The New Yorker:

Confronted with a Vegas buffet of carnality, Generation Z appears to be losing its appetite.

By Jia Tolentino

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 Atlanticgave 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.

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