Sociologists, psychologists, journalists, and others who write about such things have been scratching their heads — at least since the 2010s — over the apparent decline of sexual activity among people of all age groups, but especially among young adults and teens. Drawing on the work of Jean M. Twenge, a San Diego State University psychologist and other researchers, Kate Julian in the Atlantic reported a few years ago that today’s young adults are on track to have fewer sex partners than members of the two preceding generations. Early 20-somethings are two and a half times as likely to be abstinent as Gen Xers (aged 40-58) were at that age; 15 percent report having had no sex since they reached adulthood.
That’s because what’s hidden is always more tantalizing than what’s shown.
Other research backs this up. From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. Even a survey of couples in committed relationships tracked by the American Family Survey found couples who have sex weekly dropped from 59 percent to 49 percent between 2015 and 2020. Sexual “inactivity” — no sex for one year — according to an an analysis of national survey data, increased from 19 percent to 31 percent among men 18 to 24 between 2000 and 2018; among 25 to 34 year-old men it doubled from 7 to 14 percent, while women went from 7 to 13 percent during the same two decades. (READ MORE from Seth Forman: Why White Ethnics Left Newark)
This is, apparently, a paradox. Sex in all its splendor and variety has become more commonplace, less stigmatized, and more celebrated than it ever has been and yet people are engaging in it less. “With the exception of perhaps incest and bestiality—and of course nonconsensual sex more generally — our culture has never been more tolerant of sex in just about every permutation,” Julian explains. So why less sex?
There is no shortage of theories about why Americans seem to be in what Julian called a “sex recession.” The ubiquity of internet porn, hookup culture, economic pressures, increased use of antidepressants, falling testosterone levels, higher female incomes, to name only a few, are frequently mentioned.
But few critics, steeped as they are in the cult of “sex positivity” — the belief that virtually any form of consensual sex is everywhere and always an unequivocal good — have stopped to consider whether this normalization of sex has robbed it of its energy.
As author Ginevra Davis, writing in Tablet, has noted, “In reality, though, sex is now so acceptable that it’s boring.” Sex positivity is a “false flag,” Davis writes, “celebrating the physical act of sex while hiding from the impetus for sexual attraction.”
It seems the sex positivists forgot that sex is such a powerful impulse because it stands apart from the everyday banal world. It is and should be mysterious, enigmatic, and sometimes even forbidden. That’s what drives desire.
“The problem with all this normalizing and demystifying is that too much information runs counter to the very nature of desire,“ writes Ani Wilcenski in last week’s Spectator. As psychologist Esther Perel states in her bestselling Mating in Captivity, “Where there is nothing left to hide, there is nothing left to seek.”
Have you ever noticed that the Hollywood starlets of yesteryear such as Kim Novak or Ava Gardner seem so much more alluring than the starlets of today, even though they almost never wore skirts above the knee and certainly did not prance around in thong bikinis? (READ MORE: The Decline and Fall of Hollywoke)
That’s because what’s hidden is always more tantalizing than what’s shown. Bodies are often attractive, but they almost never provide the unvarnished beauty we hold in our imaginations. Ginevra Davis again: “That is the purpose of lingerie, and the ubiquitous role of shadow in erotic visuals — to add some novelty, and artificial blockers, to an object that can otherwise only do so much.”
This week, The American Spectator’s Lou Aguilar raves about the feminine beauty of Gene Tierney in Otto Preminger’s 1944 classic film-noir Laura. Quoting a blurb on Amazon about the movie, Aguilar writes, “Laura Hunt was the ideal modern woman: beautiful, elegant, highly ambitious, and utterly mysterious. No man could resist her charms.” That phrase “utterly mysterious” says a lot.