Title: The Gen Z Intimacy Recession

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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Call it a crisis, or recession, or just a trend, but apparently, young people are having less sex than past generations. We'll say first that the trend is bigger than just being about sex. By most measures, Gen Z is an especially lonely and anxious generation. Dating, sex, emotional vulnerability. They've been shaped by sexual politics, social media and the Internet generally, and by the pandemic. As their lives are increasingly lived online, intimacy is mediated more and more through social media like TikTok and dating apps.

That makes it all the more difficult to forge a connection and keep one going. Reportedly, one way this all expresses is through less sexual activity. Joining us to talk about this is Carter Sherman, also author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, published this year by Gallery Books. Carter's a reproductive health and justice journalist at the Guardian. Carter, thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNYC.

Carter Sherman: Thank you so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Let's get everyone on the same page. When we say sex recession, what are we talking about?

Carter Sherman: I think you defined it pretty well. It's the phenomenon wherein younger people, Gen Z, are having less sex than previous generations. There are numerous studies that show that this is occurring. One in four adult members of Gen Z has not had sex with another person. We know that only about a third of high school students have had sex, which is down from about half back when I was in high school around 15 years ago. We also know that even masturbation is on the decline. These trends confound scientists.

There's no one real explanation for why this is happening. I think that is in part why people are so fascinated by this, because we just don't know why people are doing something that I think is generally considered to be pretty fun and pleasurable.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, help us report this story. Are you a young person who thinks social media and the Internet have complicated intimacy? Do you find that using dating apps have made it harder, not easier, to meet someone? I realize this is asking a very personal and vulnerable question if you're in Gen Z, but anyone want to share a story about your sex life or maybe the lack thereof, or even your lack of interest in it as we are discussing? 212-433-WNYC. Maybe it can help others dealing with something that they're going through and are uncertain about what it means.

212-433-9692, call or text with our guest Carter Sherman, author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. I see you talk to over 100 young people for your book. Were there a few central questions that you were asking folks?

Carter Sherman: There were many, many questions that I was asking folks. These interviews tended to be about 90 minutes. Many of the things that I asked them were about the general-- what they see as the major cultural and political, and technological developments in their lives that shaped their approach to sex. There were a number that came up over and over again. MeToo was a huge turning point for a number of young people because I think it showed them not necessarily just how common sexual assault and sexual harassment is, but how few institutional resources there are to deal with it.

Many of the young women I talked to spoke of feeling much more anxious around sex because of that, in part because they saw, after MeToo broke out there weren't actually that many institutional changes. The main thing we saw in response to MeToo, as far as legal reforms go, were changes in NDA law and more HR trainings, which are not things that really help young people who are trying to navigate having safe sex. People also tended to bring up the overturning of Roe v. Wade. 16% of Gen Zers are now more hesitant to date since Roe was overturned.

Of course, they brought up the Internet. We spoke at length about the many different ways that growing up online on social media has reshaped the way that these young people really see their bodies and see their ability to connect with others. I think the primary thing they spoke about there, and something that was backed up by research, is the extent to which social media makes people see their own bodies as objects and moreover, makes them see that their bodies are objects to be compared against other people's.

That is to say that these are young people who are growing up very aware of their sexual desirability. They are having it quantified for them through things like likes and matches, and follower counts. They're constantly trying to figure out ways to fine-tune their bodies, fine-tune the brands or narratives that they put out online to become more sexually desirable.

Brian Lehrer: I know you were a source in the New Yorker magazine article about this by Jia Tolentino, which some of our listeners might have read. In it, she wrote, "The real problem at the heart of this matter is less about sex and more about loneliness." Do you agree with that assessment?

Carter Sherman: I do. The thing is, and I keep on trying to emphasize this in interviews, is that I'm actually not terribly worried about the sex recession. I'm not really worried about whether or not young people are having enough sex. In fact, in the book, I really try to reject the idea that we should be telling young people that they're doing sex wrong, because I think that we are always obsessed with telling young people that they're doing sex wrong.

What I think sex can be an important proxy measure for and something we should be keeping an eye on, is the extent to which sex is a measure of whether or not young people are willing to be vulnerable with one another, to the extent that they are willing to connect with other people, to the extent that they are willing to take risks and maybe face rejection, because I think that those are things that all of us need to cultivate in order to live a full and happy life. I think, frankly, that these things have political dimensions.

When people are willing to connect with other people, they learn how to build empathy. I think that that's something that I think a lot of people would agree is lacking right now in our politics.

Brian Lehrer: Often, historically, and you write about this in the book, narratives around the sex lives of young people have been used time and time again to justify all sorts of political agendas. Do you see ones that are attaching itself to this?

