What does occasional sexuality in European women look like in 2022? For World Orgasm Day on December 21, Ifop questioned nearly 5,000 women living in the five largest European countries (Spain, Italy, France, Germany and the United Kingdom) about their leisure sexuality. . Sexual relations from the first evening, after a meeting on dating apps or even under drugs… The institute has dissected their (new) practices.
According to the study, a majority of European women have had sex with a partner “from their first meeting“. Among them, more and more French women are taking on “go to bed on the first night“, despite the risks of stigmatization that still weigh on women : they are now 38%, i.e. 4 points more than in 2015. This phenomenon is still more pronounced among those under 25 : they are 41% to assume it, i.e. 5 points more than in 2015.
Users of dating apps are also more likely to experience this kind of unattached relationship: 84% of current users have had sex on the first night, compared to 42% of women who have never had one.
Dissociate sexual relationship and couple relationship
Despite a social context that still normalizes couple sexuality for the most part, European women seem to be freeing themselves from it little by little, and have sexual relations “without tomorrow“. Nearly one in two Europeans (47%) has already had a short-lived sexual affair, outside of an ongoing relationship, “in the sense of a relationship that begins before coitus and continues after“, details the study. 33% of European women even admitted to having slept “with a person only once while knowing in advance that they were not going to see them again“.
Among French women under 25, 49% report having had sex without a future (+8 points since 2013). Along with the British and the Spanish, they are the ones in Europe who most easily practice “one night stand“.
As for sexual relations from the first evening, the women who indulge in these ephemeral sexual encounters have an above-average social and socio-cultural level, a progressive political positioning, a location in an urban environment and finally a clear emancipation from the regard to religious morality.
New practices without commitment… but not without risk
Nearly one in three young Europeans has already had a sexual experience of the “sex friends“, or relations with people they know, but always without any commitment or feeling. If this proportion of women having regular relations with one of their friend(s) remains limited in the whole of the feminine (only 23% among women aged 18 to 69), it is much less so among young people: more than one in three women aged 18 to 24 have already engaged in this form of sexual friendship, especially in France (41%) and the United Kingdom (42%)
One in five young Britons have had sex with hard drugs and 23% of them have also had sex in sex parties, parties mixing hard drugs, sex and alcohol (against 16% of French women). Practices that canoverexposing young women to risky behaviors to the extent that it compromises their capacity for judgment and decision-making”says the study.
“Whatever the risks they run, European women therefore increasingly claim recreational sexuality, understood in the sense of leisure sexuality in the strongest sense, free sexuality (…) whose main objective is well-being. “concludes François Kraus, director of gender, sexuality and sexual health expertise at Ifop.
Source :
- Ifop study for Wyylde carried out by self-administered online questionnaire from October 17 to 26, 2022 with a sample of 5,000 women, representative of the female population aged 18 and over living in the following countries: France, Italy, Spain, Germany and United Kingdom.
