A generation that grew up with dating apps in their pockets, pornography a tap away, and sex discussed more openly than at any point in modern history and yet they are having less of it than any comparable generation on record. Not slightly less. Dramatically less.
This is not rumour, cultural anxiety, or moral panic. It is documented in nationally representative surveys, peer-reviewed in some of the most rigorous medical and behavioural science journals in the world, and replicated across multiple high-income countries. Generation Z born roughly between 1997 and 2012 is experiencing what researchers have begun calling the “sex recession,” and the numbers behind it are striking enough to demand serious attention.
The Numbers Are Not Subtle
Start with the broadest measure. The General Social Survey (GSS), conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago and widely regarded as the gold standard of American social measurement, has tracked sexual behaviour since 1989. Its data show that the share of US adults aged 18 to 64 who have sex at least once per week collapsed from 55% in 1990 to just 37% in 2024. That is an 18-percentage-point decline sustained across more than three decades not a blip, not a pandemic artefact, but a long structural retreat.
Zoom in on young adults and the picture sharpens considerably. Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the proportion reporting zero partnered sex in the previous year what demographers call “sexlessness” doubled from 12% in 2010 to 24% in 2024. One in four young adults. A decade earlier it was one in eight.
A landmark 2020 study published in JAMA Network Open, one of the most widely read open-access medical journals in the world, drilled further into the data. Analysing GSS responses from adults aged 18 to 44 between 2000 and 2018 approximately 9,500 respondents researchers found that among men aged 18 to 24, sexual inactivity rose from 18.9% in 2000–2002 to 30.9% in 2016–2018. In less than two decades, the proportion of young men going without sex for a year or more increased by nearly two thirds. Meanwhile, the share of those same young men having sex weekly or more frequently fell from 51.8% to 37.4%.
Psychologist Jean Twenge and colleagues, publishing in the Archives of Sexual Behavior in 2017, brought the longest historical lens to bear. Using GSS data from 1989 to 2014 and more than 26,000 respondents, they found that American adults in the early 2010s reported roughly nine fewer sexual encounters per year than their counterparts in the late 1990s. More revealingly, their age-period-cohort analysis showed the decline was primarily generational in character not a reflection of economic hard times affecting everyone equally, but a pattern embedded in birth cohort. People born in the 1990s reported the lowest sexual frequency of any group in the dataset. People born in the 1930s reported the highest.
The trend begins even before adulthood. The CDC’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey, which has tracked American high schoolers since 1991, found that the percentage of students who had ever had sexual intercourse fell from 54% in 1991 to 40% in 2017, with continued declines in subsequent waves. Delayed sexual debut has downstream consequences: young adults who initiate sex later tend to accumulate fewer partners and lower frequencies throughout their twenties.
And this is not a uniquely American problem. In Japan, approximately half of adults remain sexually inexperienced into their mid-twenties. Parallel declines have been documented in national surveys conducted in Australia, Germany, and the United Kingdom. The cross-national convergence is significant it points toward shared structural forces rather than anything specific to American culture or politics.
It Is Not Just About Having Less Sex It Is About Forming Fewer Relationships
A critical and sometimes overlooked driver of the decline is not changing attitudes toward sex itself but declining rates of partnering. Married and cohabiting adults report far higher rates of regular sexual activity than their single counterparts 46% versus 34% in 2024 GSS data. The problem, in part, is that fewer young adults are in relationships at all.
The share of 18 to 29-year-olds living with a partner married or cohabiting fell from 42% in 2014 to 32% in 2024, according to Institute for Family Studies analysis of GSS data. A 10-point drop in a decade. That alone would explain a significant share of the decline in sexual frequency without requiring any change in the behaviour of people who are in relationships.
Even within relationships, however, frequency has declined. The sex recession is therefore operating through at least two distinct channels: fewer people are forming the kinds of partnerships within which sex regularly occurs, and those who do form such partnerships are having sex less often than equivalent couples did a generation ago.
Why Is This Happening? The Evidence-Based Explanations
No single cause explains the sex recession. Researchers point to a convergence of economic, technological, psychological, and cultural forces many interrelated and mutually reinforcing.
Economic precarity and delayed independence are perhaps the most structurally intuitive explanation. Forming a stable romantic relationship the primary context for regular sexual activity typically requires a degree of financial and residential independence. Both have become harder to achieve. The share of US adults aged 25 to 34 living with their parents was 18% in 2023, double the 9% recorded in 2000. Student debt, stagnant wages for non-college workers, and historically high housing costs have pushed back the age at which young people establish independent households. Unemployment and low income are among the strongest individual-level predictors of sexual inactivity, particularly among young men.
Digital technology and the displacement of in-person socialisation represent the second major force. Smartphone adoption became near-universal among American adolescents between 2012 and 2015 — almost exactly the inflection point at which numerous measures of in-person social engagement began to decline. IFS analysis of 2024 GSS data found that weekly in-person social time among young adults had roughly halved, from 12.8 hours in 2010 to approximately 5 hours by 2024. Sex, for most people, requires physically encountering potential or existing partners. When socialisation migrates to screens, those encounters become rarer.
Dating applications, despite their apparent purpose, have not produced an increase in partnered sex in the general population. Some research associates heavy app use with heightened social anxiety, reduced confidence in face-to-face interaction, and dissatisfaction with real-world romantic prospects. The apps may be simultaneously making the process of meeting people feel more systematised and more discouraging.
