What Goes on Behind Closed Doors

Sex and Housing from A Taste of Honey to Love Island

Mujeres al borde de un ataque de nervios (1988)

That Spain is undergoing a youth crisis is no secret; although youth unemployment has dropped from its high of 57% in 2014, 1 in 3 young Spanish people are currently without work, and the country still has its historically high dropout rates from secondary education. The economic fallout of the 2008 financial crisis still hits the young disproportionately hard. The long term social, economic and personal implications of this crisis will play out for decades, and this week it was reported that of the nearly 7 million Spanish young people, barely one million live outside their parent’s home. That figure - 14.9% of the youth population - compares to 58% of British and American young people. In Scandinavia the figure is even lower: just 4% of 25-34 year olds in Denmark still live with their parents.

The causes of people living with their parents are economic, and political. Low employment rates, precarious work, rising living costs and stagnant wages, and, of course, a lack of social housing and housebuilding programmes. The consequences are serious, too: low self-esteem, family conflict and long-term unemployment can be a direct effect of living with one's parents well into adulthood. Reading the article, however, I was also wondering about the effect this lack of independent living situations was having on people’s sex lives. How can one maintain a healthy sex life without the degree of independence from family offered by moving out, even into shared accommodation? It seems obvious that our sexual development, our sexual liberty, is intimately tied in with our living conditions, yet this degree of freedom seems unremarked on in many accounts of the housing crisis, perhaps as it’s seen as a secondary need when compared with the primary needs of a roof and a warm room. Yet these problems intersect: after all, in the US, where it’s thought around 7% of young people are LGBTQ, they make up 40% of the young homeless population, while the risk of homelessness for BIPOC young people in the US is 83% higher than their white counterparts.