THE permissive revolution has almost wiped out differences in sexual habits between men and women, according to a comprehensive study of sex lives over nearly 60 years.

The researchers argue that this has come about because women’s sexual attitudes and experience have been transformed, while men’s have hardly changed since the 1940s.

They find a near-quadrupling in the proportion of teenage women who are sexually active, while the age at which they lose their virginity has fallen by four years.

Guilt about sex has declined sharply, while attitudes to premarital sex have reversed since the 1940s — slightly more men than women now disapprove of a couple sleeping together before their wedding night.

Jean Twenge, associate professor in psychology at San Diego State University in California, who led the research, said: “In the 1950s and 1960s, men and women were a long way apart; now the gender differences have almost disappeared. The 1960s might have been called the ‘sexual revolution’, but they were just the beginning.”

Although the research is American, Twenge said trends such as improving social equality for women and greater access to contraception meant the findings would also be relevant to Britain.

“The trends we are seeing are pretty common across all western countries, including the UK,” said Twenge. “Many young people see these patterns as the long-overdue shedding of arbitrary restrictions on sexuality.”

Twenge, along with Brooke Wells, a graduate student at City University of New York, compiled the data by analysing 530 studies from 1943 to 1999, covering 270,000 people.

She found that only 13% of teenage girls admitted being sexually active in the 1950s — compared with more than 60% of boys. By the late 1990s this figure had jumped to 47% for girls, while the percentage of sexually active teenage boys had fallen.

In the earlier years of the study women lost their virginity at the age of 19, while for men the age was 18. By the 1990s, the age for both sexes had fallen to 15.

Despite more liberal attitudes to sex the authors say they could find no significant change in the number of sexual partners, suggesting that while sexual experience is growing, promiscuity may not be.

The researchers also find that sexual guilt in men and women, especially the latter, has fallen. The most pronounced change in attitudes was to premarital sex. In 1958, 30% of women said they approved of it, compared with 54% of men. By 1987, the most recent year for which comparable figures were available, women had overtaken men, with 91% having no objection to intercourse before marriage, compared with 84% of men.

Dr Tuppy Owens, 61, a therapist at the Sexual Freedom Coalition, said: “I was a teenager in the 1950s and it was quite difficult to find a place to have sex . . . you were looked on as fast and loose, not that it stopped many of us. Nowadays young people are allowed to have boyfriends in their bedrooms. Sex is considered a good thing to do.”

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