How Social Media Is Fueling Gen Z’s Sex Recession

As a teenager growing up in Seattle, Carter Sherman was “pathologically obsessed” with the fact that she was still a virgin.

In her new book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, which chronicles Gen Z’s sex lives (or lack thereof), Sherman describes having a meltdown after one of her best friends has sex with their classmate, making her feel left behind.

“I fully broke down crying in front of my mom,” she tells me when I bring up the incident. She cried harder when her mom admitted she wasn’t a virgin at the same age. Fourteen years later, Sherman, a 31-year-old journalist (she works at The Guardian; the two of us also previously worked together at Vice News), has interviewed more than 100 young people about why they aren’t having as much sex as previous generations and, despite the narrative that they’re prudes, she found that many of them want to have sex—there are just a lot of complicated factors stopping them.

“Many of them are very horny. They would like to be having sex, and in fact they feel a lot of shame over the fact that they haven't had sex yet or that they’re not having sex enough.”

The numbers Sherman found in her reporting bear out the idea that young people are in the midst of a “sex recession.” One in four Gen Z adults have never had partnered sex, according to a 2022 survey by the Kinsey Institute and Lovehoney, while data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 2023, around a third of high schoolers said they’d had sex—down from 47 percent in 2013. Even masturbating is on the decline.

As for why, Sherman says the ubiquity of social media and smartphones have definitely played a role in how young people engage with each other, but also in how they view themselves. Throw in stress over the overturning of Roe v. Wade and multiple presidential administrations that have collectively poured billions of dollars into abstinence-only sex education, and you can start to see how the answer to why young people are hooking up less goes far beyond just “they’re puritanical."

Sherman shared her eye-opening and sometimes troubling observations from the book in an interview with WIRED.

This interview has been edited for clarity and length.

WIRED: There is a perception that Gen Z are prudes or a “nation of virgins” to borrow a phrase from your book. What’s stopping them from having sex?

Carter Sherman: It is undeniably the case that they are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. What is not true, from my reporting—and I talked to more than 100 people under 30 for the book—is that Gen Z isn't interested in sex. They're definitely not “sex negative.” They're sort of swimming in this miasma of anxiety from a lot of different sources that are contributing to a lack of desire or lack of ability to connect with people enough in order to have sex with them.

People are spending not only just a ton of time on their phones, which means that they have less time to have interactions with other people, but the social media that they're consuming leads them to do this thing called “comparing and despairing,” which basically means that they feel like their bodies are not as good as other people's, and that can make people less interested in sex.

They're also dealing with just an incredible amount of politicization of sex at this time. They're living in a post-Roe reality, they’re living in a post-#MeToo reality. So I think that they are just being battered by all of these developments and forces that they don't necessarily understand how to handle and that older people in their lives have certainly not given them enough advice on how to handle, and it makes them not able to cope in such a way that would lead them to be able to develop vulnerability and develop empathy and develop the kind of honest connection that they’re looking for.

I want to touch on the shame piece for a second. Is there a sense of where the shame around not having sex is coming from?

Especially now, with the internet, you can go online and Google any kind of sex you want, and probably a few that you don't. And I think people get this outsize idea of how much sex other people are having, and so they feel like they're being left behind in some way, especially because I think sexuality is often equated with adulthood and maturity, and having sex is seen as this rite of passage, and so for young people who haven't gone through it, they feel like they are just not living up to the expectations of everybody.

There’s this tension playing out where millennials and people who grew up with sexual liberation sort of feel like Gen Z is sex-shamey, like they've talked about how they don't really care for sex scenes on television. They got mad over Sabrina Carpenter's horny album cover. But it seems like what you're saying is that that narrative isn't necessarily true.

I don't think so at all. And I think anti-sex gets thrown around in a way that sort of obscures the contours of the political debates that we have over sex. The main clash that I chart in the book is this fight between what I call “sexual conservatism” and “sexual progressivism.” And I think what I found with young people is that many of them are what I would call sexually progressive, which is to say that they are very aware of the political dimensions of sex, which, yes, can contribute to maybe overheated discussions about Sabrina Carpenter's album cover but also leads them to fight for things like LGBTQ+ rights and access to abortion and against sexual assault. And on the other side of the coin is sexual conservatism, which I think gets called “anti-sex” a lot but in fact is not anti-sex. It's in favor of straight sex, it's in favor of married sex, it's in favor of procreative sex.

I wanted to ask you about the pandemic and how being isolated impacted young people's game, or just their ability to flirt and socialize with each other

I think what it did is sort of speed up a process that was already happening, which is the outsourcing of a lot of sexuality to the internet, because that was their only outlet for sex, in a lot of ways. This was happening in some ways that were helpful, because, you know, I think in particular the internet has been really great for young LGBTQ+ folks to find information about themselves. And in some ways that made people more fearful of sex.

I spoke to one young woman, for example, who got Covid, and her boyfriend got Covid, and they couldn't see each other during lockdown, and he pretty much pressured her into sending nudes, because he was saying, “If I can't see you, I want to be able to have nudes of you.” And she felt a great deal of shame around that. It was saddening to me, because I do think that sending nudes can be a totally normal activity, but because more and more of young people's sexuality can get pushed onto the internet today, young people are not always comfortable with what that means, and they should be.

