Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be On to Something.

Data shows that Gen Z is in a sex recession. Technology, #MeToo and a growing emphasis on platonic relationships are reshaping how many people think about sex. As anxiety grows over falling birthrates and changing behaviors, Nadja Spiegelman, a Times Opinion culture editor, speaks with the journalists and researchers Carter Sherman and Christine Emba about why this shift might not be such a bad thing.

Below is a transcript of an episode of “The Opinions.” We recommend listening to it in its original form for the full effect. You can do so using the player above or on the NYTimes app, Apple, Spotify, Amazon Music, YouTube, iHeartRadio or wherever you get your podcasts.

The transcript has been lightly edited for length and clarity.

Nadja Spiegelman: In one word or a small handful of words, how do you feel about people having less sex?

Carter Sherman: I feel intrigued. It raises the question: Why, and what does it mean? And that’s been the guiding light of my reporting for the last several years.

Christine Emba: The word would have to be “mixed.” I actually feel happy for young people if they feel less pressure to do things that they don’t want to do. But I do feel concerned about what it represents about relationships more broadly, and their interaction with each other.

Spiegelman: Americans are having less sex, and it’s particularly visible among young people. There’s a recent study that shows that one in four Gen Z adults say that they have not had sex, and the number of young people who haven’t had sex in the past year has doubled from 2010 to 2024, from 12 percent to 24 percent. Christine, you’ve been reporting on sex and dating in the culture for a long time. What are you seeing about the causes behind this trend?

Emba: The trend is notable, especially among millennials and Gen Z. Gen Z is doing a lot of things less frequently than their older peers used to — or at least later. They started driving later; they’re moving out of their parents’ houses later; they’re drinking later or not at all. Sex is another thing that they are doing later than their peers.

But I think the causes behind it are both manifold and, when you think about it, kind of obvious. I think one is, frankly, the internet and smartphones, where there’s kind of a substitution effect. You could get dressed up and go out on a date and try to find someone to sleep with, or you could scroll your feed and watch pornography at home and not have to make all of that effort and fear rejection. So the technological climate has a lot to do with it.

Spiegelman: Carter, you’ve interviewed a lot of Gen Z-ers about sex. What have you seen or observed? Anything different from what Christine was saying?

Sherman: I definitely second Christine’s point, particularly about phones. This is not a trend that we’re seeing just in the United States; I think it’s notable that we’re also seeing it abroad, in countries like Japan and South Korea, which would point to there being some kind of global shared cause. And the emergence of smartphones and the social media that’s on them is a very obvious culprit.

That said, I don’t think that there really is just one thing that we can pin the sex recession, as it’s called, on. When I talk to young people, many of them bring up stuff like the political climate. It makes them feel more anxious to have sex right now.

After the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there was a study that came out which found that about 13 percent of millennials and Gen Z have become more anxious around sex, because of the overturning. We really have to look at what is going on overall in the climate when it comes to sex, and not just say, “OK, we can just change or fix this one thing and that will fix the entire dating crisis,” as some people have termed it.

Spiegelman: There are a lot of possible reasons behind this sex recession. Christine, you were talking about phones; Carter, you were talking about Roe v. Wade. I also wonder if #MeToo had an impact on young people and how they were thinking about sex.

Emba: That’s something that definitely came up in my reporting and with young people that I’ve talked to, millennials and Gen Z. I think one of the things that Carter was pointing out, very correctly, is that the entire social environment shapes how people move about, how they interact with each other, and maybe eventually how they have sex.

So, first of all, we have to know that Gen Z has come of age in a very anxious time. There was Covid-19 and the pandemic. Everybody was stuck at home. Our political climate is, frankly, insane. And #MeToo happened in 2017. So a formative age for many people in terms of thinking about sex and dating and how to relate to other people.

For young women, #MeToo served as a moment in which they could say, “The current sexual climate, our current sexual landscape, maybe actually doesn’t feel that great for me, and I feel like I’m allowed to say that publicly. There’s less pressure on me to assent to things.” Which is a really good thing.

I think for young men, however, they became really frightened, actually. There’s one guy I remember interviewing who said that after #MeToo, asking out a colleague in the workplace or hitting on a girl in public was like handing him a loaded shotgun. It was really dangerous and could have consequences for him.

