Why Aren’t Young Men Having Sex?
This first appeared on my YouTube channel, Second Look With Chris Endrey
A third of young men in America haven’t had any sex in the last year.
It’s one of those social statistics that does the rounds now and then and can be hard to know what to do with. But a quick dig reveals that this isn’t simply data that’s been cherrypicked for clickbait — it really does seem that young men are having less sex than the cohorts of young men before them.
And not just a bit either, but far less.
Another major longitudinal study of Americans has the rate of men who have zero sex in a given year going from 7% in 1989 to 27% just three decades later.
Getting an exact picture of the trend is difficult, given that there are so many factors that make it difficult to measure sexual activity across different societies and times — not least being the changing conceptions of sexuality, gender and sex itself.
But while the specifics may be thorny to disaggregate, the trend appears to be the same — across the liberal world, people of all ages are generally having less and less sex. And of all the groups who are having less sex, by the numbers, it’s young people that clearly stand out. And of them, young men stand out further still.
The causes and consequences of social phenomena are, for mine, always too complex to pretend to understand exhaustively. But that doesn’t mean it isn’t interesting to explore and more than worth taking a second look at why today’s young people — and young men in particular — appear to be having much less sex than their ancestors.
When I raised this phenomenon with a married friend, he was really surprised. If this universal decline in sex is also news to you, I can see why and I think you can be forgiven for not expecting it.
Sex mostly happens in private, and given that so many traditional barriers to sexuality have been removed, it’s easy to assume that people are doing it more than ever.
After all, extra-marital sex has gone from a taboo to a norm.
Contraceptive technologies have decoupled male-female intercourse from reproduction, radically lowering the consequences of sex and making it much easier to pursue purely for pleasure.
Dating apps have removed some of the harder parts of finding a sexual partner. They mostly decouple the act of expressing your interest in someone from the pain of rejection, and they can also speed up courtship by guaranteeing some baseline of mutual interest before you’re even able to start a conversation with someone.
And our culture is, in a way, just far more sexualised than the recent past.
TV shows that form the centre of the mainstream like Euphoria, Game of Thrones, and Normal People depict levels of nudity, types of sexual acts and styles of relationships that wouldn’t have been publicly seen at any level in the very recent past.
For perspective, Elvis Presley, who is close enough to the present to remain a household name, had to be filmed from the waist up on the Ed Sullivan Show so that audiences wouldn’t have to be confronted by the sexual provocation of his gyrating hips.
It wasn’t until the year that I was born that anyone said the word ‘period’ on tv at all. When I was at school Seinfeld could only allude to the word clitoris, even though it was the punchline of an entire storyline (deloris!!!).
Today, the mainstream is far less shy.
There’s also been a relative decline of the church, family and state as regulators of permissible sexual practices. They’re still present, but the transition has been huge. Again, in the space of mere decades, liberal society has led homosexual sex from being a codified mental illness and punishable crime to something that is actively approved of by most major churches in Australia.
The change is enormous.
Aliens watching from the outside in could well be forgiven for assuming that humanity had suddenly entered an age in which sex had gone from an unspoken taboo to a routinely enjoyed pastime.
What’s fascinating — at least to me — is that the correlation appears to be the exact opposite.
Because the numbers are clear. And increasingly stark.
A recent survey in Japan had 43% of surveyed people between 18 and 34 having never had sex at all.
So there’s evidently more to the story. But what exactly?
What is the cause of our growing sexlessness?
There are a number of candidates. After all, it’s been a time of significant social acceleration in more ways that I think we realise day to day.
We have a sudden access to everyone and everything at all times in a way that is totally new. The upheaval of our social norms that’s come with this is impossible to quantify from such a close distance. But I think anyone would predict that this would swing a hammer to our lives and culture in any number of ways.
- PORNOGRAPHY
The first and maybe most obvious one, is access to porn.
At the time that I was born, if you wanted to access some good masturbating stimuli you had to look at the underpants section of the Kmart mailout or go all the way to a service station and shamefully pick out a magazine that you couldn’t even browse through before buying.
