Sex recession? How the frisky Danes can teach us to make more love

While other countries are deep in a sex recession, the Danish drive shows no signs of stalling. How do they stay so frisky?

Nearly half of straight Danish men and 43% of straight Danish women have sex weekly, across all age groups, according to studies.

Copenhagen in the winter... a beautiful city populated by beautiful people.

But none of that can surely explain why young Danes in Denmark, unlike gen Z across the developed world, are still having sex. Winter isn’t even their frisky season.

“You feel the atmosphere in the springtime,” says Ben, 35, half-British, half Danish. His friend Anna, also 35, originally Hungarian, says: “Post-hibernation fever, you can feel the sexual energy. Everyone is on.” Ben and Anna are millennials, of course, rather than gen Z: they provide the outsiders’ perspective.

Some of the data is starkly depressing: one US study in 2023 found 24% of adults aged 18-29 reported no sexual activity at all in the past year. A global sex habits survey by Feeld and Kinsey’s the following year found 37% of gen Z reported no sex in the last month, compared to 19% of millennials and 17% of gen X.

In the UK, only a quarter of people across all age groups said they had had sex in the past week in a 2020 YouGov poll - compared with the Danish figures of nearly half of straight men and 43% of straight women, again across all age groups (Denmark’s survey data on sex is, predictably, the best in the world).

Statistics for Ireland are harder to come by, but a 2015 study showed 40% of couples together for more than two years have sex less than once a week, with 13% getting it on less than once a month.

This surveying trend even has its own vocabulary — “heteropessimism”, “voluntary celibates”, “boy sobers” (that’s girls who have sworn off boys; the boys aren’t sober).

In Denmark, the age of becoming sexually active has remained constant since the 1950s, at 16.4 (the age of consent is 15, in common with a lot of Scandinavian countries). Gen Z Danes are having no less sex than previous generations, and most people report satisfaction with their sex lives.

“That’s the impression I get,” says Carl Christian, 23, a psychology student at the University of Copenhagen. “But I don’t know if it’s from the news or from my own life. At least, with the crowds I’m in, situationships are very common. Maybe in our early teens, if a girl lost her virginity, she’d be less likely to boast about it.

“But people don’t judge women in their 20s for being sexually active; we’d much rather celebrate when we hear our female friends have met someone nice in a club.”

People get laid more often, says Frida, also 23 and studying psychology, “because it’s more accepted that you might have an intimate connection with just a friend. It takes a lot to get people to settle into a committed relationship.”

“Danish people drink a lot — that doesn’t hurt, either,” adds Christine, 24, a student of global development.

There’s certainly an economic factor: only 11% of Danes still live at home by the age of 24. There’s no student debt in Denmark; students get paid more than €600 a month to study; it’s very common to take a year or often two out between school and university, so everyone’s more confident by the time they start studying.

Frida spent last term at the University of California, Berkeley, and says, “I talked to US friends about a lot, including dating. I noticed that it felt like everything for them revolved around the school and studying. It’s easier to pause that when you don’t have to maximise every minute.”

According to Katinka, 25, who is studying public health, there has been a quiet revolution in sex education. When she was at school, they had a good practical grounding, she explains: they were taught how to put a condom on when they were 13. But now, “it’s become gradually more sex positive. There’s more focus on female pleasure. I would definitely say it was inclusive.”

“It didn’t really focus much on women when we were at school,” Christine adds, “and it was very heteronormative. Maybe the more inclusive you are, the more you speak about it, and the more you realise it should be pleasurable for everyone.”

The chat-up culture isn’t patriarchal here. “Women pick,” Anna says. “The men are more timid.” That sex positivity runs across government departments. During covid, the director of health announced: “Sex is good. Sex is healthy. Of course you can have sex in this situation.”

On the flip side of this, there’s a lot of chlamydia here. “I would say young people in Denmark are very bad at using condoms,” Nanna says. “I think maybe people feel fearless. A lot of women think: if I can’t get pregnant, I’m fine.”

The most common hypothesis for non-Danish gen Zs’ sex drought is a combination of social media and dating apps; the first isolating everyone and draining them of their real-life capabilities, the second reducing everyone to a two-dimensional version of themselves, so that everyone’s “having very surface conversations, swiping people as if they’re not people,” Frida says.

Denmark doesn’t seem to be immune to doom-scrolling: “A lot of people have trouble with addiction,” Christian says. Late last year, the government announced plans to restrict social media use for the under-15s, citing worries about access to harmful content. It just doesn’t seem to be killing anyone’s sex drive.

It would be impertinent to come out with a pat answer, on this level of acquaintance, but if somebody said a combination of economic security, inclusivity, gender equality, straightforwardness, sex-positive education and policy, erotically experimental art, culture and commerce, and hedonism had all interacted to create a rabbit generation in a world of pandas, I wouldn’t fall out of my chair.

- Guardian