When responding to surveys, young people are more likely to toss out the sex question than the race or ethnicity question. This got developmental psychologist Ritch Savin-Williams wondering: if youth are rejecting these categories, how are they experiencing sexuality and romance?
So he set to work interviewing hundreds of young people (eighteen and up). What he found is that Zoomers are expanding their vision and vocabulary around sexuality. And, as Ritch Savin-Williams argues, this is not a phase—youth aren’t changing how they feel about themselves, but how they express it.
Today, he joins Tuesday host Ali Muldrow to talk about this research on youth sexuality and findings from his new book, Bi: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Nonbinary Youth.
Ritch C. Savin-Williams is an emeritus professor of developmental psychology at Cornell University. His latest book is Bi: Bisexual, Pansexual, Fluid, and Nonbinary Youth (NYU Press, 2021).
Cover photo by Jonathan Kemper on Unsplash
