A Second Sexual Revolution?

Talking with Carter Sherman about hookup culture, the sex recession, and her new book.

Young people today are having too much sex. Wait, no, maybe they're not having enough sex. And when they do have sex, it's the wrong kind—too porn-influenced, too gay, too…something. Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong: that's the main refrain we hear about young people and sex.

Carter Sherman isn't interested in telling today's youth that they're doing sex right or wrong. But she is interested in the ways politics, culture, and technology are radically reshaping sex for millennials and members of Gen Z. "We are living through nothing less than the second coming of the sexual revolution," she proclaims in The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, out this week.

I recently spoke with Sherman about her book, hookup culture, the sex recession, dictionary porn, abstinence-only education, and more. Here's a transcript of our conversation, lightly edited for clarity and length.

Reason: In the book, you don't really use the terms sex positive and sex negative, and instead you talk about sexual conservatism and sexual progressivism. Can you talk about that distinction a little bit? 

Sherman: I don't know that I actually have strong opinions on sex positivity and sex negativity, but I felt like they weren't great terms for what I was trying to describe in the book because, frankly, I'm less interested in individual beliefs on sex and more interested in movements. Sex positivity and sex negativity [are] oftentimes so distorted by the way that we talk about them that everybody has a different view about what they mean. So I would be talking to young people—I interviewed more than a hundred young people, people under 30, for the book—and I oftentimes did ask them if they were sex negative, sex positive, how they would identify in that way. They oftentimes said that they were sex positive, but then they would have such an array of beliefs about sex and sex work and relationships between men and women, that it just started to feel like a label that didn't really convey what I wanted to convey to the reader. So instead, I turned to these terms—sexual sexual progressivism and sexual conservatism—to identify the movements that I was seeing and the common threads that I saw in these attitudes.

For me, sexual conservatism describes the movement—politically, culturally, historically—to make it difficult, if not dangerous, to have sex that is not straight, that is not married, that is not potentially procreative. Because part of what the movement is interested in doing is making it harder to access abortion and hormonal birth control. Then sexual progressivism is this trend that I noticed among the young people I interviewed that was not only indicative of an interest in expanding access to abortion rights, to LGBTQ+ rights, to contraception, but also an interest in really rethinking the ways that we approach sex, and by extension the ways we approach gender, and taking a more expansive view of both to free people from narrow ideas that I think have left a lot of young people feeling quite stifled.

One of the things that first drew me to your book and made me want to read it was your exploration of hookup culture and how so much of the media and pundit class got the story wrong there. Why do you think people were so willing to believe "hookup culture" hype? 

I think because it's sexy, frankly. People love to tell young people that they're doing sex wrong, and this idea that sex was running amok on college campuses and high schools is really sort of fun to think about in a lot of ways. Obviously, this discussion about hookup culture came with all of this talk about downsides, but then you get to talk about this rampant sex while also moralizing about it, and people can never resist doing that.

Do you think that there's any phenomenon today that you see getting this same treatment, with people pushing a false narrative or a narrative that there's not really evidence for because it's sexy or politically advantageous or confirms what they want to talk about with sex anyways? 

I have two answers to this. I think the dominant narrative about sex among young people right now is the "sex recession," which is this idea that young people are having sex later and less. That said, there is more evidence for that than there was for the hookup culture narrative. I don't want to say that that's a false narrative, but I do think it's one of the dominant narratives.

As far as an actual false narrative that I think we talk about too much or that the media talks about too much? Probably the narrative that we have around porn. I worked at Vice News for six and a half years, and I spent a lot of time during that time talking to sex workers, talking to porn stars, talking to full-service escorts. I anticipated that when I interviewed young people, there would be probably a myriad of opinions about sex work and about porn. What I found is oftentimes people had really negative views of porn and they felt like porn had really warped them, and I think they got that because they were being told all the time by the media that porn was really bad for them, and that it was leading them to have rougher sex, more degrading sex. The fact of the matter is we just don't know if that's true.

