Despite popular alarm and fascination with “hooking up” on campus, college students are not having sex with more partners than in the past few decades, are no more accepting of sex before marriage and are actually less likely to report having sex weekly or more often, according to a study released Tuesday.
“We’re not living in a new era of no-holds-barred sexuality,” said Martin Monto, the University of Portland sociology professor who co-wrote the study. For instance, 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, Monto and a fellow researcher found, is who students sleep with: 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.
Among those who were sexually active, 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.