No civilization in human history has been as sex-drenched as modern day America. TV shows, music and even commercials constantly reference sex; an unlimited amount of free pornographic clips of every imaginable variety and sort are available to anyone with an Internet connection and Americans have a libertine attitude about sex. It has gotten so over-the-top that I had an acquaintance who managed to get lots of TV and press attention just by writing a book saying that she’s not a virgin, but that she intends to remain chaste until marriage.
Yet, intriguingly, according to a much discussed article in the Atlantic, Americans are in the middle of a sex recession.
To the relief of many parents, educators, and clergy members who care about the health and well-being of young people, teens are launching their sex lives later. 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. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t. (And no, they aren’t having oral sex instead—that rate hasn’t changed much.)
Meanwhile, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high. When this decline started, in the 1990s, it was widely and rightly embraced. But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood.