Millennials Might Not Be the Hookup Generation After All, Says Study
There's been a lot of hand-wringing among a certain faction of the older set about the overly liberal sexual proclivities of the next generation. (I think there has, at least - I feel like I saw a 60 Minutes segment about "sexting" on an airplane once. Hi, I'm old.)
By Sam Lansky
And yet! A new study out of the University of Portland suggests that sexual behavior among college students has remained largely consistent over the last 25 years, with recent college students of the so-called hookup era no more likely to have engaged in "frequent sex or more sexual partners during the past year or more sexual partners since turning 18 than undergraduates from the earlier era." Findings are to be presented in full at the 108th Annual Meeting of the American Sociological Association, which basically goes down like the movie Caligula because age ain't nothin' but a number - at the end of the day, we all freaks. Am I right or am I right?
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Study co-author and sociology professor Martin Monto explained: "Recent research and popular media reports have described intimate relationships among contemporary college students as characterized by a new and pervasive hookup culture in which students regularly have sex with no strings attached... This implies that the college campus has become a more sexualized environment and that undergraduates are having more sex than in the past. We were surprised to find this is not the case."
If anything, the first generation sampled, from 1988-1996, reported having sex more frequently with more partners (albeit by a small margin); the only metric in which the "hookup generation" was markedly different was that they were likelier to describe a sexual partner as a casual date or pickup and less likely to have a spouse or regular partner.
In short? As Monto explained: There hasn't been any "significant liberalization of attitudes towards sex" and "sexual behavior among college students has remained fairly consistent over the past 25 years." Might be time for the conversation about how millennials are all instant-gratification slores addicted to indiscriminate sex and Snapchat to shift a little bit. And hey - it's still good exercise.
Read more at Cosmopolitan.com!
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