The science on porn is really muddled. It is riddled with biases about what degrading sex looks like. For example, some researchers assume that anal sex is always degrading. So I think young people have really imbibed this notion about sex that it is hurting them, and we just can't really back that up with the science that we have.

I often see this phenomenon where younger people seem to believe anything that's hard about sex or dating or relationships these days is hard because of porn or because of the internet—that it's some technology-enabled phenomenon. It's like, no, dating and sex and relationships have always been hard. 

If sex was easy, we would've figured it out by now.

But you do find that there is evidence for the sex recession? That it is not another media-created myth? 

No, I think there is definitely more evidence for the sex recession. I mean, when I was in high school in my junior year, 2011, a major [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] survey found that 47 percent of high school students had had sex at that point. By 2021—so 10 years later—only 30 percent of high school students had had sex, and that's an enormous drop within 10 years, and it's not something that we can just blame on the pandemic. This was a trend that we had already started to see, and frankly that the media had already started to talk about, before the pandemic locked everybody indoors.

This is obviously not an explanation for the high school thing, but I did think it was interesting, in your book, the bit about marriage rates being one reason why people in their twenties are having less sex, since married people have more sex on average than non-married people. That's something no one ever really talks about. Do you have any explanation aside from the marriage thing for why younger people might be having less sex? Or why high school kids are having less sex? Do you have a pet theory? 

I have many pet theories, many which I try to work out or breathe to life in the book. It's very hard to see the sex recession and not think that smartphones and social media have something to do with it. We do know that mental health started to decline around 2010, which is about the time that everybody started to have social media in their hands all the time in the form of smartphones. If you're spending a lot of your time on your phone—if you're spending all this time looking at images of supposedly perfect bodies on social media—there is some evidence that indicates that people are less likely to have sex because then that leaves people feeling like they have to be perfect looking in order to get naked.

There's also this change in the approach to relationships, and I do think that that trickles down to high school. People are not looking to get married even within the first 10 years after graduating high school in the same way. They are just approaching and thinking about what monogamy or what sex looks like very differently than past generations.

One of the things that I actually found very interesting was one young woman who I write about in the book told me that she hadn't had sex because she was afraid that she would encounter an incel or a man who identifies as "involuntarily celibate." Basically the incel ideology holds that women owe men sex, and incels have really flourished in the manosphere, and she just basically felt that that ideology had really trickled out into the wider world in such a way that she could never be sure that she wasn't going to be engaging with someone who hates women. As we do see this greater polarization between men and women politically, I have to wonder about how men and women can even come together to have sex if they can't bridge the ideological divide. I'm not saying that they should bridge the ideological divide—I don't want anybody to be having sex with people who hate them for their gender. But it does raise questions about how as a country people can move forward, when we're so polarized all the time over politics.

You said you talked to more than a hundred young people for the book? 

Yeah. Predominantly folks under 25, and then some folks under 30.

Was there anything that really surprised you or challenged what you thought you were going to find during these interviews? 

A lot. I feel like I was challenged all the time, or surprised all the time, by young people's inventiveness, particularly online.

One of the interviews that I probably enjoyed the most was this one young woman was telling me that she used to, let's say, titillate herself by going on Urban Dictionary and looking up dirty words, like sex, for example. If you go and look up sex on Urban Dictionary, you will find that people have written these short smutty vignettes that use the word in it, sort of how a normal dictionary would use the word in a sentence. She would look at those vignettes to basically turn herself on. I did not know that you could even do this. I'm shocked that people would write these. I'm shocked that people would go to these to get aroused. I really enjoyed that part of interviews because people would share all of these surprising and fun stories about their early sexual adventures, and I think people really had never shared a lot of them before. So it was a nice process of discovery for both of us in these interviews.

