Young Americans are having less sex than ever before. Like. Way less sex. According to new data released by the General Social Survey, a record high of twenty-three percent of American adults between the ages of 18 and 29 reported having no sex in 2018. That’s double the number of young adults who went without a decade ago. In fact, they’re having even less sex than their elderly counterparts; only 13 percent of Americans in their fifties spent 2018 sexless, Yahoo.com reported. It’s such a massive trend that the Washington Post is calling it “the Great American Sex Drought.”

So how did this happen? It may be because people are coupling up later than they used to.

“There are more people in their twenties who don’t have a live-in partner,” Jean Twenge, professor of psychology at San Diego State University, told the Post. “So under those circumstances I think less sex is going to happen.”

It appears that young men are having markedly less sex than young women, and that the rates of sexlessness in young men have risen steeply. The Post reported: “For most of the past three decades, 20-something men and women reported similar rates of sexlessness. But that has changed in recent years. Since 2008, the share of men younger than 30 reporting no sex has nearly tripled, to 28 percent. That’s a much steeper increase than the 8 percentage point increase reported among their female peers.”

Yikes! What gives? Professor Twenge speculated for the Post that higher rates of joblessness in young adult men—and their attendant, higher rates of those young men living at home with parents—may be putting a damper on sex lives. “When you’re living at home it’s probably harder to bring sexual partners into your bedroom,” she said.

Twenge continued: “There are “more things to do at 10 o’clock at night than there were 20 years ago,” she told the Post. “Streaming video, social media, console games, everything else.”

Uh, yeah. The “everything else” includes a lot of sexually explicit media. Sure, the real thing is great. But in a culture where millennials have to work twice as hard for the same pay their predecessors earned back in the eighties, where student loan payments and high rents dominate their lives, who has time for serious dating? And, when you can access a webcam show or streaming porn online for free, who needs the real thing?

Man using computer photo by Rajesh Sundaram