For many years now we have all been agonising over the fertility crisis. Why aren’t the kids having kids? It’s become a sort of parlour game, the swapping of the various theories. Is it the cost of living? Micro-plastics? Eco-anxiety? Tight underwear, I heard the other day, and snorted with scorn even as I tipped my son’s stretch-cotton pants into the bin.
But now another, rather more fundamental explanation for the baby shortage has emerged. It’s not just that younger generations aren’t having babies – it turns out they aren’t really having sex at all. The Atlantic was first to properly examine this trend among young Americans, in a terrific piece which gave a name to the phenomenon: The Great Sex Recession. Just before Christmas, the Telegraph conducted its own survey of young Brits, which revealed that the proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds having sex has declined dramatically. In October 2019, it was 67 per cent, but as of November last year, it apparently stands at just 43 per cent.
A 24-point drop in six years? Even allowing for the curse of Covid, that’s astonishing. At this rate, by 2030, only a tiny fraction of the young fertile humans sex was designed for will actually be doing it. By 2050, maybe sex will be a niche hobby, like playing the euphonium. Aldous Huxley anticipated babies born in hatcheries, but even he didn’t see the sex drought coming.
This summer, the National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) will reveal its findings. Natsal is a once-a-decade affair, and it’s looking almost certain that it too will uncover a sexpocalypse among the young. So there’ll be a national debate, and every man and his dog will have an opinion. We’ll scrutinise poor Gen Z like so many dairy farmers standing around a non-performing bull, shaking our heads and sucking our old teeth. Why don’t they just get it on? What could be wrong? When I was your age…
There is no ‘between the lines’ for the children of progress. Everything is explicit and everything is political
But thinking about that poor, harried bull and then about Gen Z begins to make the situation seem a little clearer. There’s nothing more repulsively unsexy than being chivied into the bedroom by your parents, and our young men and women have had sex pushed at them by adults since they could crawl. In the interests of removing stigma they’ve been drilled on every gruelling detail of every possible sex act. All the weird and arcane ways human body parts can be rubbed together are now part of the curriculum.
For boomers, sex education was just that one copy of The Joy of Sex that they found tucked away in their parents’ sock drawer. For my generation, for the girls there was Judy Blume and Jilly Cooper and not much else. We wondered, read between the lines.
But there is no ‘between the lines’ for the children of progress. Everything is explicit and everything is political. Every sexual identity and every fetish must be explored, not just or even primarily to pursue pleasure, but so as to strike a blow against the hetero-normative patriarchy. Erotic, eh?
Then there’s porn, which until quite recently was presented to kids as benign and helpful – a resource. Though any number of women have now written about the awful porn-inspired trend for strangling during sex, good progressives were slow to condemn it. ‘Breath play’, they called it, for fear of kink-shaming – and then they wonder why their daughters choose to identify as asexual. Asexuality is, I think, one of the fastest-growing sexual identities and it seems like a decent strategy in a world of sex strangling, but it’s dangerous too. It’s easy to announce your asexuality to the world; much trickier, having done so, to back out.
Meanwhile, and pointlessly, we’ve introduced into the ordinary business of flirting a hectoring list of impossible laws. Don’t touch, don’t pursue, do seek consent at every stage. Don’t stare, ever.
There are posters on the Tube prohibiting staring. If I want to unsettle the twenty-somethings in the Spectator office, I tell them truthfully that staring on the Tube was once one of teen life’s great pleasures. You’d catch a stranger’s eye, then, once you’d left, look back at them from the platform, through the departing glass. But it was also normal not to care much if a man rested his hand on your knee, or leant in for a kiss. You simply pushed them off and took it as a compliment. ‘Not safe in taxis,’ my mum used to call the lungers. She didn’t mean they were all John Worboys, the black cab rapist.
I’m not sure any of us who grew up pre-2000 have much of an idea of the extent to which the rules of dating have suddenly changed; how much of what was ordinary courting for thousands of years is now hysterically beyond the pale. As part of her research, the author of that Atlantic piece, Kate Julian, interviewed a young American man, Simon, who fancied a girl he played volleyball with. After several depressing and unproductive years on dating apps, he considered asking this real live girl out, but ultimately (he said) concluded that this would be ‘incredibly awkward’, even ‘boorish’.
Julian writes: ‘At first, I wondered whether Simon was being overly genteel, or a little paranoid. But the more people I talked with, the more I came to believe that he was simply describing an emerging cultural reality. “No one approaches anyone in public any more,” said a teacher in Northern Virginia. “The dating landscape has changed.”’ According to a poll in the Economist, 17 per cent of Americans aged between 18 and 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink ‘always’ or ‘usually’ constitutes sexual harassment.
This, then, is the happy environment we’ve created, the one in which Gen Alpha are now growing up: all porn and politics, and a feeling of terrible anxiety about even asking someone out. It’s the worst of all romantic worlds, and a sex strike seems a perfectly reasonable response.
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