Over the past few years, Jean M Twenge, a psychology professor at San Diego State University, has published research exploring how and why Americans' sex lives may be ebbing. In a series of journal articles and in her latest book, iGen, she notes that today's young adults are on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations. People now in their early 20s are two-and-a-half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers were at that age; 15 per cent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood.

When I call the anthropologist Helen Fisher, who studies love and sex and co-directs Match.com's annual Singles in America survey of more than 5000 unpartnered Americans, I can almost feel her nodding over the phone. "The data is that people are having less sex," she says, with a hint of mischief.

Fisher, like many other experts, attributes the sex decline to a decline in couplehood among young people. For a quarter century, fewer people have been marrying, and those who do have been marrying later. At first, many observers figured that the decline in marriage was explained by an increase in unmarried cohabitation – yet the share of people living together hasn't risen enough to offset the decline in marriage: about 60 per cent of adults under 35 live without a spouse or a partner. One in three adults in this age range live with their parents, making that the most common living arrangement for the cohort. People who live with a romantic partner tend to have sex more than those who don't – and living with your parents is obviously bad for your sex life. But this doesn't explain why young people are partnering up less to begin with.

Over the course of many conversations with sex researchers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults, I heard many other theories about what I have come to think of as the sex recession. I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, of surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropping testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator's golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido.

Sex seems more fraught now because the world has changed in so many ways, so quickly. Blend Images / Alamy Stock Photo

Some experts I spoke with offered more hopeful explanations for the decline in sex. For example, rates of childhood sexual abuse have decreased in recent decades, and abuse can lead to both precocious and promiscuous sexual behaviour. And some people today may feel less pressured into sex they don't want to have, thanks to changing gender mores and growing awareness of diverse sexual orientations, including asexuality. Maybe more people are prioritising school or work over love and sex, at least for a time, or maybe they're simply being extra deliberate in choosing a life partner – and if so, good for them.

Many – or all – of these things may be true. Still, a handful of suspects came up again and again in my interviews and in the research I reviewed – and each has profound implications for our happiness.

1. Sex for one


The retreat from sex is not an exclusively American phenomenon. Most countries don't track their citizens' sex lives closely, but those that try (all of them wealthy) are reporting their own sex delays and declines. One of the most respected sex studies in the world, Britain's National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, reported in 2001 that people ages 16 to 44 were having sex more than six times a month on average. By 2012, the rate had dropped to fewer than five times. Over roughly the same period, Australians in relationships went from having sex about 1.8 times a week to 1.4 times. Finland's "Finsex" study found declines in intercourse frequency, along with rising rates of masturbation.

In the Netherlands, the median age at which people first have intercourse rose from 17.1 in 2012 to 18.6 in 2017, and other types of physical contact also got pushed back, even kissing. This news was greeted not with universal relief, as in the United States, but with some concern. The Dutch pride themselves on having some of the world's highest rates of adolescent and young-adult wellbeing. If people skip a crucial phase of development, one educator warned – a stage that includes not only flirting and kissing but dealing with heartbreak and disappointment – might they be unprepared for the challenges of adult life?

Modern Japan's sexual funk may be a cautionary tale for the West. Prasit Rodphan / Alamy Stock Photo

Meanwhile, Sweden, which hadn't done a national sex study in 20 years, recently launched one, alarmed by polling suggesting that Swedes, too, were having less sex. The country, which has one of the highest birth rates in Europe, is apparently disinclined to risk its fecundity. "If the social conditions for a good sex life – for example through stress or other unhealthy factors – have deteriorated," the Swedish health minister at the time wrote in an op-ed explaining the rationale for the study, it is "a political problem."

This brings us to fertility-challenged Japan, which is in the midst of a demographic crisis and has become something of a case study in the dangers of sexlessness. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015, 43 per cent of people in this age group were, and the share who said they did not intend to get married had risen too. (Not that marriage was any guarantee of sexual frequency: a related survey found that 47 per cent of married people hadn't had sex in at least a month.)

For nearly a decade, stories in the Western press have tied Japan's sexual funk to a rising generation of soushoku danshi – literally, "grass-eating boys." These "herbivore men," as they are known in English, are said to be ambivalent about pursuing either women or conventional success. The new taxonomy of Japanese sexlessness also includes terms for groups such as hikikomori ("shut-ins"), parasaito shinguru ("parasite singles," people who live with their parents beyond their 20s), and otaku ("obsessive fans," especially of anime and manga) – all of whom are said to contribute to sekkusu shinai shokogun ("celibacy syndrome").