Now, reading this, you are a couple of steps away from consuming basically whatever hyper-specific sexual niche that excites you the most.
Which I guess, like everything, is good and bad.
It’s certainly convenient and, not unlike sex itself, can be super addictive. And it’s changing the sexual appetites of its users.
Of the most viewed of all time videos on PornHub, more than half involve incest fantasies — which growing up I wouldn’t have guessed was something that would become popular at all, outside of very niche circles.
Suddenly having instant access to perfectly fulfilling — or for many I’m sure superior — forms of sexual pleasure is such a powerful wildcard to throw alongside the sexual urges that our bodies and courtship cultures have evolved for.
Even if you, like many, don’t find porn as fulfilling an experience as sex with another person — accessing porn today takes a lot less time and cognitive energy than even just standing up and brushing the crumbs off your shirt. Compared to the energy and wellbeing risks involved in navigating the complexities of human relationships, you can see why more than 60% of women and more than 90% of men reported using porn in the past month.
But it doesn’t end at its use, and there’s plenty of evidence that the prevalence of porn impacts sexual experiences with real-life partners.
This phenomenon is always going to have an outlier impact for young people, who have been the first generations to have this easy access dominate the mix of their formative sexual experiences.
And while it’s worth remembering that we were absolutely not living in an Eden of flawless sexual exchange before, the wrecking ball of internet porn has its own flavour of impact that’s worth reflecting upon because porn use is a distinct experience of sex and can impact young people in particular in a number of ways.
Most obviously, it may supplant sex, but porn is not sex. It is in fact commonly a hyper-stylised example of sexual activity. And where it supplants formative sexual experiences — as for any young people without an existing base of real world sexual experiences — it can be easy to assume that it is modelling routine sexual behaviours, which can lead to people developing totally unrealistic expectations of sexual partners.
Even moderate regular use of porn can condition sexual arousal in a manner that’s disconnected from the interpersonal encounters that lead to real life sexual relationships. This is thought to be behind the massively growing number of otherwise physically capable young men who find themselves unable to achieve erections in sexual encounters
The marketplaces of porn see them in the same algorithmic competition for attention that has seen an escalating arms race of increasingly stark content leading to desensitisation. That can distort people’s perceptions of more outlier sexual acts and interests as being commonplace, leading to lowered personal confidence and less embodied or respectful in-person encounters
And maybe most importantly for the rate of sex in society, pornography fills a space that might otherwise be used to develop personal and interpersonal experiences of sexual exploration in the physical world. This can really cloud the journey of learning how to find, discern and share enjoyable sexual experiences while stunting the development of the associated skills.
None of these problems are new in and of themselves and it’s a difficult area to map cleanly, particularly given that there are any number of factors influencing sexual development, and we are still in the relatively early days of ubiquitous porn.
I personally don’t think that internet porn alone is responsible for the decline in sex — after all, a happy meal is an easy source of salt, fat and carbohydrates that takes none of the work of preparing a meal and is very cheap — but very few of us choose to eat nothing but happy meals. It certainly can’t be helping, but there are other factors to look at.
2. OUR PHYSIOLOGY
Contemporary life seems to be taking a distinctive physical toll.
Our bodies are different to those of even our recent ancestors, this is due to some mix of changes to our lifestyles, environments, and chemical intake.
Men’s testosterone is one area where the change has been significant. Different studies give different specifics, but it appears that the testosterone level of the average man has been declining around 1% per year for many decades now.
The cumulative effect of this decline is that the average 22 year old man today has a testosterone level similar to that a 67 year old man would have had in the year 2000.
As an indicator of how this might impact the rates of sexual activity, take a look at the symptoms that a doctor checks for when determining if someone should be concerned about low testosterone:
- Low sex drive
- Chronic fatigue
- Erectile dysfunction
Hardly the desired ingredients for a flourishing sex life.
They seem to be such mood-killers that you could imagine blaming low testosterone for the reduced sexuality of young men all by itself.
But it’s still too complex to isolate the blame. And given that having sex increases testosterone and not having sex for long periods decreases it, how can we be sure if low testosterone levels are the consequence or the cause of reduced sexual activity here?
