What's Behind Gen Z's Sex Recession?

WIRED

5 days ago

Jul 21, 2025 12:56 PM On this episode of Uncanny Valley , author Carter Sherman breaks down the forces shaping Gen Z's unique relationship to sex. Photo-Illustration:All products featured on WIRED are independently selected by our editors. However, we may receive compensation from retailers and/or from purchases of products through these links.
In today's episode, we look into why Gen Z is having less sex than other generations—and what it says about how we are all relating to each other. WIRED's Zoë Schiffer is joined by author and journalist Carter Sherman to talk about her latest book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future , which reveals how the internet, politics, and conservative legislation have shaped how Gen Z views sex.
Mentioned in this episode:
How Social Media Is Fueling Gen Z's Sex Recession by Manisha Krishnan
Thinking Machines Lab Raises a Record $2 Billion, Announces Cofounders by Will Knight
You can follow Zoë Schiffer on Bluesky at @zoeschiffer. Write to us at [e-mail]. How to Listen
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Note: This is an automated transcript, which may contain errors.
Zoë Schiffer: Hey, this is Zoe. Before we start, I want to take a chance to remind you that we really want to hear from you. If you have a tech-related question that's been on your mind or a topic that you wish we'd talked about on the show, you can write to us at [e-mail]. And if you listen to and enjoy our episodes, please please rate the show and leave a review on your podcast app of choice. It honestly really helps other people find us. Welcome to WIRED's Uncanny Valley . I'm WIRED's, director of Business and Industry, Zoë Schiffer. Today on the show, why Gen Z is having less sex than prior generations, and why it has a lot more to do with tech than you might think. According to a 2022 survey by the Kinsey Institute and Lovehoney, one in four Gen Z adults, meaning people between the ages of 13 and 28 in the year of our Lord 2025, have never had partnered sex, and the most recent data available from the CDC shows that only around a third of high schoolers reported having sex, down from 47% in 2013. There's been a lot of talk around why Gen Z seems less interested in sex with the prevailing theory being that they're just a more puritanical generation. But in her new book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future , writer and journalist, Carter Sherman, found that it's not quite that simple. Social media, the pandemic, and conservative legislation have all influenced Gen Z's current predicament. To break it down, Carter Sherman joins us today on the show. Carter, welcome to Uncanny Valley .
Carter Sherman: Thank you for having me.
Zoë Schiffer: So you open up the first chapter of your book by describing the moment that we're in as a sex recession, particularly for Gen Z. What exactly is a sex recession and why does it matter?
Carter Sherman: Well, a sex recession is the cutesy name that we have given this phenomenon that you just described where young people are having sex later and less frequently than past generations. We tend to associate the, quote unquote, "sex recession" with Gen Z, but it actually began amongst my cohort, late Millennials. So this is not a phenomenon that we can peg to, say, the pandemic. It started before we were all locked down within our homes. The reason why it matters in my view is less so about whether or not young people are actually engaging in the physical act of sex and more about whether or not sex is a proxy measure for things like connection and vulnerability and the development of empathy. That's what I worry about, because in my book, I talk to more than 100 young people under 30, and a lot of them felt a great deal of shame over the fact that they felt like they weren't having enough sex, over the fact that they felt it was really difficult to cultivate intimacy with other people their own age, and so what I really wanted to understand about the sex recession is what factors led to it and what can we do to alleviate not necessarily the lack of sex itself, but alleviate the lack of connection that we're seeing in our society at this time.
Zoë Schiffer: That's really, really beautifully said. I feel like one of the first factors that you point to in the book as being responsible or partly responsible for this decline in young people having sex is social media, not just because of the time we all spend on it, and it really is all of us. It's not just Gen Z obviously, but because it's shaped how Gen Z interacts with each other in a particular way. So what did you find as you were talking to people?
