Young women seek sexploits free of shame - it's a brave new world

Amy Schumer's character in Trainwreck embodies the modern hook-up lifestyle. Photo / AP

So when did it become cool for young women to have lots of sex? A guy asked me that the other day and I had no idea.

He'd read a piece I'd written on how young people use after-sex selfies as a status symbol. (I argued that we "conspicuously consume" sex as a way of showing everyone how cool we are.) He wanted to know when having sex became something that young women could boast about. After all, it used to be that young women who had a lot of sex were "sluts". What changed?

It's a really good question. It seemed especially pertinent recently, with the release of movies like Trainwreck, where Amy Schumer embodied this hook-up lifestyle.

So firstly we should ask, has it become hip for young women to have lots of sex?

Well, it's not uncommon for girls to feel uncomfortable, if not downright daggy, if they haven't lost their virginity by their late teens. (It's even worse to be a male virgin in your late teens and early 20s.)

A girlfriend told me that when she was about 19, a friend sat her down to earnestly tell her that her virginity "was becoming a problem". Another friend told me how she was mocked by her boyfriend for losing her virginity at the withered age of 18.

That's just the first time you have sex. What about having lots of sex? Yes, it's cool. Well, it's cool to have wild stories. One of the favourite drinking games of our generation is "Never Have I Ever". That's where someone says something that they've never done, and if you've done it then you drink. It always descends into a discreet(ish) brag about who has done the most crazy stuff. And wild sex stories are the game's royal flush.

There's also a degree of envy, among girls, towards others who've been there, shagged that. I remember feeling furiously jealous of a friend when she told me she'd slept with three guys from three continents in one night. Not because of the sex, but because it was so ... daring. She was so experienced, worldly and rebellious.

What's clear is that there is a desire to appear wild. Girls want to be the cool girl who really doesn't care what anyone thinks. Given that for a long time people have really really cared about female virginity, showing everyone that you have a lot of sex subverts this entrenched social norm.

So we should be asking when did it become cool to be rebellious? That concept kicked off in the 50s with the creation of the word "teenager". James Dean laid the foundations that equated cool to rebellious.

And that legacy has been carried on in modern pop culture. Stars as diverse as Nicki Minaj to Amy Winehouse have made careers from popularising the image of carefree, cool women who get a lot of sex.

If part of it can be linked to the historical rise of the rebel, another part of it can be linked to the rise of the desire to be "experienced". The idea of being sexually experienced is part of the modern desire to be experienced in "life".

I'm sure previous generations have wanted this. But in the last five years, the need for experiences feels particularly strong. By experience, we mean wild experiences.

We're told that we need to be out there having crazy times in order to be living, #yolo. So when girls flaunt their sexual exploits it is just another way of showing they're living a "proper" modern youth.

These two factors also coincided with increased acceptability of female desire. Furthermore, men who call women sluts are increasingly frowned upon as sexist dinosaurs. In the early 2000s, Bridget Jones showed that women who sleep around are normal, funny and cool.

The rise of the rebel, the yolo mantra and waning social stereotyping have all come together. I don't think it's a bad thing that women can talk about how many men they've slept with. It frees women up to feel comfortable with exploring their sexuality - and we all like hearing stories about the Russian, the restaurant toilets and the inconveniently timed call from the parents.