I’m Fuu, a column writer.
Since there have been several candid questions in a row, I looked up some data online.
It comes from Jex, a Japanese condom company that I use myself, and is based on their 2020 survey, “The 4th Japan Sex Survey 2020.” It appears to have been an online survey of 5,000 randomly selected people. If you’re interested, try searching for it—you can download the summary as a PDF.
Percentage of men who don’t use contraception:
20s: 11.2%
30s: 16.2%
40s: 14.9%
As the questioner suggested, it seems that this isn’t limited to a particular generation: around 10–15% of men in their 20s to 40s don’t use contraception and have sex without a condom.
Among men and women overall, the rate was 30.2%.
What’s interesting is that the figures are pushed up by people aged 50 and over. Presumably because many women have gone through menopause, 25% of men and 43.6% of women said they don’t use contraception. Among women aged 60 and over, 70% said they don’t use contraception.
Fuu agrees that it feels good and going without a condom can be tempting, but with papa-katsu (compensated dating in Japan), I’m worried about infections, so I use one.
Maezawa from the CEO’s office will answer this one too.
> If you look at it another way, that means I was having unprotected sex with her, right?
> I asked whether there was a generational gap.
Ah, I see. So in your generation, people had sex just for fun?
People in their 40s and older were all pretty serious back then（笑）. When they had sex with their girlfriends, they were genuinely serious about the relationship. Only a small number of men slept with women casually.
Most men dated women seriously, and many probably thought, “If she gets pregnant, maybe we should get married.”
In that sense, if you compare it with today, when people have sex more casually, there may well be a generational gap.
Incidentally, women rarely got naked back then, either. It was considered normal not to have sex with anyone other than the person you intended to marry.
Adult videos are probably a good example. Since the prevailing view was that you should only have sex with your future spouse, appearing in an adult video was considered completely out of the question. As a result, actresses had to be offered very high fees before they would agree to appear.
That’s why there were adult video actresses earning 100 million to several hundred million yen a year. They would finally agree to undress if they were offered that much.
These days, some people might do it for as little as 100,000 yen per video. That’s how much times have changed—anyone will take their clothes off now.
When you think about it that way, it may make more sense that people in the past had sex while already considering marriage.
Of course, some especially popular men probably didn’t share that mindset. But ordinary men, for the most part, were always serious about their relationships.
I’m Dai, a male member.
I did have sex without a condom with my girlfriend when we were planning to get married. If she got pregnant, I was prepared to take responsibility—that was all there was to it.
Having sex without a condom when you’re not prepared for a pregnancy is out of the question. I don’t think this has anything to do with a generation gap.
Just because you’re anonymous doesn’t mean you should write in a way that looks down on people. It really shows what kind of upbringing you had.
I wouldn’t want to get involved with a jaded woman like the person asking this question.
I’m Kazu, a male member.
I don’t think it’s really a generation gap—it’s more likely based on each person’s individual experiences.
By the way, when I was younger, the only older woman I was ever intimate with without protection was someone who was taking the pill.
I’m afraid of STIs, so I never ask women I barely know to go without protection. That’s why I’ve always been surprised that about 10% of women say they’re fine with no condom even from the first meeting.
