[사진출처 = 연합뉴스]One in three Korean adults has not had sex in the past year. This number more than tripled from 21 years ago. Experts evaluated that the gender conflict and polarization prevalent in Korean society were the result of negatively affecting sexual life.
According to the results of a study on the “Sex Life of Seoul Residents in 2021” by Yusik Yum, a sociology professor at Yonsei University and Junyong Choi, a professor of internal medicine at Yonsei University, 36% of respondents said they had not had sex in the past year. Considering that it was 11% in the Korean version of the “Global Sexual Attitudes and Behavior Study (GSSAB)” conducted by Pfizer in the United States in 2000, the figure more than tripled in 21 years. The survey was conducted in the form of an online survey on 2,182 men and women over the age of 19 in Seoul from January to May.
The tendency of ‘sexless’ was higher in women. In terms of gender, 43% of women and 29% of men had not had sex in one year. For sexless reasons, the most common reason for women was ‘not interested’ (24%), and men’s ‘not having a partner’ (15%) was the largest.
This trend was greater in men and women in their 20s. Among women in their 20s, 21% said they did not have sex because they were not interested, but only 9% of men in their 20s answered that they were not interested. Among men in their twenties, 24% answered ‘I do not have a partner’. There was a large mismatch between men and women in the youth with the most active sex life.
Experts pointed to the spread of feminist discourse as the cause. It is argued that gender conflict, which is prevalent in Korean society, has negatively affected the sexual life of young people following marriage and childbirth. Polarization was also cited as a cause. Of the women who rated themselves as upper-middle class, 65% said they had had sex for one year, while 53% of the lower class said they had sex. For men, the upper-middle class was 79%, but the lower class dropped to 67%.
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