WITH THE ARRIVAL OF THE SO- CALLED GREAT SEX RECESSION, A WAVE OF ZILLENNIALS IS GROWING BORED WITH THE CASUAL HOOK-UP CULTURE THAT DOMINATED PRE-PANDEMIC TIMES — AND REWRITING THE RULES OF INTIMACY
‘A WOMAN’S RIGHT TO OPER ATE BY HER CONVICTIONS should never be questioned, especially when it comes to sex,’ Pennsylvania-based law yer Fumi Ekhator, 32, is saying. She’s been celibate for five years and tells me it’s brought her greater romantic satisfaction, not less. ‘The glorification of hook-up culture is often little more than a facade,’ she says. ‘Dating while celibate gave me the freedom to be free from expectations and with a mindset focused on finding a bond built on genuine friendship. We are so much more than our bodies.’
At a time when hook-ups are available at the swipe of a screen, you’d expect that we’d be having more of them than ever. But Ekhator is one of countless young women who have chosen to turn away from sex either largely or altogether.
Barely a month seems to go by without a headline declaring that Gen Z are stuck in a ‘sex recession’. Studies show that, across the UK and US, Gen Z (those born between 1996 and 2012) are more concerned about tightening their belts rather than undoing them. One, from 2017, found that just 24% of people aged between 18 and 23 said they were having casual sex, compared to 38% in 2007. In another, 31% of young single women reported having sexual intercourse during the past month in 2007, versus 22% in 2017.
Gen Z is experiencing a distinctly different kind of sexual revolution from previous generations such as millennials or Generation X (1965-1979); it’s one where the approach to sex is more pragmatic and personal.
Scott South, a professor of sociology at the University of Albany in New York, says the stats showing a sex famine have caught many researchers ‘by surprise’. ‘While there has been a good deal of speculation as to why people were having less sex, there are few rigorous studies testing these explanations,’ he says. Following their 2021 study Why Are Fewer Young Adults Having Casual Sex?, South and his co-researcher Lei Lei, the Dean of Rutgers Business School, found that waning alcohol consumption plays a ‘substantial’ factor, as does the decreasing frequency of informal dating relationships and increasing economic precarity.
There are also the factors more likely to be revealed in anecdotes than data: a backlash against hook-up culture, changes in people’s approach to intimacy post-pandemic (decreased sexual desire, irritation at less privacy, tiredness from feeling overworked), and even helicopter parents. And let’s not forget the ubiquity of porn, which has skewed the expectations of sex, resulting in disappointment and disillusionment when the ‘real thing’ can’t compete with its fictio
