Most young adults had one or zero sexual partners in the past year.
A popular story online—especially among young men—is that a small group of men are having lots of sex partners while everyone else is left out. This belief breeds anger and resentment. It frames dating as a winner-take-all competition. But the data tell a different story, challenging the idea that society is divided into sexual elites (aka “Chads”) and permanent losers (aka “incels”).
For most young adults, the most common number of sexual partners in the past year is one or zero. A minority of men and a minority of women account for most casual sex, and they mostly pair with each other. Most sex still happens inside relationships.
In his 2017 book “Cheap Sex,” sociologist Mark Regnerus drew on data from more than 15,000 American adults. He found that 20% of men between ages 25 and 50 account for about 70% of reported sexual partnerships with women. Those figures are easy to misread. They don’t mean that 70% of women are sleeping with 20% of men, because women show a similar pattern. About 20% of women account for roughly 65% of reported male partners.
Continue reading the entire piece here at the Wall Street Journal (paywall)
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Rob Henderson is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute and a contributing editor of City Journal. He has a PhD in psychology from the University of Cambridge and is the best-selling author of “Troubled: A Memoir of Foster Care, Family, and Social Class.”
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