3. TOO BUSY
I also can’t imagine that people’s sex lives aren’t being impacted by the historically-recent instant access we have to endlessly occupying stimuli of all kinds.
Algorithmically addictive social and other media is extraordinarily low cost to access and by design drives an endless appetite so that whatever your particular poison is, it’s not only closer than ever before, but probably actively calling out to you on the numerous devices you have within arm’s-reach of you right now.
And I think there’s a strong case that this is a big culprit, because while it is most noticeable in young men, the percentage of people having sex is in decline across every demographic.
There isn’t space to properly unpack it here, but the hijacking of our cognitive faculties and dopamine systems at this scale is something new, and given how many of us start and end the day looking at our phones, it seems logical enough that this would hit our ability to be present in the places of relaxation, connection, and even boredom that might otherwise become the sites of our sexual pursuits.
We spend less time wandering around looking for fun and more time being idly entertained than ever before.
When I told my sister I was making this video, she straight away said I should talk about video games, and showed me these pictures of rooms of gaming addicts asserting that these people could absolutely not be having sex.
You also might have seen the advent of AI partners now, typically in the form of freemium model apps with a customisable friend that learns about your interests, demonstrates care for you around them, flirts with you, and, for paid subscribers, will engage with you sexually.
I don’t have any data, but based on a quick reddit-scouring, these apps seem to be mostly used by young men, whom I found posting story after story delighting in the emotional and sexual connection that they’re sharing with their chatbots.
It’s hard to imagine that this isn’t 1 to 1 supplanting the sexual relationships they otherwise might be forging. Given that these are mostly early-adopters and that the technology has so far to come yet, it’ll be interesting to see how this tech impacts the sexual development of young people in the near future.
You don’t have to leave the house to get food, you don’t have to leave the couch to be entertained, you don’t have to stand up to connect with someone; and you can get apparently perfectly captivating hits of intimate connection without even turning your head from wherever you are right now.
These things have become so familiar that it’s weird to think that this capacity didn’t exist for the thousands of generations of people that came before us.
4. RELATIONSHIPS
Whether this change to intimate human inter-relations is caused by being so busy, or we are busying ourselves because we’re lonely — the structure of relationships in our society has changed massively.
30% of US adults are single, but it’s 47% for those under 30. People are having kids less and less and later and later, and the percentage of single people who are not looking for a partner at all is up to 50%.
Just a reminder — I’m not saying that this is good or bad, it’s inevitably both for different people. But it’s definitely interesting and worth trying to understand.
People are also getting married at lower rates and those who do get married much later in life. It’s another one that might seem counter-intuitive, but people who are married as a cohort have more sex than people who aren’t. I can imagine that the commitment that people make in forging an ongoing intimate relationship is on the whole less of a barrier to sexual activity. I mean your husband or wife is likely already there in the bed with you, it’s a much shorter path to sex than risking a boring dinner conversation with someone you don’t really know.
As the traditional courtship methods have been obliterated, they’ve eradicated the better-known paths to sexual connection. This is for sure a good thing for those many people in all cultures who have been disempowered and disrespected through types of courtships based on entitlement and rite of passage.
But the new landscape also requires a higher degree of skill to successfully navigate — and the space of what is or isn’t acceptable behaviour is still very contested and would understandably induce anxiety and confusion in young people who are at the point of developing those skills for the first time. Especially given the lack of modelling.
I didn’t learn anything at all about courtship or intimate relationships from my parents and picked up surprisingly little from my peers. It has been — and continues to be — a path of trying, failing, and recalibrating. But it’s always easier when you can skip some lessons thanks to learning from the mistakes of others.
But the conditions are probably more alien than ever. And I can only imagine for people younger than me that it’s even more difficult to relate across the generations. After all, I’m only in my late 30s, but I didn’t have a phone until I was 17. I remember girls coming up to me in school to tell me that one of their friends liked me. I remember being bored sitting at home and going out on my own to find any place where other people might be and swallowing my shyness to talk to strangers that I thought looked interesting. These are experiences that are sliding down the list of how people connect. It’ll be more than a decade until I’m giving relationship and sex advice to my own son — how completely out of date will my own experiences be by then?
