These should be boom times for sex.
Our culture has never been more tolerant of sex
in just about every permutation.
Shameful terms like perversion have given way to
cheerful ones like kink.
Polyamory is now a household word.
You can use apps to arrange for casual sex within an hour.
But despite it all, young people are not having more sex,
they're having less.
The average adult has gone from having sex 62 times a year
to 54 times.
In the 90s, the percent of high-school students who reported dating began to drop.
More people than ever seem to be sitting on the sidelines,
romantically speaking.
Some experts say this may be because
people are spending less time in couples.
At the same time, the share of American men who reported
masturbating in a given week doubled
while women more than tripled.
Easy access to porn is part of this story, of course.
Some people say that the Internet has made it
so easy to gratify basic social and sexual needs
that there’s far less incentive to go out into the real world
to satiate these desires.
One study found that the arrival of broadband Internet access to U.S. counties
explained between 7 and 13 percent of the teen birth rate decline.
Social media use goes hand in hand with
rising rates of anxiety and depression,
which also happen to inhibit sexual impulses.
Other critics blame online dating for relocating the romantic landscape.
Over a very short period of time,
it’s become less acceptable to strike up a conversation
in real life without seeming inappropriate or creepy.
According to one poll, 17 percent of young Americans
now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink
constitutes sexual harassment.
Romantic pursuit is being cordoned off
into a prearranged online space that, for many people,
does more to suck up time than create successful matches,
leaving them confused and overwhelmed.
One reason for the decline in sex might be
people feeling empowered to say, ‘No thanks.’
In 2012, 30 percent of women said they experienced pain
the last time they had vaginal sex.
Most women don’t tell their partners about their pain
and may have internalized the idea that physical discomfort
goes along with being female.
A healthy sex life is linked to a happy life,
and having a partner is a stronger predictor than ever of happiness.
But in this modern era,
sex seems more fraught and intimacy more elusive.
In time, perhaps we will collectively rethink some things
like the abysmal state of sex education
and the dysfunctional relationships so many of us have with our smartphones.
Finding love and sex should not be anywhere
near as difficult as it is today,
but for the time being the sex recession seems
more likely to continue than abate.