Early on, most Western accounts of all this had a heavy subtext of "Isn't Japan wacky?" This tone has slowly given way to a realisation that the country's experience might be less a curiosity than a cautionary tale. Dismal employment prospects played an initial role in driving many men to solitary pursuits – but the culture has since moved to accommodate and even encourage those pursuits. Roland Kelts, a Japanese American writer and longtime Tokyo resident, has described "a generation that found the imperfect or just unexpected demands of real-world relationships with women less enticing than the lure of the virtual libido".

Online dating favours the photogenic yet continues to attract more users. Image Source / Alamy Stock Photo


From 1992 to 2014, the share of American men who reported masturbating in a given week doubled, to 54 per cent, and the share of women more than tripled, to 26 per cent. Easy access to porn is part of the story, of course; in 2014, 43 per cent of men said they'd watched porn in the past week. The vibrator figures in, too – a major study 10 years ago found that just over half of adult women had used one, and by all indications it has only grown in popularity.

Ian Kerner, a well-known New York sex therapist and the author of several popular books about sex, tells me that he works with a lot of men who, inspired by porn, "are still masturbating like they're 17," to the detriment of their sex life. "It's taking the edge off their desire," he says. Kerner believes this is why more and more of the women coming to his office in recent years report that they want sex more than their partners do.

Sex may be declining, but most people are still having it – even during an economic recession, most people are employed.

The recession metaphor is imperfect, of course. Most people need jobs; that's not the case with relationships and sex. I talked with plenty of people who were single and celibate by choice. Even so, I was amazed by how many 20-somethings were deeply unhappy with the sex-and-dating landscape; over and over, people asked me whether things had always been this hard. Despite the diversity of their stories, certain themes emerged.

Christian pro-abstinence groups take credit for a decline in the teen pregnancy rate but the reality is more complex. iStock

Many of the younger people I talked with see porn as just one more digital activity – a way of relieving stress, a diversion. It is related to their sex life (or lack thereof) in much the same way social media and binge-watching TV are.

An intriguing study published last year in the Journal of Population Economics examined the introduction of broadband internet access at the county-by-county level, and found that its arrival explained 7 to 13 per cent of the teen-birth-rate decline from 1999 to 2007.

Maybe adolescents are not the hormone-crazed maniacs we sometimes make them out to be. Maybe the human sex drive is more fragile than we thought, and more easily stalled.


2. Hookup culture and helicopter parents

I started high school in 1992, around the time the teen pregnancy and birth rates hit their highest levels in decades, and the median age at which teenagers began having sex was approaching its modern low of 16.9. Women born in 1978, the year I was born, have a dubious honour: we were younger when we started having sex than any group since.

But as the '90s continued, the teen pregnancy rate began to decline. This development was welcomed – even if experts couldn't agree on why it was happening. Birth-control advocates naturally pointed to birth control. And yes, teenagers were getting better about using contraceptives, but not sufficiently better to single-handedly explain the change. Christian pro-abstinence groups and backers of abstinence-only education, which received a big funding boost from the 1996 welfare-reform act, also tried to take credit. Yet the teen pregnancy rate was falling even in places that hadn't adopted abstinence-only curricula, and research has since shown that virginity pledges and abstinence-only education don't actually beget abstinence.

Still, the trend continued: each wave of teenagers had sex a little later, and the pregnancy rate kept inching down. You wouldn't have known either of these things, though, from all the hyperventilating about hookup culture that started in the late '90s. The New York Times, for example, announced in 1997 that on college campuses, casual sex "seems to be near an all-time high." It didn't offer much data to support this, but it did introduce the paper's readers to the term hooking up, which it defined as "anything from 20 minutes of strenuous kissing to spending the night together fully clothed to sexual intercourse."

Pretty much ever since, people have been overestimating how much casual sex high-school and college students are having (even, surveys show, students themselves).

Data from the Online College Social Life Survey of more than 20,000 college students conducted from 2005 to 2011 found the median number of hookups over a four-year college career to be five – a third of which involved only kissing and touching. The majority of students surveyed said they wished they had more opportunities to find a long-term boyfriend or girlfriend.

