In France, a staggering 24% of adults aged 18 to 69 reported having no sex in the past 12 months, compared to 9% in 2006. Photo / 123rf
If even France, with its mighty reputation, is losing interest in getting frisky, what hope do the rest of us have?
Everywhere you look, it seems, the French are at it. This week alone, reports emerged of a senator caught with his trousers down on the job with an assistant in a sex tape blackmail scandal. The Senate president is looking into it.
All help to bolster the long-held belief that France is the land of romance, seduction, and by extension, of frequent, unbridled sex – whether within a relationship, with a lover “de cinq à sept”, or in the arms of a total stranger.
But the image of the indefatigable Gallic lover has taken a huge knock this week: according to a major new survey, France is in the middle of its very own “sex recession”.
The poll by the French Institute of Public Opinion (IFOP) found that 24 per cent of French adults aged between 18 and 69 said they had had no sex over the previous 12 months, compared with 9 per cent in 2006. The proportion of those aged 18 to 24 who had never had sex was 28 per cent, up from 5 per cent in 2006. Overall, 43 per cent of the 1,911 respondents said they had sex at least once a week, compared with 58 per cent in 2009.
Overall, the proportion of French people who have had sexual intercourse in the past year – 76 per cent on average – is at its lowest level in 50 years.
The results mirrored those found in other Western countries, including a separate study last year which suggested that the number of British teenagers having their first sexual experience by the age of 15 had declined by up to a third in the past decade.
With France’s raunchy reputation going limp, the burning question is: why have we (much of the Western world and beyond) stopped – or at least cut down – on having sex, and “est-ce grave docteur”? Is this a sign of individual sexual liberation and the demise of any sense of (conjugal) sexual duty? Or a symptom of collective depression? How often should we be having sex?
Outside Europe, the most sex-starved of all appear to be the Japanese with a major survey out this month finding that more than 68 per cent of marriages in the country are completely sexless or virtually devoid of a physical element, underlining the problems the government faces in reversing the nation’s falling birth rate.
Over in South Korea, about one out of three adults living in Seoul have not had sexual intercourse for over a year, according to a 2021 study by Prof Youm Yoo-sik from Yonsei University’s Department of Sociology. The country even has a boycott movement followed by tens of thousands of women who are actively choosing single life. Dubbed 4B, where B refers to the Korean prefix bi-, meaning “no”, its four commandments are: “Say no to dating, no to sex with men, no to marriage, and no to childbirth.”
Meanwhile, a separate study, published this month in the Journal of Sex Research, examined data on 180,000 teens in 33 countries, including England, Wales and Scotland over 10 years.
It found that in 25 countries, the number of 15-year-olds who reported they have had sex has significantly decreased, and has increased in none.
In the French poll, many of those questioned preferred flicking through social media, playing video games, watching television or reading a book rather than cosying up to their partners in the flesh, it found.
That trend has been noted in an American study, which also found that adults and young people in the US seemed to be having less sex than previous generations. Mobile phones and other screens were named as the cause of this change in behaviour. The findings were based on data from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior (NSSHB), comparing more than 8,500 individual responses from 2009 and 2018.
Those results echoed a similar study in the UK, the National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal), which has been collecting information about the public’s sexual experiences for over three decades.
With every survey, Natsal has found the average number of sexual liaisons per week has decreased: in 1991, respondents said they had sex five times a month. In 2001, this was down to four times per month, and by 2012, the average number was three per month. Postponed due to Covid-19, the fourth study is due out later this year.
Declines have also been reported in Australia, Finland and Germany, where a 2019 study by the Leisure Monitor (Freizeit-Monitor) found that only 52 per cent of Germans have sex at least once per month. Five years earlier, the figure was 56 per cent.
The study found that singles and retirees had the least sex, and, contrary to the stereotype, parents had the most. It cited an increase in “non-work-related stress” as a key culprit. Bombarded by images of other people’s perfect lives, it argues, people increasingly feel obliged to “over-perform” in their free time. As a result, people in Germany “take less and less time for sex and eroticism”, says scientific director Prof Ulrich Reinhardt.