Carter Sherman: So a lot of the trends that we see right now in things like sex and mental health, we can trace back to around 2010, which is when we all got smartphones that had social media on them, and when we could spend so much more of our day staring at these screens. The thing that I found about social media is it really contributes to this phenomenon called, quote unquote, "comparing and despairing", which is basically what it sounds like. You look at other people's lives, you look at other people's bodies, and you are made to feel like you are less than. And young people described basically being very aware of their sexual marketability, which is to say that they became really aware of how attractive they were or were not through things like likes and matches and follower counts, and that constant rating on yourself can make people not really want to engage in intimacy, in sex, in relationships. If you feel like your body has to be perfect in order to get naked, the chances are you're not going to get naked.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, this feels particularly true, I don't know if you can speak to this part, but for women or women identifying people. The desire to have sex has so much to do with feeling sexy, and if you're constantly comparing yourself and your body to other people, I can't imagine that it's very difficult to feel that way.
Carter Sherman: Absolutely. I think this is something that very much affects women and girls in particular. There was one young woman in particular I remember talking to who was posting photos of herself in a bikini in high school the way so many young people do, and her friends were commenting on how her hips looked or how her breasts looked or how her legs looked. And she liked the compliments that they were giving, but it did make her feel very much like, "Oh, they're evaluating me. Oh, we're in competition with one another." And initially when we spoke, she wasn't really aware of why she was posting these photos, and then as we kept talking, she said it was definitely for men. It was for men's appreciation of me. And in fact, I talked to another young man who said, "As I'm scrolling through my social media platform, if I see one girl who looks cute and then I see another girl who's in a bikini and also looks cute, I am comparing them. I might go for the girl in the bikini over the girl who's not," and I appreciated the honesty that he had about it. He also talked about all the young women that he knew were using things like filters to change how they looked online, and I asked, "Oh, have you ever altered your body, edited your body in any way in photos?" And he said, "Yeah, I made my shoulders look bigger in a photo." So this is not just something that affects young women, even if it affects young women more. Young men are definitely very much dealing with this. He kept on using this phrase, the criteria, that you had to meet the criteria on social media, and there's no way that feeling like there's a criteria for your body isn't corrosive.
Zoë Schiffer: Absolutely. Yeah, I'm curious how dating apps fit into this, because that feels like another avenue where, especially with the current generation of dating apps, you're literally being evaluated all the time.
Carter Sherman: Oh, yeah. I think dating apps are basically like an extension of social media because that's what they are at this point, especially because people now oftentimes date through social media so the boundaries between those apps have become much more blurry. And I found that oftentimes, yes, people had the same sort of comparing and despairing feeling because of dating apps. In fact, dating apps make legible a lot of things that I think are harder to see in IRL interactions, so for example, a founder of OkCupid once said that race is the ultimate confounding factor among Americans who are meeting online, and so you can really look at and measure how things like sexualized racism play a role in dating apps, and these are the kinds of things that make people feel terrible, but we can also see more clearly through this technology.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, fascinating. So let's talk about the rest of the internet outside the social media, because Gen Z is the first generation that has always known a world where porn and nudes are readily available online in just a few clicks. And I'm curious, how has that impacted them?
Carter Sherman: What's really interesting about porn is when I was going into this book, I thought I would find a diverse array of beliefs about it. I thought that people on the right would be more opposed to it, that people on the left might feel a little bit more warmly towards it. I thought that everybody would watch it, which was generally true, but I instead found that in general, no matter person's political background, they tended to feel like porn was really bad for them, that it had warped their sexuality in some way. Three quarters of Americans have seen porn by the time they hit 18. The thing is that the science on porn is incredibly muddy. It's very hard to find a control group, find people who have not seen porn, so you can't really do the best science on this, and so much of the research that we do have on porn is riddled with biases and baked in beliefs about what constitutes a degrading act or what constitutes rough sex. So what I found among young people is that they had what sociologists call a, quote unquote, "deep story", and a deep story is this belief about something that feels true, and this belief can be more powerful than the facts. And the deep story for young people is that porn was bad for them and that it had in particular normalized, quote unquote, "rough sex", and in particular, normalized choking. If you are under 40, you are almost twice as likely to have been choked during sex than someone who is over 40, and a majority of young people have not been asked before they were choked on every occasion or on some occasions. So for me, I think that if you enjoy choking, if you enjoy rough sex, more power to you, but I want you to be doing it safely and consensually and not just treat it like this is another average act you don't have to ask consent for.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah. It feels like with so much of this, it's less about the thing itself than our, or their I guess, relationship with that thing.
