Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be On to Something.

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0:37Women only want to date men who are, you know, tall, rich, and handsome. And if you're not one of those— Six, four, blue eyes, and works in finance? Yes.

0:49We're in a sex recession. Americans are having less sex than ever before, especially Gen Z. The number of young people who say they haven't had sex in the past year has roughly doubled since 2010. And that data has caused a lot of worry. The record level decline last year is leading to fears there may not be enough children to sustain the next generation. But when asked what was more important to them than regular sex, many Gen Zers replied, Gen Z would rather have a good night's sleep than sex. I've been celibate for two years. I've never felt this much peace. It really opens up like a new level of thinking in your mind.

1:25It means no dating, no romance, nothing for a full year. And I was thinking today, I did sort of have the realization, I was like, oh, I don't know, this actually might be a lifetime thing. But is there happiness outside of happily ever after? I spoke with reporters and researchers Carter Sherman and Christine Emba, who have reported extensively on the sex and dating lives of young people and the anxieties and obstacles that they're facing. Christine, Carter, thank you so much for being here with me. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. Just to start, in one word or a small handful of words, how do you feel about people having less sex?

2:05I feel intrigued. I just, it raises the question, why and what does it mean? And I think that's been kind of the guiding light of my reporting for the last several years. The word would have to be mixed. I think I actually feel happy for young people if they feel less pressure to do things that they don't want to do. But I do feel concerned about what it represents about relationships more broadly and interaction with each other. So Americans are having less sex, and it's particularly visible among young people. There's one recent study that says one in four Gen Z adults haven't had partnered sex.

2:43And the number of young people who haven't had sex in the past year has doubled from 2010 to 2024, from 12 percent to 24 percent. And so, Christine, I want to start with you. You've been reporting on sex and dating in the culture for a long time. What are you seeing about the causes behind this trend? Yeah, I mean, the trend is notable. especially among millennials and Gen Z. Gen Z is doing a lot of things less frequently than their older peers used to, or at least later. So they started driving later. They're moving out of their parents' houses later. They're drinking later or not at all. So sex is another thing that they are doing later than their peers.

3:25But I think that the causes behind it are both manifold and when you think about it, kind of obvious. I think one is, frankly, the internet and smartphones, where there's kind of a substitution effect. You could get dressed up and go out on a date and try and find someone to sleep with, or you could scroll your feed and watch pornography at home and not have to make all of that effort and fear rejection. So I think the technological climate has a lot to do with it. Yeah. Carter, what about you? You've interviewed a lot of Gen Zers about sex. What have you seen or observed? Anything different from what Christine was saying?

4:06No, I definitely second Christine's point in particular about phones. I mean, this is not a trend that we're seeing just in the United States. I think it's notable that we're also seeing it abroad in countries like Japan and South Korea, which would point to there being some kind of global shared cause. And the emergence of smartphones and the social media that's on them, I think, is a very obvious culprit. it. That said, I don't think that there really is just one thing that we can pin the sex recession as it's called on. When I talk to young people, many of them bring up stuff like the political climate.

4:37Like it makes them feel more anxious to have sex right now. Actually, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there was one study that came out that found out that about 13 % of millennials and Gen Z have become more anxious around sex because of the overturning of Roe. And so I think we really have to look at what is going on overall in the climate when it comes to sex and not just saying, okay, we can just change or fix this one thing, and that will fix the entire dating crisis, as some people have termed it. I think that's absolutely true. I think one thing we might do just to sort of set the groundwork for the conversation is I think there are a lot of possible reasons behind the sex recession.

5:15I think it'd be interesting to just go through some of them. So, Christine, you were talking about phones. Carter, you were talking about Roe v. Wade. I also assume or wonder if Me Too had an impact on young people and how they were thinking about sex. Is that something that's come up in your reporting? That's something that definitely came up in my reporting and with young people that I've talked to, millennials and Gen Z. I think one of the things that Carter was pointing out very correctly is that the sort of the entire social environment shapes how people move about, how they interact with each other, and maybe eventually how they have sex.