And I was like, “That seems extreme.” But I think a lot of conscientious young men noted that #MeToo had happened. Women had been made uncomfortable in a number of circumstances that they hadn’t known about, and dialed back their own behavior — their own willingness to ask people out, to try to pursue sex on a date, to even try to pursue dating in some situations. And obviously, if you’re not talking to potential sex partners, it is far less likely that you will have sex with them.

Sherman: What I found in my reporting is that it’s different for the genders, as Christine has talked about. But what I found really interesting is that when I talked to young men — and I should say that for my book, “The Second Coming,” I interviewed more than 100 young people under 30, and I’ve also covered gender and sexuality for 10 years now — I found that young men actually weren’t all that moved by #MeToo, and I think this is partially an age thing.

Which, to Christine’s point, she’s talking about people being in the workplace. But many of the young people I was interviewing, they did not remember #MeToo, which was sort of a dagger to the heart the first time I heard it, because it was so pivotal to me.

And there was one young man I remember, 18 years old, who grew up in New York City, had just graduated high school right after we spoke, and he was talking about the ways that young men in his cohort talk about women, and he was using terms like “bop” and “ran through,” and things that really are not very friendly to women. Yeah, “ran through” was really the term that stuck with me.

Spiegelman: I don’t know the term “bop.”

Sherman: I mean ——

Spiegelman: Is it not appropriate for a New York Times podcast?

Sherman: It’s not family-friendly.

Emba: Yeah. I don’t know if we need to spell it out.

Sherman: No, look it up on Urban Dictionary if you feel so inclined after this. But what was striking to me is that he said this thing — he was like, “You’re talking about #MeToo, and #MeToo was about not sexually assaulting women, but I didn’t understand it as, like, treating women as people. Like, that’s not how I understood it.” And he drew a line between affording women and girls full humanity and just not sexually assaulting them.

I found that fascinating, because it suggests to me that #MeToo didn’t really do as much as we maybe would have liked it to do, that it didn’t actually really change some of these mores as permanently as we might have liked, because people just don’t remember.

The thing I will say about young women — I totally agree with Christine — I have found that they have become more anxious, and I think part of that is because, for the women who remember #MeToo, it helped them recognize, certainly earlier than I did, that maybe something that happened to them that was wrong was actually a violation — that they should recognize this as sexual assault or sexual harassment — and they deserve to seek redress for that. They deserve to be made whole.

But what these women have also found is that we didn’t actually really see that many institutional changes after #MeToo. Like, we have seen more H.R. trainings around sexual violence. We have seen some legislation around NDAs. But for institutions like colleges, we haven’t actually seen an overhaul of the way that we address sexual violence.

The same goes for K-12 institutions. And so these young women walk around with a greater knowledge of how pervasive sexual violence is, and an understanding that if something happens to them, their institutions are not necessarily set up to help them in that instance. And that is just a culture of fear. It’s a miasma of anxiety. And that makes you not want to engage in any of this to begin with.

Emba: I think that’s a great point. I think you’re right to point out this distinction between millennials and older Gen Z, who might have had their sexual memory working when #MeToo happened, and a younger generation who did not. One of the things that I’ve also noticed, as an age and gender split, is that in a post-#MeToo environment, where young women are more OK with talking about negative experiences, they share those, especially on TikTok and Instagram. A lot of women are more open to making reels about, “I had this bad experience with a man” or “I went on this date and it was awful, and here’s why.”

And there is just a lot more content about how men can be dangerous or predatory — or in social media dating advice parlance, narcissists or liars or something. And so it makes men feel both scarier and less responsive to female concerns. And there’s a whole dialogue that has grown, that is negative around dating men. It’s a term that I think The New York Times has published a number of pieces on — “heteropessimism,” right? This idea that, for a woman, trying to date a man is kind of a hopeless enterprise. And you might, in fact, wish that you were a lesbian or not interested in men at all, but alas, you are.

And then on the male side of the equation — if women are seeing feeds that are full of negative content about the opposite sex, and descriptions of unfortunate and scary occurrences that then shape their idea of dating — men are getting dating advice that is also really negative about women. These terms that we just used: All women are on OnlyFans; women can’t be trusted; women only want to date men who are tall, rich and handsome, and if you’re not one of those ——

Sherman: Six-four, blue eyes, and works in finance?

Emba: Yes, actually.

