Tune In, Tune Off

Sex is in trouble. Despite its apparent ubiquity in the media, from dating apps to Love Island, we are actually having less of it and seem to be enjoying it less than ever before. Strangely, that’s especially the case among young adults. In the States, research has shown the proportion of Americans aged between 18 and 29 who reported having zero sex between 2008 and 2018 doubled to 23 per cent – a bigger proportion than the over-50s.

What’s true there is almost certainly true here, too. In a world in which dating is now done almost exclusively by app, the manoeuvring required to turn digital profiles into flesh and blood encounters has become a running joke. More seriously, a generation has come of age programmed to ‘swipe right’ jadedly past face after face – and it shows. It shows in the angry, bossy or monosyllabic profiles exhibited in the apps, in the way ‘ghosting’ (suddenly disappearing, possibly forever) has become a perfectly legitimate exit from a developing relationship, and in the apparent boredom or even reluctance with which sex is now greeted. In the US research, what sent eyebrows soaring highest was this: Far more young men were going bonk-free than women, with rates tripling to 29 per cent.

Young men, traditionally the lustiest demographic, are either declining sex, point blank, or are too confused about how to approach it to actually do so. Late August saw the updated English language translation, with much fanfare, of Respect: Everything a Guy Needs to Know about Sex, Love and Consent, a manual aimed at teenage boys. Its author, Inti Chavez Perez, saw how sorely the new generation of young men need help, crippled as they are by a mixture of physical insecurity and porn-induced misconceptions about real-life intimacy. No wonder, in this climate of miserable doubt, men in their 20s and 30s are increasingly suffering from erectile dysfunction. Cosmopolitan magazine noted this phenomenon in a survey: “There are a lot more millennial men experiencing [it] than we all thought.”

Meanwhile, other recent studies have suggested that an addiction to the likes of Netflix and Amazon Prime streaming services, as well as the rise of online gaming, is killing off action in the bedroom. And while you could hardly bemoan a remarkable statistic, revealed last year, that teenage pregnancy rates in Britain have fallen by 55 per cent in the last decade, the reasons given were revealing, too. It’s not just because kids are suddenly more judicious in their use of birth control, but because ‘lifestyle changes’ are meaning they simply stay at home.

In fact, the nearest most of today’s teenagers get to fooling around is some illicit sexting from their parents’ sofas (really).