America is going through a sexual revolution, and this self-identification survey proves it
Whether you're aware of it or not, America is going through a sexual revolution.
Simply put, young people are less likely than older generations to say that they're exclusively heterosexual.
According to a study of 1,000 people from YouGov, only 64% of respondents aged 18 to 29 identify themselves as completely heterosexual. For all adults, 78% identify as wholly heterosexual.
Here's how the data breaks down along the Kinsey scale, which measures sexuality from "completely heterosexual" to "completely homosexual":
For the study, YouGov interviewed 1,000 adults between August 12 and 13 - you can see the questions here.
As editor Peter Moore notes on YouGov, sexual fluidity depends strongly on age group:
29% of respondents under age 30 identified as bisexual or homosexual
24% of respondents from age 30 to 44 identified as bisexual or homosexual
8% of respondents age 45 or older identified as bisexual or homosexual
The Kinsey scale was developed in 1948 by zoologist Alfred Kinsey and his colleagues Wardell Pomeroy and Clyde Martin. After interviewing thousands of people about their sexual histories, Kinsey's team discovered that people didn't exclusively stick to partners of the same or opposite sex.
As Kinsey argued in his 1948 book "Sexual Behavior of the Human Male," humans don't really fit into a sexual binary.
"Males do not represent two discrete populations, heterosexual and homosexual," he wrote. "The living world is a continuum in each and every one of its aspects."
And now the self-identification data is really beginning to show it.