Spiegelman: I’ve also heard of this as like 6-6-6 — he needs to be six feet tall, make six figures and have a six-pack. Which I think is something that men believe women want.

Emba: And when men are told this by their dating advisers, like the “Fresh & Fit” podcast or Andrew Tate types — even Joe Rogan occasionally trades in this sort of discourse — they begin to feel really negatively toward women. And so, yeah, they aren’t really interested in being with each other in the same way.

Spiegelman: I have so many theories for why this is happening. One is something a friend of mine, who’s 21, brought up when we were talking about this: She was saying Gen Z is facing a lot of mental health issues, in part because of the anxieties of the world, and they are very medicated for their mental health.

They’re one of the most medicated generations, which, for anyone who’s been on antidepressants, can have an impact on your libido. She was positing that this might be one of the causes why Gen Z is having less sex. Has that come up in either of your reporting?

Emba: Not necessarily the medication effect specifically, but it is worth noting that something like one in four members of Gen Z has been in therapy at some point in their adolescence, which is more than any other generation. I think there is something to be said about mental health generally, and how Gen Z views protecting their mental health and protecting their space and peace in different ways than their older peers might have.

One of the things tying back to the reasons men are seemingly having less sex than women is that, for many young men at this point, this idea that you have to be the perfect man — you have to be the right model of masculinity, you have to be ready before you can be in a relationship — seems to be driving a number of men into taking a step back and moving into self-optimization, going into monk mode and thinking that they have to figure out every aspect of their lives before they can start dating, before it’s OK to approach anyone else. And so that moves having sex later.

And then, for young women, there’s this idea that your mental health is fragile. Other people can be anxiety causing. Relationships — and I think we can actually all understand this — can be really anxiety causing, can produce a lot of pressure. And to stay on balance, to keep oneself safe, the better thing to do is invest in yourself, invest in your mental health, invest in the relationships that you can control, your friendships, and maybe not experiment with sex and dating at this time because it seems too stressful and too fraught.

Spiegelman: I was looking at a survey that asked Gen Z-ers: What is more important to you than regular sex? And they answered: success at work, friendships, a good night’s sleep was very high up there.

Sherman: Fair.

Spiegelman: Christine, you were talking about the amount of work and readiness that men think they need to do in order to be ready for a relationship, and I’ve noticed that, in my conversations with young people, much more so than when I was young — I guess I no longer am ——

Sherman: No, we’re all young forever.

Emba: No, you’re still young.

Spiegelman: OK, much more so than when I was in my early 20s. There’s a big focus on the idea of a long-term relationship as this venerated goal, this huge commitment. Part of it is that you see on social media that these relationships take huge gestures, financial and emotional, and part of that is just how an algorithm is designed — to promote performativity or the sale of a product.

But there’s this idea that a long-term relationship is this really serious thing, and that’s much more desired and much more the focus than casual sex. How have you seen the distinction about how young people feel between long-term romantic relationships and casual sex, and have there been shifts there?

Sherman: I found it very interesting how much young people are dismissive of hookup culture, as they put it. When I was growing up, as a millennial, I think we were very overwhelmed by the narrative of hookup culture. There was this real sense in the media that young millennials were having too much sex, that they were having sex so casual it verged on impersonal, and that this would imperil our ability later on, down the line, to get married, to have kids.

And guess what? We are getting married. We are having kids. We’re just doing it at a later point. I think that this narrative, though, has still trickled down to young people. They saw that millennials got roasted for hookup culture, and now they don’t really want to engage in that as much. They do want to be in these long-term relationships.

I understand that desire. I really do. Particularly for a group that feels very alone, having a person who feels like theirs, who feels like they are going to be a foundation for them and for their life — I don’t think that’s a bad desire whatsoever.

Emba: To go a little bit deeper into how that narrative has shifted, there was a spate of stories like “Cat Person,” the New Yorker short story that was just about a normal girl who goes on a date and hooks up with a guy and is grossed out by it. And there is an openness to this idea that millennial sex positivity — which I would not describe as sex positivity in the classic feminist sense, that sex is a good thing, but sex positivity in a kind of deterministic sense, meaning you need to go out and have a lot of sex, otherwise you’re not a good feminist or a modern young person, et cetera — was blown up a little bit.