Carter Sherman: Oh, yeah.
Zoë Schiffer: It feels like there's a lot of shame surrounding it or sadness or it's detracting from people's lives in some way, then that's the issue, versus if they just had this relationship with porn that felt additive and totally fine, we wouldn't be talking about this.
Carter Sherman: Yeah. I think the thing that porn does do is it portrays pleasure, right? It shows what it's like to give and receive sexual pleasure, and that pleasure might not be reflective of a lot of people's real life preferences, but we have in this country a real dearth of comprehensive sex education. Since 2000, the federal government has poured more than $2 billion into abstinence only sex education, and that sex education just can't account for porn, it can't account for pleasure because it's so narrow-minded and only focuses on telling people, "Oh, if you have sex, you will get pregnant and die," in the words of Coach Carr from Mean Girls. And so young people turn to porn because they want to know what pleasure looks like, and this seems to be the only way that they can find out about it.
Zoë Schiffer: That thought completely blew my mind, and I want to get into high school sex ed in a little bit, but one more question just about online communities that have become more and more popular in recent years. Incels and trad wives, one recent survey found that in the US, over 35% of self-identified incels were between the ages of 22 and 25 years old, making this age group the most dominant. So how do they fit into the trend of Gen Z having less sex?
Carter Sherman: I think we know that young women and young men are on wildly diverging political paths. Obviously, young men voted for Donald Trump in the last election, whereas young women are the most progressive cohort we've ever measured in US history, and I think that there is no denying that the manosphere and incel ideology are likely playing a role in this divergence. It's hard to say if this polarization is a symptom or a cause of this sex recession. Is it that young women and young men aren't engaging with one another sexually or romantically and that's making people run towards incel ideology? Which is not to blame young women, but I do think that young men are dealing with, to dame [inaudible 00:11:50] another big topic in the news right now, a loneliness epidemic and they're looking for answers about why this is happening, and it's easy for them to say, "Oh, I'm not having enough sex. Oh, it's women's fault." I talked to one young woman actually who I found very striking who said that she had not had sex even though she was straight and interested in having sex because she was afraid that she would encounter a man who was basically secretly poisoned by incel ideology. That he would evince misogyny, that she just wouldn't understand how to counter. She felt like incels have just totally taken over the theater of gender relations and their ideas are everywhere, and in fact, in reporting this book, I did feel like incel ideology is everywhere. There was one day where I was trying to procrastinate on writing the chapter that includes information about incels, and one of the things that incels like to say is they describe things as maxing, like you're optimizing, you're maxing out on something. And I opened the New York Times and they were talking about smell maxing, which is this phenomenon where I guess middle schoolers love to use a lot of cologne, and I was like, "Oh, this language is everywhere now." This is just how we talk at this point, and we don't even think about the fact that the manosphere is the source of so much of this lingo.
Zoë Schiffer: Oh my God. Yeah, I feel like in AI, they're talking about bench maxing right now, which I totally missed as being an incel thing until you started talking about this, and I'm like, oh, yeah, that's like when we're talking about how AIs compare on benchmarks, that's a coded language. Let's go to break, and when we come back, we'll dive into how it's not just the internet. The changing political landscape has also affected how Gen Z views sex. Carter, you touched on this before, but Gen Z is obviously very politically aware. They've witnessed the Me Too movement, the overturning of Roe v. Wade. How have these developments impacted how they view and go about sex in their personal lives?