Decades on from the sexual revolution, and we’re experiencing other upheavals in our collective narratives on sexuality, gender, consent, respectful relationships, and so much more. I think it’s fair to say that the currents young people are navigating in forging sexual relationships have grown in complexity. Which, at the end of the day, probably also results in less sex.
I don’t think that the difficulty level would even have to be significantly harder at an individual-level to make a huge difference at the social level. After all, I live an 8 minute walk from a supermarket, and 8 minutes from another, superior one, which is uphill. I would go to the downhill supermarket 10 times for each time I visit one uphill — even though it’s a humble Aldi with no good fruit and uphill is a Spar and has a little place where you can get sour cherry poppyseed rétes.
I can see this accumulation of small barriers being absolutely the same with sex. Maintaining an intimate relationship only needs to be a little bit more complex than maintaining a relationship with a twitch audience, for sex to suddenly fall off the to-do list entirely.
5. DATING APPS
I mentioned earlier that dating apps remove a lot of the uncertainty of in-person courtship, because users already know that they like one another. The apps can also massively reduce the time spent finding someone and arranging to meet. So, you would think that this would lead to way more sexual encounters, right?
For some, it absolutely does — but the experience is not universal, and I think there’s a fair case to be made that, on the whole, dating apps reduce sexual activity.
As anyone who’s used them knows, connecting and communicating without the accountability markers of in-person or in-community situations can be a pretty degrading experience. Especially for women.
They are also increasingly colonising the culture of how people meet each other. A 2019 Stanford study found that dating apps had taken the lead for the first time to become the most common way that American couples meet — mostly displacing people being introduced by friends or family.
LET’S TALK ABOUT IT
I can imagine that any one of these factors wouldn’t need to be too strong to have a significant impact in a vicious cycle, wherein sex being slightly less rewarding to have or being slightly more complicated to navigate, would see people pursuing it a lot less and change the shape of its culture as a result.
And, obviously, sex itself can’t be meaningfully measured by its frequency alone. It’s perfectly possible to have lots of sex that isn’t enjoyable. Or to have occasional sex that you enjoy spectacularly. If someone told me I could read one great book a year or 50 bad ones, it would be a no-brainer.
All considered, I think there is still cause to be concerned about this development. Mainly because it seems to be accompanied by other cultural trends that I think indicate a frustration and sadness from our less-sexed young people. From the toxically-entitled incel movements and growing audience for feckless braggards like Andrew Tate to the near-ubiquitous complaining about men that you will hear from any woman who is trying to find one to date — it doesn’t seem like everyone is just happily swapping sex for NPC streaming.
Which ultimately, seems sad to me. But I’d love to hear from everyone else on this.
Whether you’re hoping to have more sex in your life or feel alienated in your choice to deprioritise sex with others, I hope that it’s of some comfort to see that you’re not alone in this experience, and despite the representations of sex in the public culture, it’s something that the collective is spending less and less time doing.
I think, as always, it’s best just to be having dialogues about the big things that are happening in our society. So that we can work together to navigate life’s difficulties and help to make life as rewarding as it can be for each other.
And if you’ve struggled with sex and blamed yourself, I hope that you can see how much there is in the contemporary landscape that is totally new in making it more difficult for everyone. Hopefully for some of you there are small barriers that, now defined, won’t seem so difficult to overcome.
Because for those who want to be connecting to others, you don’t need the stats to know of the health and wellbeing benefits. Being lonely gives the equivalent health hit of smoking 15 cigarettes a day.
Everyone’s different of course, but I think for most people, the experience of having intimate relationships in life offers benefits that are beyond compare — and all despite being amongst the hardest things that any of us will do.
I hope you enjoyed taking a second look at this and thanks so much for joining me, with a special thanks to my patrons. If you found this interesting please do consider sharing it and if you want to help me out, any interaction goes a long way. But, of course, joining my patreon goes ever further.
Thanks again and I hope you’re doing well out there.
