Gen Z-ers Are Ditching Sex. They Might Be On to Something.

Men are getting dating advice that is also really negative about women. You know, like, all women are on only fans. Women can't be trusted. Women only want to date men who are, you know, tall, rich, and handsome. And if you're not one of fours-- Six fours, blue eyes, and works in finance. Yes. We're in a sex recession. Americans are having less sex than ever before, especially Gen Z. The number of young people who say they haven't had sex in the past year has roughly doubled since 2010. And that data has caused a lot of worry. The record level decline last year is leading to fears that may not be enough children to sustain the next generation. But when asked what was more important to them than regular sex, many Gen Zers replied, "Gen Z would rather have a good night's sleep than sex." I've been celibate for two years. I've never felt this much peace. It really opens up like a new level of thinking in your mind. It means no dating, no romance, nothing for a full year. And I was thinking today I did sort of have the realization I was like, "Oh, I don't know. This actually might be a lifetime thing." But is there happiness outside of happily ever after? I spoke with reporters and researchers Carter Sherman and Christine Emba, who have reported extensively on the sex and dating lives of young people and the anxieties and obstacles that they're facing. Christine Carter, thank you so much for being here with me. Thanks for having us. Thank you for having us. Just to start, in one word or a small handful of words, how do you feel about people having less sex? I feel intrigued. I just, it raises the question, why, and what does it mean? And I think that's been kind of the guiding light of my reporting for the last several years. The word would have to be mixed. I think I actually feel happy for young people if they feel less pressure to do things that they don't want to do, but I do feel concerned about what it represents, about relationships more broadly in interaction with each other. So Americans are having less sex, and it's particularly visible among young people. There's one recent study that says one in four Gen Z adults haven't had partnered sex, and the number of young people who haven't had sex in the past year has doubled from 2010 to 2024, from 12% to 24%. And so, Christine, I want to start with you. You've been reporting on sex and dating in the culture for a long time. What are you seeing about the causes behind this trend? Yeah, I mean, the trend is notable, especially among millennials in Gen Z. Gen Z is doing a lot of things less frequently than their older peers used to, or at least later. So they started driving later. They're moving out of their parents' houses later. They're drinking later or not at all. So sex is another thing that they are doing later than their peers. But I think that the causes behind it are both manifold, and when you think about it kind of obvious, I think one is, frankly, the internet and smartphones, where there's kind of a substitution effect. You could get dressed up and go out on a date and try and find someone to sleep with, or you could scroll your feet and watch pornography at home, and not have to make all of that effort and fear rejection. So I think the technological climate has a lot to do with it. Yeah, Carter, what about you? You've interviewed a lot of Gen Z years about sex. What have you seen or observed anything different from what Christine was saying? No, I definitely second Christine's point in particular about phones. I mean, this is not a trend that we're seeing just in the United States. I think it's notable that we're also seeing it abroad in countries like Japan and South Korea, which would point to there being some kind of global-shared cause. And the emergence of smartphones and the social media that's on them, I think is a very obvious culprit. That said, I don't think that there really is just one thing that we can pin the sex recession as it's called on. When I talk to young people, many of them bring up stuff like the political climate. Like it makes them feel more anxious to have sex right now. Actually, after the overturning of Roe v. Wade, there was one study that came out that found out that about 13% of millennials and Gen Z have become more anxious around sex because of the overturning of Roe. And so I think we really have to look at what is going on overall in the climate when it comes to sex and not just saying, okay, we can just change or fix this one thing and that will fix the entire dating crisis as some people have termed it. I think that's absolutely true. I think one thing we might do just to sort of set the groundwork for the conversation is I think there are a lot of possible reasons behind the sex recession. I think it would be interesting to just go through some of them. So Christine, you were talking about phones. Carter, you were talking about Roe v. Wade. I also assume or wonder if me too had an impact on young people and how they were thinking about sex. Is that something that's come up in your reporting? That's something that definitely came up in my reporting and with young people that I've talked to, millennials and Gen Z. I think one of the things that Carter was pointing out very correctly is that the sort of the entire social environment shapes how people move about, how they interact with each other, and maybe eventually how they have sex. So first of all, we have to know that Gen Z has come of age in a very anxious time, right? There was COVID in the pandemic. Everybody was sick at home. Our political climate is frankly insane, and then me too happened in 2018 that kind of a formative age for many people in terms of thinking about sex and dating and how to relate to other people. I think for young women, me too served as a moment in which they could say, you know, the current sexual climate or current sexual landscape. Maybe actually doesn't feel that great for me, and I feel like I'm allowed to say that publicly. There's like less pressure on me to ascend to things, which is I think a really good thing. I think for young men, however, they became really frightened actually. There's one guy I remember interviewing who said that, you know, after me too, asking out a colleague in the workplace or hitting on a girl in public was like handing them a loaded shotgun. It was really dangerous and could have consequences for him. And I was kind of like, that seems extreme, but I think a lot of actually conscientious young men noted that, you know, me too, it happened. Women had been made uncomfortable in number of circumstances that they, you know, hadn't known about and dialed back their own behavior, their own willingness to ask people out to try and pursue sex on a date, to even try and pursue dating in some situations. And obviously, if you're not talking to potential sex partners, it