Americans Boned More in the 90s Than We Do Now

Nineties nostalgia is in high gear, what with those Calvin Klein underwear ads everywhere, classic Gap hoodies back on the shelves, and chokers gently strangling many a neck. But instead of feeling wistful about fashion, maybe what we're really craving is a return to our old sex lives. A new study finds that Americans are having less sex than we did in the 90s. The biggest declines are happening among couples that live together.

The study, published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior, looks at data from the nationally representative General Social Survey, which asks more than 26,000 adults every year about their sex lives, among other things. (The survey has been polling people on sexual behavior since 1989.)

They found that, overall, Americans got laid seven to nine fewer times per year in 2014 than they did in the 90s: From 62 or so times a year in the 90s to 53 in 2014, which is still an average of once per week. But cohabiting couples saw big declines in just the past 15 years: they had sex 16 fewer times per year in between 2010 and 2014 compared to the years 2000 to 2004. Amounts for married couples specifically fell from 73 in 1990 to 55 in 2014. Researchers found that the declines were not affected by race, education level, or employment status.

Despite the largest declines being among couples, single people were partly responsible for dragging us all down. There are more single people today than there were in the 90s, and since singletons have half as much sex as people in couples, they contributed to an overall decline in shags. But the researchers also noted that partnered people were getting it on less often. It's possible that as people wait longer to have children and are parenting in middle age, they will have less sex than people who had kids when they were younger.

The study data lend some support to that theory: The biggest decreases were among people in their 50s, people who had school-age kids, and, interestingly, those who don't watch porn. Declines were less pronounced among younger people, people with kids under the age of 6, and those who had watched porn in the past year (see? Porn is not turning us into craven sexless zombies after all).

Relationship status aside, younger people had the most sex, but when they controlled for age—that is, comparing the same time period in each generation's lives—they found that people born in the 90s were having sex the least often compared to other generations. This has been borne out in previous research, too.

Lead author Jean Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, told the Washington Post that technology could also be screwing us over. We have so much entertainment and social media at our fingertips. "People aren't looking around saying, 'Hey, it's ten o'clock, what are we going to do?'"

A modest proposal: use that technology to listen to Ginuwine's "Pony," released in 1996 when we were all boning more.

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