Mental health deterioration has been extensively documented among cohorts who grew up with social media. Rates of anxiety, depression, and self-reported loneliness among young adults have risen sharply since the early 2010s. Both anxiety and depression suppress libido, increase avoidance of emotional and physical intimacy, and reduce the social confidence required to initiate and sustain relationships. Loneliness paradoxically tends to reinforce social withdrawal rather than motivate outreach. Whether declining mental health is a cause, a consequence, or both simultaneously relative to the sex recession remains an active research question.
Shifting cultural norms and identity have also played a role, though their precise magnitude is harder to quantify. Greater cultural acceptance of asexuality and diverse sexual identities has reduced the social stigma of non-partnered life. Higher rates of self-identified LGBTQ+ identification in Gen Z a demographic whose sexual encounters may not be fully captured in survey items calibrated around heterosexual partnered sex affect aggregate statistics. Declining alcohol consumption among young people removes a social lubricant that historically facilitated early sexual encounters. Heightened awareness of consent dynamics following the #MeToo movement has, some researchers argue, increased the perceived social and legal risk of sexual initiation particularly for young men.
One commonly proposed explanation has not held up well to scrutiny. Pornography use is frequently cited as a substitute for partnered sex, but GSS data suggest the opposite correlation: those who report pornography use are actually less likely to report sexual inactivity than non-users. This does not establish causality in either direction, but it is inconsistent with a straightforward displacement story.
Who Is Most Affected
The decline is not evenly distributed. It is most pronounced among unmarried, lower-income, and less-educated young adults groups disproportionately affected by economic precarity and least likely to be in the stable partnerships that sustain regular sexual activity. The divergence between partnered and unpartnered adults in sexual frequency, already substantial, appears to have widened over the past decade.
Among those who are having sex, there is evidence that the qualitative picture may be more varied than aggregate frequency statistics suggest. Gen Z adults report higher rates of diverse sexual practices including kink-identified activity and a broader range of partner types compared with prior generations at equivalent ages. The recession in quantity coexists with what some researchers describe as an evolution in the diversity of sexual expression among the sexually active minority.
What It Means and Why It Matters
The implications of the sex recession extend well beyond the bedroom. A substantial body of research, distinct from the trend literature reviewed here, links regular partnered sexual activity to better psychological well-being, higher relationship quality, and modest associations with physical health indicators. If the decline reflects involuntary deprivation a gap between what people want and what they are experiencing rather than freely chosen abstinence, it represents a meaningful source of human suffering at population scale.
Demographically, reduced partnered sexual activity coincides with historically low fertility rates across most high-income countries. While contraception and deliberate childlessness are the primary drivers of low birth rates, the sex recession may be a contributing factor at the margins.
More broadly, the pattern sits within a wider retreat from face-to-face relationships. Declining church attendance, falling civic participation, rising rates of living alone, and shrinking social networks are all documented in the same survey data that reveal the sex recession. The sexual dimension may be the most easily measurable symptom of a deeper social disconnection one whose consequences, including loneliness, reduced social trust, and attenuated community ties, carry their own significant costs.
Some researchers are resistant to framing the trend as a crisis. Reduced stigma around non-partnered lifestyles, genuine personal choice freed from prior social compulsion, and expanded conceptual space for non-normative sexual identities may represent real progress for individuals who freely choose them. Not all sexual inactivity is unwanted, and treating it uniformly as pathological would be a mistake.
But survey data also reveal that a significant proportion of sexually inactive young adults report that they would prefer to have sex and are experiencing difficulty forming intimate relationships. For this group, the recession is not liberation it is a form of relational deprivation with measurable costs for well-being.
Trend That Is Not Going Away
The sex recession is real, sustained, generational, and multinational. It predates COVID-19 by at least a decade, survived it, and shows no sign of reversal in the most recent available data. It is driven by a convergence of economic, technological, psychological, and cultural forces none of which will resolve themselves easily or quickly.
The most important research questions ahead involve distinguishing between voluntary and involuntary inactivity at the individual level, tracking longitudinal outcomes for each group, and evaluating whether structural interventions affordable housing, accessible mental health services, investment in in-person social infrastructure can address root causes rather than symptoms.
What seems clear, looking across the data, is that something significant has changed in the social and emotional architecture of young adult life. The sex recession is one of its most measurable expressions. Understanding it fully is not a matter of prurient curiosity it is a matter of taking seriously the conditions under which human flourishing does or does not occur.
References
- Ueda P, Mercer CH, Ghaznavi C, Herbenick D. Trends in Frequency of Sexual Activity and Number of Sexual Partners Among Adults Aged 18 to 44 Years in the US, 2000–2018. JAMA Network Open. 2020;3(2):e1920757.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2019.20757 - Twenge JM, Sherman RA, Wells BE. Declines in Sexual Frequency among American Adults, 1989–2014. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2017;46(8):2389–2401.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-017-0953-1 - Twenge JM, Sherman RA, Wells BE. Sexual Inactivity During Young Adulthood Is More Common Among U.S. Millennials and iGen: Age, Period, and Cohort Effects on Having No Sexual Partners After Age 18. Archives of Sexual Behavior. 2017;46(2):433–440.
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10508-016-0798-z - Bailey G, Wilcox WB. The Sex Recession: The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping. Institute for Family Studies, analysis of 2024 General Social Survey data. August 2025.
- New Scientist. Why aren’t young people having sex any more?
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Youth Risk Behavior Surveillance System (YRBSS): Trends in the Prevalence of Sexual Behaviors and HIV Testing. National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention. 2017 and subsequent waves.
Data portal: https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/data/index.html - NORC at the University of Chicago. General Social Survey: Cumulative Codebook and Data Explorer. University of Chicago.
This article synthesises published peer-reviewed research. All statistics are attributed to their original sources as cited.
