Jia Tolentino at The New Yorker:
The virgin allegations emerged about a decade ago. Young people “are so sexually inactive that it practically boggles the mind,” a writer for Bustle proclaimed, in 2016, invoking a then recent study that suggested that celibacy had lately doubled among people in their early twenties. Two years later, The Atlantic gave this evident trend its working name, with a cover story on “The Sex Recession.” (The illustration: a bird and a bee turned away from each other, looking both sullen and shy.) The youth had stopped fucking. They were a “new generation of prigs, prudes, and squares,” a blog declared; they were “anxious, lonely and addicted to porn,” according to the Telegraph. They were dragging the rest of the population down with them, the Washington Post argued, blaming the “Great American Sex Drought” on young people, and particularly young men, for being losers, more or less—having no girlfriends, living with their parents, preferring video games and social media to real, live, naked bodies.
This, it should be noted, was not your typical kids-these-days hand-wringing. Traditionally, it is the role of the old to worry that the young are having sex too much. In the nineteen-twenties, society’s elders panicked about flappers fornicating in speakeasies; the sixties prompted fears of love cults and orgies; the eighties brought a new wave of AIDS-centered gay panic.
more here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.