In the US, the portion of young men between the ages of 18 to 34 who report having at least one partner has fallen substantially in recent years (sorry for the small image size):
Charts similar to the one above have prompted talk of a sex recession. Yet worries that Millennials are killing sex (as well as napkins, diamonds, and casual dining) may be premature. This data comes from the GSS, which samples a few hundred people between the ages of 18 and 34. The 95 percent confidence intervals around these estimates, shown by the whisker bars on the chart, are very large. For example, the margin of error on the 2018 estimate for men (77.5% with at least one partner) is 7.5 percentage points.
In my submission to the annual Macleans Charts to Watch compilation here I compare the GSS numbers to those obtained from the much larger Canadian Community Health Survey. I find a smaller, but similar, downwards trend in young men's sexual activity rates north of the border. With the larger sample, I could pinpoint the downturn more precisely: it is concentrated among 20 to 24 year olds.
It does seem that these numbers are picking up something real. The question is, what?
You are free to leave your favourite theory in the comments. Here's mine: cohort size matters. Let's look at a similar chart calculated for 35 to 49 year olds - who are doing just fine, from a partnering point of view:
Here is comparable data for 50 to 64 year olds, where there is perhaps a slight downwards trend, and a big gap between male and female sexual activity rates:
If substantially more men between 50 and 64 are sexually active than women, who are these middle-aged men having sex with? It could be that men overstate their number of sexual partners while women understate theirs - but over/understating should affect the numbers for all age groups, not just the 50 to 64 year olds. Some men are having sex with each other - but some women are too, so this cannot explain the male-female divergence either.
The most likely scenario is that a number of men in their 50s and early 60s are having sex with younger women, that is women in their late 30s and 40s. What do men 35 to 49 do in response? They too have sex with younger women, raising female sexual activity rates in the 18 to 34 year old range. What about men in the 18 to 34 year old range? They can date younger women too - yet there are hard limits on this dating-younger-women strategy. Consequently, a number of the youngest men find themselves without partners.
Older men have desired younger women for millennia. What is historically unprecedented, however, is number of older men relative to the number of younger women. Here is the US population pyramid for 2018, grabbed from here:
Men over 50 constitute a greater portion of the US population today than at any other point in human history. The number of young women, relative to the number of older men, is steadily shrinking.
This is, I believe, one reason why an increasing portion of young adult men are without sexual partners: cohort size matters. To the extent that women, on average, partner with men slightly older than themselves, men born before, or at the front end of, a baby boom have a wide range of possible partners. Conversely, men born at the end of, or just after, a baby boom have relatively few. The reverse is true for women. The hard times facing men born in the mid to late 1990s is just another case in point.
Note: Thanks to Derek Mikola for suggesting the title for this blog. The .do file used to generate these charts can be downloaded here: Download GSS sex activity do file They were generated with Daniel Bischof's colorblind graph schemes: https://danbischof.com/2015/02/04/stata-figure-schemes/
Isn't this consistent with the "half your age plus 7" rule for dating ranges for me? General following of this rule would increase the cohort size effect, I think.
Posted by: Linda Welling | December 05, 2019 at 03:33 PM
Linda, absolutely! I didn't particularly want to go there, but I was thinking of that rule as I was writing this. So 46 year old men can look for partners as young as 30, 30 year old men look for partners as young as 22, etc. US data has precise ages rather than age categories (it is unbelievably easy to work with!) so it would be quite easy to work out the size of the potential partnership pool using the American Community Survey, say (did I say how easy US data is to work with? That's the subject of another blog post!).
Posted by: Frances Woolley | December 05, 2019 at 04:34 PM
Were there similar but reversed outcomes after WWI and WWII?
Posted by: Linda Welling | December 06, 2019 at 06:29 PM
Linda, I have an idea for how I might be able to get at that, but it'll involve having a day or so to nerd out with data and graphics. CCHS/GSS doesn't go back that far. Instead, I'm thinking of using Census data to figure out what's happened to distribution of the husband/wife age gap. Could also look at the portion married, too - that would be an interesting indicator. (Though since I'd have to learn the basics of R, ggplot and gganimate to do this, it might be a week or so of nerding out. But it would be totally worth it!)
Posted by: Frances Woolley | December 07, 2019 at 04:32 PM
The USA got more conservative under W and Trump. If you look at their Presidential candidates, it is all about the rent income you get with age. Here, the Conservatives lowered the age of consent. When I was in Windsor, I walked right by a High School on my favourite shopping/river walk of friendly women/girls I would've otherwise talked to, the last time I had my own place.
In the late 90's, you could buy a house in Winnipeg for $10000 and rent was as cheap as $270/month in 2000 or one week of pay. The last cheap rent I had was 2011; it is why Nicholson knows non-heteros generally take the hateful easy way out in high rent cities like SF, Vancouver, NYC, Toronto; it is the opposite of the Scottish Enlightenment where you get rent for being ethical and a good soldier and act sane. During the Cold War, you believed in things other than income in the USA. The effects are fading as Al Qaeda isn't an existential risk (getting lazy is the reference, it is not excellence to work but looking for a good partner is requiring practise) like USSR was.
There is more entertainment. The main issue is the housing stock is in smaller communities and immigrants like to go to 3 cities in Canada.
Posted by: lateral Mimas | January 02, 2020 at 10:55 PM
...to give an example: in 1999, I would've had my own place and learned autoCAD enough for a middle class job leading to a portfolio with commodities in it. In 2010, I would rent a room and consider school leading to an animation job in 4 years, with money to date efficiently. In 2020, I've spent 2 hours trying to remember how to make a simple block on a streaming game engine. I cant afford bus fare let alone the top of the line software I bought in 1997. Dating is not an issue when people act as if this is some sort of education how the universe should not be run.
Posted by: lateral Mimas | January 02, 2020 at 11:16 PM