The virgin allegations emerged about a decade ago. Young people “are so sexually inactive that it practically boggles the mind,” a writer for Bustle proclaimed, in 2016, invoking a then recent study that suggested that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties. Two years later, The Atlantic gave this evident trend its working name, with a cover story on “The Sex Recession.” (The illustration: a bird and a bee turned away from each other, looking both sullen and shy.) The youth had stopped fucking. They were a “new generation of prigs, prudes, and squares,” a blog declared; they were “anxious, lonely and addicted to porn,” according to the Telegraph. They were dragging the rest of the population down with them, the Washington Post argued, blaming the “Great American Sex Drought” on young people, and particularly young men, for being losers, more or less—having no girlfriends, living with their parents, preferring video games and social media to real, live, naked bodies.
This, it should be noted, was not your typical kids-these-days hand-wringing. Traditionally, it is the role of the old to worry that the young are having sex too much. In the nineteen-twenties, society’s elders panicked about flappers fornicating in speakeasies; the sixties prompted fears of love cults and orgies; the eighties brought a new wave of AIDS-centered gay panic. More recently, millennials were harangued for “hookup culture,” exemplified by frat parties and “Girls Gone Wild.” But the statistics since then have consistently suggested a genuine sex recession, one that includes young millennials, though it has become attached in the public imagination to Gen Z—roughly speaking, those who are currently in their teens and twenties. In 2018, a survey of eighteen- to twenty-four-year-olds found that nearly a third of the men in that group, and about a fifth of the women, had gone without sex for a year—a significant jump from the numbers in the early two-thousands. The pandemic didn’t help: in 2021, nearly forty per cent of Californians aged eighteen to thirty had had no sexual partners the previous year.
The Zoomer sex recession is puzzling in part because sex has seemingly never been less stigmatized or easier to procure. The electronic devices in our pockets contain not only a vast universe of free porn but also apps on which casual sex can be arranged as efficiently as a burrito delivery from DoorDash. Today, it is a mainstream view that desire isn’t shameful, that kinks can be healthy, that a man should make an effort to give a woman an orgasm, that people can do what they want in the bedroom as long as everyone involved is pleased. And yet, presented with a Vegas buffet of carnality, young people are losing their appetite. How should we understand this? And what, if anything, should we do?
According to Louise Perry, a British journalist in her early thirties, we should celebrate. Perry, who styles herself as a pragmatic apostate from liberal groupthink, recently published “A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century,” a young-adult adaptation of her first book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution.” The new title exemplifies one of Perry’s favorite moves, which is to present reactionary conservatism as simple common sense. Chapter titles include “Sex Must Be Taken Seriously,” “Men and Women Are Different,” “Not All Desires Are Good,” “Violence Is Not Love,” “People Are Not Products,” “Marriage Is Good.” These are reasonable statements, meant to lead the book’s intended reader—a young, straight woman with more fears than experience—to be equally persuaded by Perry’s broader conclusion: that, rather than hope to change anything about our society, we can only individually compress ourselves into a defensive crouch against the very worst that could happen.
Perry’s book is less a guide than a warning. It is important, she cautions readers, to remember that “almost all men can kill almost all women with their bare hands, but not vice versa.” Biological differences between men and women create an ineradicable mismatch between male and female sexual desire, she maintains; unless a woman is in the “small minority” of her kind who appreciate sexual variety, “the risks of casual sex will outweigh the benefits.” She also advises that, “while most women assess their short-term and their long-term partners based on the same criteria, most men do not,” a snippet I considered texting to many female friends who, before settling down with men you’d go to Pottery Barn with, enthusiastically bedded d.j.s and floor-mattress degenerates for years.
