LOS ANGELES—A new study has found that the rampant hook-up culture that has supposedly inundated American college campuses from coast-to-coast is a fiction, and that sexual activity among students has not increased over the past few decades.
"We're not living in a new era of no-holds-barred sexuality," said Martin Monto, the study’s co-author and a sociology professor at the University of Portland.
According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, the study found that “fewer than a third of college students surveyed between 2002 and 2010 said they had had sex with more than one person in the preceding year — about the same level as reported during the late 1980s and early '90s.”
What has changed over time is that people are more open about talking about sex, but more significantly, who people are having sex with has also evolved. ‘
“Recent college students were more likely to say they had sex with a friend or ‘casual date" and less likely to say they were wed or had a ‘regular partner,’ compared with students polled between 1988 and 1996,” reported the Times.
The data underscores the finding. “Among those who were sexually active,” it continues, “more than 68 percent said they had had sex with a friend in the last year — an increase from roughly 56 percent during the earlier period.”
If anything, the findings suggest that the same percentage of students engage in sex at college, but that for those who do have sex, changing expectations about marriage and life—and subsequently what they want out of a potential sexual partner—are very different now from just a few decades ago.
“Many students, eager to forge careers and have adventures, see peril in a relationship that could limit their opportunities," reported the Times.
1,800 young adults who had finished at least one year of college participated in the survey.