5:54So first of all, we have to know that Gen Z has come of age in a very anxious time, right? There was COVID and the pandemic. Everybody was stuck at home. Our political climate is frankly insane. And then Me Too happened in 2018, that kind of a formative age for many people in terms of thinking about sex and dating and how to relate to other people. I think for young women, Me Too served as a moment in which they could say, you know, the current sexual climate, our current sexual landscape maybe actually doesn't feel that great for me. And I feel like I'm allowed to say that publicly. There's like less pressure on me to assent to things, which is, I think, a really good thing.

6:41I think for young men, however, they became really frightened, actually. There's one guy I remember interviewing who said that, you know, after Me Too, asking out a colleague in the workplace or hitting on a girl in public was like handing them a loaded shotgun. It was really dangerous and could have consequences for him. And I was kind of like, that seems extreme. But I think a lot of actually conscientious young men noted that, you know, Me Too had happened. And women had been made uncomfortable in a number of circumstances that they hadn't known about and dialed back their own behavior, their own willingness to ask people out to try and pursue sex on a date, to even try and pursue dating in some situations.

7:30And obviously, if you're not talking to potential sex partners, it is far less likely that you will have sex with them. I actually think what I found in my reporting is it's different for the genders, as Christina's talked about. But what I found really interesting is when I talked to young men, and I should say for my book, The Second Coming, I interviewed more than 100 young people under 30. I've also covered gender and sexuality for 10 years now. I found that young men actually weren't all that moved by Me Too. And I think this is partially an age thing, which to Christine's point, you know, she's talking about people being in the workplace.

8:04But many of the young people I was interviewing, like, they did not remember Me Too, which was sort of a dagger to the heart the first time I heard it because it was so pivotal to me. And there was one young man I remember who, 18 years old, grew up in New York City, had just graduated high school right after we spoke. And he was sort of talking about the ways that young men in his cohort talk about women. And he was using terms like bop and ran through. And, like, things that really are not very friendly to women. Yeah, ran through was really the term that stuck with me. I don't know the term bop.

8:35I mean, is it not appropriate for a New York Times podcast? It's not family friendly. I don't know. Yeah. Look it up on Urban Dictionary if you feel so inclined after this. But what was shocking to me is he said this thing. He was like, you're talking about Me Too and Me Too was about not sexually assaulting women. But it's not necessarily I didn't understand it as like treating women as people. Like, that's not how I understood it. And he kind of drew a line between, like, affording women and girls full humanity and, like, just not sexually assaulting them. And I found that very fascinating because it speaks to me that, like, Me Too didn't really do as much as we maybe would have liked it to do.

9:14That it didn't actually really change some of these more as permanently as we might have liked because, like, people just don't remember. And the thing I will say about young women, I totally agree with Christine that I have found that they have become more anxious. And I think part of that is because for the women who remember Me Too, Me Too helped them recognize certainly earlier than I did that maybe something that happened to them that was wrong was actually a violation. That they should recognize this as sexual assault or sexual harassment and they deserve to seek redress for that. They deserve to be made whole.

9:46But what these women have also found is that we didn't actually really see that many institutional changes after Me Too. Like we have seen more HR trainings around sexual violence. We have seen some legislation around NDAs, but for institutions like colleges, we haven't actually seen an overhaul of the way that we address sexual violence. The same goes for K-12 institutions. And so these young women walk around with a greater knowledge of how pervasive sexual violence is and an understanding that if something happens to them, their institutions are not necessarily set up to help them in that instance.

10:19And that is just a culture of fear. It's a miasma of anxiety, and that makes you not want to engage in any of this to begin with. I think that's a great point, actually. And I think you're right to point out this distinction between kind of millennials and older Gen Z who might have had their sort of sexual memory working when Me Too happened and a younger generation who did not. So one of the things that I've also noticed as a sort of age and gender split is in a post-MeToo environment where people, where young women, I think, are more okay with talking about negative experiences, they share those.

