The pandemic disrupted American life in many ways, but one trend remained the same: rising sexlessness. A growing share of younger Americans are living without sex. The new 2021 General Social Survey can be used to track these trends over time. As Figure 1 below shows, since 2010, there has been a sharp rise in the share of males and females ages 18 to 35 who report not having sex in the prior year. This trend, which has been described in detail in prior IFS reports, continued in 2021.| Institute for Family Studies
A recent terrorist attack in Toronto, which left 10 people dead, has brought global attention to the “incel” movement, which stands for “involuntarily celibate.” The term refers to a growing number of people, particularly young men, who feel shut out of any possibility for romance, and have formed a community based around mourning their celibacy, supporting each other, and, in some cases, stoking a culture of impotent bitterness and rage at the wider world. In a few cases, this rage h...| Institute for Family Studies
In this post, I analyze data from the past four waves of the NSFG, spanning the years 2011 to 2019, exploring both year-long celibacy for men and women, and longer intervals of sexlessness for women.1 These data are compared to the more familiar estimates from the GSS. Year-long celibacy is defined as the absence of any oral, anal, or vaginal contact and therefore extends to both same-sex and opposite-sex encounters. Data limitations relegate the measurement of long-term celibacy to the incid...| Institute for Family Studies
For me, the release of the 2022 data from the General Social Survey (GSS) could only mean one thing: what’s going on with the sex recession? Back in 2021, I examined the previous decade of data from both the GSS and the National Survey of Family Growth. I tried to get a handle on whether the sex recession had worsened over the previous 10 years. The answer was equivocal: there wasn’t strong evidence of a decadal trend in celibacy, although celibacy had definitely spiked in 2017-2019.| Institute for Family Studies
It’s well established that Americans are having less sex. In a recent post for IFS, I explored whether this trend has been gathering steam—if the sex recession was turning into a great sex depression. The results were equivocal: 2018 was a bad year for sex in America, but there’s little evidence that more Americans have foresworn sex over the past decade. My post examined sex data from two national data sets. Much of the research to date on the sex recession has been based on the Gene...| Institute for Family Studies