Gen Z saw millennials dealing with the fallout of that culture and decided that they didn’t want to be part of it. And especially with some of the changes that had happened in sexual culture between millennials and Gen Z, so much of the sex that people seem to be having — that they’re reporting having as kind of abusive or unpleasant — was extremely porn-informed, for one thing. And so they have backed off from hooking up on the same level.

But then, when it comes to longer-term relationships, there’s the idea of the cornerstone versus capstone model of long-term relationships. Traditionally, long-term relationships — getting married, having a long-term partner — was seen as the cornerstone to your life. You find someone, and then you continue to build your life on top of that. Maybe you’re together and you go through grad school, you go through your careers, you’re joining your lives together. And maybe at the cornerstone, you’re not making that much money. You’re not that secure, but it’s OK.

Now, I think, in this more performative moment, where your big days, your dates are supposed to be celebrated as perfect on social media, a lot of young people feel like your long-term relationship should be the capstone of your life. That’s something that you only do when you’ve got all of the other bricks in a row: when you’re finished with school, when you have your career set up, when you’re making enough money — that’s when you can go for a long-term relationship.

Sherman: Just to complicate that narrative a little bit, because something that I do think comes up a lot, that sometimes frustrates me when we talk about Gen Z and the sex recession, is that millennials were also having less sex. So while we were having all of this discussion around, “they’re hooking up too much,” the reality is that they were having less sex than previous generations. And so when we think about the causes of the sex recession, we have to remember that this started before #MeToo.

This started before the pandemic. Gen Z is the inheritor of a trend that began among millennials. So whatever we’re seeing with Gen Z — how they see relationships, how they see hooking up — we have to be looking at both generations and thinking about things that have happened with both generations.

Spiegelman: Although I do think that there’s a shift that’s not so much about the having of sex, but the thinking about it in the culture. And for Gen Z, when sex is constantly being sold to you as a product — when it’s constantly over-available on your phone — it becomes uncool so quickly. We grew up in this very hypersexualized, “Girls Gone Wild,” culture that Gen Z is just a little grossed out because it’s so tied into a thing that’s being sold to them all the time.

Sherman: But is it uncool to not be able to have sex? Because I think it’s perceived as cool to choose not to have sex, but it’s not always clear that someone is making the active choice to be celibate versus just being unable to get laid.

It’s not cool to be powerless, right? It’s cool to be in control, and I think this is why people find the concept of virginity or the concept of being a virgin to be inherently embarrassing. Because that is a state you can’t change by yourself.

Emba: What you’re saying about people not wanting to admit to powerlessness — being powerless as being cringe and uncool — is extremely true. So, by going out and saying, “Well, actually, I’m choosing to be celibate,” or, “Actually, I am embracing loneliness and becoming a loneliness influencer,” or, “I’m decentering men; I’m a heteropessimist,” taking on the label for yourself feels like a reclamation of something that you might have otherwise felt powerless about.

Spiegelman: I’ve been thinking a lot about the difference between loneliness and solitude, which I think, in part, is a difference about choice. You’re lonely because you have no choice. Solitude is about choosing your own company.

But again, this might also be a way of reclaiming power over something that you don’t have a choice over.

I wanted to talk about loneliness influencers a little bit. Carter, can you explain what a loneliness influencer is?

Sherman: For folks who have not had this show up on their algorithms — first of all, I would love to know what makes you immune to this. Does my phone just think I am very lonely?

But basically, what loneliness influencers are — oftentimes women, which I find very striking, who are coming home and are taking off their shoes and making pizza, hanging out with their cat, and there’s text on the screen that says something like, “This is what your Friday night looks like when you are single and have no friends.” It’s very much selling the idea of a full life without anyone else in it, which I find really fascinating and inherently contradictory, because, of course, this is a person who is broadcasting their loneliness to the internet.

How much can I really believe that these people actually agree with the concept of loneliness? How many of these people are trying to change their circumstance? They’re a fascinating indicator of where we’re at in modern life, that these are an emerging system of influencers.

Emba: I think the rise of loneliness influencers speaks to another trend about Gen Z and millennial dating: One thing that has become clear to millennials and Gen Z is that, in a post-sexual revolution, feminist-inflected, if not feminist-winning world, is that women ——

Sherman: Definitely not feminist-winning. I don’t think the White House would identify as particularly feminist.

