REVIEW: Why a Hypersexualized Culture Is Having Less Sex Than Ever

How Debra Soh’s new book argues that modern intimacy broke somewhere between the smartphone and the swipe

There’s a puzzle sitting at the center of modern life, one that seems to violate its own premise: never before has a culture been so saturated with sexual content, and never before have so many of its people been going without sex, love, or lasting partnership. Pornography is a tap away. Dating apps promise an infinite catalogue of potential partners. “Sex-positive” messaging has become mainstream wisdom, repeated in classrooms, in magazines, and across social media. And yet, by nearly every available measure, actual intimacy — the kind involving another person, sustained over time — is in retreat.

This is the paradox at the heart of neuroscientist and sex researcher Dr. Debra Soh’s new book, Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy, published by Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions. Soh, the author of the 2020 bestseller The End of Gender and a longtime science columnist, spends the book chasing an answer to a question polite society has mostly stopped asking out loud: if we’re so comfortable talking about sex, why are we having so little of it?

Soh’s argument runs against the grain of a common cultural assumption. The prevailing narrative of the last two decades has been that Western societies are shedding old sexual hang-ups, moving from repression toward liberation. Soh flips that story. Her claim isn’t that we’ve become too uptight about sex — it’s that we’ve been oversaturated with it, marketed to and propagandized by what she characterizes as kink-focused academics and online activists, until sex itself became a commodity, stripped of the emotional intimacy that gives it meaning for most people.

That framing puts her in conversation with a broader, long-running debate about the sex-positive movement itself. Since it entered the cultural mainstream in the early 2010s, sex positivity has been credited with expanding sex education, centering consent, and reducing shame around female desire and LGBTQ identities. But critics — including some feminists who otherwise support the movement’s aims — have argued that its popularized version quietly created a new pressure: to treat any sexual act, however extreme, as a healthy lifestyle choice rather than a personal one, and to treat abstinence or plain vanilla monogamy as somehow regressive. Some young women who came of age inside that culture have described feeling obligated to perform enthusiasm for casual or rough encounters they didn’t actually want, precisely because saying no felt unfashionable. Soh’s book lands squarely on that side of the argument, though it’s worth noting the debate isn’t settled — sex-positive educators would counter that these are distortions of the movement’s actual principles, and that consent culture has demonstrably improved.

What isn’t seriously contested, however, is the underlying behavioral data. It doesn’t merely feel like people are having less sex — the surveys back it up, repeatedly and across data sets.

The Numbers Behind the “Sex Recession”

The term “sex recession” entered public discourse via a 2018 Atlantic feature, and the trend it described has only deepened since. The General Social Survey, one of the longest-running sociological datasets in the United States, found that the share of American adults reporting weekly sex fell from 55 percent in 1990 to just 37 percent by 2024 — nearly a twenty-point decline in a single generation, according to an analysis from the Institute for Family Studies.

The decline is sharpest among the young. Roughly a quarter of adults aged 18 to 29 reported having no sex at all in the past year as of 2024 — a figure that has doubled since 2010. Separate data from the National Survey of Family Growth tells a similar story: sexlessness among adults aged 22 to 34 has risen sharply over the past decade, with the increase roughly twice as large among young men as among young women.

Researchers point to a fairly mundane structural cause underneath the cultural noise: fewer people are living with a partner at all. The share of young adults who are married or cohabiting fell from 42 percent in 2014 to 32 percent in 2024 — and simply having a live-in partner remains one of the single strongest predictors of how often someone has sex. Even marriage itself hasn’t insulated couples from the trend: weekly sex among married adults fell from 59 percent in the 1996–2008 period to 49 percent between 2010 and 2024.

Soh’s book treats these numbers as symptoms rather than the disease itself. Her deeper argument, as the Quillette synopsis of the book puts it, is that this isn’t really a book about sex — it’s a book about a mismatch between the way the human brain evolved to seek intimacy and the incentive structures of a digitally mediated, hyper-optioned modern world.

Swiping as the New Courtship

Dating apps are an obvious culprit, and increasingly, the data on user sentiment backs up the intuition. A 2025 Forbes Health survey found that 78 percent of dating app users report feeling burned out, and that number climbs higher among the youngest users. A parallel Kinsey Institute and DatingAdvice.com survey found that just over 21 percent of Gen Z respondents said apps were their primary way of meeting people, while 58 percent said they preferred meeting in person. Match Group, which owns Tinder and Hinge, has seen its user base contract and its stock battered as a result, and has begun publicly retooling its products to chase a generation that increasingly says it wants less of the very technology that built the modern dating market.

