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France is considered a country of love, but according to a study, people there are having less and less sex. Some people prefer to watch series or click through social networks. A representative survey by the Ifop Institute published on Tuesday found that love lives, especially among young people, have reached a low point since the 1970s.

The share of adults who say they have not had sex in the past twelve months has increased from 9 to 24 percent between 2006 and 2023 and from 5 to 28 percent in the 18 to 24 age group. However, in the 25 to 34 age group, 94 percent have had sex at least once in the past year.

While in 2009 58 percent of men and women in France said they had sex at least once a week, this was down to 43 percent in 2023. Many people are dissatisfied with the silence in bed. 55 percent of men and 39 percent of women say they rarely make love. The number of dissatisfied women has almost doubled since 1996, when 21 percent wanted to be together more often.

According to the study, the reasons for the decrease in sexual activity were that people preferred to watch movies on television or Netflix, scroll through social networks, play computer games or read a book. Compared to previous years, the principle of consensual agreement has also become more established. While in 1981 three-quarters of women under the age of fifty indicated that they had had sex without wanting to do it, in the current study this is still one in two.

Ifop study director François Kraus also spoke about a historical cycle. The 1980s and 1990s were a time of hypersexualization. Today we are moving towards a sexuality that is more qualitative than quantitative. “It is counter-cyclical: what one generation does intensively, the next does less.” (dabbing/sda/dpa)