Emba: No. But a culture in which women are able to exist by themselves, where women have jobs, where women are going to college and graduate school at higher rates than men, where, in a lot of major cities, women are earning more than their male counterparts, you don’t have to get married or be in a relationship to make a life for yourself. And it’s felt as a liberating thing, at least, for younger women, millennials and Gen Z. And perhaps also for these older married women who maybe didn’t feel like they had as much choice in the matter, and so ended up with a husband and kids and a house and all of this stuff to deal with, as a way to feel like they were a part of and accepted by society.

So, the sort of romanticization of loneliness, I think, also speaks to a kind of romanticization of the idea that women can do it by themselves, that they don’t have to be in a relationship to be happy. They don’t have to have a boyfriend to be able to afford their, frankly, alarmingly clean apartments that are ——

Sherman: You and I are seeing the same woman, Christine.

Emba: Yes. It’s a little bit “American Psycho,” frankly.

Spiegelman: She has a lot of time to clean it.

Sherman: She does have a lot of time. This is the woman — if we’re thinking of the same person — who takes off her Louboutins when she comes in the door, which speaks to, again, her socioeconomic success, it seems like.

Emba: But I do think that there is something worrying about the loneliness influencer, because humans are wired for connection. It’s in our DNA to connect with people.

You can become physically and psychologically ill by being touch-starved, by not interacting with other people. Interacting with other people, whether in romantic relationships or simply friendships, is how you learn about the world, how you come to understand men or women or people in your office, how we know enough about each other to begin to create a civil society. The idea that we’ve decided that solitude is the best thing that you can have doesn’t really speak well for the future of our shared project.

Sherman: I guess I feel so conflicted about these influencers because the first time I came across a loneliness influencer, I was suddenly flung back to when I was, I think, 23 years old and had just moved to New York, and was working nights and did not have friends.

And I thought about how, if I had seen that content when I was that age, it would have really made me feel less lonely, because I would have realized that this is a life that other people are also living. Other people also struggle with making friends. The other thing is, when we think about the concerns that we have around young people not getting into relationships, not getting married, not having babies — which is another whole conversation; people are really worried about birthrates right now — I worry about how much importance we place on sex and relationships sometimes, because they’re really not a balm for all of the issues that plague us as a country, or as individuals.

Spiegelman: There’s so much moral hand-wringing and anxiety about the falling rates of people having sex, and I’m curious why it matters so much. We’ve been sold this one idea of a happily ever after for a very long time. But maybe, if we move away from that, there’s plenty of other reasons to be happy, ways to find happiness. People who say that they’re intentionally not dating say they’re focusing on self-improvement, on paying down debt, on getting fit, on traveling. Maybe there’s an abundance of other options for finding happiness?

Emba: One of the things that I wrote about in my book “Rethinking Sex” was a sort of critique of how sexuality — having sex and relationships and what kind of sex you’re having — became a defining factor of our self-identity. It’s something that people lead with; our relationship status, dating, is one of the first things that people ask about. One thing that we haven’t talked about is how dating has changed for millennials, but especially for Gen Z.

On dating apps, people get a volume of rejection, of people swiping past them and not matching with them, that is unparalleled in the history of dating. You might, 20 or 25 years ago, ask someone out and get turned down. On a dating app, you might swipe through and try to match with 50 people and get turned down by 49 of them.

That feels outside of your control, and also feels awful. And of course, it also doesn’t lead to dates in the real world. So I think some of the stigma around not having sex and not being in a relationship might also be what it reveals about your success in presenting yourself in this very specific forum that is the dating world today, where image matters a lot.

Dating apps are very picture-forward, where the ability to transition from the app into the real world is much harder and feels much more fraught for people. What I worry about, when it comes to young people not having as much sex or young people not having kids, is not necessarily the sex or the kids that might come from it, but actually just what it says more broadly about connection.

The first step to having sex or having kids is, ideally, being in a relationship of some kind with some person, which starts with just talking to people, having friends, getting to know people outside of yourself. And whether that leads to sex or dating or anything else, just this idea of connecting to other people is still really important — and it’s something that we have valued as a society and should value as a society.

And if our lower birthrates and our lower rates of sex and relationships are signals that we have forgotten how to do that, or a whole generation is struggling to make friends — and that is what the statistics are showing us, that younger people report higher levels of loneliness. They report higher levels of anxiety around relationships, but also around their state in life and security — the stuff that would allow them to form relationships — that seems like a problem to me. That is why I, at least, have been drawn to this question, because it speaks to the broader backdrop of discomfort.

