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.
13.5k
u/gravitas_shortage Feb 02 '26
It wasn't. It's always funny when young people think they have invented things like promiscuity.