A new sort of sex scare is taking hold. This time—after decades of folks freaking out over the opposite—it's young people abstaining from sex that has the youth-panic pundits and other chattering-class types fretting.
An article and accompanying chart in The Washington Post sparked off the latest flurry of concerned commentary. The latest General Social Survey (GSS) found that the number of 18- to 30-year-olds who hadn't had sex in the last year rose for both men and women between 2008 and 2018:
Currently celibate young men rose from around 10 percent in 2008 to around 28 percent last year.
Currently celibate young women rose from a little below 10 percent to 18 percent.
The GSS simply asked about sexual frequency and didn't pry into the causes, leaving assumptions to run wild and letting people project whatever political spin they wanted (#MeToo! the financial crisis! video games!).
Folks also speculated about the trend's potential consequences, ranging from the election of Donald Trump to the decriminalization of prostitution. Most of the concern came for the sex-free young men, whom no one seems to suspect are celibate by choice and/or content in their current arrangement. Rather, the assumption seems to be that this additional segment of sex-free young men is a sign and portender of any number of catastrophic things.
There are plenty of possible positive or neutral explanations for the increases, including people getting married at later ages and more people choosing to reject casual sexual encounters. (Keep in mind that the past few decades have also seen decreases in teen pregnancies, unintended pregnancies overall, abortions, and HIV infections.) But the Post article—which relies heavily on commentary from perennial generation doomsayer Jean Twenge—and social media commentators leapt right to imagining a new lost generation of young men, jobless and living in their parents' basements, unable to land dates or find love.
From there, it was a quick jump to talking about MAGA hats and hate crimes. Others blamed technology, social media, and porn.
Samuel Perry, a sociologist at Oklahoma University, corrected the record with regard to higher consumption of porn equating to less sex in real life. "Folks have been asking whether the decline in people (mostly men) having sex is due to #porn. Not likely," Perry tweeted.
Rather it seems the decline is among men NOT watching porn….Men who watch porn tend to have MORE sex, not less….
And of course people gotta remember that women are more likely to watch porn within the context of sexual relationships, as part of sexual activity. So it shouldn't be surprising that the women who view more porn also have more sex on average (i.e., cuz they watch w/a partner).
Economist Gray Kimbrough also suggested a reason to be skeptical of the data overall:
A lot of people have been passing around this "stunning chart," and it looks pretty dramatic. But I'd like to once again strongly warn anyone not to draw strong conclusions using only GSS data. https://t.co/I3LZtRd5ZJ
The GSS sample is only "a couple of thousand people every two years. And the questions aren't exactly constant across years," Kimbrough tweeted.
@graykimbrough/Twitter
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