In 1967, in the so-called summer of love, hippies, drug dealers and the homeless young filled San Francisco’s Haight-Ashbury, saturated with the scent of incense and dope. Flower power, love and peace were visibly fraying into psychedelic seediness. I was 19, a British student on a full grant, travelling by Greyhound bus. I had stopped off in California to see what the revolution was all about.

While I dressed the part – mini-skirt and silver boots – the 60s for me, until then, had been identical to that experienced by the poet Michelene Wandor, “full of people I didn’t sleep with/ joints I didn’t smoke/ plays I wasn’t in”. On this particular afternoon, a heavily bearded male, not much interested in personal hygiene and festooned in beads, stopped me in the street. “Wanna ball?” he asked speculatively. So much for free love. I politely declined.

In How Was It for You? Women, Sex, Love and Power in the 1960s, published last month, the writer Virginia Nicholson charts this period, including the cumulative impact of the pill, unhitching sex from reproduction, and the explosion of anti-authoritarian youthful optimism, female aspirations and working-class talent in fashion music, books and film.

Women’s liberation was also bubbling up but still, in the allegedly egalitarian “swinging” 60s, the late writer Jenni Diski told Nicholson: “I was raped several times by men who arrived in my bed and wouldn’t take no for answer.”

“The sexual liberation liberated a generation,” Nicholson writes. “But men most of all.” So how, last week, did we arrive at the conundrum of young male celibacy?

According to the University of Chicago general social survey, a key barometer of US social life, nearly one in three American men aged 18 to 29 said they did not have sex in 2018. (And we have to take them at their word.) Among young men, the figure in the past decade has tripled to 28%, while young women have seen an increase since 2008 of 8% to 18%.

What’s happening? History is like looking through a series of keyholes. Each keyhole to which we fix an eye can give a radically different interpretation of what’s occurring, especially viewed at times of pessimism or moral panic. Extramarital sex wasn’t invented in the 60s, as the myth-makers have it, but it was encouraged by improved contraception and liberalised legislation on homosexuality, abortion and divorce. So what tides of social change are driving celibacy? And should we be alarmed?

Extramarital sex wasn’t invented in the 60s, it was encouraged by improved contraception and liberalised legislation on abortion

Sex in the past was tricky. Ignorance was rife. “Self-abuse” led to insanity. Unmarried mothers spent a lifetime in mental hospitals. Illegal abortions could kill. But, as the historian Steve Humphries recorded, premarital sex was, nevertheless, not that uncommon, especially at the top and bottom of the social scale. Likewise, paradoxically, the “permissive” 60s may have been far tamer than branded. In 1975, the sociologist Geoffrey Gorer concluded that only 11% of the unmarried population, usually young men, was even relatively promiscuous, having three or more partners. “England,” Gorer concluded, “still appears to be a very chaste society.”

What’s unfolding today is a similarly contradictory ragbag. Research says that in the US, if you are married, share the chores in an equal relationship in which both partners work and go to church at least once a month, you are probably both happy and have a satisfactory sex life, although quality might matter more than quantity. If you are none of the above and celibate, you are also probably unhappy.

In 2018, the share of Americans aged 18 to 34 “very happy” in life fell to 25%, the lowest level the survey has ever recorded. (In 1972, 59% were “very happy”.) In addition, last year, 51% of 18- to 34-year-olds in the US said they did not have a steady romantic partner (33% in 2004). Is this the outcome of selfies, narcissism and grossly unrealistic expectations? Or something else? Life can be messy.

In December 2018, Kate Julian in the Atlantic magazine described what she called “a sex recession”. Sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. Is that so bad?

Female independence is to blame, say angry young white men calling themselves “incels” – involuntary celibates – allegedly driven to violence. Killer Elliot Rodger, 22, wrote indignantly: “I don’t know why you girls aren’t attracted to me but I will punish you all for it.”

The accessibility of pornography is also seen as a problem. Fear of phallic failure is arguably easier to manage in a room on your own but it may make healthy relationships that much harder to negotiate, while dating apps are frustrating except for the Kardashians and their ilk.

No sex, for many young women, may be better than bad sex. The joyless coupling described by Kristen Roupenian in her short story Cat Person went viral.

Religion also figures. Saving oneself for marriage is far more common in the US than in the UK.

Are we satiated? As a commodity, is junk sex now on the wane, just like shopping on the high street?

Or, a more positive analysis of increasing sexual abstinence may also be part of the mix. Sex matters, but now it’s so ubiquitous, so too do hobbies, career, friends, children, community, sudoku. Some individuals may also be happily asexual – hardly a tragedy.

Today, sex sells almost every product. It overwhelms popular culture, invades childhood. Are we satiated? As a commodity, is junk sex now on the wane, just like shopping on the high street? Are the young beginning to recalibrate sex and also understand its invaluable connection with intimacy, social skills, self-awareness and mutual self-respect?

In the 60s, rampant misogyny was dressed up as emancipated “permissiveness”. Now, post Harvey Weinstein and Bill Cosby, are young men and women distressingly isolated or starting to exercise a little more (female) agency and (male) caution while learning the value of delayed gratification? Or, again, is it still too early to press our eye to the keyhole and, objectively, assess?

• Yvonne Roberts is a freelance journalist, writer and broadcaster

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