#Cover: Why Is Young Americans' Sex Drive in a "Recession"?

Porn and dating apps have not made this generation's sex life more "prosperous."

A new generation of young Americans is losing interest in sex — young adults and teenagers alike.

Several things bear this out. First, they start having sex later. Between 1991 and 2017, the share of American high schoolers who had had sex fell from 54% to 40%. They also have fewer sexual partners than the two generations before them. People born between the 1960s and the 1980s — "Generation X" — had more sex at 20 than today's 20-year-olds do, but at the age they have now reached they are also doing less than the generation before them did: between the 1990s and 2014, the average adult's annual number of sexual encounters fell from 62 to 54.

This delay and decline is not only an American trend. It shows up in every country that keeps detailed data on its citizens' sex lives, which usually means the developed ones. Japan, which has a population crisis, is one: a 2015 survey found that 43% of 18-to-34-year-olds had never had sex, up from a third a decade earlier. The share of people who do not want to marry has risen alongside it.

This is a little puzzling, because the culture around sex seems to be loosening its restrictions, not tightening them. More open attitudes have taken the stigma out of premarital sex. HIV prevention and treatment have advanced, and contraception is widespread. "Hookup culture" has found new settings, and dating apps like Tinder and Grindr have made casual sex and one-night stands easier to arrange. Pornography keeps multiplying — "whatever exists in the world, there is porn of it" has become a stock joke on the American internet. In pop culture, the shame attached to sexual language and sexual topics is fading, and Teen Vogue, written for teenagers, ran a piece this past August called "A Guide to Anal Sex."

Sex, in almost every American setting, has become an entirely ordinary thing to do and to talk about. So why is young people's actual sex life shrinking? Changes in how couples form, the spread of sex education and a new caution about sex, anxiety, depression — each of these looks like a reason, but once you set them against today's thriving sex culture and project them onto an individual life, each turns out to have its own particular cause.

The Atlantic tried to answer the question from five angles: how individual sexual behavior has changed, how intimate relationships begin, what dating apps actually do, sex that makes people uncomfortable, and finally the other reasons desire is fading.

What Individual Sexual Behavior Has Become

The spread of pornography has mostly left people settling for "sex alone," and real-world sex is increasingly shaped by this "online sex life." According to one study, between 1992 and 2014 the share of American men who masturbated in a given week doubled, to 54%; among women it tripled, to 26%.

Japan is a good place to start. In recent years the Japanese internet has produced a run of terms for people whose sex lives have shrunk: "herbivore men" (soushoku danshi), too busy with work; "parasite singles" (parasaito shinguru), who still live with their parents; and anime-obsessed "otaku." At the same time, Japan makes and consumes enormous quantities of pornography and sex toys. The source of all this may be social facts like a bleak job market, but there is no denying that a culture is taking shape around a life lived "alone and self-sufficient, through the internet," and that the industries serving masturbation are booming. Take "herbivore men": they are not free of desire. They simply want less of the old-fashioned kind of sex life, the kind that requires more than one person.

Masturbation has a long history as a taboo in the United States. Even now, some argue that masturbating to pornography is addictive, that it changes the structure of the brain and causes sexual dysfunction. That is disputed, but one thing is certain: masturbation is coming loose from real-world sex, and it is more likely to shrink a sex life than to enlarge it. In 2017, the most popular categories on the porn site Pornhub were lesbian and hentai — categories most people will never take part in offline.

Young people often watch this kind of pornography to relieve stress and pass the time. It satisfies them differently than real sex does, but there is no denying that it dissolves part of the desire and the need. A 24-year-old man told The Atlantic: "I often ask myself, 'If I didn't have this [porn], would I go out more, would I have more sex?'"

Sex That Hurts, and the Women Refusing It

Easy access to pornography has another result: more and more of what happens during sex is imitation of what happens in porn. A good deal of that — choking, for instance — hurts women. More and more women now refuse it.

Women in pain during sex, with no one talking about it and nothing being done, was common in the past too, especially among young people with little experience. What deserves fresh thought is that pornography may be making some of that early, uncomfortable sex worse. Without systematic, decent sex education, pornography becomes the way teenage boys learn what sex is. And in pornography, scenarios that hurt women are mainstream, or at least common. In her interviews, the reporter heard many women say some version of: "He wanted me to do things I didn't like, and I later realized those things always show up in porn."

Learning about sex has become necessary, but learning it from pornography clearly has bad consequences. One-off sex with a stranger is a related case. Research shows it is less likely to produce physical pleasure than sex with a steady partner, because knowing each other, and having "partner-specific sexual skills," matters a great deal. If young people today start relationships later and later, then their chances to learn the skills that work for themselves and for their partners really are dwindling.