The mechanism behind the fatigue is fairly well understood: apps convert courtship into a numbers game, generating a paradox-of-choice effect where no match ever feels final and no connection feels worth investing in, since another option is always a swipe away. That dynamic rewards exactly the kind of low-commitment, high-optionality behavior that leaves people more sexualized in their daily inputs — more images, more profiles, more possibility — while leaving them less connected in practice.

The Economics of Modern Mate Selection

One of the more provocative threads in Soh’s book concerns what happens to romantic pairing when women’s educational and economic gains outpace men’s. It’s a genuinely double-edged story. Women now make up roughly 60 percent of U.S. college students, a gap researchers describe as the widest in the history of American higher education. That achievement has translated into real independence — women don’t need marriage for financial security the way earlier generations often did. But it has also reshaped the pool of available partners in a way that a lot of research suggests creates friction, particularly for women who — on average and as a statistical tendency, not a universal rule — still tend to prefer partnering with someone of comparable or greater status and education.

A National Bureau of Economic Research working paper tracking marriage patterns across U.S. birth cohorts from 1930 to 1980 found that as the ratio of college-educated men to college-educated women fell from 1.8 to 0.8, college-educated women largely preserved their marriage rates by increasingly partnering with high-earning men who didn’t have four-year degrees — tradesmen, business owners, and similar. That adaptation kept marriage rates among degree-holding women roughly stable. But it came at a cost passed down the ladder: marriage rates for women without a college degree fell sharply, from roughly 79 percent to 52 percent over the same period, as the shrinking pool of stable, marriageable men without degrees was increasingly absorbed by women who did have degrees.

Sociologists have a name for the underlying preference pattern — hypergamy, the tendency, attributed largely (though not exclusively) to women, to partner at or above one’s own status level. It’s a concept evolutionary psychologists trace to reproductive strategy: securing a partner capable of providing long-term stability carried much higher stakes for women across most of human history than it did for men. Whatever its origins, the practical effect in a labor market where women now frequently out-earn and out-degree the available men is a structural mismatch — not a shortage of “good” partners in some moral sense, but a shortage of partners who fit a status-matching pattern that, per this body of research, hasn’t gone away just because the underlying economics have flipped.

Alienation, Not Just Abstinence

What makes Soh’s framing distinct from a simple “kids these days aren’t dating” lament is her insistence that this is fundamentally a story about mismatch and alienation, not repression or laziness. The brain’s wiring for pair-bonding, courtship, and sexual connection evolved for small, stable, face-to-face communities — not for an environment of infinite digital choice, status-flattened global dating pools, algorithmic matching, and a culture that markets sexual content aggressively while making genuine emotional intimacy harder to build. People are, in her account, mindlessly swiping through profiles because the technology and the culture around it trained them to — even though a large and growing body of survey evidence suggests that isn’t actually what most of them want.

That gap between stated behavior and stated desire shows up clearly in the exit interviews people are giving as they abandon the apps. Surveyed daters increasingly describe wanting “clarity” over chemistry, in-person introductions over algorithmic matches, and boundaries over endless optionality — language that reads less like a rejection of intimacy and more like a generation trying to re-learn a skill the culture never quite taught them.

The final stretch of Sextinction turns toward the frontier: AI companions, sex robots, and a “digital intimacy” industry racing to fill the vacancy left by the retreat from human partnership. It’s a future some reviewers have found genuinely unsettling — one flagged the book’s unflinching discussion of the market for AI and robotic companions as its most disturbing material — but it’s also, per Soh’s argument, the logical endpoint of a culture that spent two decades optimizing for sexual stimulation while neglecting the harder, slower work of actual connection.

Whether one accepts Soh’s diagnosis of “sex-positive” culture as the villain of the story, the underlying behavioral data is difficult to dispute: adults across nearly every demographic are pairing off later, cohabiting less, and having measurably less sex than their parents did — even as the volume of sexual content in daily life has never been higher. Sextinction is, in that sense, less a book about sex than a book about what happens to a species wired for intimate connection when the marketplace around it stops rewarding the thing it actually evolved to want.

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Wayne Creed

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