Kate Julian's December 2018 Atlantic cover story, "Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?", named what the survey data had been showing for several years and what nobody yet wanted to call by its name. Young Americans were having less sex than any cohort measured in the modern era — fewer partners, fewer encounters per month, more virgins past twenty-five, more abstainers past thirty. The pattern was not confined to the celibate or the religious; it ran across the population. Julian called it a "sex recession." Five years later, the data has continued downward, and the term has stuck.
The numbers are stark. The General Social Survey shows that the share of Americans aged eighteen to twenty-four reporting no sex in the past year rose from about ten percent in the early 2000s to over twenty-five percent by the early 2020s. For young men specifically, the figure approached thirty percent. Jean Twenge's analyses confirm the same pattern in multiple independent surveys: each successive cohort since roughly 1995 has had less partnered sex at every age than the cohorts before it had at the same age. This is not a delay; it is a structural decline.
The 2nd Law — Think — asks for clear-eyed reasoning about causes. The causes here are plural, and the temptation to pick one and run with it is exactly the cognitive failure the law warns against. The candidates include: pornography filling the substitution slot; dating apps producing a winner-take-most market that strands the median user; smartphones consuming the time and attention that pairing requires; rising anxiety and depression among young adults; declining alcohol consumption (which historically lubricated early sexual encounters); shifts in consent norms that raise the cost of misreading a situation; economic precarity that delays cohabitation; and the broader retreat from in-person socializing that the same generation shows across friendship, family, and civic life. Each candidate has empirical support. None is sufficient alone.
What is clear is that the decline is not driven by lack of interest. Surveys consistently show that young adults want partnered sex and relationships at roughly the rates prior generations did. The gap between wanting and having is the diagnostic feature of a sex recession, distinguishing it from a values shift. Values shifts produce satisfied abstainers. The current pattern produces dissatisfied abstainers — people who report they would like more sex than they are having, and who blame themselves, their bodies, or their dating luck for the gap. The misattribution is itself part of the problem: a structural shortage looks, from the inside, like a personal failure.
The gendered shape of the recession is worth attention. Young men report less sex than young women on average, and the gap is widening. The dating-app distribution of attention is part of the story — most men compete for a flat share of the market while a thin top tier captures disproportionate matches — but it is not the whole story. Young men also report lower friendship density, fewer extracurricular ties, more time alone, and higher rates of "incel" identification at the margins. The recession is not only sexual; it is relational, and the sexual decline is one indicator of a broader withdrawal from the social.
At the collective scale, the consequences extend well beyond bedrooms. Sex is the entry point to cohabitation, marriage, and childbearing. A cohort that pairs less, pairs later, and pairs more conditionally produces fewer households, fewer children, and a thinner familial infrastructure for elder care twenty years out. South Korea, Japan, Italy, and Spain are already seeing the demographic consequences play out. The US is on the same curve, just with a lag. The sex recession is not a curiosity of cultural commentary; it is the upstream variable on the demographic models that determine state pension solvency, school enrollment, and labor supply.
What does honest thinking about this look like? It looks like resisting both the "kids these days" frame and the "everything is fine" frame. The kids are not unusually broken. The conditions they inherited — phones, apps, porn, anxiety, precarity — are unusually un-conducive to the formation of romantic and sexual habits, and they are doing approximately what any cohort would do under those conditions. The fix, if there is one, is not exhortation. It is the reconstruction of the contexts in which young people can encounter each other without mediation, without performance, and with enough sustained attention to find out whether they like each other.
Kate Julian's piece ended on a note of cautious puzzlement; she could see the data but not the way out. The five years since have not produced an obvious exit. The exit will likely come, when it comes, from cohort-level cultural counter-moves — a generation that has lived through the recession deciding to live differently than the one before — rather than from any single intervention. The 2nd Law's job in the meantime is to keep the analysis honest, refuse simple stories, and name what is actually happening without flinching from it.