How Social Media Is Fueling Gen Z’s Sex Recession | WIRED
▻https://www.wired.com/story/carter-sherman-the-second-coming-interview
Sherman, a 31-year-old journalist (she works at The Guardian; the two of us also previously worked together at Vice News), has interviewed more than 100 young people about why they aren’t having as much sex as previous generations and, despite the narrative that they’re prudes, she found that many of them want to have sex—there are just a lot of complicated factors stopping them.
“Many of them are very horny. They would like to be having sex, and in fact they feel a lot of shame over the fact that they haven’t had sex yet or that they’re not having sex enough.”
The numbers Sherman found in her reporting bear out the idea that young people are in the midst of a “sex recession.” One in four Gen Z adults have never had partnered sex, according to a 2022 survey by the Kinsey Institute and Lovehoney, while data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 2023, around a third of high schoolers said they’d had sex—down from 47 percent in 2013. Even masturbating is on the decline.
As for why, Sherman says the ubiquity of social media and smartphones have definitely played a role in how young people engage with each other, but also in how they view themselves. Throw in stress over the overturning of Roe v. Wade and multiple presidential administrations that have collectively poured billions of dollars into abstinence-only sex education, and you can start to see how the answer to why young people are hooking up less goes far beyond just “they’re puritanical."
Sherman shared her eye-opening and sometimes troubling observations from the book in an interview with WIRED.
What’s the vibe around dating apps? Like are people as sick of them as they seem to be?
Yes, yes they are. Dating apps suck. Also, dating sucks. I think dating apps promised that they would be a break from the torture of dating, or the torture that dating can be, but people have realized at this point that they’re not. In the book, I treat them as an extension of social media, because I think they do a lot of the same things, which is to say they do make you very aware of your sexual value and oftentimes make you feel like you’re lacking in some way.
What makes you feel positive, having researched this topic exhaustively, about young people and their sex lives, and maybe getting over this sex recession, if that is indeed what some of them want to do.
I actually don’t care very much about whether or not young people are having sex or not having sex. What I worry about is whether or not young people are connecting with one another and whether or not they’re growing in their relationships, in themselves, if they’re not engaging in sexual, romantic relationships to the extent that they want them. I just worry that there is a dearth of willingness to be vulnerable in a way that I think is not only bad for individuals but bad for politics, because it diminishes our ability to connect with one another and understand one another’s differences.
My second thought is that as far as hope goes, I was really heartened by the degree to which young people were very much fighting for what they believed in and were very aware of the political valence of sex. This is a generation that understood, certainly far earlier than I did, that what happens in the bedroom is influenced by what happens outside of it. I think that if these young people are able to succeed in their endeavors, they’re going to feel better about themselves, but also potentially create a better world.
#Sexe #Internet #Jeunes #GenZ
