No One is Having Sex Anymore For One Reason
Romance gets a big "meh" these days.
On July 14, 1861, Major Sullivan Ballou penned a letter to his wife, Sarah. His Rhode Island unit had been stationed at the nation's capital, and with the maelstrom of war brewing, he feared he would never speak to Sarah again.
In rushed scrawl, he lamented that if he "should fall on the battlefield for my country, I am ready."
His most desired wish at that moment was;
“If I do not [return], my dear Sarah, never forget how much I love you, nor that, when my last breath escapes me on the battlefield, it will whisper your name.”
Unfortunately, Ballou's fears came true. He was felled on the plains of Manassas.
They just don't make men like Major Ballou anymore.
If he sent that letter to his wife today, she would complain her husband was "love bombing" her.
Obviously, it’s rare for anyone today to die on a battlefield screaming their lover's name. But as society leans toward endless creature comforts, we become more complacent about human connection. Not only can we have food appear at our doorstep with the touch of a button, but we also can order up a date with a few swipes and some lighthearted banter.
It's all too easy.
And then there's sex. No one is having it. A recent study found that between 2009 and 2018, abstinence rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent in men and from 49.5 percent to 74 percent among women.
Unruffled sheets are found across each generation. Gen Z is keeping their pants on, probably because we left them with an economy that forces them to live with their parents. (sorry!) Millennials are having the least amount of sex, but they are breaking their thumbs on dating apps more than any other generation. Gen X has given up and bought vibrators. (We prefer to find solutions instead of complaining.)
And Boomers…well, they are actually not doing too bad. (But seriously, wrap it up, kids. Your STD rates are getting alarming. Don't make me lecture you about syphilis.)
But there's a reason why younger generations are passing on sex, and it's not their sex drive. It's desire. Romance celebrates desire. Or at least gives it enough of a patina to make it worth the fall.
F. Scott Fitzgerald said it best, "I'm a romantic; a sentimental person thinks things will last, a romantic person hopes against hope that they won't."
Stop and think about that quote.
We have become a society of sentimental fools, desperate to catch the feels. Yet, we size people up like expensive cutlery knives. We want a love that slices through our hearts, but it also has to last.
Fuck forever. I learned a long time ago you don't get to be with the person you most love. Call it cynicism, but there's freedom in not being pulled by the winds of sentiment. I remain a hopeless romantic.
Unfortunately, dating apps have turned people into commodities and not hot ones. We have traded in our zipless fucks for mindless swiping.
Recently, one of my friends refused to go on a second date with a guy because his teeth were not white enough. Not snaggle-toothed or missing teeth. Just a shade off.
She is not an outlier. Many of us approach every new person with a checklist and an agenda. That isn't romance. That is sentiment. Sentiment makes us feel entitled to a partner with perfect teeth. How else will they fit into our Instagram story?
Just give it time. Once the metaverse clamps over our hearts, our avatars will be getting more sex than our real selves.
Social media isn’t the only reflection of our sexlessness. Films are ditching romance too. Encanto is a magnificent movie, but it doesn't have any cloying love scenes. Even Disney is ghosting the shared spaghetti dinner date.
Then there is Euphoria, or what I refer to as Dickphoria. If you have not watched it, here's a fun game you can play with your partner. Guess how many dicks you will see before each episode. The winner gets a sexual treat. (Tip: add at least ten to your guess.)
What you won't see in Euphoria is romance. And by romance, I mean sex with a human connection. It's just a lot of drug-induced sport fucking. They use prosthetic penises, but some of the sex scenes are so wooden that they could replace the actors with tree stumps.
If you want a mirror to our soullessness, just look at our art.
Or better yet, look at our actions. We have become a nation of hedonists chasing our white rabbit. But once we catch it, we hunger for bigger prey. Then once we kill our bigger prey, we have no desire to chase silly rabbits. And so on and so on.
Psychologists call this hedonistic adaptation. Ever go from a king-sized bed to a queen? Kings don't become queens. That's hedonistic adaptation.
But here's a bigger conundrum. Do we even know what sexual pleasure means anymore? To me, pleasure comes from feeling connected with someone with every part of your being. (If you are rolling your eyes right now, then we probably won't run into each other at a poetry reading.)
Then there is feminism — that shadowy Prometheus that stole romance's fire. Would 50 Shades of Grey have become popular after the MeToo movement? Probably not. The novel marked a zeitgeist moment of powerful women wanting to be thrown down and ravaged.
I will probably get pilloried for this one, but…men don’t ravage anymore. Men today fear they will be labeled as predators if they dare even approach a woman. Men fear seducing. Women fear surrendering. How did we get into this standoff?
Perhaps we are having less sex because single people today find it ridiculously hard to find a decent partner. To start, we can no longer date our co-workers. But some of the happiest couples I know met at work years before the MeToo movement. They got to know each other slowly and became friends first. But thanks to the bad apples, we all got kicked out of the Garden of Eden.
Romance is also dead because it was once tied to rituals. But those rituals — holding doors, giving up your seat, offering your jacket — are in the graveyard with our sex lives. Every time I write a piece about dating etiquette, the trolls sharpen their claws. Apparently, having manners has become another form of fascism.
There’s a reason why each generation is passing on sex and it’s not their sex drives. It’s desire. Romance celebrates desire. Or at least gives it enough of a patina to make it worth the fall.
Do you know what happens to a species that isn’t having sex? Plummeting fertility is not the answer, although that is happening too.
Violence. Humans are simple creatures. We will make love or war. It’s happening now. Domestic violence has moved in lockstep with dropping sex rates. The murder rate rose by 30 percent in 2020. Sexual harassment in the workplace has increased since the MeToo movement (even for those who work remotely.)
Sociologists tie their brains in knots trying to figure out why violence has risen and sex has dropped. Instead, they should look to bonobos — our closest relative.
Bonobos are the gentlemen of the ape world. Unlike their thuggish cousins, chimpanzees, bonobos are far less violent. They are too busy with pleasure, and it is remarkably similar to human sex. They have frontal sex, oral sex, and well…a lot more sex than chimps.
Maybe we should start taking love advice from Jane Goodall. It’s not a bad idea. Although Goodall studied mainly chimps, she is a bit of an idealist. Goodall said, "The greatest danger to our future is apathy."
Compassion, love, romance…Meh. Who cares?
Maybe we should start caring.
Carlyn Beccia is an award-winning author and illustrator of 13 books on history, science, art, and why humans do the things we do. For past articles grouped by subject, see my Table of Contents.
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