Dysfunctional relationships with social media leave many young people ill-equipped for adulthood. aarcher@fairfaxmedia.com.au

In more recent decades, by contrast, teen romantic relationships appear to have grown less common. In 1995, the large longitudinal study known as "Add Health" found that 66 per cent of 17-year-old men and 74 per cent of 17-year-old women had experienced "a special romantic relationship" in the past 18 months. In 2014, when the Pew Research Center asked 17-year-olds whether they had "ever dated, hooked up with or otherwise had a romantic relationship with another person" – seemingly a broader category than the earlier one – only 46 per cent said yes.


So what thwarted teen romance? Adolescence has changed so much in the past 25 years that it's hard to know where to start. As Jean Twenge wrote in The Atlantic last year, the percentage of teens who report going on dates has decreased alongside the percentage who report other activities associated with entering adulthood, like drinking alcohol, working for pay, going out without one's parents, and getting a driver's license.

These shifts coincide with another major change: parents' increased anxiety about their children's educational and economic prospects. Among the affluent and educated, especially, this anxiety has led to big changes in what's expected of teens. "It's hard to work in sex when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion," said a man who was a couple of years out of college, thinking back on his high-school years. He added: "There's immense pressure" from parents and other authority figures "to focus on the self, at the expense of relationships" – pressure, quite a few 20-somethings told me, that extends right on through college.

3. The Tinder mirage

"The dating landscape has changed. People are less likely to ask you out in real life now, or even talk to begin with," said a 28-year-old woman in Los Angeles who volunteered that she had been single for three years.

This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 per cent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink "always" or "usually" constitutes sexual harassment. (Among older groups, much smaller percentages believe this.)

Laurie Mintz, who teaches a popular undergraduate class on the psychology of sexuality at the University of Florida, told me that the #MeToo movement has made her students much more aware of issues surrounding consent. She has heard from many young men who are productively re-examining their past actions and working diligently to learn from the experiences of friends and partners. But others have described less healthy reactions, like avoiding romantic overtures for fear that they might be unwelcome. In my own conversations, men and women alike spoke of a new tentativeness and hesitancy. One woman who described herself as a passionate feminist said she felt empathy for the pressure that heterosexual dating puts on men. "I think I owe it to them, in this current cultural moment particularly, to try to treat them like they're human beings taking a risk talking to a stranger," she wrote me. "There are a lot of lonely, confused people out there, who have no idea what to do or how to date."

How could various dating apps be so inefficient at their ostensible purpose – hooking people up – and still be so popular? For one thing, lots of people appear to be using them as a diversion, with limited expectations of meeting up in person. As Iris, who's 33, told me bitterly, "They've gamified interaction. The majority of men on Tinder just swipe right on everybody. They say yes, yes, yes to every woman."

Many critiques of online dating, including a 2013 article by Dan Slater in The Atlantic, adapted from his book A Million First Dates, have focused on the idea that too many options can lead to "choice overload," which in turn leads to dissatisfaction. Online daters, he argued, might be tempted to keep going back for experiences with new people; commitment and marriage might suffer. Michael Rosenfeld, a sociologist who runs a longitudinal study out of Stanford called "How Couples Meet and Stay Together," questions this hypothesis; his research finds that couples who meet online tend to marry more quickly than other couples, a fact that hardly suggests indecision.


Some say dating apps have resulted in people having no idea how to date. B Christopher / Alamy Stock Photo

Maybe choice overload applies a little differently than Slater imagined. Maybe the problem is not the people who date and date some more – they might even get married, if Rosenfeld is right – but those who are so daunted that they don't make it off the couch. This idea came up many times in my conversations with people who described sex and dating lives that had gone into a deep freeze. Some used the term paradox of choice; others referred to option paralysis (a term popularised by Black Mirror); still others invoked fobo ("fear of a better option").

And yet online dating continues to attract users, in part because many people consider apps less stressful than the alternatives. Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up (We've each opted in; I'm at least a little bit interested in you).

In all dating markets, apps appear to be most helpful to the highly photogenic. As Emma, a 26-year-old virgin who sporadically tries her luck with online dating, glumly told me, "Dating apps make it easy for hot people – who already have the easiest time." Christian Rudder, a co-founder of OkCupid (one of the less appearance-centric dating services, in that it encourages detailed written profiles), reported in 2009 that the male users who were rated most physically attractive by female users got 11 times as many messages as the lowest-rated men did; medium-rated men received about four times as many messages. The disparity was starker for women: About two-thirds of messages went to the one-third of women who were rated most physically attractive.

