Isn't the elephant in the room obesity? Is it possible we are less sexually active because people are turned off by unhealthy weights, and being in the "healthy" BMI band now makes you an elite minority?
It'd be easy to demonstrate this isn't true, if we had something like "obesity is mostly middle-aged people, young adults are roughly unaffected" or "weight and number of sexual partners are actually uncorrelated" or something. But I wonder.
No!no!No!!!! The 500 lb gorilla sits anywhere it wants. The elephant in the room is what people don't want to talk about. Nowadays not only has the gorilla's weight increased to 800 lbs, he is now in the room. This article goes further, now we have multiple gorillas in the room? Flee that room.
My point is, we need editors
I think the real explanation is the the curve in the graph, we had 3 for greatest generation, 5 for silents then jumping up to 11 during the boomers, then declining slightly during x and declining further during millennials.
I bet if we could extend the graph back historically we would see the vast majority of human generations were closer to the greatest generation in number of sex partners. This looks to me like there was an increase in sexual promiscuity during the sexual revolution, the effects of which are tapering off as humans return to their normal sexual habits.
The most attractive women have always, everywhere, had a waist-hip ratio of around 0.7 (http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves...). That would rule out obesity as the new norm of attractiveness. I assume there is also a formula/ratio for attractive men that rules out their being obese.
Also, people are known to lie about the number of sexual partners they have had (http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/st...). Could that be a factor here?
Finally, the article focuses on age of first sex and number of sexual partners, not frequency of sex. It doesn't rule out millennials having more frequent sex with fewer partners.
Stop press: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large-number...
"[Online life] ends up putting a lot of importance on physical
appearance, and that, I think, is leaving out a large section
of the population."You could also say that non-Tinder online dating i.e. OKCupid is actually putting less importance on appearance by matching people on preferences instead of "prettiest girl at the bar."
Having all that extra personal data on OKC might be useful in some edge cases in swaying someone to correspond with someone they might have skipped over, but it's only going to go so far. Maybe you'll go out on a date with a girl who's a "6" because she loves Firefly and AD&D, when normally you only date "7s", but some girl who's into a bunch of geeky things you like but is only a "2" is not going to be of interest to you, except maybe in the "friendzone".
I blame porn.