Carter Sherman: They've impacted young people's sex lives massively. 16% of Gen Zers are now more reluctant to date because of the overturning of Roe v. which is in my mind a staggering statistic. I asked people in my interviews to name a cultural or political moment that had an impact on their sex lives, and almost all of them said Roe versus Wade being overturned, or Me Too, or both. I think for young women, what Me Too did is I think very much lead them to understand, certainly earlier than I did, that maybe if something had happened to them that felt off, that that action might have in fact been wrong, that it might've been sexual assault or sexual harassment, and that they deserved accountability for that. The thing is though that Me Too did not actually lead to many institutional changes. The only real legal reforms we saw come out of the Me Too movement were changes in the regulation of NDAs and more HR trainings, and these are not things that really help young people who don't work. And so for many of the young women I talked to, they understood that sexual harassment and sexual assault are everywhere, but they also understood that there was very little that they could do about those things, and that if something had happened to them, that institutions would likely not be on their side. So that creates just an incredible miasma of anxiety for young women to be walking through every day. It makes them afraid of sex, and I think for good reason. For young men, I really appreciated, there was one young man who told me that he felt like the Me Too movement was actually anti-cis male in some ways, and this is a young man who is liberal, active in Democratic politics, he is a reproductive justice advocate, and he did feel though that sometimes the Me Too movement demonized young men, and again, that leads to more anxiety. When it comes to the overturning of Roe v. Wade, I think a lot of people were just very aware that if they got pregnant, they might not have options. There was a run on contraception after Roe v. Wade was overturned, and I talked to one young woman who got an IUD after Roe v. Wade was overturned. And I think what both of these events did is it made young people very aware of the political valence of sex, and I think that that can be very helpful. I think we need to understand how much of our sex lives are determined by things that happen in school board meetings and courtrooms and state legislatures and in Congress, but I think sometimes the weight of all of that politics makes people unwilling to engage in sex or even maybe attached too much meaning to sex. Is the Sabrina Carpenter album cover really all that serious? Do we need to have all of this debate around it? I don't know, but I do think that it has something to do with the ways that we've made sex incredibly politicized in this moment.
Zoë Schiffer: Yeah, this blew my mind as well. I think just the idea that something going on in national politics would impact such a personal decision, like whether or not to engage in sex. But then I also remembered that a lot of women of my generation and a lot of friends of mine have had climate change be a major, major factor in their decision about whether or not to have kids, and I was like, oh, I do think this is Gen Z's version of that phenomena.
Carter Sherman: Absolutely. I think we want to pretend that we have total control over our sex lives or our reproductive lives or our family lives, but the fact of the matter is we don't. We do live in a country, we do live on a planet, and it is always this emotional balancing act of figuring out, okay, how can I still feel in control when I might not actually have the total control that would make me able to live my life fully?
Zoë Schiffer: Okay. I want a chance to touch on something that we talked about before, which is the kind of sex ed classes that Gen Z is having or has access to, particularly in high school. I remember when I was in high school, we had a very, very, very explicit sex ed class, but maybe that was very unique in my generation, I'm not sure. But what is happening now?
Carter Sherman: Where did you grow up?
Zoë Schiffer: Well, I grew up in Santa Barbara. I think they were like, "Santa Barbara, these kids are partying way too much and having way too much sex, so we need to really tell them what's going on," and it rocked all of us.
