Something unusual has happened in the bedrooms and living rooms of the developed world. Younger adults are having less sex than previous generations did at the same age. Partnerships form later, if at all. Birth rates have fallen in parallel, settling well below replacement in the United States and across most high-income countries. These trends are not rumors or moral panics. They show up consistently in large, repeated surveys. Understanding them requires looking at the data first, then at the overlapping forces that appear to be driving the change.
The Evidence on Sexual Activity
The numbers are unambiguous. In the U.S. General Social Survey, the share of 18- to 29-year-olds who reported having no sex in the past year roughly doubled between 2010 and 2024, rising from around 12 percent to 24 percent. Weekly sexual activity among adults aged 18–64 dropped from 55 percent in 1990 to 37 percent in recent years. National Survey of Family Growth data focused on adults in their twenties and early thirties show even sharper shifts: male virginity rose from 4 percent to 10 percent, and the share of young men reporting no sex in the previous year climbed from 9 percent to 24 percent. Young women experienced smaller but still clear increases in sexlessness.
Similar patterns appear in other wealthy countries. The decline is steeper among young men than young women and accelerated after smartphones became ubiquitous, with a further drop during the pandemic years. Partnered adults continue to have substantially more sex than singles. As the share of young adults living with a romantic partner has fallen, overall sexual frequency has declined with it. Marriage, which remains the strongest predictor of regular sexual activity, is occurring later or not at all for a growing portion of the cohort.
At the same time, mainstream film and television have grown noticeably tamer. Analyses of top-grossing movies show roughly 40 percent less sexual content since 2000, with a large rise in films containing no sex scenes at all. Nudity on prestige television has also declined. Part of this reflects commercial realities—global markets, franchise filmmaking, and the fact that free online pornography has made on-screen sex less novel. Part of it also tracks audience preferences, particularly among younger viewers who often say they prefer less emphasis on sex and more on plot or friendship.
What Appears to Be Driving the Decline
No single explanation accounts for the full pattern. Several forces have converged and reinforced one another.
Technology and attention. Smartphones and social media have reshaped daily life. Young adults spend far fewer hours in unstructured face-to-face socializing than earlier cohorts did. Social time with friends has roughly halved. Pornography offers reliable, low-effort, rejection-free sexual release. For a non-trivial share of young men, this appears to reduce the urgency of pursuing real-world partners. Social media also fuels constant comparison and body-image anxiety, which can dampen desire and confidence. Real sex requires vulnerability, coordination, and time offline—qualities that compete poorly with an always-available screen.
Economics and delayed adulthood. Housing costs, student debt, and uncertain early-career prospects keep more young adults living with parents longer. Forming an independent household—the practical precondition for most sexual relationships—has become harder. Dating itself carries higher costs than in previous decades. Economic pressure does not make the physical act expensive, but it raises the logistical barriers to the relationships in which sex most reliably occurs.
Cultural and relational friction. The post-#MeToo emphasis on consent improved protections against genuine misconduct. It also increased caution. Many young men report greater hesitation to approach women in person for fear of missteps, public shaming, or false accusations. Dating apps became the safer default, yet they often produce less successful real-world pairing than older forms of courtship. Political and cultural polarization between young men and young women has widened, reducing the pool of compatible partners. Rising identification with non-heterosexual identities, especially bisexuality among young women, has occurred alongside the broader decline. The available evidence does not support the claim that this identity shift is the primary driver of overall sexlessness; the drop is most pronounced in heterosexual pairings, and some data suggest higher partnered activity among bisexual-identifying young people. Still, the cultural climate around sex and gender has grown more charged and anxious for many.
Changing priorities. Newer cohorts place heavier weight on education, career, personal autonomy, and intensive standards of parenting. Parenthood feels more optional and more demanding. When fewer peers are having children, the social expectation weakens further. Alcohol use among young adults has also declined, removing a traditional social lubricant that once lowered inhibitions and facilitated meeting people.
These factors interact. Less in-person socializing reduces opportunities. Economic pressure delays independence. Cultural caution raises the perceived cost of initiation. Technology supplies substitutes. The result is fewer relationships and less sex within the relationships that do form.
The Link to Low Birth Rates
The connection to fertility is direct. Fewer partnerships and less frequent partnered sex reduce both intended and unintended pregnancies. U.S. total fertility has settled near 1.6 children per woman—well below the replacement level of approximately 2.1. The general fertility rate (births per 1,000 women ages 15–44) has reached successive record lows, and provisional data show the decline continuing. Teen birth rates keep setting new lows. Parallel patterns hold across most high-income countries.
Marriage remains a strong predictor of higher fertility. As marriage and stable cohabitation have declined among young adults, births have followed. The drop is not simply delayed childbearing that will be made up later; first-birth rates have fallen across most age groups, and completed fertility for recent cohorts is tracking lower. Economic uncertainty, high housing and childcare costs, longer education, and shifting life priorities all contribute. But the upstream decline in sexual and romantic pairing is a necessary part of the story. Societies cannot have many children if large numbers of young adults are not forming the relationships in which children are usually conceived.
Looking Ahead
The sex recession and the birth drought are real, measurable, and multi-causal. Treating them as the fault of any single ideology or movement oversimplifies the evidence. Technology, economics, delayed adulthood, changing norms around risk and consent, and evolving life priorities all play substantial roles. Political polarization between the sexes adds further friction. None of this requires nostalgia for earlier eras of higher risk or lower agency. Reliable contraception, expanded opportunities for women, and clearer standards of consent are genuine gains. Yet the data show that ordinary partnership formation has become more difficult for many young people, with consequences that extend well beyond private life into demography, labor markets, and the long-term shape of societies.
Understanding the pattern clearly is the necessary first step. Whether and how societies respond—through housing policy, cultural signaling, technological design, or something else—remains an open question. What is no longer open is whether the change is happening.
Sex used to be fun. Take it from a baby boomer: sex was really fun when I was young. We had sex often and with great gusto.
Today, sex seems to be trapped in a sociological mine field with enormous amounts of internet porn splashed over everything.
My conclusion is that we would all be better off if we had more regular clean, healthy, simple, and fun sex in respectful relationships.
