The percentage of Japanese high school girls and female college students who have had sex dropped for the first time in 38 years, a survey released on Aug. 4 found.
According to the survey, the percentage of college male students and female students who have had sex at least once stood at 54 percent and 47 percent, respectively.
The figures represented a drop of 7 percentage points for males and a decline of 14 points for females, compared with the previous survey in 2005.
Comparable ratios for high school boys and high school girls came to 15 percent and 24 percent, respectively. In the previous survey, the figure for boys was 27 percent and that for girls was 30 percent.
The latest figures were down to the level in the 1993 survey for male high school and college students. As for female high school and college students, it was on par with the 1999 survey.
The survey by the Japanese Association for Sex Education has been conducted almost every six years since 1974 to measure the young generation’s experimentation with sex.
The latest survey, held between October 2011 and February, involved about 7,700 male and female students from junior high schools through colleges in 11 locations around Japan.
For junior high school boys, the ratio was 4 percent, the same as in the 2005 survey. The figure for junior high school girls totaled 5 percent, up from 4 percent.
Kazuo Katase, professor of sociology at Tohoku Gakuin University who led the survey, said that a sharp drop in the number of female students at high schools and colleges who have experienced sex is a major change from the 2005 survey.
Although the ratios for their male counterparts curved downward in the previous survey, those for high school girls and female college students had been consistently on an upward trajectory.
“A growing number of female students have the same tendency as some male students who have been described as 'soshoku-kei' ” (herbivore type) since the late 2000s,” he said.
The herbivores refer to those who are mild-tempered and passive in building relationships with the opposite sex and don’t have strong worldly desires or ambitions.
The survey also found that the number of male students who have experienced kissing at least once was 66 percent in college, down from 72 percent from the 2005 survey, and 37 percent in high school, down from 48 percent.
As for female students, the figure was 63 percent in college, down from 72 percent, and 44 percent in high school, down from 52 percent.
Katase also said that the average age of male and female students who have kissed and had sex at least once is lower among those who were born between 1993 and 1999, compared with other age groups.
SOURCE: Asahi Shimbun
A very interesting downward trend...didn't realize the idea of soushokukei/herbivore was spreading to girls as well~