That’d essentially be me.
Had girlfriends in high school, had sex with them a few times. By the time I turned 18 I figured out that I’m bi with a preference for men.
I haven’t had sex with a woman since I was a teenager. But I would if it were as easy and straightforward as having sex with men.
It’s a paradox for the corporations. The more prosperous a society gets overall, the fewer children people have. That’s more true in an aggressively capitalist place like the U.S. that doesn’t provide much state social support for parents. It’s just more expensive to bring up a middle-class child than it is to bring up one born into (often multi-generational) poverty.
The only thing that pushes back against that phenomenon are religious fundamentalists (think Quiverfull, Mormons, ultramontane Catholics, Orthodox Jews) but there aren’t enough of them in the U.S. to “solve” the paradox for the corps. White supremacists, on the other hand, could become a group the corporations start mining to a greater degree.
I like to think I stand as an exemplar in that regard for the younger people in my life. Never married, no kids, but they definitely see me as a happy, well-adjusted grownup and – more importantly – they see their parents treating me that way. As you say, there are factors specific to my social circles, but in general I see American culture making more room for different ways of being an adult.
True that. A large part of that is that women in the patriarchy never have a chance to gain the outsized sense of entitlement that men do.
I’d like to know how much of this effect is just young men being more honest in surveys. I was no Casanova when I was that age, but I was also no virgin. I suspect I fell roughly in the middle of the curve for sexual activity, and that definitely included a couple of sexless years (and others that were more… sexy). And the spread between 18 and 30 is really immense in terms of maturity and sexuality.
My cognitive bias wants to say that the result of the study is further evidence of social alienation in our culture, but I am more inclined to think it is a combination of more truth and just a more nuanced picture than ‘people between 18-30’ really covers. Also, the damn pandemic.
I started dating my husband in 2007,and I’m so grateful I was done with dating before apps became involved. If my choices were go on Tinder or be a cat lady, I’d definitely go with cat lady.
The article must have corrected the text on their graphs since the boingboing summary with the copy of hte graph - the text is part of the jpeg, not an editable caption above it.
And of course with rising student debt, and the crapification of the job market, establishing themselves has taken longer than it used to. Of course effective birth control has existed for decades, so the link between sex, marriage and children is not as strong as it was in the first half of the 20th century, before the “sexual revolution.”
Ah…good. I’ve done it right. 
Seems also like it’s a continuation of a trend that only just recently is starting to get more numbers behind it as more of the bulk millennial and post-whatever generations reach the target age range. Relationships are hard and take time from school, work, and the hope of stable income.
A lot of Gen X and Millennial experience has been seeing a very real decline in what one could expect to provide for one’s children and often also involves sifting through the misery created by ill-prepared if well-intentioned boomer parents of which there are plenty. Younger people will have watched this play out and likely are making choices to avoid the mistakes they’ve seen other adults make.
For those who want a family and even find a willing partner it is precarious, dangerous, prohibitively expensive, and should you have pregnancy troubles it might well, bankrupt you, kill you outright, or land you (or your partner) in prison. So for singles who might want that kind of life at all it probably seems better to put it off and hope for better times.
When I was a teen in the 00s the pressure to lie about not being a virgin past middle school was immense, it was always directly tied to masculinity in a way where you were not allowed to be interested in anything else as a teen boy without being accused of being queer which was also forbidden to talk about. I imagine the openness of addressing some of these issues has contributed to the rise in admitting you are a virgin as a male, and I question how real the numbers were before.
I would[n’t] be too, if I had my stuff with me.
Grindr was released in 2009. Could be another correlation since this study only counted sex as PiV.
As a guy who grew up in the 90s and 2000s, this can’t be overstated.
There is most likely an app for cat ladies now too. You can’t escape. 
I’m a gen-xer, and I can remember the boys in my 7th grade class insulting each other by calling them virgins. This would have been back in the 80’s. So that social “stigma” has been around for a long time.
Seconded (thirded?). At one of the high schools I went to it was enough to simply be really interested in video games to have those accusations thrown around. The second one was quite a bit less aggressive about it (although it definitely still existed).
I honestly would like to see if there is a causation there. But it seems like a rather large number of people either coming out as gay, or realizing they are bi and foregoing straight sex for gay sex. I mean, if so, more power to them, but that seems like too big of a huge swing in changes in sexual behavior in such a short span of time. It is possible, but I’d like to see some data back it up.
Tean in the 90s - and no one would have believed me if I had lied. Liking bright colors in high school didn’t help my labeling as gay. I guess being a scrawny nerd I had no overt masculinity to defend. 
Oh well. It got better.
Hasn’t it been a right-wing position for generations that people should abstain from sex before marriage? Surely they should take this as good news, right?
Oh, they were only talking about women. Carry on.
Thank you for this- I was disappointed (not in BoingBoing) that it took 42 posts to see this pointed out.
This data was self-reported. Leaving aside that almost all self-reported data is garbage, this survey may just as well be saying more about how perceptions of the acceptance of male virginity are changing. Bros don’t have to feel like they have to lie about “conquests” as much any more, they are more honest on a survey like this.
I’ve only ever heard the phrase, “mating outside of mating season” in science fiction, as a way of insulting someone. But it’s not hard to look around at what’s going on in the world, and decide that it’s a bad time to be making babies.
And if sex for procreation is off the menu, recreational sex is likewise going to change as well. And not for the better.
So yeah, that list of things you mention is going to kill the mood somewhat. And if a possible sex partner is still super horny despite all those things being a threat, they might not be the best choice of partner in the post-apocolyptic sexual landscape…
