Four months ago I started a three-part series on a
longstanding social problem only then starting to graze national media’s
consciousness. Titled “For Free Thinkers
Only: America’s Sexual Shortcoming” (see
the archive under July and August 2018 at this site), it took an independent
view on the main failing of the 1960s sexual revolution, that, as New York Times columnist Ross Douthat
had put it, sex has been unevenly distributed, with its bounty failing to reach
many Americans. In the series I
responded to Douthat’s ideas, assessed where we actually are sexually as a
nation, and proposed eight changes to minimize the shortfall. The final installment has been viewed over
800 times, so clearly there is much interest in this topic.
That may also have influenced Atlantic magazine senior editor Kate Julian, as she wrote an
article, now featured on the December 2018 cover and long enough to print out
to 38 pages, titled “Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?” It named some stunning facts and
developments, such as high-schoolers’ intercourse experience dropping from 54%
to 40% in the 26 years ending 2017 contrasted with Teen Vogue running a guide to anal sex, and ran off a list of no
fewer than 19 possible causes mentioned by “sex researchers, psychologists,
economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults.” She zeroed in on five reasons or combinations
of same that could be most responsible.
After making points I had also, such as the lack of sex not being
immediately life-threatening, she found no solid single conclusion, and ended with
the statement that “sex seems more fraught now” and a gloomy story about a 28-year-old
woman – not even a man – losing a good emerging relationship by admitting she
was a virgin. The closest Julian had to
an overall message seemed to be that we will get through this, which, itself,
is sad, not to mention insufficient.
If we are going to mitigate this trend, we need to assess
its grounds. Which of the ones Julian
discovered, researched, and wrote more on are truly responsible? The 19 she first mentioned are a mixed
bag. “Hookup culture” I consider
illusory, as it has served only to facilitate opportunities for those with
plenty already, and is not a cause in itself.
“Crushing economic pressures” is only a source of possible reasons, as
we will see. “Surging anxiety rates” are
not responsible for more than a few. “Psychological
frailty” is not an original cause, and neither is “widespread antidepressant
use.” The distracting effects of
“streaming TV,” “the news cycle,” “smartphones,” and “information overload,” and
the possible impediments of “sleep deprivation” and “obesity” would, if there were
no other issue, be easily brushed aside.
“Environmental estrogens” are only a nit, and “dropping testosterone” is
clearly, per Julian’s first detailed assessment, not the problem. “Digital porn” and “the vibrator’s golden age”
cannot replace sex by themselves.
The remaining 4 of the 19 have more causal merit, and are
covered in Julian’s “handful of suspects,” discussion of which took up 27 of
its 38 pages. The first was “Sex for One,”
or more frequent masturbation enhanced with better pornography and physical
devices. I see two main things wrong with
it as a less-sex cause. One,
masturbation is like an economic inferior good, such as margarine, which
becomes more popular when the superior alternative is unavailable or too expensive. Two, therefore, the causality is reversed;
masturbating at a frequency that Julian-cited sex therapists would consider
excessive is primarily a result of insufficient intercourse opportunities, not
a reason for them.
The second “suspect” was the combination of “Hookup Culture
and Helicopter Parents,” which also brings in “careerism” and “option
paralysis” from the 19. While “hookup
culture” is old under the skin, “option paralysis” can be a result of having so
many choices in immediate view, especially for young women, that they settle on
nothing, parallel to a Harvard Business Review finding that retailers would
sell more cola or chocolate-chip cookies if they had 5 different kinds instead
of 30. As for the other two, we can’t dispute
one of Julian’s sources when he said that “it’s hard to work in sex when the
baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at
4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs
completion.” If high school and college
students are denied free time, they will not date. In a truly informed society, such as, per
Julian, where the Netherlands might be headed, parents would schedule romance time
for their adult and nearly-adult children.
The third major cause Julian called “The Tinder
Mirage.” The problem here is that dating
sites which allow men and women to respond freely to each other’s posts will
precipitate vastly more contacts from men, most of whom soon find they can never
expect responses from women they have right-swiped, Liked, messaged, or the
equivalent. A model such as what
eHarmony used in the past decade, where people of both sexes are paired with a
more limited set of others, does not have this problem. However, the real damage done by such apps is,
apparently, cutting the viability of trying to pick up people in person, with
one of Julian’s respondents considering it now “borderline creepy.” That, along with such photo-based tools
overemphasizing appearance, is reason enough to label modern romance-seeking
methods deficient.
Fourth, we get “Bad Sex (Painfully Bad).” Pornography is unfairly vilified in many
ways, but deserves some blame for distorting how it often shows the act, from
emphasis on anal sex, which hurts much or most of the time, entering without
lubrication or foreplay, to even choking partners to heighten their orgasms. The real problem here is not with porn but
with communication, with good sources for technique buried among bad ones and
the near-complete-failure of school sex education, which could have become as
much of a foundation and valid information source as has that for driving, and
is of course compounded by so many men’s lack of opportunities that would get
them experience.
Last, surprisingly to me, was “Inhibition.” Did you know that “by the mid-1990s, most
high schools had stopped requiring students to shower after gym class”? I did not.
An apparent unintended consequence of the end of that innocuous part of
daily life is that many Millennials “want their own changing rooms and
bathrooms, even in a couple.” After
literally thousands of grade school through college nude locker-room appearances
in front of other males, which precipitated a total of zero sexually improper
comments or actions, it seems bizarre to me not to accept sometimes being undressed
in front of someone with whom I’m having intimate relations. A real cause indeed – if for no reason more
than, as one of my gym teachers used to say, “getting in that (dirty) uniform
is enough to take a shower,” can we bring them back?
There are more explanations than Julian named for our lack
of physical intimacy. The inflection
point we are at, where people differ on whether women should be protected, have
full equal rights, have equality of income outcomes, or some combination of
these, is one. The probably about 3-to-1
ratio of unattached, romantically-interested high school or college males to
the same in females is discouraging. We
are in our infancy in working to understand and solve this problem – what
otherwise could I conclude from an article named “We’re All in Sales Now,”
written by a woman apparently naïve that men in the bottom 60% of romantic
desirability have been forced to be there since Ford was president, making a
November 2018, not 1978, New York Times
Sunday Review first page? Yet there
is much more in Julian’s article, which I heartily recommend. You can find it at https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex-recession/573949/. In the meantime, free thinkers should keep
the faith, and everyone else should join us.
Too little sex for too many people may not kill us, but its effect on
our collective happiness is devastating and unnecessary. Let’s fix it.