You write about a couple of people having mentioned dictionaries as places where they found sexual content, and I just think that's such a perfect detail because it gets out at how teenagers are going to find sexually oriented material no matter what lengths we go to to try and stop them. What does that tell us about our current efforts to restrict sexually oriented materials and how they're doomed to fail? Things like efforts to remove books from libraries or check IDs for online porn in the name of stopping kids from seeing sexually-oriented stuff? 

I totally agree that this is doomed to fail. I think that in this day and age, you can go online and Google and find any kind of sex you want within a few minutes and probably a few kinds of sex you don't, and there's just no way around it. You wrote about this, I think, in one of your columns where recent research has shown that in states that have these age verification laws around porn and are trying to effectively ban porn for young people, people just ended up using [virtual private networks] or going to sites that don't adhere to those age verification restrictions. People are hardwired to look for sex wherever and whenever they can get it, and the internet has given people so many more opportunities to find sex. If you try to restrict it, they're probably just going to go into darker and more concerning places. I think it's better to bring this stuff out into the light and talk about it and have open discussions so that people can navigate these things effectively.

That sort of ties into your whole chapter on sex education in the U.S. and its failures. The U.S. spent a ton of money on abstinence-only education. How did that work out? 

Poorly!

This was actually a surprise to me when I started researching the book—I did not realize that this explosion in abstinence-only sex ed happened right around the time that I entered school.

I'm older than you, but also a millennial, and I also didn't realize that it really ramped up with us.

We would've been running headlong into it and had no idea. Basically since 2000, I believe, the U.S. has spent more than $2 billion on abstinence-only sex ed. And yes, there's a sex recession, but the sex recession happened years into that so I don't think you can really blame or credit abstinence-only sex ed. In fact, a federally funded study has found people who receive [abstinence-only sex ed] are likely to have sex for the first time at the same time as people who don't receive it. And they're likely to have the same number of sexual partners as people who don't receive abstinence-only sex ed.

So the evidence shows that this is not successful. It can even be really harmful; people can come away from abstinence-only sex ed feeling more shame about their bodies, particularly among girls. Students of color have reported feeling like they were being discriminated against in abstinence-only sex ed. Black students have talked about feeling like they were expected to be more sexually active because of historical stereotypes around Black sexuality. I just don't think that this is a good use of government funding. [It] feels wasteful.

It seemed like we got out of this culture war about what was being taught about sex in schools for a little bit. And now we seem to be in it worse than ever. 

And now we've also expanded that to look at things like, what's the internet telling us about sex? We should ban that.

Who are you hoping reads your book and what do you hope that they take from it? 

I think that oftentimes these books are written for parents, and I do want parents to read this book because I think it is important to understand what Gen Z and younger people are going through. I also hope that Gen Z and millennials read it to understand what they went through, and to have a sort of revelation that you and I have had, like, "Oh, I was a part of this great experiment in abstinence-only sex ed. I had no idea."

And I hope that it sheds light on the ways that politics impact the personal and the ways that sex—while we might think of it as a thing that happens between two or more people in the bedroom—is actually greatly shaped by what goes on in legislatures, what goes on at school boards, what goes on in courtrooms. We're really living in a time where people are starting to make that realization because of how much politics is demanding our attention at this moment. I hope that this book continues that revelation for folks.

I also just read this book called The Kids Are Online, and it seems to do the same thing your book is doing, except for social media, trying to point out how a lot of the hype is wrong and how something—like sex, or social media—can be bad for young people but also good at the same time. How young people experience both of those things simultaneously. I think books like these are important because it's good for millennials and people in Gen Z and whatever comes next not to get these skewed impressions about what their own peer cohort is doing, which can lead to feeling like you need to do things you don't want to, or to shame if you don't.

I felt so bad about being a virgin, as you probably saw if you read the beginning of the book. And, realistically, people were not having as much sex as I thought they were. I could have really avoided a lot of that pathological shame if I had just known that.

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Hyattsville, Maryland | 2019 (ENB/Reason)