When it comes to young people’s propensity to 
in their free time, the conversation tends to play into the Gen-Y-is-randy-AF genre of things. We’re sexualising kids too young say some; we’re consuming too much porn, too early, say others; Tinder’s ability to match us and get the ball rolling is so fire, we’re having more sex—and with more partners—than ever before, say the rest.
But when it comes down to it—despite reaping the glorious benefits of more sexual freedom and LGBTQI acceptance than any generation before us—how we’re approaching sex, talking about sex and how often we’re having sex may well be overwrought in the media – or so says writer Rachel Hills, in an excerpt from her book The Sex Myth: The Gap Between our Fantasies and Reality, published in Fairfax’s The Good Weekend today.
“Despite our long-standing preoccupation with sexuality, most people know surprisingly little about the sex lives of others,” Hills writes, “One result of this information gap is that, like I did, many people assume that others are having better sex, and more of it, than they actually are.”
Hills cites an American study of 24,000 students: while 80% of final-year students were not virgins, only about 5-10% were having sex on any given weekend. University life = catching 
all day, every day? Crossing off items on your NSFW bucket list by the second? Yeah, nah.
And in terms of our sex lives being less rampant than previous generations? Hills cites a survey from La Trobe University, where 25% of high school students surveyed in 2014 had had sex – compared to 33% of high school students in 1977. Furthering that, sexual assaults and teen pregnancies have also declined, while the use of condoms is up.
In the context of Australia—or specifically, YOU, readers—Pedestraian.tv’s 2013 readership survey results weren’t too far off others’ marks. 22% of you said you’d had sex in a public space in the last six months, and 25% of you had done the sex via a one night stand in the same period. If you were under the impression that 99% of your mates are getting laid with strangers on the regular, the stats are likely to paint a pretty different picture.
The stats support ones produced last year, from the Australian Study of Health and Relationships. Across people aged 16-69, the survey revealed the frequency Australians were having sex across all age groups had declined in the 11 years since their last survey: from 1.8 times per week in 2003 to 1.4 times per week in 2014.
But perhaps the conversation around sexuality and the regularity in which we’re getting boned is changing, says Hills, as pop culture is showing the unglamorous reality of our sex lives just as much as it hyper-sexualises the everyday.
For every Game Of Thrones, True Blood, movie starring Fassbender or gaming commercial featuring Kate Upton, pop culture gives us Broad City, and Abi reluctantly scheduling appointments with her vibrator; there is Amy Schumer and Mindy Kaling ceaselessly preaching body and sex positivity on the small screen; we also have Jane The Virgin breaking ground in the sexual choices of women, and films like The To Do List, among many others – skewering the myth of sexual dexterity by showing that what everyone’s supposedly “talking about” might not be what it’s cracked up to be, after all.
And we also have Lena Dunham‘s Girls, just as happy to highlight the sexually-liberated Marnies and Jessas of the world as it is to shed light on the Soshannas and Hannahs.
The reason for a decline in sexual intercourse remains unclear. The scourge of smartphones on our lives has been labelled as one factor, according to The Age this year, where author of Sex By Numbers and professor at Cambridge University David Spiegelhalter directly attributed the use of smartphones to our declining sex lives.
On BBC Radio 4′s Women’s Hour, Spiegelhalter said, “We used to have a very big separation between our public lives and our private lives – now they are so mixed up and integrated. People are checking their emails all the time, you do not have this same sort of quiet empty time that there used to be.”
Rachel Hills doesn’t attribute anything specific to the noted decline – she does, however, signal a shift that could take place amid our growing sexual freedom – rejecting a Barney Stinson approach of praising notches in your sexual history, and being welcomed by a society that accepts boning heaps as much as it does of not boning much, or at all.
“It is time to forge a new brand of sexual freedom, a freedom that incorporates the right not to do as much as the right to do,” Hills concludes, “A freedom in which our sexual choices and histories are not burdened with such excess of significance, in which there is no stigma attached to the gay, the transgendered of the sexually audacious, but in which equally no stigma attached to the asexual, the vanilla or the carnally prudent.”
P R E A C H.
Rachel Hills’ book is released on August 4.
Via Good Weekend.
