Canadians are having less sex. Here’s what it means

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The questions sociologist and sex researcher Tina Fetner gets asked most often are: How often are people having sex? What’s ‘normal’? Am I getting as much as the average person?

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Turns out, sex isn’t what it used to be. Rates of partnered sex are falling around the world. People across generations, including young people, aren’t having as much sex as they used to. In the United States, “sexlessness” among 22- to 34-year-olds is surging. Emerging data in other countries (U.K., Australia, Germany, Japan) is also pointing to serious dry spells, and Fetner’s best guess? “It’s likely happening here, too.”

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When she set out, pre-pandemic, to explore how much and what kind of sex adult Canadians are actually having, one third — 32 per cent — of those who responded to her sweeping 2018 survey said they had not had sex with a partner in the previous year.

Among those who were having sex, a number reported that their most recent sexual encounter fell into a grey area of “unenthusiastic” consent.

The sex wasn’t necessarily non-consensual. Rather, “someone wasn’t as into it as their sexual partner,” said Fetner, author of Sex in Canada: The Who, Why, When and How of Getting Down Up North. When invited to fill in a box to explain why, “a lot of people were, like, ‘Oh, well, I didn’t feel like it, but I didn’t want to hurt my partner’s feelings,’” Fetner said. “Or, ‘I wasn’t feeling it because I was really busy,’ or, ‘This was the only time we could fit it in our schedules.’

“Some people are having sex because they feel they should.”

Fetner hasn’t collected data since her delve into what Canadians think and do sexually, information Canada has been far more prudish about collecting compared to other nations. It’s not clear how, or if, living through the worst of COVID’s waves changed sex and intimacy.

An exclusive Leger poll for Postmedia conducted in mid-January found that while a quarter (27 per cent) of adult respondents said they engage in sexual activity at least once a week, and 32 per cent have sex at least once a month, one in seven engage less than once a month (14 per cent) or not at all (15 per cent).

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Pre-pandemic, multiple studies documented declines in “all modes of partnered sex queried.” One U.S. group found that the proportion of 18- to 49-year-olds who reported no sexual activity in the prior year rose from 24 per cent in 2009, to 28 per cent in 2018. The proportion of 14- to 17-year-olds reporting neither solo nor partnered sex rose from 28.8 per cent of young men and 49.5 per cent of young women in 2009, to 43.3 per cent of young men and 74 per cent of young women.

A convergence of social and cultural changes might explain the shifts among young people. Sexting and easy access to sexually explicit media “have added a new medium” for sexual experiences outside physical sex with a partner, the authors wrote. Teens are drinking less and engaging in less risky behaviour overall. They’re spending more time playing computer games. #MeToo and other movements have raised conversations around consent. Aggressive or “rough sex,” such as choking during sex — which, the authors note, is technically a form of strangulation that can be lethal even as part of consensual sex — is growing. “We don’t know to what extent that may be driving some people to opt out, but we do know that some people are feeling frightened and don’t know what to make of what’s being presented to them, especially young adults,” Tsung-chieh (Jane) Fu, the paper’s co-author, told Scientific American.

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We have to hold down jobs, bring up children … have friends, make food, tidy the house … Where is the actual time (to have sex)?

Anniki Sommerville, podcaster

Declining sexual activity among young people warrants concern, Fu and colleagues wrote, even if some parents are relieved with the direction it’s heading. “Solo and partnered adolescent sexual exploration are developmentally normative, offer opportunities for learning and joy, and are supportive of adult sexual development,” they said.

Among adults, declining sex raises concerns about the potential fallout on human fertility, relationship happiness, human connection and intimacy, they said. Studies have also linked an active sex life with lower odds of depression, prostate and breast cancer, and fatal coronary events. One recent study found that those who have sex less than 12 times a year face the highest risk of developing cardiovascular disease. The more sex, the more the risk gradually decreased, before reaching a sweet spot at approximately 52 to 103 times per year. After that “a negative correlation began to emerge,” the researchers warned. Excessive sex (more than 365 times a year or higher) is capable of triggering “sympathetic overexcitement,” leading to damage to cells lining the blood vessels, blood clots and other negative outcomes.

The effects of the pandemic on sexual functioning and activity are still being scrutinized. One study by University of British Columbia researchers found that, somewhat paradoxically, higher levels of COVID-related stress were associated with higher desire for sex with a partner, possibly due to an elevated sympathetic nervous system response. Stress triggers the “fight or flight” phenomenon, which “may have elicited excitation transfer, thereby increasing sexual response.”

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As stress decreased over subsequent phases of the pandemic, so did desire. Sex activity increased in the summer months of June to August 2020, when restrictions were at their lowest. But the increase in sexual activity was reported among those without a live-in partner. Those with a live-in partner saw a decrease in sexual activity, a drop that could be down to couples working from home and not benefiting from that age-old maxim, “distance makes the heart grow fonder,” the researchers said.

Whatever the desire killer, over time, “COVID-19 became a chronic stressor on relationships,” lead author and UBC professor of obstetrics and gynecology Dr. Lori Brotto said when the study was released. Other studies found that COVID-related restrictions correlated with higher rates of sexual dysfunction and reduced sexual activity, changes that were greater in women compared to men.

