Tymiq Williams always hoped he'd lose his virginity the way Bella Swan did.
For Williams, the "Twilight" protagonists Edward Cullen and Bella Swan were "literally the true definition of love." So when he considered losing his virginity, "Yeah, I was expecting some 'Twilight' honeymoon scene or something."
But it didn't quite happen that way, the 27-year-old real-estate agent and part-time hotel receptionist from East New York told Business Insider.
"I always thought losing my virginity would be on a flower bed somewhere and making the sweetest of love and all this sparkling and sparks in my heart," he said.
Instead, "I found myself in a staircase at age, like, 15, 16," and the experience was over in a minute or two. "I'm like, this was what I was keeping my body reserved for?"
Now more than a decade out from "losing it," Williams looks back on his first time with mixed feelings.
"Back when it happened, I was like, 'Oh, this is whatever, this is cool. Finally just got that out of the way, boom,'" he said. As he got older, he began questioning why he felt so much pressure to "lose it" in the first place.
In July, Business Insider partnered with YouGov to survey more than 1,880 American adults between the ages of 18 and 95 — including 647 Gen Zers over the age of 18 — on all things sex and relationships: their sexual identities, how often they're having sex, and whether they're having it at all.
We also assembled a focus group of nine Gen Zers to dig a little deeper into our findings and found that Gen Z — an age group generally defined as born between 1997 and 2012 — thinks about virginity differently.
More than 37% of the Gen Zers BI surveyed — ranging in ages from 18 to 26 — said they hadn't had sex yet. Our survey also found that among those who had been sexually active, 31% of Gen Zers had gone through a period of voluntary celibacy in the past year, compared with 34% of millennials, 28% of Gen Xers, and 37% of boomers.
Some of that can likely be attributed to coming of age during a pandemic when access to partnered sex might have been limited. Yet, even before COVID, Gen Z's interest in sex was seemingly trending downward. In a 2019 survey from Australia Talks, 40% of the 18- to 24-year-old Australians polled said they hadn't had sex.
But those statistics don't tell the whole story.
For starters, Gen Z is challenging the very concept of virginity — an idea that's been used to shame women for having sex and attempt to keep them "pure" or "clean." Secondly, the traditional definition of virginity — vaginal intercourse with a partner — leaves out the wide swath of LGBTQ+ people who don't have those types of sexual interactions.
Several of the Gen Zers BI spoke with said that the concept of virginity just didn't matter to them that much, while others, like Williams, said their experience of "losing it" was overblown.
These days, Williams said, virginity seems like less and less of a concern. "I mean, I don't even think I've heard the word virgin in a very long time. I don't think it really matters anymore."
'Do all those times not count?'
Sasha Roberts, a 20-year-old teacher from Brooklyn, told BI that she's bisexual and only started dating men last year. Having previously dated exclusively women, she's found herself in something of a virginity limbo.
"I've had so many people say to me, 'You're a virgin until you've had sex with a man,'" Roberts said. "But in reality, I've been having sex with girls since I was 15. Do all those times not count? They just disappear?"
"I've had so many people say to me, 'You're a virgin until you've had sex with a man'
"When is my 'seal broken?'" Roberts added, using a term often meant to describe a woman's hymen being broken after having sex for the first time. "The idea of a seal needing to be 'broken' is so completely not relevant anymore. Why do I even need to make this a matter of importance in my life? Why do I have to look at every sexual experience in my life and wonder, 'Is this it? Is this sex?'"
Roberts isn't alone. With more people identifying as LGBTQ+, the constrictive idea of virginity is becoming increasingly obsolete. More than 26% of the Gen Zers we polled identified as something other than straight, compared with 15% of millennials and 11% of Gen Xers.
"Everybody has sex in different ways," Roberts said. "Everybody identifies in different ways of different genders and everybody is hooking up in so severely different ways. There's no way for me to quantify it. There's no way for me to be like, 'Yep, that was it. That was exactly what made you lose your virginity.'"
Gen Z may be having less partnered penetrative vaginal sex, but that doesn't mean they're sexually inexperienced.
They also prioritize sex differently from other generations. Only 5% of the Gen Zers we polled considered sex the most important part of a relationship, while 14% said sex was not at all important or not very important in a relationship. Among millennials, 10% considered sex to be the most important part of a relationship, while 8% considered it not at all or not very important.
The problem with virginity
"There's as many ways to view virginity as there are ways to view sex," Lindsey Weiss, a 26-year-old law student living in Queens, New York, said. "What sex means to everybody is going to be a little different, especially based on your gender or sexual orientation."
Weiss, who identifies as queer, added that "when you decide that you've had sex … that depends on a lot of social and cultural factors."
"The term is complicated," Danielle Bezalel, a sex educator and the host of the "Sex Ed With DB" podcast, said of virginity, adding that "it comes with a lot of baggage."
"Religiously, culturally, and societally, we use the concept of virginity to shame people — mostly cis women and girls — into remaining pure and clean by not having intercourse, specifically before marriage," she said. "At the end of the day, it truly does not matter."
But as social norms change, so does virginity's relevance. In the 1940s, the median age for American women to be married for the first time was 20; now it's 28. Fewer people get married with the goal of having children, and those who do often wait until later in life to have kids. The average age women first give birth is now 27, up from 24 in 1990. And more people who don't already have kids say they are unlikely to opt to have children than ever before.
With a waning biological imperative for heterosexual intercourse, more young women are pursuing solo sexual endeavors over "losing it," Sue Milstein, an assistant professor of health studies at Springfield College, said.
Milstein attributed the shift, in part, to how COVID-19 so deeply affected Gen Z's views on mortality and disease.
"Some of them saw their friends getting sick," she said. "So they're like, why do I want to be with a stranger physically when I don't know where they've been?"
Instead, young people are choosing solo sex. They'll say: "I don't really feel like doing a hookup because it's not giving me what I want. I'm getting what I want for my friendships, getting what I want for my vibrator, my toys, whatever it may be," she said.
She also thinks the idea of hookup culture among young people has been vastly overblown.
"They say that there's this hookup culture in the colleges," she told BI. "We've been saying that for 10 years. We've never seen the data that support that ever."
Roberts said other generations should be careful about conflating sexual openness with hypersexuality or promiscuity among Gen Zers.
Just because we're less ignorant about sex doesn't mean that we're ready to hop into it as fast … openness is different than promiscuous."Sasha Roberts, 20
"Older generations, in general, tend to think of Gen Z or younger generations as hypersexual, and I think it's because of how much we're willing to have ready and open conversations about sex," she said. "But just because we're less ignorant about sex doesn't mean that we're ready to hop into it as fast … openness is different than promiscuous."
Milstein is happy to see the culture move away from obsessing over virginity, adding that thinking about sexual experience in terms of virginity doesn't account for people who had no choice or control in how, when, or to whom they lost it.
Tess-Mathilde Bryan, a 22-year-old Virginia native living in New York, has been in only one relationship and described it as "very abusive." It's since ended, and as a result, Bryan said she hasn't had sex in five years.
"A lot of us aren't sexually active," Bryan said, referring to Gen Z. "I think it's because a lot of us are a little bit traumatized."
She's not only avoiding sex but also taking back what it means to be a virgin — by negating her experiences so she can leave room for a new first time.
"It's hard to explain, but I almost still consider myself a virgin just because I want to erase that whole thing, and I think I should be allowed to do that," Bryan added. "I think I should be allowed to say, 'Well, that doesn't count.'"
Dive deeper: Check out our exclusive survey on what Gen Z believes and how they live, work, and love.