Are a number of societal shifts conspiring to turn America into a nation that just can’t give a fuck anymore?
While the economy continues to fly straight into the red, white and blue crapper formerly known as the good ol’ US of A, another national crisis is simultaneously threatening to make America lame again—the death of sex. Porking is supposed to be a recession-proof affair, as even the most broke citizens can still afford to get naked and forget about their troubles. Yet some sociologists are out there professing that sexlessness has “skyrocketed” over the past decade and that the number of young men joining the Not Getting Any Club has doubled since 2010, with a 50% increase for women. They claim that nearly a quarter of men and 13% of women haven’t had sex in at least a year. In a nutshell, they warn that the United States is smack-dab in the middle of a sex recession.
Admittedly, some of the hand-wringing is agenda-driven. Recently, a sociologist named Lyman Stone, who serves as senior fellow and director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the conservative think tank Institute for Family Studies, credited the drop in sexual activity, in part, to young people’s aversion to marriage. “[O]ne of the biggest drivers of declining sexual activity is the decline in marriage,” Stone wrote. “Married people have more sex, and for most young adults, marriage is occurring later or not at all. As a result, sex is declining.”
The people we talked to beg to differ. Many claim that Stone has it all wrong, and that if there is a sex recession, it’s happening within the nation’s more than 62 million marriages, not among the single population. “I took down all kinds of tail back in the day,” Kenny, 46, of Casper, Wyoming, tells HUSTLERMagazine.com. “Now that I’m married, I’m lucky if I get any.”
As much as we’d like to say the report of a sex recession is just a bunch of hooey propagated by the Christian extremists, it might not be. In 2018, a story published in The Atlantic warned against the coming of a sexless generation, mostly due to young people’s lack of interest in getting it on. “Over the past few years, a series of studies have come out in one of the leading sex research journals finding that people are having sex less frequently, that young adults—people in their 20s—are more likely to have been celibate in adulthood and that they are on track to have fewer lifetime sexual partners than either Boomers or Gen Xers have had,” Kate Julian, the writer of the article, told NPR.
