1THE SEX RECESSION AND ITS HIDDEN PROMISE
“Sometimes bad sex becomes habitual and I can’t break the cycle. Even if physically and mentally it’s not enjoyable, on some subconscious level maybe I’m getting something out of it. Vindication? That I’m a ‘manly man’ and can ‘pleasure a woman’? Although if the second part isn’t true then, yeah, why continue?”
—twenty-nine-year-old cis straight man
I couldn’t tell you the exact moment I realized that sex wasn’t working for me, but I could tell you the era: post-college, pre-self-realization. I remember taking the subway one night from Bushwick to Manhattan to surprise my then-boyfriend, a tall scientist I didn’t particularly care for.
While he was in the bathroom shaving his entire body in that way he did, I crept into his room, where I found a fleshlight lounging on his pillow, its little silicone slit smiling from under a blanket. Panicked, I tried to develop a game plan for his return. Do I acknowledge it? Joke about it? Toss it into that dark wasteland between the bed and the wall? My visceral reaction was disappointment—that my vagina was not enough—and this triggered shame: I was a sex-positive sex writer who at least intellectually believed that boyfriends can and should use toys to explore their sexuality. Was I a fraud? Well, yes. But that’s a B plot.
He and I hadn’t been having sex as often as he might like—just about once a week. I wished it were zero. My clinical depression and the new medication for it worked in tandem to ensure that I was not only incapable of orgasm, but also disgusted by emotional and physical intimacy—cruelly, the only two things I wanted. To pass the time during missionary or doggie style, I’d find an open New Yorker on the floor to stare at and rehearse what I’d say to the cable people when I worked up the energy to call them.
“The cable,” I’d say, “it never works.”
When my boyfriend emerged from the bathroom, his chest gleaming and smooth, I choked. By the time I’d cobbled together a speech about how masturbation was brave and important, he’d thrown the dick tube into his closet and mumbled a defense: we hardly ever had sex. He wasn’t wrong, and he didn’t owe me an explanation. All genders, no matter their relationship status, should feel empowered to use sex toys. For as many social perks as they enjoy, men are often made to feel ashamed for it.
I told him it was no big deal—that I lovedddd the fleshlight and the fact that he was using one—but the damage was done. The truth was now obvious and awkward: he wished we were having more sex, and I wished we were having no sex. When he broke up with me two weeks later, I felt an unusual lightness, grateful he had made a choice I didn’t have the energy to. I slipped into a months-long dry spell that felt cozy and correct, punctuated by masturbation, short-lived dating app flirtations, and sexually charged dreams of Hugh Grant, in character as the villain from Paddington 2, taking me out for craft cocktails. The distance from regular, bad sex—which I hadn’t even processed as bad because it was so regular—helped me realize that I could, and should, opt out of sex that I hated. Not so coincidentally, I’m part of a generation that’s increasingly making the call to have less sex.
There has never been a better time to overhaul our sex lives, and I believe that starts with having less of it, by cutting out the bad stuff and being choosier about the sex we do have. There’s good news on that front: studies seem to indicate the millennials—people born between 1981 and 19961—are having less sex than generations before them. Reporter Kate Julian detailed the phenomenon in a viral 2018 Atlantic article called “The Sex Recession,” which cast a darker light on the trend. There are many theories as to why we’re having less sex, the most likely being that several factors are working in tandem: we’re burned out, exhausted by a grind that may never drag us out of debt, no matter how many hobbies we monetize; we’re on libido-killing antidepressants; we’re passing on the nuclear family or marrying later in life; we’re eschewing human connection because we’re too busy bleep-blooping on our phones. Our attention spans are shot: we can’t read two pages of a book, or write two paragraphs of this one, without checking the Instagram of a Bachelorette runner-up from seven seasons ago. There’s so much porn, truly so much porn, and we can carry it with us wherever we go.
From the late ’90s to at least 2016, psychologist Jean M. Twenge found that the average adult went from having sex sixty-two times a year to fifty-four. In her book, iGen, she says that people in their early twenties are far more likely to be abstinent than Gen Xers were at that same age. We’re seeing this phenomenon around the world, from Japan to Sweden, in various forms, including declining birth rates, and it’s affecting all age groups.
Teens are starting their sex lives later,2 too, and married couples are having less sex than they were a decade ago. Plus, there are more single people than ever before, who are getting married later or never, and singles typically have less sex than people in relationships. As a chronically single individual, I can corroborate this—we simply don’t have the access! Coordinating sex takes work, especially when you don’t have a live-in partner, which, increasingly, people do not.3
The pandemic has accelerated this trend, with all the barriers to sex becoming steeper for pandemic-related reasons; lockdowns, mass death and illness, and widening inequality have not inspired most of us to feel sexual. According to the 2021 General Social Survey, 26 percent of Americans age eighteen and up did not have sex in the past year.
The “sex recession” can still feel deeply paradoxical: not only are young people generally more sex-positive and more educated about safe sex than previous generations, but facilitating sex is the easiest it’s ever been. From the comfort of my own toilet, I can coordinate a hookup as mindlessly as I can order my third delivery meal of the day. I can use an app designed for sex and dating, or I can jaunt over to the “other” folder of my Twitter DMs, where a lively assortment of come-ons and penis photos await my consideration. I could set something up with one of those guys! My choices, it would seem, are endless. And yet.