10:57Especially on TikTok and Instagram, a lot of women are more open to making reels about, you know, I had this bad experience with a man or I went on this date and it was awful and here's why. And there is actually just a lot more content about how men can be dangerous or predatory or sort of in social media kind of dating advice parlance, narcissists or liars or something. And so it makes men feel both scarier and sort of less, I think, responsive to female concerns. And there's a whole dialogue that has grown that is kind of negative around dating men. In fact, it's a term that I think the New York Times has published a number of pieces on, heteropessimism, right?

11:39This idea that for a woman trying to date a man is kind of a hopeless enterprise. And, you know, you might in fact wish that you were a lesbian or not interested in men at all, but alas, you are. And then on the male side of the equation, if women are seeing feeds that are full of kind of negative content about the opposite sex and sort of descriptions of, you know, unfortunate and scary occurrences that then shape their idea of dating, men are getting dating advice that is also really negative about women. You know, like all women are on OnlyFans. Women can't be trusted. Women only want to date men who are, you know, tall, rich and handsome.

12:20And if you're not one of those. Six, four, blue eyes and works in finance. Yes. I've also heard of this as like six, six, six. He needs to be six feet tall, make six figures and have a six pack. Which like I think is something that men believe women want. Yeah. And when men are told this by sort of their dating advisors, like the Fresh and Fit podcast or Andrew Tate types or even Joe Rogan occasionally trades in this sort of discourse, they begin to feel really negatively towards women. And so, yeah, they aren't really interested in being with each other in the same way. I have so many theories for why this is happening that I want to keep moving us through them.

13:00One that a friend of mine who's 21 brought up when we were talking about this is she was saying Gen Z is facing a lot of mental health issues in part because of the anxieties of the world. And they are very medicated for their mental health. I think they're one of the most medicated generations, which for anyone who's been on antidepressants can have an impact on your libido. And she was positing that this might be one of the causes why Gen Z is having less sex. Has that come up in either of your reporting? So not necessarily the medication effect specifically, but it is worth noting that something like one in four members of Gen Z has been in therapy at some point in their adolescence, which is just way more than any other generation.

13:41I think there is something to be said about mental health generally and how Gen Z views protecting their mental health and protecting their space and peace in different ways than their older peers might have. One of the things actually tying back to the reasons why men are seemingly having less sex than women is that, you know, for many young men at this point, this idea that you have to be the perfect man, you have to be the right model of masculinity, you have to be ready before you can be in a relationship, seems to be driving a number of men into, you know, taking a step back and moving into self-optimization, going into monk mode.

14:24And thinking that they have to figure out every aspect of their lives before they can start dating, before it's okay to approach anyone else. And so that moves having sex later. And then for young women, there's this idea that, you know, your mental health is fragile. Other people can be anxiety-causing. Relationships are, and I think we can actually all understand this, you know, can be really anxiety-causing, can produce a lot of pressure. and to stay on balance, to keep oneself safe, the better thing to do is invest in yourself, invest in your mental health, invest in kind of the relationships that you can control, your friendships, and, you know, maybe not experiment with sex and dating at this time because it seems too stressful and too fraught.

15:12Yeah, I think I was looking at a survey that asked Gen Zers, what is more important to you than regular sex? and they answered success at work, friendships, a good night's sleep was very high up there. Fair. And fair. But to go back to something that you were just saying, Christine, you were talking about sort of the amount of like work and readiness that men think that they need to do in order to be ready for a relationship. And I've noticed in my conversations with young people that much, much, much more so than when I was young, I guess I no longer am than when I was young. No, you're still young.

