally-representative General Social Survey, Monto and Carey examined two periods: 1988 to 1996 and 2002 to 2010. The responses used in their analysis involved 1,829 individuals between 18 and 25 years of age who had completed at least one year of college.

“Overall, our results provide no evidence there has been a sea change in the sexual behavior of college students or that there has been a liberalization of attitudes toward sexuality,” they wrote in their paper. Monto told NBC that what seems to have changed is the narrative surrounding people’s college years. He referenced the term “hooking up,” as being partially culpable for the belief that college-aged kids are over-sexed.

“Recent research and popular media reports have described intimate relationships among contemporary college students as characterized by a new and pervasive hookup culture in which students regularly have sex with no strings attached,” Monto said. “This implies that the college campus has become a more sexualized environment and that undergraduates are having more sex than in the past. […] We found that college students from the contemporary or ‘hookup era’ did not report having more frequent sex or more sexual partners during the past year or more sexual partners since turning 18 than undergraduates from the earlier era.”

Among individuals from the 1988 to 1996 range, 65.2 percent reported having sex weekly or more often in the previous 12 months. The percentage of individuals in the “hookup era” group reporting having sex weekly or more often was a little lower, at 59.3 percent. There was hardly any change in number of sexual partners reported: 31.9 of individuals in the yesteryear group reported having more than one sexual partner in the past year compared to 31.6 percent among “hookup era” individuals. Researchers discovered that 51.7 percent of yesteryear’s students had more than two sexual partners before turning 18, while 50.5 percent of “hookup era” students did.

“Hookup era” students don’t appear to be significantly more liberal, either: they are not any more okay with sex between 14 to 16-year-olds, infidelity, or premarital sex than the students of yesteryear. They were found to be more accepting of homosexuality, however. Other significant differences are how much more likely “hookup era” students were to report sex had occurred with a casual partner instead of within a long-term relationship: 44.4 percent “hookup era” students reported casual sex compared to 34.5 percent of yesteryear’s students. Also, 68.6 percent “hookup era” students reported sex within a “friends with benefits” relationship in the past year, compared to 55.7 percent of yesteryear’s students. Today’s college students are less likely to report having a spouse of regular sexual partner (77.1 percent fessed up among “hookup era” students versus 84.5 percent among students of yesteryear).

Monto belies that it’s not “hookup” culture that is driving behavior, but rather the fact that we are marrying later in our lives.

“This means the idea of waiting until marriage to begin sexual behavior is a less tenable narrative,” Monto said. “Courtship and relationship practices are changing, and the implications of these changes present a new unique set of challenges, but this study demonstrates that we are not in the midst of a new era of no rules attached sexuality. In fact, we found that, overall, sexual behavior among college students has remained fairly consistent over the past 25 years.”

Header image by Mark Hooper.