The world is definitely having less sex, confirms Soazig Clifton, the academic director for Natsal at University College London and NatCen Social Research. But why? Clifton says one potential cause is that “people feel more comfortable talking about sex now, compared with the 1990s”.
She adds: “Maybe people are more able to tell us that they’re not having sex. There is some statistical work we’ve done that shows we have a bit less reporting bias in our data.”
‘What one generation does intensely, the next does less’
While this factor was probably marginal, another potential cause she and colleagues detected – at least among middle-aged respondents, mainly women – is exhaustion. “Women are too tired for sex. They have so much else going on in their life.”
Given all this, the fact that the trend has reached France seems logical enough.
But that doesn’t stop it being faintly depressing for the likes of Pamela Druckerman, Paris-based American author of Bringing up Bébé and There are No Grown Ups. “When I look out the window and see all these inviting cafes and restaurants, Paris is set up for people to seduce each other,” she sighs. “So to think they are flirting but not consummating or flirting and then watching Netflix is a bit disappointing and takes the sheen off things a little bit. You want everyone to have their own secret garden that you don’t know about.
“It’s après moi le déluge, but in reverse.”
As well as denting France’s reputation, the data also casts into question President Emmanuel Macron’s hopes of boosting France’s once stellar but now flagging birth rate, after figures showed the number of births fell to 678,000 last year, the lowest since 1945. With France’s generous welfare system reliant on a vigorous birth rate, last month Mr Macron pledged to make France stronger with a “demographic rearmament”, announcing measures to boost France’s stamina with free infertility checks and treatment for young couples.
Although the falling birth rate is due to a variety of factors, the National Institute of Demographic Studies said in a recent report that regular sexual intercourse “plays a role in determining couples’ level of fertility”.
Observers suggested that there could be a highly positive side to the decline in sexual activity, namely a form of liberation from the social pressure to be sexually active, as well as from people simply finding other things to do. Women, for instance, are less prone to agree to sex with their partners as a matter of conjugal duty than they were a couple of generations ago.
François Kraus, the director of the IFOP’s politics and current events poll, says: “The central theme that emerges from this data is that there is a growing proportion of French people for whom sex is not an obligation.
“We are witnessing the deconstruction of the concept of conjugal duty. This is an anthropological sea change because ever since Christian marriage was conceived from the Middle Ages onwards, it has always been presented culturally as the place of procreation, of legitimate sex.
“For a long time, the concept of marital rape was out of the question. All that has changed.” One factor was a significant minority of, mainly Muslim, citizens who abstain from sex before marriage. Muslims make up 10 per cent of the French population.
He also attributed the trend in part to a generational shift away from the sexual liberation that engulfed France at the end of the 1960s as the country threw off its conservative post-war shackles. “It’s counter-cyclical. What one generation does intensely, the next does less.”
Prompted by the #Metoo movement, the fallout from that period gave rise to two seminal books in France. The first, Consent by Vanessa Springora, revealed her damaging relationship as a minor under the sway of Gabriel Matzneff, author of what effectively amounts to a paedophile manifesto called The Under Sixteens. Their relationship was long sanctioned by the arts establishment and her mother. The second, La familia grande by Camille Kouchner, unveiled the incest of her twin brother by their stepfather, a famed political commentator Olivier Duhamel with links to the great and good.
In his upcoming book, Impossible City, Simon Kuper dedicates a chapter to France’s “Sexual Reckoning with 1968″ and its student revolution with its playful slogans such as “Enjoy unhindered” and “It is forbidden to forbid”.
“When the French version of #MeToo belatedly took off around 2020, the soixante-huitard generation was caught off-guard by the lurch in sexual mores,” he writes. The shockwaves continue, most recently with the indictment and shaming of actor Gérard Depardieu over rape allegations and publicly fantasising about a minor.
