Why College Students Are Having Less Sex

When asked to estimate how many sexual partners their peers had had during the past schoolyear, college students guessed three times the number of partners they'd had. "Even people involved in extreme behavior think their friends are more extreme," says Kathleen Bogle, author of "Hooking Up: Sex, Dating, and Relationships on Campus." The study also found that for male students, the number of sexual partners in the previous year has dropped, from 2.1 in 2000 to 1.6 in 2006. According to a Centers for Disease Control survey, the number of ninth- to 12th-grade students who have had sex dropped almost 10 percent, to fewer than half of respondents, between 1991 and 2005. And a 2001 study found that 39 percent of freshman college women were virgins, and 31 percent of those women still hadn't had sex by senior year. In 2006, nearly half of Harvard undergrads who responded to a survey reported they had never had intercourse.

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Comments

[starboymikey]

06:01 PM on 02/20/2008

My main question is how students are defining sex. From talking to several young people, I get the impression that some of them define "having sex" as only intercourse. For example, mutual masterbation and in some cases even oral sex don't count as "having sex."

How many girls who claim to still be virgins when they graduate college take it to mean to sexual contact at all?

Just curious.

[isis]

06:35 PM on 02/18/2008

I'm not saying that it's a bad thing that they aren't hooking up in random excess but perhaps one additional reason could be their weight.