So where does this leave us? Many online daters spend large amounts of time pursuing people who are out of their league. Few of their messages are returned, and even fewer lead to in-person contact. At best, the experience is apt to be bewildering. But it can also be undermining, even painful.

An even bigger problem may be the extent to which romantic pursuit is now being cordoned off into a predictable, prearranged online venue, the very existence of which makes it harder for anyone, even those not using the apps, to extend an overture in person without seeming inappropriate. What a miserable impasse.

4. Bad sex (painfully bad)

One especially spring-like morning in May, as Debby Herbenick and I walked her baby through a park in Bloomington, Indiana, she shared a bit of advice she sometimes offers students at Indiana University, where she is a leading sex researcher. "If you're with somebody for the first time," she said evenly, "don't choke them, don't ejaculate on their face, don't try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well."


I'd sought out Herbenick in part because I was intrigued by an article she'd written for The Washington Post proposing that the sex decline might have a silver lining. Herbenick had asked whether we might be seeing, among other things, a retreat from coercive or otherwise unwanted sex. Just a few decades ago, after all, marital rape was still legal in many states.

In 2009, Herbenick and her colleagues launched the ongoing National Survey of Sexual Health and Behaviour, which is only the second nationally representative survey to examine Americans' sex lives in detail – and the first to try to chart them over time.

For most people, casual sex tends to be less pleasurable than sex with a regular partner. MOODBOARD

I asked Herbenick whether the NSSHB's findings gave her any hunches about what might have changed since the 1990s. She mentioned the new popularity of sex toys, and a surge in heterosexual anal sex. Back in 1992, the big University of Chicago survey reported that 20 per cent of women in their late 20s had tried anal sex; in 2012, the NSSHB found a rate twice that. She also told me about new data suggesting that, compared with previous generations, young people today are more likely to engage in sexual behaviours prevalent in porn, like the ones she warns her students against springing on a partner. All of this might be scaring some people off, she thought, and contributing to the sex decline.

Some of Herbenick's most sobering research concerns the prevalence of painful sex. In 2012, 30 per cent of women said they'd experienced pain the last time they'd had vaginal intercourse; during anal intercourse, 72 per cent had. Whether or not these rates represent an increase (we have no basis for comparison), they are troublingly high.

Sex takes time to learn under the best of circumstances, and these are not the best of circumstances. Modelling your behaviour after what you've seen on-screen can lead to what's known as "spectatoring" – that is, worrying about how you look and sound while you're having sex, a behaviour the sex researchers William H Masters and Virginia E Johnson long ago posited was bad for sexual functioning.

Learning sex in the context of one-off hookups isn't helping either. Research suggests that, for most people, casual sex tends to be less physically pleasurable than sex with a regular partner.

5. Inhibition


"Millennials don't like to get naked – if you go to the gym now, everyone under 30 will put their underwear on under the towel, which is a massive cultural shift," Jonah Disend, the founder of the branding consultancy Redscout, told Bloomberg last year.

Some observers have suggested that a new discomfort with nudity might stem from the fact that, by the mid-1990s, most high schools had stopped requiring students to shower after gym class. Which makes sense – the less time you spend naked, the less comfortable you are being naked. But people may also be newly worried about what they look like naked. A large and growing body of research reports that for both men and women, social-media use is correlated with body dissatisfaction.

As one might imagine, feeling comfortable in your body is good for your sex life. A review of 57 studies examining the relationship between women's body image and sexual behaviour suggests that positive body image is linked to having better sex.

Rates of anxiety and depression have been rising among Americans for decades now, and by some accounts have risen quite sharply of late among people in their teens and 20s. Anxiety suppresses desire for most people. And, in a particularly unfortunate catch-22, both depression and the antidepressants used to treat it can also reduce desire.

A study 10 years ago found that just over half of adult women had used a vibrator. Celeste Sloman/ New York Times

I was struck by what a paralysing and vicious cycle unhappiness and abstinence can be. The data show that having sex makes people happier (up to a point, at least; for those in relationships, more than once a week doesn't seem to bring an additional happiness bump). Yet unhappiness inhibits desire, in the process denying people who are starved of joy one of its potential sources. Are rising rates of unhappiness contributing to the sex recession? Almost certainly. But mightn't a decline in sex and intimacy also be leading to unhappiness?

