You really should take some time off from porn, and maybe look into getting it on with your partner. Don’t click that other window and pretend like that’s not what you were doing. We know better. And we also know that Americans in general are having less sex than they were back in the olden days of the early 2000s, according to a new batch of (hopefully non-porn-inspired research).
The new study, which appeared in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, took a gander at the data collected by the General Social Survey, a sexual behavior report that has been taken from a sample of Americans across the country since 1989. What they found was that from 2010 to 2014, Americans that were living together or married had sex 16 fewer times per year than in 2000–2004.
Could it be caused by the proliferation of more fap-worthy sites? Perhaps, but researchers aren’t quite sure what to put the blame on.
“These data show a major reversal from previous decades in terms of marriage and sex,” said Jean M. Twenge, Ph.D., the lead author on the study and professor of psychology at San Diego State University. “In the 1990s, married people had sex more times per year than never-married people, but by the mid-2000s that reversed, with the never-married having more sex.”
And don’t think that the hook-up happy Millennials are doing it more often. The study found that they are actually having less sex than their parents or grandparents did at the same age, which Twenge attributes partially to the fact that they have fewer steady partners, leading to fewer chances to get it on. Age also played a significant role across the years, with 20-year-olds having sex more than 80 times per year on average, and that declines to about 60 rolls in the hay by the time we are 45. Once we get to retirement age at 65 that number drops to a depressing 20 times a year.
But the one bright spot on the sheet was for those people over 70—they had an average of 11 bouts of sex during the year, up from about 10 times in 1989.
Sex
