Young adult sexlessness skyrocketed in the last decade while male virginity doubled: study
The share of young adults who say they have not had sex in the last year has skyrocketed in the past decade, while the virginity rate for young adult males has more than doubled, according to a recent data analysis.
Examining findings from the National Survey of Family Growth, Institute for Family Studies Senior Fellow Lyman Stone observes that "all measures of sexlessness rose for both young adult males and females" between an initial survey wave conducted in 2013-2015 and the most recent wave conducted between 2022-2023.
Stone's analysis focuses on young adults between the ages of 22 and 34, most of whom have finished their education and are beginning their adult lives.
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While the dominant majority of young adults surveyed reported having had sex at some point in their lives, nearly a quarter (24%) of young adult males reported not having had sex in the last year, nearly triple the 9% who said the same in 2013-2015. About 13% of young adult females said they hadn't had sex in the last year, up from 8% in the initial survey wave.
Nearly one-third of young adult males and females said they hadn't had sex in the last three months — 35% for men and 31% for women. In 2013-2015, 20% of men and 21% of women reported not having sex in the prior three months.
About one out of 10 young males (10%) in this demographic reported being virgins in 2022-2023, up from 4% in 2013-2015. For females, the virginity rate increased from 5% to 7% during that time.
"We focus here on males and females ages 22-34 because this is the key window in which people tend to marry and start families," Stone wrote.
"In sum, for young adult males, sexlessness has roughly doubled across all measures over the last 10 years or so. For young adult females, it has risen by roughly 50 percent."
According to Stone, most of the increase in sexlessness in the past decade occurred between the 2017-2019 survey wave and the 2022-2023 wave, which could be due to a "methodological change in the NSFG," the impact of the COVID-10 pandemic or other unknown factors.
The NSFG's most recent wave included a new online component that wasn't available for previous waves, which "returned unusually high rates of reported sexlessness." The IFS study limited the results for the 2022-2023 to face-to-face interviews, most of which were conducted in 2023.
"The fact that sexlessness is rising faster for men than for women could seem to imply that a small group of men are having sex with many women. This isn't the case," Stone examined.
"[W]hat we can actually observe is not that a small number of men are having sex with more and more women, but simply that men and women are failing to couple off together: the major decline is in sex between people who only had sex with one person in the prior year, i.e. approximately monogamous sex."
"This is because one of the biggest drivers of declining sexual activity is the decline in marriage," he continued. "Married people have more sex, and for most young adults, marriage is occurring later or not at all. As a result, sex is declining."
A 2023 Pew Research study found that a record share of 40-year-old American adults say they have never been married (25%), an increase from 20% in 2010. IFS has found that as marriage rates plummet, more young people are delaying or avoiding dating altogether.
"Parenthood is viewed with much greater apprehension among young people than it once was," Daniel A. Cox, a senior fellow in polling and public opinion at the American Enterprise Institute, wrote in a 2023 IFS report. "Young women express growing reservations about starting families, and many believe marriage benefits them less than it does men."
Observing data from 2018, Charles Fain Lehman, a fellow at the Manhattan Institute and former staff writer at the Washington Free Beacon, noted that there are "fewer Americans married, and more Americans single, than at any point in at least the past 140 years."
In addition to sexlessness among young adults, other analyses of NSFG data in recent years have found that fewer teens are having sex.
"Specifically, between 2002 and the period 2015–2019, the percentage of teen boys (15–19) who ever had sexual intercourse fell from 45.7 percent to 38.7 percent. During the same period, the percentage of teen girls (15–19) who ever had sexual intercourse fell from 45.5 percent to 40.5 percent," Michael New, senior associate scholar at the pro-life Charlotte Lozier Institute, wrote in an op-ed for National Review.
New added that teenage girls who report having ever had sexual intercourse has dropped by 10 percentage points since 1988, while the share of men who said the same fell by 21% since 1988.
