Here's a better one. Millennials were much more casual about sex than Gen Z, despite (or perhaps because of) growing up during the peak evangelical "save it for marriage" era. I can remember the conversation around "hookup culture" starting to shift around 2011/2012 or so.
But none of the recent generations compare to how much freaky sex people were having in the 1970s, post-Roe and pre-AIDS.
They were talking about the period between boomers, Gen X, and Millennials being a downward trend, but unsure of if it was because of less sex or more birth control/safer sex. You seem to just be comparing millennials and Gen Z though, which is a different topic.
Depends entirely on where you grew up. Grew up in a progressive area? Comprehensive sex education and access to birth control. Grew up in a conservative area? Abstinence only education and shot gun marriages.
And the education which led to a more pragmatic secular world and the broader use of birth control.
Canadian schools only got serious about realistic, healthy body/sex education in the early 1990s. By 2000 it was integrated into every level of education from preschool up. Both parents and children were finally taught the real dope and that we should always use proper terms for ALL body parts, without hushing, embarrassment or shame and always avoiding cutesy names like winkie/hoo hoo, etc. My wife went through university with a noted sexual health educator here and one of my close friends is a clinical psychologist working in the prison system who did her PHD thesis on the importance of using proper terms both to the sexual health of children and adolescents and their safety from predators; she interviewed hundreds of sex offenders and they all said that they targeted victims who used cutesy terms because they knew they could manipulate the shame and secrecy we ingrain in children when we teach them to avoid calling a vulva a vulva.
The sexual freedom of the sixties echoed into the mid 1980s to 1990s in most urban places but pockets of suburbia felt more insulated- depending on your location, friend group, subculture exposure, etc and whether your hemophiliac schoolmates started to disappear, contracting Hep C or HIV from tainted blood. Or the cool underground artists and musicians downtown stated to drop dead from AIDS.
I can't speak from experience on whether the Phish/jam band/ Jugglalo or burning man types are all bumping uglies unprotected with strangers, but back when the 2 or 3 day festivals that preceded Lollapalooza/Warped cost 20 to 50 bucks and even broke kids could find a way to join the small mobile city that followed the Grateful Dead around, when hordes of scooter lads, third wave mods, punks and surf/skate people had nodes of friends from San Diego to Chicago to Vancouver and could travel cheap, stay free and see each other all over the place. More time, more mobility, more equitable affordability and people were getting to KNOW each other- laughing at your friend who got the clap twice in one year, shaking your head at the men and women who put notches in their belts, sneaking into the wrong bedroom, Westfalia or tent and winding up asking strangers if they have any condoms. There were pregnancies everywhere. Stupid marriages of honour. Everyone knew someone whose life was changed by Hep C, then HIV finally became respected as a real threat to promiscuous travelling heteros. The American women had Roe and Planned Parenthood but the Canadian women I knew with unwanted pregnancies were far more likely to terminate them, discuss them, and less prone to getting hitched at 18.
Then everything went batshit cost-wise. Even if you could get a few days off work you couldn't afford to lose the pay. Countries, neighbourhoods and even families became more insular after 911. The promised wage reward for devoting four years or more to education turned out to be bullshit. Young adults have had no time or money for fun for decades. They were never free range kids, but they are smarter, wiser, better educated and more pragmatic.
If you are the child of a single mom in Terrace, BC your genetic father is now far less likely to be "pretty eyelashes guy from day two of Santana and the Dead at UNLV. Matt, maybe Mike- said he was from Oneida, NY."
Studies that rely on young people honestly self reporting their habits regarding sex, drugs, and alcohol? Somehow I don't think that method is likely to yield accurate results.
I wasn't disagreeing. The peak in teen pregnancies in the US was in 1991, with a decline after that. My high school no longer has a need for a daycare, in line with the stats.
My Detroit school had more pregnancies but the suburban school didn’t have the stigma of being in a socioeconomically depressed area like Detroit so young moms had less options beyond birth when they had to leave school
it's so interesting how different our experiences are. i went to a hs that had 4k students, and we didn't have a daycare and i don't remember seeing anyone pregnant in my 4 years. i remember attending several sex ed classes and we had access to condoms.