15:52All of us are young. Much more so than when I was in my early 20s. There's a big focus on the idea of a long-term relationship as this very venerated goal, as like this huge commitment. Part of it is that you see on social media these relationships take huge gestures, financial and emotional. And part of that is just because of how an algorithm is designed to promote performativity or the sale of a product. But there's this idea that a long-term relationship is this really serious thing. And that's much more desired and much more the focus than sort of casual sex. And I wonder, how have you seen the distinction about how young people feel between long-term romantic relationships and casual sex?

16:37And have there been shifts there? I found it very interesting how much young people are kind of dismissive of hookup culture, as they put it. Like when I was growing up as a millennial, I think we were very overwhelmed by the narrative of hookup culture. There was this real sense in the media that young millennials were having too much sex, that they were having sex so casual it verged on impersonal, and that that would imperil our ability later on down the line to get married, to have kids. And like, guess what? We are getting married. We are having kids. We're just doing it at a later point.

17:07Right. And so I think that that narrative, though, has still trickled down to young people. They saw that millennials got roasted for hookup culture and now they don't really want to engage in that as much like they do want to be in these long term relationships. And I mean, I understand that desire. I really do, particularly for a group that feels very alone. Having a person who feels like theirs, who feels like who feels like they are going to be a foundation for them and for their life. Like, I don't think that's a bad desire whatsoever. I think to go a little bit deeper into how that narrative has shifted, there was a spate of stories like Cat Person, the New Yorker short story that was just about a normal girl who goes on a date and hooks up with a guy and kind of, you know, is grossed out by it.

17:51And there is a sort of openness to this idea that sort of millennial sex positivity, which I would describe not as sex positivity in the classic feminist sense, that sex is a good thing, but sex positivity in a kind of deterministic sense, meaning you need to go out and have a lot of sex, otherwise you're not a good feminist or a modern young person, etc., was kind of blown up a little bit. But Gen Z, I think, saw millennials sort of dealing with the fallout of that culture and decided that, like, they didn't want to be part of it. And especially with, I think, some of the changes that had happened in sexual culture between millennials and Gen Z.

18:33So much of the sex that people seem to be having, that they're reporting having as kind of abusive or unpleasant, was extremely porn-informed, for one thing. And so they have backed off from hooking up on the same level. But then when it comes to longer-term relationships, there's a term, the idea of the cornerstone versus capstone model of long-term relationships. And so traditionally, long-term relationships, getting married, having a long-term partner was seen as sort of the cornerstone of your life. Like you find someone and then you continue to build your life on top of that. Maybe you're together and you go through grad school, you go through your careers, you're joining your lives together.

19:17And maybe at the cornerstone, you're not making that much money. You're not that secure, but it's okay. Now, I think in this more performative moment where, you know, your big days, your dates are supposed to be celebrated as perfect on social media, a lot of young people feel like their long-term relationship should be the capstone of your life. That's something that you only do when you've got all of the other bricks in a row. When you're finished with school, when you have your career set up, when you're making enough money, that's when you can go for the long-term relationship. I mean, I do think just to complicate that narrative a little bit, because something that I do think that comes up a lot that sometimes frustrates me when we talk about Gen Z and the sex recession is like millennials were also having less sex.

19:59So like while we were having all of this discussion around, oh, they're hooking up too much, like the reality is that they were having less sex than previous generations. And so when we think about the causes of the sex recession, I think we have to remember like this started before Me Too. This started before the pandemic. And this is really like Gen Z is the inheritors of a trend that began among millennials. So whatever we're seeing with Gen Z, how they see relationships, how they see hooking up, like we have to be looking at both generations and thinking about things that have happened with both generations.

20:30That's true, though. I do think that there's just there's a shift that's not so much about the having of sex, but the thinking about it in the culture. And for them, I realized, like, when sex is constantly being sold to you as a product, when it's, like, constantly over-available on your phone, it becomes uncool so quickly. Like, we grew up in this very hyper-sexualized, girls-gone-wild blowjob advice in Cosmo magazine culture that, like, Gen Z is just a little grossed out by because it's so tied into a sort of, like, thing that's being sold to them all the time. But is it uncool to not be able to have sex?

