Currents

Once upon a time as a salesman in the mid-2010s, I took a call from an irate client who wished to lodge a formal complaint about a television commercial our company had created which included a shot of two men holding hands and another of two women holding hands. This caller, a deeply conservative Christian woman, was furious that we had apparently participated in what she called the “homosexual agenda.” She believed that the normalization of same-sex relationships would lead to degeneracy, hedonism, and ultimately social breakdown. Her attitudes were nothing new. They go back thousands of years to Genesis stories such as Sodom and Gomorrah, mythologized cities destroyed by divine fire and brimstone for their sinful ways. The nature of those sins is highly debated, but religious conservatives have tirelessly sought to link them to same-sex relations and, by extension, to social disintegration. Any society that tolerates LGBT people or grants them equal rights, these purity crusaders have long warned, will degenerate into a hellscape of sex-crazed debauchery.

Except, that’s not what the data says. The recently released 2021 Youth Risk Behavior Survey shows that young people are both more LGBT-accepting and more bisexual, and yet less sexually active than previous generations. If we should be concerned about anything, it’s that far from being sex-crazed, young people, specifically young straight people, are having less sex than their parents did, a trend with troubling implications both for birth rates and the economy.

The Youth Risk Behavior Survey, conducted annually by the US Centers for Disease Control, has tracked the behavior patterns of young people going back more than 30 years. Between the years of 1991 and 2021, they found that the share of high school students who had ever had sex plummeted from 54% to 30% — a 24-point drop. A whopping 57% in 2021 stated that they’d had no sexual contact at all. This isn’t just about young men (58%) — their numbers are almost equal with young women (56%). And it’s not just high schoolers, either. The data is most pronounced among young adults, but people of all ages are having less sex than they used to — even before the pandemic.

During this same span, LGBT rights and acceptance have soared. In 1996, Gallup polls showed that only 27% of Americans supported same-sex marriage. That figure is now 71%. In 2012, 3.5% of US adults were openly LGBT. By 2023, the figure is 20% for Generation Z — two-thirds of whom are bisexual in particular. Marriage equality is the law of the land, LGBT people are covered by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, and gay, lesbian, and bi characters proliferate throughout popular culture.

The “homosexual agenda” has clearly won the day. And yet, where are all the decadent, late-Roman-style orgies we were promised? By all rights, according to the naysayers, society should be teeming with the epigones of Blackadder’s (1982–1989) lecherous Bishop of Bath and Wells, who proudly proclaimed, “Animal, vegetable, or mineral — I’ll do anything to anything!” The reality, however, has been much closer to The Big Bang Theory’s (2007–2019) sexless and borderline aspie Sheldon Cooper (minus the IQ points). Frankly, I feel a little ripped off. Society has never been more openly LGBT friendly, and yet we are simultaneously becoming more prudish and celibate. What’s going on?

When we dig a little deeper into the data, we find some surprising divides. While 57% of high schoolers polled in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey reported no sexual contact whatsoever, the figures vary by sexual orientation. Students who are gay, lesbian, or bisexual were less likely to say that they’d never had sexual contact, relative to population size, by about 18%. Straight students, however, were over 5% more likely, relative to population size, to say they’ve never had sexual contact. Crunching these numbers, the rate of “no sexual contact” among straight students is closer to 60%, while the same rate for LGB students is about 46%. Based on this, the decline in sexual activity among young people appears to be more pronounced among straight people. At the same time, there is no evidence that LGB young people are hyperactive sex demons either. Rather, LGB students seem to be exhibiting the normal levels of sexual activity we have long expected of hormone-addled teens. The question is, what is behind this decline, and what changed for straight young people?

The easy answer that nearly everyone first reaches for is pornography. From Christian conservatives to radical feminists to Pulitzer Prize-winning journalists, ready access to porn is routinely implicated as a culprit for the declining sex lives of younger generations. But there are two problems with this hypothesis. First, recent data published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior shows that not only is partnered sexual activity down among adolescents, but so is solo masturbation. The study found that between 2009 and 2018, the percentage of adolescents who reported having masturbated “at least once in the past year” fell from 56% to 39.5%. Similarly, the number who said they had masturbated “more than a year ago or never” jumped from 44% to 60.5% during this period. If today’s teens are indeed spending all their free time watching porn, they certainly appear to be doing it wrong.