As any depressed person with a vacuum cleaner can tell you, just because an activity seems to require little effort doesn’t mean it will happen. Every task I hate—paying bills, going to the pharmacy, scouting sex partners—is streamlined on my phone. Nothing has ever been easier than anything, in the history of everything. And yet, and yet, and yet.
Janet Brito, a sex therapist in Hawaii, told me that while many of her clients who report dissatisfying sex lives are middle-aged, she sees a large contingent of millennials struggling for distinctly millennial reasons.
“They feel connected via social media and don’t have the urge to form intimate relationships, as they seem to find fulfillment in other relationships where their emotional needs are getting met,” she said. “They are busy pursuing other projects, careers, hobbies, and do not have the time to date—in some cases, due to increased social media communication and having very busy schedules.”
At first, her reasoning sounded like yet another way to scold young people for adopting new technology, music, and fashions that rot our brains and erode social mores. But the more I thought about it, the more I realized that, yes, my phone does help sustain the delusion of a vibrant social life. I cobble together small online flirtations—a retweet from a glasses-wearing musician here, a DM from a high school crush there—into a vital imagined romantic life, one that requires far less of me than a real one. I scavenge for that pleasing ding of validation without needing to leave my home to meet a stranger who could be a murderer or five inches shorter than advertised.
For single people, the barriers to sex—namely, putting on pants to meet someone who statistically will disappoint you—steepen with the harassment that often awaits us. There are now thousands of virtual platforms where people can look for love and sex, only to get called ugly sluts or any number of slurs. It makes sense that people would want to opt out. In one study, a third of dating site users said someone sent them sexually explicit photos or messages that they didn’t ask for, and a third have also been called explicit names, with 10 percent saying they’d been threatened with physical harm. The toll of being female, LGBTQIA+, and/or BIPOC online is burdensome, on dating apps especially. Lesbian, gay, and bisexual dating app users face more harassment, from name-calling to physical threats, than straight ones.4 Many queer people report feeling alienated, marginalized, and unprotected by dating apps, despite their very public pushes to promote inclusive branding. Trans Tinder users, for example, still report getting banned arbitrarily.5
Apps aside, it’s rough out there. Eli Sachse, a forty-one-year-old trans bi man based in Northern California, told me the challenges “start even before having sex and just dating as a trans person. You have to come out as trans at some point, especially if you’re going to have sex, but sometimes when you’re cruising with gay dudes, they don’t even give you that chance.” Sachse, a registered nurse, illustrator, and writer, is the author of Sex Without Roles: Transcending Gender. “I’ll be dancing and a dude will grab for my crotch and not find what he’s looking for, and give me a disgusted kind of look like, ‘You’re fooling me,’ that whole kind of thing,” he said.
The toll of harassment—and just plain prejudice—feeds into what I believe to be the biggest sex-recessing factor, which is burnout. If you could choose between wading through hundreds of people, some abusive, to find a potential date, or lying flat on the floor, recalling that Olympics where Bob Costas’s pink eye got progressively worse, which would you choose? To rest, or to suffer?
The slew of tiny exertions required to orchestrate sex—say, perusing Grindr half asleep or kissing your long-term boyfriend’s neck—feel more daunting with each passing day. Everything feels daunting now, for millennials, it seems. We’re the “burnout generation,” and efficiency isn’t the cure.
Quite tragically, sex requires a wealth of physical and emotional energy. Sex feels like yet another item on the long list of things we should be doing, which renders it ever more daunting, in a way that passively sinking into forty episodes of The Nanny never will. The millennial burnout theory paints a bleak picture of the “sex recession”—it suggests that our reticence to have sex stems from a profound lethargy you can only embody when you know you’ll never be able to afford retirement. I find this explanation compelling, I type from my bed before closing my laptop for my 3 P.M. Depression Nap.
“I think having more sex would be nice. If time permitted, I’d definitely try to make it happen on Grindr or Tinder,” a thirty-year-old cis gay man told me. “But as I’m getting older, I feel like I’ve been hedging a lot more. Like, is it worth risking having sex with someone who ends up being terrible? Maybe I should just jack off on my own and call it a night.”
Hey, that sounds like a nice night. The dip in sexual activity is not all bleak, even if some of the factors causing it are. Many theorize that declining birth rates in many countries reflect a broader uptick in freedom available to childbearing people. So fewer people are getting married? Fantastic. Studies have shown that married straight women, for one, often report feeling coercion from their husbands to have sex. Women are raising their relationship standards so significantly “that dating opportunities for heterosexual men are diminishing,” claimed a recent Psychology Today article that urges men to address their skills deficits. Let’s fucking goooo.
New research6 even indicates that people who have no desire to marry report better sex lives than single people who want to eventually marry, proving, at least a little, the toxicity of the heteronormative nuclear family—even the idea of it—as it relates to sex.
