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In this episode of Everything Should Be Better , Tristin Hopper tackles the sex lives of millennials — and why they are having less sex than any other generation in human history.

Watch the video and read the transcript below.

Why Millennials aren’t having sex

The numbers are in, and it’s official: The Millennial generation, my generation, are having less sex than any other cohort of homo sapiens that has ever lived. Go all the way back to primordial man, and chances are good you’ll find people who are hooking up with greater frequency.

According to research published in the Archives of Sexual Behaviour, Millennials are having less sex with few people than their parents did at the same age. A recent British study found that one in eight 26-year-olds is still a virgin. One third of American men aged 18 to 29 didn’t have sex once in all of 2018. And the sexlessness is even seeping into the generation coming after the Millennials: Nearly 60 per cent of modern teenagers are staying virgins until after they graduate, a complete reversal of the 1990s, when a majority of teenagers had had sex by prom night.

So what’s happening? We live in one of the most sexually liberated eras ever, and the young, nubile people best able to take advantage of it are just … playing video games?

Well, there’s a few reasons for this.

MILLENNNIALS AREN’T GETTING MARRIED

Say what you will about sex after marriage, but getting married does indeed pack you into a house with someone who will probably get bored and have sex with you once in a while. Unless you’re able to cultivate a Sex and the City level of promiscuity, you’re not going to be able to top the sex frequency of someone who sleeps next to a sexing partner every single night. Millennials are not only waiting way longer to get married, but they’re doing it at way lower rates. In the U.S., up to 25 per cent of Millennials are on track to never get married, compared to just 9 per cent of early Baby Boomers.

TOO MANY MILLENNIALS ARE LIVING WITH THEIR PARENTS

It’s not a stereotype: A disproportionate number of Millennials are indeed living with their parents. According to U.S. data, 15 per cent of 25 to 35-year-old are living with their folks, nearly double the rate of early Baby Boomers. it’s hard to get your bone on when you’re sharing a kitchen with your elderly parents.

DATING APPS

For some, the advent of “swipe-right” dating apps have ushered in an avalanche of constant banging. But the vast majority of us aren’t all that pretty, so we need to trick people into sleeping with us with other attributes like confidence, money or sense of humour. Unfortunately, none of those things show up in a Tinder photo, so no banging for you. At least, this is the theory of Jean Twenge, who has researched Millennial sex habits. Said Twenge, “(dating apps) end up putting a lot of importance on physical appearance, and that, I think, is leaving out a large section of the population.”

CONSTANT PORN EVERYWHERE

Now I’m not going to get all Moralist Mindy on you here, but come on: Obviously the constant porn everywhere is having an effect on real-world sex lives. Every Millennial has spent their entire dating lives in a world where bottomless free pornography was just a few clicks away. And yeah, if you’re mainlining your eerily specific fetish every day, it might be reducing your motivation to go out and find some real sex, which unlike pornography is often sticky, poorly lit and disappointing.

There’s no HARD evidence yet that porn is contributing to celibacy, but consider this fact: Urology clinics around the world are increasingly encountering men in their 20s with erectile dysfunction, with some of them reporting that they can no longer be aroused by anything other than porn.

MILLENNIALS ARE SUPER UPTIGHT

Last reason Millennials aren’t having any sex: They’re all super uptight. That’s right: I said it. While Generation X was making out to Thriller, we’re too busy lecturing someone on Twitter about how The Little Mermaid is problematic.

And yeah, being a constantly outraged scold will definitely have an effect on your sex life. Recent survey data from the online dating site OkCupid found that when it comes to finding romantic partners, Millennials are increasingly prioritizing political affiliation over good sex. Among Millennial women, fully 42 per cent considered politics more important than sex, a spike of 50 per cent from only two years before.

So yes, if your generation is willing to forego mind-blowing sex just because your partner voted for the wrong party, you might have a problem.

Copyright Postmedia Network Inc., 2019

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