Carter Sherman: Oh, absolutely. I think MeToo is a huge narrative that we're seeing right now, and that there's a lot of-- I think, frankly, we're in a bit of a backlash to MeToo. The narrative right now, I think, is that young men have been turned off from sex by MeToo, and that now they have to go to the right, they have to go to Republicans in order to regain more control and feel more powerful or feel more heard by their politics.

One of the other narratives that I think has been used to direct young people's sex lives is the idea that they're actually having too much sex. Clearly, there's no real great metric for how much sex young people should be having. Either they're having too much or having too little, but that narrative has been used to fuel abstinence-only sex education in schools, which is generally not evidence-based and generally does not result in the outcomes that it's purporting to show. It doesn't lead people to have less sex, but nevertheless-- Oh, go ahead.

Brian Lehrer: Go ahead, sorry.

Carter Sherman: Oh, I was just going to say, nevertheless, over the last 20 years, the federal government has poured more than $2 billion into funding abstinence-only sex education.

Brian Lehrer: Certainly, that's what we usually hear, it seems to me, is young people are having too much sex. This current narrative that's out there, why is Gen Z having so little sex? It's a historic anomaly, right?

Carter Sherman: Right. It's very funny because I'm a Millennial, and I grew up during the era of hookup culture, that moral panic that young people were having so much sex that it was basically impersonal or even indifferent. The fact of the matter is that the sex recession actually started among late Millennials like myself, Millennials born in the 1990s. We started to see this drop off as those people were entering high school and college. The thing is that these narratives around sex so rarely map onto the reality of what's really going on, and they tend to not actually be willing to address the reality.

If we're worried that young people are having too much sex, we should look at that straight on as opposed to doing things like hand-wringing in the media around, "Why aren't they doing enough?" We should be actually looking at evidence-based solutions.

Brian Lehrer: With Carter Sherman, author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. Elizabeth and Queens, you're on WNYC. Hey, Elizabeth, thanks for calling up.

Elizabeth: Hi, thanks for taking my call.

Brian Lehrer: What you got?

Elizabeth: Oh, pitching it on the sex recession, I'm a Gen Z born in '97, and it was like the start or the beginning of dating apps, Tinder, OkCupid, and Hinge. As I was in my early 20s, it was fun, exciting, and I was very active. Now, I've noticed that it's taken a toll as I've gotten older in my late 20s and realizing the pattern of consistently doom-scrolling on Instagram, Hinge, and Tinder, flipping on people's profile pics like they're magazines, and simply treated them like transactional things, and then I am feeling empty.

There is a lack of connection. There is a lack of relatableness between me and person A and B online. It's taken a mental toll where I'm like, "I don't feel good having empty sex anymore." Therefore, it has placed me in a position where I have to consciously stay away from these dating apps, delete the profiles, and make an effort in my passions and hobbies, join the communities out there, and actually form a real connection with someone in real life, because ultimately, that is the prerequisite of a healthy sexual relationship. That's my take.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for your take. I think good rules to live by. You write about this in your book, Carter?

Carter Sherman: I do. Basically, everybody I spoke to hated dating apps. I think that is in part because a lot of people just hate dating, which is fair. Dating can be torturous, but I think the thing that dating apps have done is they create a sense of gamification, where that app on your phone that is going through potential partners, potential people you can form loving relationships with, it just reduces them to faces on a screen. I think particularly in highly urban cities like New York, it creates this sense that, "Oh, there's always going to be someone hotter out there. There's going to be someone who's more compatible with me out there."

Many of the young people I spoke with were saying that they were frankly just getting off dating apps because it just didn't make them feel good about themselves. There was one young woman I talked to who was saying, "I basically feel like I'm having to sell myself to strangers on the Internet because I have to make them want to date me." That just didn't make her feel good at all.

Brian Lehrer: Nicole in West Hampton, you're on WNYC. Hi, Nicole.

Nicole: Hi. I was just chiming in because I wonder if some of it for young women is that there's more choice now. I was born in 1972, so I grew up in the '70s and '80s, and there was a lot of, "Oh, wow, I have to go to first base, second base. I have to do X or Y to make somebody like me." I think young women now feel like they have more choices. I have a 22 and a 20-year-old niece, two female nieces, and they feel like they have choices. They don't have to do things. They feel like they have much more autonomy. I think that might have something to do with it.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, maybe so. In fact, we also have a text from a listener who writes, "If MeToo has decreased sex, maybe that's because young women are able to say no." What about that caller and that texter?

Carter Sherman: I think that they're absolutely onto something. Young women are the most progressive cohort we've ever recorded. I think a lot of young women are standing up for their rights and fighting for what I call in the book sexual progressivism, which is this idea that we should have expanded abortion rights, we should be fighting much more against sexual assault, we should be fighting for LGBTQ+ rights. It is also true that as the sex recession has developed, the age of marriage has gone up.