Moreover, what research we have on sexually inactive adults suggests that, for those who desire a sex life, there may be such a thing as waiting too long. Among people who are sexually inexperienced at age 18, about 80 per cent will become sexually active by the time they are 25. But those who haven't gained sexual experience by their mid-20s are much less likely to ever do so. The authors of a 2009 study in The Journal of Sexual Medicine speculated that "if a man or woman has not had intercourse by age 25, there is a reasonable chance [he or she] will remain a virgin at least until age 45."

Other sources of sexual inhibition speak distinctly to the way we live today. For example, sleep deprivation strongly suppresses desire – and sleep quality is imperiled by now-common practices like checking one's phone overnight. (For women, getting an extra hour of sleep predicts a 14 per cent greater likelihood of having sex the next day.) In her new book, Better Sex Through Mindfulness, Lori Brotto, an obstetrics-and-gynecology professor at the University of British Columbia, reviews lab research showing that background distraction of the sort we're all swimming in now likewise dampens arousal, in both men and women.


How can such little things – a bad night's sleep, low-grade distraction – defeat something as fundamental as sex? One answer, which I heard from a few quarters, is that our sexual appetites are meant to be easily extinguished. The human race needs sex, but individual humans don't.

Among the contradictions of our time is this: we live in unprecedented physical safety, and yet something about modern life, very recent modern life, has triggered in many of us autonomic responses associated with danger – anxiety, constant scanning of our surroundings, fitful sleep. Under these circumstances, survival trumps desire. As Emily Nagoski likes to point out, nobody ever died of sexlessness: "We can starve to death, die of dehydration, even die of sleep deprivation. But nobody ever died of not being able to get laid."

Societal changes have a way of inspiring generational pessimism. Other writers, examining the same data I've looked at, have produced fretful articles about the future; critics have accused them of stoking panic. And yet there are real causes for concern. One can quibble – if one cares to – about exactly why a particular toy retailer failed. But there's no escaping that the American birth rate has been falling for a decade.

At first, the drop was attributed to the Great Recession, and then to the possibility that Millennial women were delaying motherhood rather than forgoing it. But a more fundamental change may be under way. In 2017, the US birth rate hit a record low for a second year running. Birth rates are declining among women in their 30s – the age at which everyone supposed more Millennials would start families. As a result, some 500,000 fewer American babies were born in 2017 than in 2007, even though more women were of prime childbearing age. Over the same period, the number of children the average American woman is expected to have fell from 2.1 (the so-called replacement rate, or fertility level required to sustain population levels without immigration) to 1.76. If this trend does not reverse, the long-term demographic and fiscal implications will be significant.

A more immediate concern involves the political consequences of loneliness and alienation. Take for example the online hate and real-life violence waged by the so-called incels – men who claim to be "involuntarily celibate." Their grievances, which are illegitimate and vile, offer a timely reminder that isolated young people are vulnerable to extremism of every sort. See also the populist discontent roiling Europe, driven in part by adults who have so far failed to achieve the milestones of adulthood: in Italy, half of 25-to-34-year-olds now live with their parents.

When I began working on this story, I expected that these big-picture issues might figure prominently within it. I was pretty sure I'd hear lots of worry about economic insecurity and other contributors to a generally precarious future. I also imagined, more hopefully, a fairly lengthy inquiry into the benefits of loosening social conventions, and of less couple-centric pathways to a happy life. But these expectations have mostly fallen to the side, and my concerns have become more basic.

A fulfilling sex life is not necessary for a good life, of course, but lots of research confirms that it contributes to one.

Like economic recessions, the sex recession will probably play out in ways that are uneven and unfair. Those who have many things going for them already – looks, money, psychological resilience, strong social networks – continue to be well positioned to find love and have good sex and, if they so desire, become parents. But intimacy may grow more elusive to those who are on less steady footing.

Sex seems more fraught now. This problem has no single source; the world has changed in so many ways, so quickly. In time, maybe, we will rethink some things: The abysmal state of sex education, which was once a joke but is now, in the age of porn, a disgrace. The dysfunctional relationships so many of us have with our phones and social media, to the detriment of our relationships with humans and efforts to "protect" teenagers from most everything, including romance, leaving them ill-equipped for both the miseries and the joys of adulthood.

Atlantic