21:07Because I think it's perceived as cool to choose not to have sex. But, you know, it's not always clear that someone is making the active choice to be celibate versus just kind of being unable to get laid. You know, it's not cool to be powerless, right? It's cool to be in control. And I think, like, this is why people find the concept of virginity or the concept of being a virgin to be inherently embarrassing. Because, like, that is a state you can't change by yourself. I think what you're saying about people not wanting to admit to powerlessness, being powerless as being cringe and uncool is extremely true.

21:41So by, you know, saying, by going out and saying, well, actually, I'm choosing to be celibate, or actually, I am embracing loneliness and becoming a loneliness influencer, or, you know, I'm de-centering men, I'm a hetero-pessimist, you know, taking on the label for yourself feels like a reclamation. of something that you might have otherwise felt powerless about. That makes a lot of sense. And I've been thinking a lot about, for this episode, about sort of the difference between loneliness and solitude, which I think in part is a difference about choice. You're lonely because you have no choice.

22:23Solitude is about choosing your own company. But again, I think that that might also be a way of like reclaiming power over something that you don't have a choice over. I think that that's an entirely plausible theory. I wanted to talk about loneliness influencers a little bit. Carter, can you explain what a loneliness influencer is? Yeah, for folks who have not had this show up on their algorithms, first of all, I would love to know what makes you immune to this. Does my phone just think I am very lonely? But basically what loneliness influencers are are oftentimes women, which I find very striking, who are coming home and are like taking off their shoes and making pizza, hanging out with their cat.

23:03And there's text on the screen that says like, this is what your Friday night looks like when you are single and have no friends. And it's very much like selling the idea of a full life without anyone else in it, which I find really fascinating and like sort of inherently contradictory because of course this is a person who is broadcasting their loneliness to the internet. And it's always very curious to me. It's like, how much can I really believe that these people actually agree with the concept of loneliness? How much of these people are trying to change their circumstance? And I think that they're just such a fascinating indicator of where we're at in modern life, that these are an emerging system of influencers.

23:46I think the rise of loneliness influencers speaks to another trend about Gen Z and millennial dating. One thing that has become clear to millennials and Gen Z is, you know, in a post-sexual revolution, feminist inflected, if not feminist, you know, winning world, is that women— Definitely not feminist winning. I disagree. Yeah. I mean, I don't think the White House would identify as particularly feminist. No. But, you know, a culture in which women are able to exist by themselves, where women have jobs, where women are going to college and graduate school at higher rates than men, where in a lot of major cities, women are earning more than their male counterparts.

24:30arts, you don't have to get married or be in a relationship to make a life for yourself. And it's felt as a liberating thing, at least, for younger women, millennials and Gen Z, and perhaps also for, you know, these older married women who maybe didn't feel like they had as much choice in the matter, and so ended up with a husband and kids and a house and all this stuff to deal with as a way to feel like they were part of and accepted by society. so the sort of romanticization of loneliness I think also speaks to a kind of romanticization of the idea that women can do it by themselves that they don't have to be in a relationship to be happy they don't have to have a boyfriend to be able to afford their frankly kind of alarmingly clean apartments I think you and I are seeing the same woman yes it's a little it's a little bit American psycho, frankly.

25:27She has a lot of time to clean it. She does have a lot of time. I mean, this is the woman, I think, if we're thinking of the same person, who takes off her Louboutins when she comes in the door, which speaks to, again, her socioeconomic success, it seems like. But I do think that there is something worrying about the loneliness influencer because humans are wired for connection, right? It's in our DNA to connect with people. You can become kind of physically and sort of psychologically ill by being touch-starved, by not interacting with other people. And also interacting with other people, whether in romantic relationships or simply friendships, is how you learn about the world.