Spiegelman: I think the discomfort is a really important part of it, because our phones can do so much for us that makes our lives completely frictionless. We live in a world of instant gratification. Porn can provide a version of sex that involves no risk, that almost involves no desire, because there’s no time to desire before it’s actively fulfilled.

And now intimacy can be met by our phones in so many different ways. I mean, you can have a very intimate relationship with an A.I. chatbot. You can have an intimate relationship with an OnlyFans creator, who can be texting you all day. And you can feel intimacy from your phone — a sort of version of it. You can get your sexual needs met from your phone, or a version of it. And if we want to make an argument for sex or dating, then we need to be able to make an argument that is actually for rejection, for heartbreak. Like, why would you put yourself through the friction and pain of these things? Can either of you make an argument for that? If I were talking to a young person who was like, “I have my needs met in this easy way. Why would I risk the pain of getting rejected or getting my heart broken?” I wouldn’t quite know what to say.

Sherman: I have had something of this actual conversation with a young person before, a year or two ago now. I was following around a group of young people who were at the Jersey Shore, and they were preaching the value of chastity, which is obviously a big sell to be making at the Jersey Shore.

Emba: At the Jersey Shore.

Sherman: I was like, “I’ve got to go report on this. This is so fascinating to me.” But I was talking to one of the young men, and he was not interested in having sex until marriage for religious reasons, which, I think that’s great; I think that people should obviously have sex according to their values. But what was fascinating to me is that he wasn’t even dating, and he was saying that this was one of the things he was thinking about: that if you aren’t dating for marriage, you’re dating for heartbreak. And that made me really sad, because I do feel like heartbreak is such — as you’re pointing out, Nadja — a formative experience.

When I had my heart broken, I learned so much about resilience. I have learned so much about anger. I have learned so much about art. I suddenly understood what all those Taylor Swift songs were about. And I feel like it turned me into the person I am today, to have gone through heartbreak. And to be able to feel that depth of feeling is a really special experience.

I don’t want people to get their hearts broken, but when it happens, it can be so enriching to your life. And I do think that young people are interested in more friction than they’re currently getting. I do actually think that there is a yearning for community. I don’t think we have to be making the argument that I was making to that young man. I think that there is an acknowledgment and an acceptance that friction is good for us. It’s better for us.

Emba: And to what you were saying, Nadja, about the idea that you can get your needs for intimacy met through A.I. or on OnlyFans — the question that was running through my head was: Can you really? Is that real intimacy? I think the thing with A.I. companions, and OnlyFans in particular — and this is my argument for friction — is that they’re meant to make you happy. They don’t fight you. They don’t push back.

Your A.I. flatters you and does what you want. It doesn’t get mad at you or tell you off, or say that it’s fine but you know it’s not fine, and then you have to figure out what’s going on. Those are the things that you have to learn to be in a relationship with real human beings. It’s how we learn how to move through the world with others. And without friction, you just don’t learn that, and I think that’s actually a pretty scary prospect.

Spiegelman: I want to keep pushing back. Why? If it’s enough for people, if it could be enough for people, then why do they really need to learn about all of the ways you can be hurt and unfulfilled by other people?

Sherman: The argument for friction is the argument for life. It’s the argument for being out in the world, for experiencing anything, and I understand that it’s scary and not always fun and feels rough, frankly — to make a pun using the word “friction” — but I do think people understand the inherent value of difficulty, and I think people understand that when I accomplish something that scared me or made me hurt or was just beyond what I thought I was capable of, they feel good.

In addition to that, I would make an argument around political power, and I would say that many young people are very fed up with our politics as it is. They feel very nihilistic. They feel like things are not going in the direction that they would like. And how do you make political change? You’ve got to build community. You’ve got to organize. You’ve got to talk to people. And of course, being on the internet can be helpful for that, but truly being in community with other people and meeting them and talking to them, and being able to have fuller conversations than you could possibly have on a screen — that is all essential to political power.

And so if you don’t want to do this because you feel very safe at home and you really love your A.I. boyfriend, that’s fine. But if you do want to change politics, maybe you should also try to experience other people.

Spiegelman: I heard you both say that an ability to be in community together is essential to politics. It’s essential to any kind of change. And from both the right and the left, there’s this feeling that we can’t just become completely atomized and isolated.