Perry repeatedly bolsters her argument by misrepresenting the territory at hand. She writes that “the need for consent is the only moral principle left for sexual liberals,” which is not true whatsoever; progressive feminists have been pointing out for years that consent often exists within a context of exploitation. (Katherine Angel wrote a particularly sharp critique of “consent culture” in her book “Tomorrow Sex Will Be Good Again,” which was published in 2021.) Perry argues elsewhere in the book that the tenets of sexual liberalism “inevitably tend towards legalising child sex,” hinting at the old, offensive comparison between homosexuality and pedophilia—even though “age gap” critiques, which typically lambaste men for dating much younger women, are omnipresent in contemporary online discourse, proliferating especially among nominally left-leaning Zoomers. Perry also likes to set things in opposition rather than examine the relationship between them—“We should prioritise virtue over desire,” for example—and she loves to weld a common-sense suggestion to a fundamentalist one. “My advice to young women has to be this: avoid putting yourself in a situation where you are alone with a man you don’t know, or a man who gives you a bad feeling in your gut.”
“A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century” is, by Perry’s own admission, addressed “almost exclusively to heterosexuals,” and so it ignores one of the most significant changes to sex in the twenty-first century: that it increasingly takes place between (or among!) people who are not straight. Nearly a quarter of Zoomers, almost double the percentage of millennials, identify as something other than heterosexual. Slightly more than five per cent of people under thirty identify as trans or non-binary, more than three times the proportion of people in their thirties and forties. Perry mentions gay people six times: thrice to acknowledge the existence and validity of gay relationships, once to note that a British public figure known for her homophobia also did great work fighting against pedophiles, and twice—in a section about how rape is primarily an expression of sexual desire rather than power—to note that gay men commit rape, too. Trans people are not mentioned at all, which is to be expected, as Perry once wrote an article for the Daily Mail with the headline “Her Foolish Critics Can Cancel Quidditch . . . But They’ll Never Cancel JK Rowling’s Rare and Precious Courage.” Last year, Perry wrote a piece for her Substack about how “transgenderism” is a “political trend that is now reaching the end of its lifecycle,” and a movement “made up of a combination of fetishists and the mentally ill.”
At the very end of the book, Perry nods to the fact that Gen Z is already following her counsel to fuck less. Then she leaves the reader with a list of advice that she would offer her own daughter, which includes, among other things: get drunk or high only with female friends, don’t use dating apps, avoid men who are “aroused by violence”—a category in which she includes things such as spanking and choking—don’t have sex with anyone until you’ve known them for a few months, and don’t have sex with a man unless you think he would be a good father to your children. I have been with my partner for sixteen years, and we have children together; I agree with Perry that there are goods other than freedom, that desire does not automatically validate one’s sexual choices, and that committed partnerships are socially and sexually important. It is also clear to me that this central relationship in my life—not to mention so much of my post-adolescent experience of friendship and fun and adventure—would not have happened if I had followed any of her advice.
Despite her protestations of centrism, Perry’s reactionary positions place her squarely on one side of a culture war that is described in another new book by a journalist in her early thirties: “The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future.” The author is Carter Sherman, a reporter for the Guardian who previously worked at Vice News. Sherman interviewed more than a hundred people in the process of documenting what she calls “the second coming of the sexual revolution,” an idea that gives the book its title and that trades some accuracy for a middling pun—what Sherman documents is not, after all, a revolution, but a tortured dance between backlash and progress. She takes the Gen Z sex recession as her primary subject and explains it, convincingly, as a result of Zoomers being caught in the middle of “enormous and oppositional forces, powered by changes in politics and technology, that no birds-and-the-bees talk can fix.” On one side there are the sexual conservatives who convert views like Louise Perry’s into public policy. On the other side, basically, is the internet.
The internet, Sherman writes, is a “TikTokian carousel of porn” and also a “mass social experiment with no antecedent and whose results we are just now beginning to see.” Its seeming bias toward novelty and expansion—and, crucially, its ability to connect disparate people of similar inclinations and tastes—has made it a locus for sexual progressivism. One activist tells Sherman that it was the internet that helped her “gain the confidence that I needed to demand transition.” Another woman recalls learning the term “compulsory heterosexuality” on Tumblr and creating a Google doc titled “Am I a Lesbian?” to help other girls realize that their lack of interest in male classmates might have deep roots. A third identifies herself as a “biromantic demisexual, leaning AFAB and transmasc partners.” Sherman “prioritized interviewing Gen Z individuals who are engaged in activism,” as she notes, and her sources are mostly highly knowledgeable, all of which adds clarity to her argument while often eliding the crucial question of how confusion actually feels to those currently experiencing it.
