It’s all apps and no action as the young choose Pokemon Go over romps… and that’s scandalous
Columnist says that more young millennials, aged 20-24, are virgins than any generation since those born in the 1920s
DESPITE scaremongering over sexting and wild tales of a hook-up culture through Tinder, it seems reports of millennials’ sex lives have been greatly exaggerated.
In reality, the generation born between 1980 and 2000 is hardly getting laid.
University halls and shared houses, once screaming with the sound of fornicating twentysomethings, now sing only with the pings of Pokémon Go.
A study has found more young millennials, aged 20-24, are virgins than any generation since those born in the 1920s.
A tragic 15 per cent of 20 to 24 year-olds haven’t had sex since they turned 18, compared with only six per cent of those born in the 1960s.
Meanwhile a sad survey showed 49 per cent of people in their twenties hadn’t had sex at all in the past year. And fewer than seven per cent of them rolled around regularly — between two and five times a week.
A generation who have invented more apps to help them hook up than their parents had sexual positions have somehow lost their libido.
This is the real scandal of our time. Not Kim Kardashian’s naked selfies or Miley Cyrus twerking on a hotdog, but that there are young people out there who aren’t getting some.
That, after decades of fighting for sexual liberation — for free love, Pride and the Pill. For an end to slut-shaming, an open-mindedness on sexual fluidity, and the right to buy Fifty Shades in WH Smiths — all young people are doing with their hard-won freedom is binge-watching Making A Murderer on Netflix.
Don’t these 22-year-olds realise this is the hottest they’ll ever look? Don’t they know that now is their chance to play the field before responsibility kicks in.
Before they’re stressed out by a partner, a mortgage, a job and kids. Before they’re lucky if they can get it up after a 90-hour week. Don’t they know they are missing out on so many great mistakes?
After all, what are your twenties for if not for sleeping with your best mate — and their ex.
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What is being 22 if it is not waking up in a bed you don’t recognise? Then standing in a shared kitchen making awkward small talk with the flatmates of someone whose name you don’t know.
It is heartbreaking to think a generation will grow up never knowing the joys of the Walk of Shame. Or what it’s like trying to find somewhere you can still buy condoms at 1am.
It is depressing to think that while baby boomers enjoyed sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll, millennials make do with Tweeting, clean eating and One Direction.
In a culture so anodyne that instead of the Sex Pistols, Bowie or Elvis the pelvis, millennials had the Jonas brothers competing to hold on to their virginity. It seems too obvious to blame this generation’s bed death on technology.
To suggest they have lost their sexual mojo to Snapchat. Or that they spend so long swiping right on Tinder that they never actually make it out on a date — let alone get the chance to invite someone back for coffee.
But there must be more to it than that. This new found frigidity seems to mark a whole attitude shift.
A generation who have invented more apps to help them hook up than their parents had sexual positions have somehow lost their libido
Now younger millennials embrace being dull. They are new young fogeys, so strait-laced that a quarter of young adults in Britain today are teetotal. Millennials smoke less and take fewer drugs.
They are a generation of Saffys to their parents’ Edina and Patsy from Ab Fab. The kind of kids who would rather spend Saturday nights posting pictures of their juice cleanse on Instagram than having a one-night stand. I despair!
In part, perhaps the reason is that this is a generation who have to work so hard they’ve forgotten how to have fun.
After all, just going to university leaves them £30k in debt, so they spend their summers working at Primark rather than chasing free love.
Whose rents are so high they are forced to move back in with their parents — a mood killer if there ever was one.
Mainly though, I think the cliché is true, it is the parents who are to blame.
Millennials did not reverse the sexual revolution by themselves. An older generation bullied them into it, by scaremongering about pornification, sensationalising sexting and panicking about pornography, while ignoring the facts.
That millennials are sensible — and you can’t get chlamydia by text.
When a melodramatic Vanity Fair piece ran, hang-wringing about the dangers of hook-up culture, researchers had already observed that millennials had fewer sexual partners than other generations.
Vanity Fair chose to ignore them.
But now the numbers are in. We have proof: Millennials aren’t doing it.
So if they ever want grandchildren, an older generation has got to stop policing young people’s sex lives, get out of their bedrooms and let them get on with it.
20-something with a disappointing sex life? Share your story.
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