Carter Sherman: It sounds like it's left some scars, I have to be honest with you. I think that very much, your sex ed is so determined by the zip code in which you grow up, and so a state like California is going to have a really different sex ed curriculum than a state like, I don't know, Alabama or Mississippi. And I grew up in Seattle, and I feel like I had, relatively speaking, fairly comprehensive sex ed, but my sex ed did try to pathologize sex. It did try to make sex into this kind of scary thing, and I don't think we have a lot of sex ed in this country, even in the most progressive states that adequately addresses things like pleasure and healthy relationships and communication. It does try to say, "Okay, here's STIs. Here's pregnancy. Stay away from sex." but the thing that I found really interesting as I was reporting in this book is I did not know that when I started to go to school in 2000 as a kindergartner, that I was basically one of the very first guinea pigs in what I call a billion dollar federal virginity campaign, because it was during the George Bush years that the federal government started pouring more and more money, hundreds of millions of dollars, into abstinence only sex ed, and that money has continued throughout the Obama administration, throughout the Trump administration, throughout the Biden administration, and I assume it will again continue throughout this current Trump administration. I think we take for granted that sex ed is bad in this country, that the teachers want to scare us or that the teachers are incompetent, but there is sex ed that is comprehensive, and the young people I talked to who had comprehensive sex ed I think had just much healthier lives in general. They didn't feel the degree of shame that I think so many of us feel around sex.
Zoë Schiffer: After doing all of this reporting and then writing the book, is there anything that makes you hopeful about the future of Gen Z and their ability to navigate sex and relationships?
Carter Sherman: I do think it is hopeful that young people understand how political sex is. Even if sometimes it can feel like it goes too far, I think being aware of that political element is in general good for young people. In the book, I chart the clash between what I call sexual conservatism, which is the movement to make it difficult if not dangerous to have sex that isn't straight, that isn't married, that isn't potentially procreative, and sexual progressivism, which is a movement that I think is very much internet fueled by young people to not only fight against sexual assault and fight for abortion rights and fight for LGBTQ plus rights, but also to expand the ways that we think about sex and gender and make those definitions much more inclusive, and make the discussions that we are continuing to have in the public sphere much more broad-minded. And I really think that we tend to write off young people. We tend to always say that they're doing sex wrong, but there's a lot to learn from young people in the way that they're thinking about sex and reconceptualizing it.
Zoë Schiffer: Okay, we're going to take another quick break, and when we come back, we'll share our recommendations for what to read this week. Welcome back to Uncanny Valley . I'm Zoe Schiffer, WIRED's director of Business and Industry, and I'm joined today by writer and journalist, Carter Sherman. Before we take off, we have some recommendations for you. I wanted to flag an article by our fabulous AI reporter, Will Knight, here at WIRED, about Thinking Machines Lab, which is Mira Murati's AI startup. They just raised an enormous seed fundraising round. They're getting ready to announce a suite of products, and they've confirmed their executive team to WIRED for the first time. So this is an area that we report on a lot. It's a left turn from this conversation with Carter, but Mira's doing really, really interesting work. I think it's obviously exciting to see a very prominent woman in this male-dominated space, and we're going to keep a close eye on the changes to come. Carter, what have you been reading this week?
Carter Sherman: I picked up a book and finished it much more swiftly than I was anticipating. It is called Cue the Sun! It's by Emily Nussbaum. She is the TV critic over at The New Yorker, and it's a history of reality television, which I would say is actually not a genre that I love all that much so I'm not even sure why I got the book, but the book was so deeply reported and so nuanced and just unearthed all of this history, not only in television, but in the United States, that I had never heard of. And it was a nice break from the current political discussion, although the book was haunted by Donald Trump and the idea of how did we end up with a reality TV star for president. So if you want something that feels frothy but also grounded in reality, I would recommend this book.
Zoë Schiffer: Frothy and grounded is always what I'm looking for, so thank you. That's our show for today. We'll link to all the stories we spoke about in the show notes. Make sure to check out Thursday's episode of Uncanny Valley , which is about how WIRED analyzed Jeffrey Epstein's video. Adriana Tapia produced this episode. Special thanks to Manisha Krishnan for her reporting. Amar Lal at Macrosound mixed this episode, Kate Osborn is our executive producer, Chris Bannon is the head of Global Audio, and Katie Drummond is WIRED's global editorial director.