I think that that reflects a genuine, real rethinking of what a relationship is good for, particularly among women who now have more choices than ever and more economic power than ever. They're not looking to get married right out of high school or right out of college, and so because of that, they are pushing off more serious relationships. When you are not partnered, you are less likely to be having sex. We have this idea that it's Samantha from Sex and the City, that single people are having more sex all the time, but in reality, it's partnered people who have more sex because they have a guaranteed source of it.

Brian Lehrer: Brian, on the Lower East Side, you're on WNYC. Hi, Brian.

Brian: Hey, good morning. I was hoping the person on the radio could speak a little bit to some of these numbers, or if this data reflects the gay and queer community at all. I'm a Millennial, but I have a lot of Gen Z friends, and I've noticed amongst them, if anything, maybe they're the most sexually liberated generation because they're not really living in the shadow of AIDs. They became adults in the era of prep. I would just love to hear your take on that. Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Carter?

Carter Sherman: Great question. What is really interesting about Gen Z is that they are the most out queer generation that we've ever seen. Depending on how you ask the question and who you ask it of, somewhere between a third and a fifth of Gen Zers identify on the LGBT spectrum somewhere. This is, I think, one of the fundamental contradictions I try to understand in the book is we have a generation that is embracing a much more fluid, much more ambiguous, much more inclusive version of sexuality, yet is having less sex.

I think that this comes from, frankly, the clash between what we're seeing in our politics, which is a crackdown on sex through the things like overturning of Roe v. Wade and the lack of action on sexual assault law, and even making sexual assault law make it less usable for survivors, where at the same time, we have the Internet, which allows so many people to experience so many more kinds of sexuality and to feel welcome and accepted in their sexuality.

Brian Lehrer: Paul in Essex County, you're on WNYC. Hi, Paul.

Paul: Hi, good morning. Thanks for taking my call. I was reminded of the book The Anxious Generation. You had the author on a number of months ago, and it's become a very important text that professionals are reading, educators. He follows a very similar argument in that people under 30 who only grew up with smartphones and have only been exposed to apps have been impacted very negatively on both sides of women, social media, negative body imaging, influencers--

Brian Lehrer: You told our screening that you have personal experience with this because your kids are Gen Z.

Paul: We have two Gen Zers and one young Millennial. My daughter's 23. My younger son's 27. My oldest is 30. My oldest son is 30. There's a difference in his mindset than my daughter's at 23. She's much more cautious. She has expressed concern about personal safety as far as expectations of what somebody may want out. For decades, we've been talking about date rape, acquaintance rape. We've talked about that for decades. It's more than that.

It's more of like she feels that there's almost an unrealistic expectation based upon these guys are watching porn. These guys are playing video games. The dopamine levels in their brains are at such a high, high, high unnatural level that when they step into the real world, what are they expecting to encounter?

Brian Lehrer: Paul, thank you for all that. Kind of related is this text, Carter. Listener writes, "Dating is also just not the center of life anymore. Young women are encouraged to think about their careers, their personal development, their friendship. These are all growing and important. It's totally okay now to not be focused on dating and sex." Another text, "I'm a woman born in 1999. While I was growing up, there was a reckoning with the patriarchy and the danger of assault being so real."

I think the caller was referencing that, too with, with his daughter, "There's an inherent lack of trust when I spend time alone with men. That's a huge turnoff." We've got one minute left in the segment. Your closing thoughts.

Carter Sherman: I think that all of these callers are highlighting all of the different dimensions of the sex recession. I think the thing that I really want folks to think about, and something I wrote the book to reflect, is that we think about sex as being something that occurs in a bedroom alone with two people, but really, the terms of sex are oftentimes set for us by what's going on in school board meetings and what's going on in courtrooms and what's going on in Congress and in state legislatures.

I think we need to be spending more time as a society thinking about all of the forces that are shaping sex and less time thinking, "Oh, this is only my fault. I'm the only person going through this. This is only happening in my family." The fact of the matter is, whatever you think is happening in your sex life, it's probably also happening in other people's, and talking about it more can help fix the things that we want to address in the world.

Brian Lehrer: Carter Sherman, author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future. She's also a reproductive health and justice journalist at The Guardian. Thank you very much for joining us today.

Carter Sherman: Thank you.

Brian Lehrer: That's the Brian Lehrer SHOW for today, produced by Mary Croke, Lisa Allison, Amina Srna, Carl Boisrond, and Esperanza Rosenbaum. Zach Gottehrer-Cohen produces our daily politics podcast. Our interns this summer are Adelina Romero and Vito Emanuel, and we had Juliana Fonda at the audio controls. I'm Brian Lehrer. Stay tuned for Alison.

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