Second, porn doesn’t explain the disparity between straight and LGB students. Why would porn be turning straight students into shut-ins while their gay, lesbian, and bi peers, who have all the same porn at their fingertips, are out having more real human experiences? We run into the same issues with other common explanations such as smartphones, social media, video games, a culture of safetyism, falling marriage rates, or changes in parenting — these apply to the younger generations across the board, and yet they don’t account for why the decline has been more concentrated among straight people. One factor that might help explain both is shifting cultural norms around relationships and interactions between men and women.

The decade of the 2010s brought with it a much-needed reckoning with sexist norms, specifically as they related to male-on-female rape, sexual assault, and sexual misconduct. It was long overdue for women who were sexually assaulted to be taken more seriously, and for powerful men who abused their positions in order to harass, coerce, or exploit women to be held to account. With the correction, however, came an overcorrection.

When the #MeToo movement churned through the obviously guilty low-hanging fruit, it moved on to ever more debatable cases no longer about rape, but about awkward dates, bad jokes, and anonymously crowdsourced lists of baseless accusations. On campuses, in the media, and throughout the culture, boys and men were told that they upheld a “rape culture” and that they were plagued with “toxic masculinity.” Neuroses and taboos intensified among young adults regarding “age gaps” and dating coworkers. By the end of the decade, the results were as clear in the data as they were to our eyes. 44% of single straight men in a 2022 survey said they avoid interacting with women because they fear being perceived as “creepy.” Add to that the ascendance of women and the stagnation of men in both higher education and the workplace, and a picture begins to emerge. The sum total of these trends and forces seems to have put a strain on the relations between young men and women. Indeed, over half of the aforementioned 24-point drop in sexual activity among high schoolers between 1991 and 2021 has occurred since 2013. But this phenomenon has not affected LGB people in the same way.

#MeToo and related movements in the 2010s were primarily about heterosexual relationships. There were vanishingly few lesbian cases, and only a small handful of gay ones, such as Kevin Spacey (who has since been acquitted, by the way). As such, same-sex relationships seem not to have been rocked by the same cultural sea changes that swept through the rest of society. The dynamics of same-sex male relations, in particular, where no females are involved, tend to be far less encumbered by cultural mores or compromises between male and female desires.

There is also the matter of bisexuality. Whenever we discuss the LGBT community, what we’re mostly discussing are bisexual folks. Bi people comprise nearly 60% of all LGBT people, and 66% among Gen Z. Indeed, in the Youth Risk Behavior Survey, bi teens comprised nearly 12% of all students and about 79% of LGB students. This is relevant because bi folks have a naturally larger dating pool since their attractions are not limited to one sex. It stands to reason that more options would correlate with more sexual interactions.

That said, there are frustrating gaps in the data that prevent us from gaining more precise insights into the ways in which sexual orientation relates to sexual activity. Research that clearly separates findings by gay, lesbian, bisexual, and straight as four separate categories is surprisingly rare. Sexuality is often not measured in polls and surveys, and when it is, multiple categories tend to get lumped together. Many obvious questions go simply unasked, necessitating extrapolations based on what data exists. This may explain why so few have discussed the fact that the decline in sex among young people is actually a decline mostly among straight young people.

The religious right’s fearmongering about LGBT acceptance as a gateway drug to widespread sexual hedonism turns out to have been just another in a very long list of bogeymen. What should concern us is the decline in dating and sex among young people, as it has not occurred in a vacuum, nor is it evenly distributed across all demographics. Understanding these more fine-grained disparities within the data helps us diagnose the real problem, and thereby arrive at better solutions. It has become commonplace in educated circles to reflexively regard anyone who isn’t straight as being automatically disadvantaged, but that’s not always true. When it comes to the dating market, the numbers don’t lie: being bisexual isn’t a handicap — it’s a blessing.

Published Jan 3, 2024