There’s an irony – or maybe not – in the fact that since we’ve become more “open” about sex as a society, we’ve been having less of it. So sex is everywhere, but not so much in the nation’s bedrooms (or sitting room floors, or on the kitchen worktops or wherever else you might care to get down to it). The generation that had most sex was born in the 1930s – the so-called silent generation; the generations that have it least are millennials, born between 1981 and 1996 and Gen Z who are born between 1997 and 2012.
In Britain, across all age groups, around one in four of us has sex at least once in an average week with almost one in 10 of us managing three times – but the older we are, the less common sex is. The average age someone loses their virginity is 17, with late twentysomethings having the most sex. But by our late 30s, four in 10 report having not had sex in the past week, and around a fifth of 40 to 44-year-olds aren’t having sex at all.