is far less likely that you will have sex with them. I actually think what I found in my reporting is it's different for the genders, as Christina has talked about. But what I found really interesting is when I talked to young men, and I should say for my book, the second coming, I interviewed more than 100 young people under 30. I also covered gender and sexuality for 10 years now. I found that young men actually weren't all that moved by me too. And I think this is partially an age thing, which, to Christine's point, you know, she's talking about people being in the workplace. But many of the young people, I was interviewing like they did not remember me too, which was sort of a dagger to the heart. The first time I heard it, because it was so pivotal to me. And there was one young man I remember who 18 years old grew up in New York City had just graduated high school right after we spoke. And he was sort of talking about the ways that young men in his cohort talk about women, and he was using terms like Bob and ran through. And like things that really are not very friendly to women, yeah, ran through was really the term that stuck to me. I don't know the term Bob, I mean, it is not appropriate for New York Times, but it's not family friendly. I don't know what happened, yeah, no, look it up on urban dictionary if you feel so inclined after this. But what was striking to me is he said this thing, he was like, you're talking about me too, and me too was about not sexually assaulting women. But it's not necessarily, I didn't understand it as like treating women as people, like that's not how I understood it. And he kind of drew a line between like affording women and girls full humanity and like just not sexually assaulting them. And I found that very fascinating because it speaks to me that like me too didn't really do as much as we maybe would have liked it to do. That it didn't actually really change some of these more as it's permanently as we might have liked because like people just don't remember. And the thing I will say about young women, I totally agree with Christy and that I have found that they have become more anxious. And I think part of that is because for the women who remember me too, me too helped them recognize certainly earlier than I did. That maybe something that happened to them that was wrong was actually a violation that they should recognize this as sexual assault or sexual harassment. And they deserve to seek redress for that, they deserve to be made whole. But what these women have also found is that we didn't actually really see that many institutional changes after we too. Like we have seen more HR trainings around sexual violence, we have seen some legislation around NDAs. But for institutions like colleges, you know, we haven't actually seen an overhaul of the way that we address sexual violence. The same goes for K through 12 institutions and so these young women walk around with a greater knowledge of how pervasive sexual violence is and in understanding that if something happens to them, their institutions are not necessarily set up to help them in that instance. And that is just a culture of fear. It's a miasma of anxiety and that makes you not want to engage in any of this to begin with. I think that's a great point. actually. And I think you're right to point out this distinction between kind of millennials and older Gen Z who might have had their sort of sexual memory working when Me Too happened and a younger generation who did not. So one of the things that I've also noticed as a sort of age and gender split is in a post Me Too environment where people were young women I think are more okay with talking about negative experiences. They share those, especially on TikTok and Instagram. A lot of women are more open to making reels about, you know, I had this bad experience with a man or I went on this date and it was awful and here's why. And there is actually just a lot more content about how men can be dangerous or predatory or sort of in social media kind of dating advice parlance narcissists or liars or something. And so it makes men feel both scarier and sort of less I think responsive to female concerns. And there's a whole dialogue that has grown that is kind of negative around dating men. In fact, it's a term that I think the New York Times has published a number of pieces on hetero pessimism, right? This idea that for a woman trying to date a man is kind of a hopeless enterprise. And you know, you might in fact wish that you were a lesbian or not interested in men at all, but alas, you are. And then on the male side of the equation, if women are seeing feeds that are full of kind of negative content about the opposite sex and sort of descriptions of, you know, unfortunate and scary occurrences that then shape their idea of dating, men are getting dating advice that is also really negative about women, you know, like all women are on only fans. Women only want to date men who are, you know, tall, rich and handsome. And if you're not one of four blue eyes and works in finance. Yes, actually, I've also heard of this as like mix six six. He used to be six feet tall, mix six figures and have a six pack. Which like I think is something that men believe women want. Yeah. And when men are, you know, told this by sort of their dating advisors, like the Fresh and Fit podcast or Andrew Tate types or even, you know, Joe Rogan occasionally trades in this sort of discourse, they begin to feel really negatively towards women. And so, yeah, they aren't really interested in being with each other in the same way. I have so many theories for why this is happening that I want to keep moving us through them. One one that a friend of minus 21 brought up when we were talking about this is she was saying Gen Z is facing a lot of mental health issues in part because of the anxieties of the world. And they are very medicated for their mental health. I think they're one of the most medicated generations, which for anyone who's been on antidepressants can have an impact on your libido. And she was pausing that this might be one of the causes why Gen Z is having less sex. Has that come up in either of your reporting? So, not necessarily the medication effects specifically, but it is worth noting that something like one in four members of Gen Z has been in therapy at some point in their adolescence, which is just way more than any other generation. I think there is something to be said about mental health generally and how Gen Z views protecting their mental health and protecting their space and peace in different ways than their older peers might have. One of the things actually tying back to the reasons why men are seemingly having less sex in women is that for many young men at this point, this idea that you have to be the perfect man, you have to be the right model of masculinity, you have to be ready before