After all, the internet contains its own oppositional forces. What passes for liberation is often just liberalization—the freedom of the market, in other words, which not only differs from existential freedom but sometimes negates it. We are free, on the internet, to sexually valorize anything and anyone; we are free to sexualize ourselves for any audience; we are not and never will be free from the hypersexuality of an online world that is built around images and videos and that relentlessly turns individuals into commodities—a world in which it is possible to view just about any act imaginable, on demand, in perpetuity. Nearly three-quarters of young Americans have watched porn by their eighteenth birthday; fifteen per cent encountered it at age ten or younger. Common sense—if I may wear my Louise Perry hat for a moment—suggests that a person’s odds of developing a healthy relationship to the hardcore Times Square in their pocket, and to sex in general, may be hampered by watching double-anal-penetration videos years before they’ve had the chance to smooch someone at a party. And many members of Gen Z do feel scarred by pornography: nearly half of adult Zoomers regard porn as harmful, compared with thirty-seven per cent of millennials, who are less likely to have encountered online porn sites as very young children. Meanwhile, social media has trained Zoomers since childhood to receive regular, quantified measurements of their market appeal, a kind of pseudo-self-knowledge that does not prepare a person well for the undefended confrontation with the Other that enjoyable sexual congress requires. In general, Sherman writes, young people feel “stranded before the maw of a vast and dehumanizing internet.” All the more so, she notes, “because their school-based sex ed pretends sexual pleasure and porn don’t exist or dismisses them as shameful.”
One may find exceptions in this Zip Code or that one, but, by and large, American sex ed has changed fairly little since its widespread implementation after the First World War, when the goal was to educate young adults into choosing a life of “continence” until marriage. In fact, if anything, sex ed has recently got less educational, with the percentage of adolescents who say they’ve been taught about birth control dropping from more than eighty per cent in the mid-nineties to less than sixty-five per cent in a recent survey. Several states have passed so-called “Don’t Say Gay” legislation, aimed at restricting the ability of educators to speak about sexual orientation or gender identity.
All of this makes for a stunning cultural whipsaw. On phones, there’s bukkake and dick pics and hookup apps and arcane sexual sub-identities; in the world shaped by conservative grownups, sex is invisible or forbidden unless it’s between a married heterosexual couple, ideally one that’s procreating. The previous decade brought us pop feminism, SlutWalks, the Good Men Project, and a nationwide reckoning over sexual assault in #MeToo. This decade has seen the end of Roe v. Wade, the reëlection of a man found liable for sexual abuse, the attempted federal erasure of trans people, the apotheosis of violent online misogyny in the form of gurus such as Andrew Tate, and the type of airless online zombie-woke discourse in which the choreographic and aesthetic decisions of the pop star Sabrina Carpenter stand in for feminist progress, or lack thereof.
Sherman’s sympathies are clearly on the side of sexual freedom, but she, like Perry, is concerned about the mainstreaming of B.D.S.M. and rough sex. The non-abstinent Zoomers, you may have heard, are all choking one another: in a recent college-campus survey, nearly two-thirds of women said they’d been choked during sex, and forty per cent of those said that it had happened for the first time when they were between the ages of twelve and seventeen. Perry pins this trend on “Fifty Shades of Grey,” published in 2011; Sherman rightly traces it back to online fan fiction, which was the original form taken by “Fifty Shades.” Erotic fan fiction is, for many young women, a baptism into the world of being horny, and Sherman points out the popularity, on fan-fiction sites, of story tags such as “noncon” (nonconsensual) and “dubcon” (dubious consent). The young people that Sherman talks to describe this kind of erotica working “in tandem with video porn to normalize ‘rough sex,’ ” i.e., B.D.S.M. without the explicit boundaries and communication that are a part of the adult kink scene.