A lot of what we're hearing is that Gen Z and young people are learning about sex from porn and that being damaging. We're also in the middle of a major porn crackdown in the US. Did young people feel like porn is a net negative?

They felt very much like they had learned about sex from porn and that was in part because they weren't getting sex ed in schools. The federal government has poured more than $2 billion into abstinence-only sex education, and that kind of education can't acknowledge that sexual desire exists, that sexual pleasure exists, and so young people go and look at porn to see what giving and receiving sexual pleasure looks like. The downside of that is a lot of porn has extremely narrow ideas about what pleasure should look like in ways that are not necessarily reflective of real people's preferences.

A lot of young people told me that they felt like porn had normalized “rough sex” and in particular had normalized choking. If you're under 40, you are almost twice as likely to have been choked during sex. And I talked to one young woman who was telling me, you know, when she was first having sex in high school, and all of her friends were having sex, all of them were getting choked, and she was like, “Some of us liked it, but not all of us liked it.” If you like porn, if you like being choked, go for it. I just want you to do it safely and consensually.

Let’s talk more about the state of sex ed in America. What were some of the horror stories that you heard? And is there literacy being taught around things like sending nudes?

A lot of them described things that sounded straight out of Mean Girls. You know, the part where Coach Carr is like, “Don't have sex, cause you will get pregnant and die.” Research consistently shows that abstinence-only sex ed produces pretty lackluster results. People who've undergone federally funded sex ed have been found, at least in one study, to have sex at the same time as people who haven't undergone that kind of education and to even have the same number of sexual partners. And because abstinence-only sex ed so narrowly focuses on this idea of “don't have sex, or you'll die” or “don't have sex, or you'll get an STI” or “don't have sex, or you're gonna have pregnancy.” They can't make room for the idea of sending nudes, or the idea of watching porn—like it can't actually reckon with the nuances of those activities. So people are just left flailing.

You've covered sex and abortion for years. Did you find that the young people you talked to were pretty politically aware? How are some of these national political discussions having an impact on their sex lives?

We're all spending time on social media platforms that are, you know, issuing take after take on politics. And so I do think that young people are very politically aware, and it's impossible to avoid news about things like #MeToo or Roe v. Wade; 16 percent of Gen Zers are now more reluctant to date post-Roe v. Wade.

The day after Roe was overturned, or right around then, I got a message from a young woman who was pregnant and didn't want to be but couldn't get an abortion because she was living in Arizona and no abortion providers were working right after Roe was overturned. So she ended up ordering abortion pills online and ending her own pregnancy. But she told me that she felt like the experience was like punishment for having sex, that she was being made to feel humiliated by the government. And that really stuck with me, because, you know, what does it mean to have a generation get thrown back to a pre-1973 attitude, not only toward abortion but toward sex? That is a generational shift in the way that we treat sex in the United States.

We’ve heard a lot about incels, but I’m wondering if you talked to people who were intentionally abstinent, but they weren’t bummed out about it.

It was really important to me to talk to people who were asexual and so, yeah, I did talk to some folks who were absent and weren't bummed out about it. What bothered them was the expectation that they should be having sex or that asexuality is not a real sexual orientation.

I was also really struck by this one woman I talked to. I call her Rian in the book. She is straight and she's not asexual but she has never had sex, in part because she's afraid of basically this idea that she would run into a guy who has embraced, to some degree, incel ideology. She feels that the manospheric incel-y beliefs have so permeated gender relations that you can't trust men, at this point, to not be secret misogynists. And so she's just abstaining from sex totally, which was really, really striking to me.

What's the vibe around dating apps? Like are people as sick of them as they seem to be?

Yes, yes they are. Dating apps suck. Also, dating sucks. I think dating apps promised that they would be a break from the torture of dating, or the torture that dating can be, but people have realized at this point that they're not. In the book, I treat them as an extension of social media, because I think they do a lot of the same things, which is to say they do make you very aware of your sexual value and oftentimes make you feel like you're lacking in some way.

What makes you feel positive, having researched this topic exhaustively, about young people and their sex lives, and maybe getting over this sex recession, if that is indeed what some of them want to do.

I actually don't care very much about whether or not young people are having sex or not having sex. What I worry about is whether or not young people are connecting with one another and whether or not they're growing in their relationships, in themselves, if they're not engaging in sexual, romantic relationships to the extent that they want them. I just worry that there is a dearth of willingness to be vulnerable in a way that I think is not only bad for individuals but bad for politics, because it diminishes our ability to connect with one another and understand one another's differences.

My second thought is that as far as hope goes, I was really heartened by the degree to which young people were very much fighting for what they believed in and were very aware of the political valence of sex. This is a generation that understood, certainly far earlier than I did, that what happens in the bedroom is influenced by what happens outside of it. I think that if these young people are able to succeed in their endeavors, they're going to feel better about themselves, but also potentially create a better world.