The other effect has been an end to the injunction that liberation equals frequent sex and je baise donc je suis (I f—, therefore I am).
He cites prominent French-Moroccan Parisian Leila Slimani, whose first novel Dans le jardin de l’ogre (published in 2014 and later translated into English as Adèle) “recounts a woman’s endless string of joyless sexual encounters.
“It can be read as a retort to The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (2002), by soixante-huitard art critic Catherine Millet, which recounts a woman’s endless string of joyous encounters.”
Slimani told Kuper: “As a woman, to be very honest, the discovery of sexuality for me was a real disappointment. I think sexuality is very often sad or melancholic. When I was a teenager, watching movies or reading books, they are giving you a very glamorous vision of sex, as if everything was beautiful and it was only about love and power.
“But the truth is that very often it can be gloomy. It’s just two naked bodies making noise, you know? So I wanted to write about that. I think a lot of people are fed up with this idea that here in France it’s all about romanticism and eroticism, and that we know so much about sex.’”
The French study, like others, finds that social pressures to have an active sex life – or at least to be thought to be having one – are dwindling. Twelve per cent of respondents defined themselves as asexual, for instance.
Their current standard-bearer is Anna Mangeot, who has just published Asexuelle on “a woman who loves without making love”.
“I’m not sexually abstinent, I’m asexual. I was born that way, it’s innate,” she says. An asexual is “a person who feels little or no sexual attraction towards others,” even if they can have libido and auto-erotic pleasure, she says.
“But that hasn’t stopped me from falling in love and being in a relationship. So I’ve always been in relationships without any sexual attraction and they’ve always worked quite well, even perfectly in my relationship today.”
In the IFOP study, 52 per cent of French women said they sometimes had sex without really wanting to. In a similar survey in 1981, the proportion was 76 per cent. “Women’s financial autonomy has enabled them to realise that they don’t always need to say yes if they don’t want to,” says Kraus.
Thirty-one per cent of respondents said that they had shied away from sex with their partner on at least one occasion to watch a television series, read a book, go on social media or play video games. The tendency was particularly common among men under 35, 53 per cent of whom admitted that they had ducked out of sex in favour of a video game at least once.
French neuroscientist and sexologist Aurore Malet Karas says that screens, apps and porn were clearly taking their toll on physical sex as they cast into question the effort-to-pleasure ratio of real-life hook-ups versus the virtual world.
“Does the recompense of a real-life encounter live up to expectations when you can make less effort and have as much pleasure? People who I consult often say it’s not worth it. When you’re single you have to find a partner, meet up, take a train, pay for a meal, have a conversation and all that for a result that may not be up to the mark.”
Bring on the orgasmatron, the dystopian device in Woody Allen’s 1973 comedy Sleeper for rapidly inducing sexual climax? In the futuristic farce, help is required as almost all people in the Sleeper universe are impotent or frigid, barring males of Italian descent.
“After a frenetic post-Covid, fatigue has clearly set in when it comes to dating apps. People want a bit more than a peep show, something more ethical, more conscientious when they don’t see 15 people but just one. They want to take their time.”
She also says that while there was a positive side to not feeling obliged to have sex, the flip side was the fact it was linked to stress about the state of society and the world at large.
“It has been proven that when the economy is booming, people’s approach to sexuality is much lighter and open. There also is a link with the mental health of youths where suicide rates have shot up,” she says. Wars and eco-anxiety were additional factors.
Regardless of such external facets, Malet Karas warned that the issue of sexual desire must not be airbrushed out of the equation.
While few would argue that being able to say “no” to sex either inside or out of a couple is a positive step, she said that “the issue of consent is masking the greyer area of desire and that there is a risk of throwing the baby out with the bathwater”.
“Consent is easier to talk about, it’s well, more consensual, but coming to terms with sexual desire is a revolution that is still waiting to happen,” she said.