I’m also interested in the left-right divide. In part because, I think, it’s one of the things that’s going on with why young people aren’t having sex. Like, Gen Z has the largest political gender gap of any generation, with the men moving to the right and the women moving to the left.

When I was growing up, I associated the right with these Christian ideas of purity — of waiting for marriage, of abstinence — and I associated the left with a more pro-sex, sex positivity attitude. And to me, it feels like maybe there’s a bit of a reversal now.

The right wants people to have more babies, to have traditional values, whereas the left is moving further away from marriage and having children, and is making more room for ideas like asexuality or intentional celibacy. Do you guys agree with that analysis?

Sherman: I don’t know that that’s necessarily a fair characterization of either the left or the right. I do think that on the right — the right often gets painted as being anti-sex, and generally speaking, they’re not. There is a rich tradition within evangelical communities, for example, of promoting sex within marriage.

Emba: You have to have the right kind of sex. And at the right time, but you should be having it.

Sherman: Married, heterosexual, possibly procreative sex. That is the push among those on the right, and evangelicals have written a ton of very famous sex guides to that point.

And I think the left — yes, there is this sort of feeling that they’re not really pushing for sex, really, but these are also the people who are pushing for Pride parades. These are the people who are pushing for a more expansive view of gender and sexuality, and I think what often the left is really pushing is, let’s just not have strictures around what kind of sex is correct. Let’s take those away, and let’s make it more possible for more people to have the kind of sex that they want, and if that includes not having sex, then so be it.

I do think it is a major problem in our politics, and in our life, how much emphasis we place on sex as being a separate activity, as being something that is apart from the rest of our lives, and I just think that we all know that’s not true. When I come home from work and it’s been a bad day, it’s not like I can just go and have sex. My sex life does not exist in a parenthetical from the rest of my life, and I think we know that as individuals, and yet we seem to be unable to grasp that as a political concept.

Emba: I think for some on the further right end of the spectrum — with which I do not identify, frankly — some of the kind of Heritage Foundation-esque, Project 2025-ish characters, some of the motivation behind worrying about young people not having sex is more about the right kind of young people, wink wink, are not making enough babies and soon will be outvoted, and so they need to get to it so that we can continue to have political power.

I think there are other people who are really invested in this idea of not necessarily the sex, but the idea of a democratic society and people being able to interact with each other socially to build a politics in which we can live together. We’re losing those skills, and that’s really scary. That’s something that I identify with.

Spiegelman: I want to see if we can end in an optimistic place, and you’re fully welcome to disagree with me. Is there a world in which having less sex can mean valuing other forms of intimacy, creating more platonic bonds with people, valuing a sort of plenitude and solitude, figuring out other forms of happiness in the world that are not as focused as the millennial generation was on equating a rich sex life with the only way of being fulfilled?

Emba: For a long time, for most of its history, America has been focused on the relationship — the two-person romantic relationship, and then the near-nuclear family as the main segment of society.

And that meant that people who were not married or who didn’t have kids felt like they were off in the wilderness. And perhaps if Gen Z is having less sex and is less centered on romantic relationships, that actually does open up more space for people to explore relationships with their families, with their friends.

We’re seeing so much more discussion about people who are deciding to move in and build communities around their friendships, to have kids who have alloparents — who have relationships with godparents, friends, people who are not part of the nuclear family but who are still in relationships with them.

I actually think that this would be a great development. I think we have seen, over the past several decades, how the closed-off, tiny — two parents, 2.5 kids, we’re the only people who talk to each other — has failed to support both individuals and the broader society. If having less sex means that we have more relationships with other people overall, stronger relationships outside of the two-person pair, that’s a good thing.

Sherman: We were complaining at the start of this conversation about phones and how much those have really impaired young people’s ability to have sexual relationships. But think about how much time we all spend texting our friends now, or texting our parents, or texting the people who we care about and are intimate with.

We are more connected to those individuals than we ever have been before, and there’s a way to see that as a really beautiful thing. It is not just that, as technology develops, everything will get worse — we will become more friendless, we will not know our families, we will not know our neighbors. We are actually more connected than ever, and so it’s just a question of: How do we want to use that connection? What do we want to build with those connections?

Spiegelman: That is a perfect place to end. Thank you both so much.

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