Americans are having less sex — again. According to the Wall Street Journal, citing a report from conservative think tank the Institute for Family Studies (IFS), Americans of all ages are spurning intimacy.

Data from the 2024 General Social Survey, produced by the University of Chicago, showed that 37% of people aged 18-64 reported having sex at least once a week, down from 55% in 1990. Predictably, youngsters show the starkest decline: 24% of people aged 18-29 said they had not had sex in the past year, twice as many as in 2010.

This is the story that hasn’t quite managed to tell itself to completion, if you will. In 2018, the Atlantic published a piece titled: “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” It used survey data to tell the story of teenage and 20-something Americans shorn of the very libidinal urges, or at least the urge to act on the urges, that used to define the young. Then in 2019, the same magazine published “The Sex Recession Is Making Young Americans Unhappy.”

These alarming statistics and headlines followed #MeToo’s first flush. And while ubiquitous porn use and the anti-intimacy effect of a generation raised on screens and social media were mooted as causes, some put a lot of weight on the deadening effect that the #MeToo movement had on gung-ho approaches to seduction. Consent had become an incredibly thorny issue, and more people were thinking twice before perving, flirting, and asking out — especially at work. In many workplaces, where people often meet their future partners or spouses, romance became severely frowned upon.

Then Covid struck in 2020, and sex fell off another cliff, partly as single people couldn’t easily date, and partly as those cooped up together didn’t necessarily find themselves filled with desire. And now, despite some indication of surging sex rates among certain demographics, such as gay men, we learn that the American sex recession is ongoing and that it extends to all ages.

Like the Atlantic before it, the Wall Street Journal offers the usual array of factors to explain this. But the most dominant — and certainly the most profound, in the sense that it marks a true departure from times past — is the heightened awareness of mental states and psychological ill health. In her book Bad Therapy: Why the Kids Aren’t Growing Up, Abigail Shrier argued that the emphasis on therapy and therapeutic paradigms across education and day-to-day care of children and young people was making them miserable.

According to Shrier, this explained rocketing rates of depression, anxiety and other disorders. Therapy, and the constant self-scanning for answers to the question of “how am I?” induces rumination and locks people in cycles of gloom and paralysis. This clearly has an effect on sexual vim, since intimacy is an inherently risky psychological undertaking. For people who are taught to be hyper-vigilant about their mental health, with potential triggers, traumas, and micro-aggressions all combed over and rooted out, sex goes from being fun and exciting to a terrifying minefield.

In its report, the IFS is mainly interested in the effect of cohabitation and non-marriage, which it says lowers rates of sex and sexual satisfaction — although this would seem to contradict other sources. The soul-destroying nature of dating apps is also mentioned.

Ultimately, it seems that the ennui of atomised, expensive, uncertain contemporary life hits young people hardest. Even still, it affects people right across the generations, even to the ripe age of 65, when rates of sexual activity remain roughly stable because they tend to be relatively low in the first place. Maybe it’s because pensioners have finally discovered that there is more to life than sex and feelings.

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Zoe Strimpel is a historian of gender and intimacy in modern Britain and a columnist for the Sunday Telegraph. Her latest book is Seeking Love in Modern Britain: Gender, Dating and the Rise of ‘the Single’ (Bloomsbury)

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