In l’Express, editorialist Abnousse Shalmani added: “Sex without consent and desire is violence and rape. But not all sex is submission. By lumping the two together, neo-feminists are extricating women from physical love.”
She said the sexual act itself was scientifically proven to be good for us both physically and mentally. “What if eco-anxiety, collective depression, aggressiveness by way of hello, and indifference of others were the consequence of one thing: the absence of sex life?,” she asked.
Questioned by the findings, most Parisians say they are not surprised by the drop.
“It doesn’t surprise or worry me,” says Audrey, 34, a university lecturer. “When I was younger, I was much more inclined to tell myself that to have a functional relationship, if you had sex with your partner once a week with some sort of code in your head, all was well. Now I don’t feel subjected to that at all. With my partner, there are times when we don’t have sex for a while, and other times when it’s more frequent.
“The idea that a functional love relationship means frequent sex is over, which I find quite healthy. And that’s quite recent.”
Gwladys, 49, a teacher in a Parisian lycée, says: “Speaking to colleagues, one thing that crops up a lot is that men have as many drops in libido as women and that’s new.
“Another thing I have noted is the explosion in the use of sex toys, notably vibrators for women. Before you had to go to a seedy shop, now you just buy them online.
“As a result, solo pleasures are a lot more democratic and widespread than they used to be, certainly compared to 2009. All my friends have one. Five minutes in the shower and off you go. That can lead to a drop in the need to have sex.”
As for the younger generation, she says: “I get the impression that they are above all searching for reassurance, solidarity, cuddles above sex.
“One student told me her nephew after Covid lockdown reunited with his girlfriend, they simply held each other all night. You’d think they would jump on each other but no. That’s symptomatic. They want mutual support.”
Jeanne, 18, a literary student, says she was surprised because “people are always meeting people online and claiming they’ve had sex. We talk about it endlessly but maybe people talk it up so as not to look odd.”
She fretted that, raised on porn, boys her age were increasingly only in search of one-night stands with no strings attached, and even then easily “bored” due to overblown expectations.
“I think there is a backlash about sexual Kleenex culture, a rebellion against the fact that sex is so supposedly liberated. Personally, I would rather have sex with someone that I really have feelings for or that I really feel comfortable with.”
Some suggest the West is heading in the same direction as Japan, which appears to hold the Guinness World Record for abstinence, judging by the latest survey, which prompted Kunio Kitamura, director of the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA), to tell This Week in Asia that “this trend towards sexlessness is not going to stop”.
Conducted by advertising agency Raison d’être, the survey revealed that among 4,000 married people aged between 20 and 59, some 43.9 per cent were in sexless marriages, while 24.3 per cent said their marriages were “nearly sexless”.
But 57 per cent of respondents who said they were in sexless or virtually sexless marriages also revealed that their relationship with their spouse was either good or very good.
While the reasons were not stated, previous JFPA data found that the prime reason for women was that sex was “bothersome”, followed by a distaste for physical contact after having a baby and work fatigue coming third.
Kitamura cited Japanese men’s “relative lack of money to go out to drink or to a restaurant with a partner. In Japan, it is difficult to fall in love if you are poor,” he says.
Given this global downward trend, is a sexual counterrevolution against an increasingly sexless world possible?
Druckerman believes if anyone can mount it, it’s the French. She has already noted that French women remain sexually active for longer than their Anglo-Saxon counterparts.
“I feel that the French could start up again. They kicked childhood obesity and turned that around, so why wouldn’t they buck the global trend on sex?”
In light of all this, how much sex should we be having? The resounding answer from experts is: “Anything goes.”
“Sex is one of those areas of life where we cannot observe what people do most of the time, so there are lots of misconceptions that people are having more sex than them,” says Clifton.
“We would all agree that it’s not really about how often you’re having sex or a magic number, it’s about the quality of the sex and whether it’s the right amount for you.”
But there is a caveat, cautioned sex expert Malet Karas. “When people are happy about it, they shouldn’t feel bad. But if they feel frustrated about it, they do need to act.”
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