… You have all kinds of reasons to have a period of time where the sex life is reduced or non-existent.

Tina Fetner, sex researcher

Throw in today’s financial stresses, housing insecurity and other economic anxieties and uncertainties, and things can get a lot drier than the latest streaming series. “These days, you’ll be hard pressed to find many women who report that they’re working hard at the sex coal face,” British author and podcaster Anniki Sommerville wrote after marvelling at the amount of “bonking” in the Disney+ series Rivals, set in the 1980s. “We’re busy, right? We have to hold down jobs, bring up children, stay healthy, get our eyebrows threaded, read books, watch content, share content, have friends, make food, tidy the house … Where is the actual time?

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It’s normal for otherwise sexually active people to experience points in time when frequency fizzles, Fetner said. While the celibate 30 per cent “I didn’t have sex in the last year” statistic might sound surprising, “maybe you have a year when your health is bad,” Fetner said. “Maybe you have a year when your partner’s health is bad.

“Maybe you have a year where you’re very busy, you’re grieving, or your relationship crumbles or stumbles. You have divorce, you have widowhood — you have all kinds of reasons to have a period of time where the sex life is reduced or non-existent.”

Twenty-one per cent, or one in five, in Fetner’s study hadn’t had sex with another person during the past year even though they’d engaged in sex before then. Eleven per cent had never had sex. Norms around virginity are changing, Fetner wrote. While “chastity before marriage” is still prized among evangelic Christians and other cultures, “the stigma associated with virginity has reversed course, making it socially awkward to be a virgin past a certain age.”

Young women still face a double standard. “That is, whereas their male peers are lauded for having sex (and lots of it), they themselves can expect some level of disapproval if they follow suit,” Fetner wrote.

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Still, only 17 per cent of “virgins” were saving themselves for marriage. Some hadn’t yet found a partner, were too shy to have sex or wanted to wait until they fell in love.

People tend to have the most sex when they’re young, Fetner said. As bodies age, sex drives wane. But older people do have sex (more than a third of people aged 70 and older told Fetner they’d had partnered sex within the last month). The survey challenged other tropes, such as singles have more sex than marrieds — the reverse was true — or that kid-less couples have more sex than couples with kids at home — also not true.

From other research in the field, we know that people are viewing online pornography, a lot …

Tina Fetner

Overall, while ideas around sex, such as the morality of premarital sex or taboos against certain activities, may have changed in the last century, the sex lives of Canadians tend to fall in line with “traditional, restrictive morals,” Fetner reports in Sex in Canada.

Generally, Canadians are having sex with a long-term partner. Older norms remain influential, Fetner wrote: Marriage, monogamy, parenthood. Few (six per cent of her sample of 2,303 Canadians aged 18 to 90) in her survey reported being in “open” relationships. Sixty-two per cent of the 1,578 respondents to the Leger sex poll were in a committed relationship of some kind, primarily married. People with a post-secondary education tend to have a more “expansive” repertoire than their high school-graduate counterparts, Fetner found. Liberals and conservatives also differ in partnered sexual activities, as do those with different religious affiliations.

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Overall, levels of sexual pleasure were reasonably high among participants to her anonymous, online sex survey, though it’s not clear whether it was higher or lower than before the sexual revolution, again owing to a dearth of Canadian data. Three in four who were having sex were happy with their sex lives, across all age groups. Respondents to the Leger survey also seemed mostly content: 73 per cent said they were “very” (42 per cent) or “somewhat” (31 per cent) sexually satisfied.

Canadians enjoy a more liberal sexual culture than Americans, among other features that make us different. The average Canadian engages in a little more sex, and a bit more variety, than the average American, Fetner said. In addition to having more secure reproductive rights, the U.S. has a higher proportion of evangelical Christians, pulling sexual behaviours into a more conservative trend.

“The second big difference is, of course, our francophone population,” Fetner said. French-speaking Canadians tend to engage in sexual activities more often than anglophones, her survey found.

Like other researchers, she documented a notable gender gap in orgasms. Women in heterosexual couples have fewer than their male partners, mostly because “what went on in bed typically centred on the penis rather than the clitoris,” Fetner reported. Among other findings: “Faking it” is more the exception than the rule. Canadians generally don’t have a problem with casual, no-strings-attached hookups.

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While Fetner has “huge regrets” that she didn’t ask about porn, “from other research in the field, we know that people are viewing online pornography, a lot, and other researchers have deeper theories about the way it is having negative impacts on our imagination of what sex can be,” she said.

Fetner quotes anthropologist Gayle Rubin who wrote that, culturally, “sexual acts are burdened with an excess of significance.” They’re also way more private, and while the social awkwardness may not be as deep-seated as past generations, there’s still a lot of apprehension about bringing up sex and sexual activity as a topic of conversation, Fetner said.

“We don’t know, because we’re not supposed to ask, and because we’re not supposed to ask, we get really super curious about it. Because it’s a secret.”

National Post

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