The broadening of choices chronicled by social scientists benefits everyone, but particularly women and the LGBTQIA+ community. Crucially, increased freedom to opt out of marriage and monogamous, cis-heteronormative sexual arrangements improves the quality of life for asexual people, who represent around 1 percent of the American population (many experts agree that this estimate is conservative). Asexual people do not experience sexual attraction, but can be romantically attracted to all genders—sub-categories include biromantic, heteromantic, and aromantic.
Julie Kliegman, a nonbinary writer who came out as asexual, or ace, in 2016, spent a giant chunk of her life having sex she didn’t like. It wasn’t until she saw an episode of BoJack Horseman, where a primary character reveals he is asexual, that she reconsidered her sexual history and put the pieces together: sex was not for her, at all.
“I knew I didn’t care for it exactly, but I didn’t know that it was an option to opt out of it altogether,” she said. To the extent she dates at all (“It’s rough out there”), Kliegman seeks intimate, romantic relationships with people of all genders that don’t include sex. As asexual representation increases, she suspects more people will come out and stop having sex. This is a fantastic thing, even though it would technically fall under the umbrella of the sex recession.
“A lot of people are puzzling through how they feel about sex,” she said, “and I think the asexuality label might apply to some of them.”
I refuse to accept the sex recession as another depressing facet of our generation. In fact, I celebrate it—we’ve been given an unprecedented opportunity to reevaluate our relationship with sex, which, for some, looks like abandoning it entirely. The actual depressing thing is not how little sex we’re having; it’s how much bad sex we’re having.
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Plenty of young people have found relief in sex-recessing. One twenty-seven-year-old cis straight woman I spoke with told me that her recent hiatus from sex and dating—a realm that has been consistently disappointing for her—has dramatically improved her mental health.
“I deleted all my apps, and wanted a break from dating in general. I didn’t want to go out of my way to go on dates for the sake of dates, but wanted it to feel more intentional and focus on myself, my friends, my work,” she said. “Now I’m still doing all those same things, and while I miss physical contact, it does feel liberating to not be defined by my dating life, but my own interests. My head feels clear, and it’s nice to focus my energy on other things. It was interesting and a little frightening to see how much brain space dating took up.”
Unplanned ebbs in sex and dating, however, can be distressing to some, especially those who’ve internalized norms about how much sex is “healthy” or “enough.” The conversation surrounding the sex recession, which suggests that there is a normal amount of sex people should have (there’s not), feeds these anxieties. One of the many barriers people face to sexual satisfaction is the heavy, shameful feeling that their sex lives aren’t as orgasmic or spontaneous or jam-packed as their peers’.
“We are filled with expectations that are unrealistic,” sex therapist Jessa Zimmerman told me. “We think we must be broken; there must be something wrong with us. It’s very isolating.”
A major part of therapy for Lindsay, a thirty-one-year-old cis queer woman, has been rethinking her relationship with sex and her body, and a major part of that has been rethinking sexual frequency. A lifelong source of relationship anxiety for her has been: Am I having enough sex? And if not, is it because I am undesirable? When we spoke, Lindsay had been dating a woman for a year and a half, and the drop-off in sex once the pandemic started triggered her anxieties about hitting the correct number of fucks per week to feel confident in the relationship. In recovery for an eating disorder, she is working to unlearn this intense scrutiny of her physical state, including her sex life.
“I still really put sex on a pedestal so that I can feel okay with my physical body,” she said. “I definitely felt bummed when the frequency dropped.” She recalled a conversation from early in her relationship when her partner said that in past dating experiences, she’d have sex two or three times a week. “I thought, ‘Oh my God, am I a terrible partner?’”
Lindsay has been trying to practice radical acceptance. “I’m not necessarily fixated on the frequency now, but just how it feels—you know, the quality versus quantity,” she said. “I feel like when you’re trying to just check the box for sex this week, it feels so transactional and gross. It feels like we’re doing it so that we can like tell everyone, ‘We’re okay! We’re still having sex!’ So, it’s just been about trying to take that pressure away.”
Most people I’ve interviewed who are unsatisfied with their sex lives cited anxiety about the disconnect between the amount of sex they had and the amount they felt they were supposed to have. They felt their number wasn’t high enough, but didn’t necessarily want to have more, either. While low sexual activity can sometimes be a cause for concern—say, in the case of an otherwise horny person whose new meds eviscerate her sex drive—the preoccupation with prescribed numbers is a recipe for a) shame when you don’t hit them, and b) bad sex when you force yourself to.
I welcome the sex recession as a reset—a moment to reconnect with our authentic sexual desires, rather than the ones prescribed to us, that can look like stepping away from sex altogether (at least until we figure out what’s going on).
“We’ve entered a minefield of new pressures to appear and act free and empowered, and these pressures to perform are out of sync with—and exacerbate—our own internal disquiet,” writes anthropologist Katherine Rowland in The Pleasure Gap. “The outward display of boldness, sexiness, the eager libertine, may have little relation to the anxiety, self-censorship, and pleasure neglect contained within.”
If the claims of a “sex recession” are true, if young people are having less sex than any generation before them, then we’re ideally positioned to harness the power of opting out of sex we don’t want to have and make space for the sex we do.
Copyright © 2023 by Maria Yagoda