Stable Relationships Are Getting Harder

Sex is, in the end, most closely bound up with a stable relationship — and for this generation, that seems harder and harder to have.

It starts in adolescence. According to Add Health, the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health, in 1995 66% of American 17-year-old boys and 74% of the girls had been in a "special romantic relationship" within the previous 18 months; by 2014, Pew Research Center data put the figure at 46%. Over the same period, activities once treated as markers of growing up have also become rarer among teenagers — drinking, holding a job, going out without their parents, getting a driver's license.

The Atlantic puts this down to parents who are more anxious about every part of their children's lives, so that teenagers have less and less free time and every day is planned for them. One interviewee, years out of high school, remembered it this way: "It was so hard to have a sex life. Baseball practice at 6:30 every morning, class at 8:15, drama club rehearsal at 4:15 in the afternoon, dinner at 6, and then more work on the script."

College carries the pattern forward. "School and career first, relationships later" is how many students think, and they are also deeply anxious about their own social skills. Northwestern University has taught a course called "Marriage 101" for 20 years, meant to help students handle relationships better. In the words of the instructor, Alexandra Solomon, the course now spends most of its time fighting against students' shrinking romantic lives. A reporter from The Atlantic sat in on several class discussions. One student said her confusion about dating went back to middle school, when her parents discouraged her from having a boyfriend because it would distract her from her work. She thinks the same way in college: "Right now I have to finish school, work out, do this, do that... and then I'll think about relationships. But then you turn 30 and say, 'What is love? What does a relationship even look like?'"

Solomon's conclusion is that "hookup culture," once sold as sexual freedom, deserves a more accurate name: "lack-of-relationship culture." One of her students described how it works: "We hook up because we have no social skills, and we have no social skills because we hook up."

What Dating Apps Really Produce Is an Illusion

Apps like Tinder seem to have made falling in love, or having sex, easier. In fact they work far less well than people imagine. And when people give up on them and try to meet someone in the flesh, that turns out to be no simpler.

Tinder is not efficient. A user uploads a photo, sees photos of candidates, and picks "interested" (a like) or "not interested" (a swipe past). Only if both sides like each other do they match and start talking. By Tinder's own numbers, the app records 1.6 billion swipes a day and only 26 million matches. In the reporter's interviews, few of those matches led to an actual date, because a match does not mean the conversation continues.

The apps do little good partly because the whole basis for choosing is a photograph, so the good-looking and the photogenic collect far more matches. Simon, a 32-year-old interviewee, said: "Unless you're exceptionally good-looking, online dating is basically a waste of time." He described himself as "short and bald — if I weren't this funny on top of that, I'd be finished." In his experience, even after a match, roughly one message in every 10 he sent got a reply.

On top of that, most people's reasons for using Tinder are not serious. Some interviewees said people have got used to a game of matching pairs, saying yes to everyone just to relax and kill time; others said being liked, and finally matching, feels like a shot of confidence. So it is no surprise that turning these exchanges into anything real is hard.

Meeting people offline is harder than it was for the previous generation, too. The reporter found that in public places, the chance of two people getting closer keeps shrinking. The rise of feminism, and a new sensitivity and wariness about sexual harassment, are part of this. According to November 2017 data from the analytics firm YouGov, 17% of Americans aged 18 to 29 think a man asking a woman out for a drink is "always" or "usually" sexual harassment; among older groups the share is lower. Laurie Mintz, who teaches the psychology of sex in Florida, found that after #MeToo took off her male students began reconsidering whether their own past behavior had been improper — some to the point of overdoing it, growing afraid to ask anyone out at all in case they crossed a line.

Anxiety Wears Desire Down

A person's sex life is tightly bound to the state of their daily life, and the anxieties that daily life throws up have become a source of failing desire.

One of the big ones is dissatisfaction with your own body. "Millennials are the generation that doesn't like being naked." Bedrooms shared with a partner now come with dressing-room layouts, and showering together in a locker room seems to belong to an earlier era. Privacy has something to do with it, of course, but what matters more is that people care more about how they look with their clothes off. A growing body of research ties this anxiety directly to social networks and media products: the bodies of porn performers, for instance, have become one source of anxiety and low self-esteem.

The small details of daily life affect people's sex lives as well. Sleep quality is one important factor — people with extra sleep have been shown to be more likely to have sex. Pressure at work and at school matters too.

The author asks in the piece whether these everyday trivialities can really reach the most basic sexual drive of an animal. The real-world answer is yes: "The human species needs sex. Any given human being does not."

As for where these factors come from, the author writes: "We are physically safer than we have ever been, but things in modern life have set off a great many danger-related, autonomic responses in people — anxiety and tension, constant scanning of the surroundings, sleep adjusted to fit the environment. In that state, survival beats desire."

Cover image from Unsplash, by Charles Deluvio.