Why Record Amounts Of Young People Are Saying No To Marriage AND Sex | Dr. Debra Soh, PhD
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What is the main reason young people are opting out of marriage and sex?
What is going on with choking and sex? Millennial women would say, I don't like this. I don't know what's going on. What we see with Gen Z women is that they'll experience the same things, but they're more inclined to say that they like it. Or they will ask a male partner to actually do it. They'll initiate it themselves. Why are Gen Z women more likely to say they like it? Because they grew up watching porn from a very young age, or they were exposed to porn at such a young age. What do you say to the 25-year-old man who feels demoralized and behind? Don't let that derail you. Put your head down and keep working. What's your alternative? If you're going to sit there and play video games and vape all day long, that will be your life in 20, 30 years.
How has the perception of consent and sexuality changed among Gen Z?
And I think the only thing worse than being where you are now is being in the exact same place 20, 30 years from now.
Not only are more young people opting out of marriage than any generation before them, they're opting out of sex. And the ones who are having sex? A disturbing number of young women report that it includes choking, roughness, blurred lines between consensual and coercive. Millennial women say they didn't sign up for violence, it just became normal. Gen Z says it's consensual, but only after growing up on unlimited high-speed pornography. Meanwhile, young men's testosterone is declining, sperm counts are dropping, one in five college students is on antidepressants, half of young adults say they probably won't have kids, and fertility clinics are marketing egg freezing like it's a Black Friday sale.
The question isn't just why aren't people getting married, it's are we living through the first generation in modern history that is biologically and psychologically less interested in sex? And if so, why? Today I'm joined by Dr. Deborah So, neuroscientist and author of Sexstinction, The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy. Dr. So specializes in human sexuality and the biological drivers of behavior. She earned her PhD from York University, spent over a decade as a scientific researcher, has spoken at the Oxford Union, and her writing has appeared in the Wall Street Journal, Harper's, The Globe, and Mail, and the Los Angeles Times. I've wanted to interview Dr. So for years, so this is a juicy episode.
It does come with a listener advisory warning for little ears. I try to spotlight conversations that are outside of the box for most health and wellness podcasts. If you appreciate that, please leave a five-star review on Apple or Spotify. It takes less than five seconds to leave a review, and it really helps us show up on the charts. On this show, we bring expert guests on to heal a sick culture, physically, emotionally, or spiritually. You can watch this episode on the Real Alex Clark YouTube channel or Culture Apothecary on Spotify. Please welcome journalist and author of Sexstinction, The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy, Dr. Debra So to Culture Apothecary. You actually found out with your research that young people today are having less sex than ever before.
That's right. It was very surprising for me to find that. At first, when I started hearing about this sex recession, I thought it was overblown. There was one study in particular that came out in 2016. It was based on data from the General Social Survey. So this is a nationally representative survey. And it was showing that across the board, Americans of all ages were having less sex than ever before. But particularly among millennials, they were the generation to be less likely to have had a sexual partner by the age of 20. So compared to previous generations, millennials, for some reason, were more sexually inactive than before. And this trend was expected to continue on to Gen Z. So we're finding that across a number of different data sets that roughly one in three men and one in five women have not had sex in the last year, which is a large proportion of people.
And on top of it, I mean, people are not even interested in dating anymore.
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Chapters
4 chapters
1
What is the main reason young people are opting out of marriage and sex?
0:00–0:33
2
How has the perception of consent and sexuality changed among Gen Z?
0:33–6:40
3
What factors contribute to the declining testosterone levels in young men?
6:40–32:49
4
Why are more women than men rejecting the idea of marriage?
32:49–1:12:37
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