France is considered a country of love, but according to a study, people there are having less and less sex and some people prefer to watch series or click through social networks. A representative survey by the Ifop Institute published on Tuesday showed that love lives, particularly among young people, have reached a low point since the 1970s.
The proportion of adults who said they had not had sex in the past twelve months rose from 9 to 24 percent between 2006 and 2023 and from 5 to 28 percent in the 18 to 24 year old age group. However, in the 25 to 34 age group, 94 percent had sex at least once in the last year.
While in 2009 58 percent of men and women in France said they had sex at least once a week, in 2023 this was only 43 percent. Many people are dissatisfied with the lull in bed. 55 percent of men and 39 percent of women said they rarely make love. The number of dissatisfied women has almost doubled since 1996, when 21 percent wanted to be together more often.
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According to the survey, the reasons for the decline in sexual activity were that people preferred to watch films on television or Netflix, scroll through social networks, play computer games or read a book. In comparison to previous years, the principle of consensual agreement has also become more established. While in 1981 three quarters of women under 50 said they sometimes had sex without feeling like it, in the current survey this was still one in two.
Ifop study director François Kraus also spoke of a historical cycle. The 80s and 90s were a time of hypersexualization. Today we are moving towards a sexuality that is more qualitative than quantitative. “It’s anti-cyclical: what one generation does intensively, the next does less.”