Remember that episode of Sex And The City when Anthony asks Charlotte when she last had sex, she pauses and he screeches, ‘If you have to think, it’s been too long’? Well, by his standards, it’s definitely been too long. It looks like we might be going through a bit of a sex drought.
The National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles asked 1,500 willing participants in the UK about their sex lives in face-to-face interviews and self-completed questionnaires for the more awks questions. One of those awks questions was ‘have you had any sex in the past four weeks?’ and you might be pretty surprised by the results.
Despite every media outlet, television programme and app developer in the world telling us that we’re the ‘hook-up generation’ and defined by our ‘devil-may-care’ attitude to casual sex, apparently a sizeable proportion of us aren’t actually getting any.
one in five girls aged 25-34 hasn't had any sex in the last month
According to the study, one in five girls aged 25-34 hasn't had any sex in the last month, with that number jumping to a sizeable 37% for 16-24s. The men in those age groups are faring slightly better in the 16-24 age bracket – with 42% claiming to have got lucky in the last month – but come in about the same as the girls in the 25-34 category at 19.5%.
The slight disparity in numbers between girls and guys could be explained by a number of different things. Either gay men under 25 outnumber gay women under 25 and they have more sex, a few different guys are all at it with the same girl, or men under 25 are more likely to exaggerate how much sex they’re having while girls under 25 are more likely to underestimate how much action they’re getting. I’ll leave that one with you to ponder.
But what we can be sure of is that everyone else is probably having less sex than you think they are. Which, on the one hand is a bit of a Debbie Downer but on the other, might make you feel better about spending your Saturday night curled up with Breaking Bad instead of screwing your brains out. Every cloud…
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.