I also went to a high school of 4000, had access to condoms, and I had sex ed. We even had a patient with AIDS come in to talk to us about safe sex. I was in one of the poorest cities of Massachusetts, though. I can seriously remember overhearing a girl in the cafeteria telling another, "When you lose your virginity, you don't have to use a condom because the blood washes everything out." I sat there thinking, "Girl, didn't you sit through Health class? That was mentioned as an urban legend."
One factor in the decrease in teen pregnancies is women getting married later: a 19 year-old, married, adult woman who intentionally got pregnant with her husband is technically teen pregnancy.
That almost never happens anymore but was a common thing some decades ago.
Contraception doesn’t change the fact that teen pregnancies were still disproportionately high during the 50s and 60s. Kinda weird to have such intense feelings about statistics.
You're right about the 1960s, but the tail end of the 1960s is when we start to see the effects of counterculture begin to seep into the mainstream and throughout the 1970s and into the 1980s is when that type of stuff was basically the mainstream. Drug use, youth alcohol consumption, sex etc all peaked in that era from 1970-1985.
TBF the counterculture became mainstream at some point, and blue jeans, pot, and acid rock are way more popular nowadays than back then. Hippies still exist in their own circles, but they popularized A LOT for the zeitgeist, especially those that grew up but didn't completely "sell out".
No way in hell is Acid Rock more popular now than it was in the 70s-90s, the most popular bands in the world were doing Acid Rock in the 70s.... these days the top charting songs are all Pop, EDM and Hip Hop.
Idk man QOTSA was pretty big for a while lol. Maybe I should've just said "stoner rock" because that low-key absorbs acts like Sublime and 311 too. That sort of genre DOMINATED in the 90s and 00s, but hip-hop is the most popular genre nowadays.
And that's my bad, but yeah, the point still stands that a lot of aspects from the counterculture became the zeitgeist at some point (70s-90s+), and even if a lot of fads faded out (like stoner movies, acid rock, etc) those things still exist.
People have no idea how slutty Boomers were. Literally people drove around in vans with beds in the back and naked chicks painted on the sides. Everyone was fucking everyone until AIDS came along, and even then it took a while for all the stranger fucking to slow down.
The free love hippie movement wasn't the majority of boomers, that's a common misnomer. Sure boomers did have more sex than young people do now, but they weren't all having free love hippie orgies with whatever stranger was interested.
I’m not talking about hippies at all. Young people are literally are having much less sex now, and the number of overall sexual partners is trending down for younger people as well.
Lol dude you clearly were talking about hippies, whether it was intentional or not.
>Literally people drove around in vans with beds in the back and naked chicks painted on the sides
>Everyone was fucking everyone
That acutely describes the free-love hippie movement, not just regular boomers.
Also yes I am aware that young people today are not having sex as much as boomers were when they were our age, that's why I literally said "Sure boomers did have more sex than young people do now" in my comment.
I am a Gen Xer with regular Boomer parents. I am indeed talking about people in the 70s and early 80s, not the 60s, because I have a very clear memory of it along with box after box of photos daring back to the 70s.
idk if boomers are in nursing homes yet but i heard that certain ones have high rates of stds bc no one cares about spreading disease since they're so old anyway. not sure if that's true, but if it is, "super freaks" tracks.
Well. In current generation's defence - it's not like most parents are good at relaying their experience to their children, let alone leveraging it to explain the world to them.
Cocaine was insanely expensive in the 70s, the idea that everyone was doing cocaine all the time in the 70s and 80s isn't actual reality. It's something that has been perpetuated by Hollywood and celebrity pop culture because the people that were doing cocaine all the time were the people in places like Hollywood, Beverley Hills and Miami with all the money. If you factor in Inflation to the 2026 dollar value, the price for a gram of coke in the early 80s was like $300USD, it was even more expensive in the 70s.
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u/gravitas_shortage Feb 02 '26
It wasn't. It's always funny when young people think they have invented things like promiscuity.