you can be in a relationship. It seems to be driving a number of men into taking a step back and moving into self-optimization, going into monk mode, and thinking that they have to figure out every aspect of their lives before they can start dating, before it's okay to approach anyone else, and so that moves having sex later. And then for young women, there is this idea that, you know, your mental health is fragile. Other people can be anxiety-causing, relationships are, and I think we can actually all understand this, you know, can be really anxiety-causing, can produce a lot of pressure and to stay on balance, to keep oneself safe. The better thing to do is invest in yourself, invest in your mental health, invest in kind of the relationships that you can control your friendships, and, you know, maybe not experiment with sex and dating at this time, because it seems too stressful and too fraught. Yeah, I think I was looking at a survey that asked Gen Zers, "What is more important to you than regular sex?" And they answered, "Success at work, friendships, a good night's sleep was very high up there." And fair. And fair. But to go back to something that you were just saying, Christine, you were talking about sort of the amount of, like, work and readiness that men think that they need to do in order to be ready for a relationship, and I've noticed in my conversations with young people that much, much, much more so than when I was young, I guess I no longer am, than when I was young. No, no, you're so young, all of us are young. Much more so than when I was in my early 20s. There's a big focus on the idea of a long-term relationship as this very venerated goal, as like this huge commitment. Part of it is that you see on social media these relationships take huge gestures, financial and emotional. And part of that is just because of how an algorithm is designed to promote performativity or the sale of a product. But there's this idea that a long-term relationship is this really serious thing. And that's much more desired and much more the focus than sort of casual sex. And I wonder how have you seen the distinction about how young people feel between long-term romantic relationships and casual sex and have there been shifts there? I found it very interesting how much young people are kind of dismissive of hook-up culture as they put it. Like when I was growing up as millennial, I think we were very overwhelmed by the narrative of hook-up culture. There was this real sense in the media that young millennials were having too much sex. That they were having sex so casual version in personal and that that would imperil our ability later on down the line to get married to have kids. And like guess what? We are getting married. We are having kids. We're just doing it at a later point. And so I think that that narrative though has still trickled down to young people. They saw that millennials got roasted for hook-up culture. And now they don't really want to engage in that as much. Like they do want to be in these long-term relationships. And I mean, I understand that desire. I really do. Particularly for a group that feels very alone, having a person who feels like theirs, who feels like who feels like they are going to be a foundation for them and for their life. Like I don't think that's a bad desire whatsoever. I think to go a little bit deeper into how that narrative is shifted. There was a spade of stories like cat person, the New Yorker short story that was just about a normal girl who goes on a date and hooks up with a guy and kind of you know, is grossed out by it. And there is a sort of openness to this idea that sort of millennial sex positivity, which I would describe not as sex positivity in the classic feminist sense, that sex is a good thing, but sex positivity in a kind of deterministic sense. Meaning you need to go out and have a lot of sex. Otherwise you're not a good feminist or a modern young person, etc. Was kind of blown up a little bit. Gen Z, I think, saw millennials sort of dealing with the fall out of that culture and decided that like they didn't want to be part of it. And especially with I think some of the changes that had happened in sexual culture between millennials and Gen Z. So much of the sex that people seem to be having, that they're reporting, having as kind of abusive or unpleasant was extremely porn informed for one thing. And so they have backed off from hooking up on the same level. But then when it comes to longer term relationships, there's a term, the idea of the cornerstone versus capstone model of long term relationships. And so traditionally long term relationships, getting married, having a long term partner, was seen as sort of the cornerstone in your life. Like you find someone and then you continue to build your life on top of that. Maybe you're together and you go through grad school, you go through your careers, you're joining your lives together. And maybe at the cornerstone, you're not making that much money. You're not that secure, but it's okay. Now I think in this more performative moment where, you know, your big days, your dates are supposed to be celebrated as perfect on social media, a lot of young people feel like their long term relationship should be the capstone of your life. That's something that you only do when you've got all of the other bricks in a row. When you're finished with school, when you have your career set up, when you're making enough money, that's when you can go for the long term relationship. I mean, I do think just to complicate that narrative a little bit because something that I do think that comes up a lot that sometimes frustrates me when we talk about Gen Z and the sex recession is like millennials were also having less sex. So like while we were having all of this discussion around, oh, they're hooking up too much, like the reality is that they were having less sex than previous generations. And so when we think about the causes of the sex recession, I think we have to remember, like this started before me too, the started before the pandemic. And this is really like Gen Z is the inheritors of a trend that began among millennials. So whatever we're seeing with Gen Z, how they see relationships, how they see hooking up, like we have to be looking at both generation. and thinking about things that have happened with both generations. That's true. I do think that there's a shift that's not so much about the having of sex, but the thinking about it in the culture. And for them, I realized when sex is constantly being sold to as a product, when it's constantly over-available on your phone, it becomes uncool so quickly. We grew up in this very hypersexualized girl's gone wild, blowjob advice from Cosmo magazine culture, that like Gen Z is just a little grossed out by because it's so tied into a sort of like thing that's being sold to them all the time. But is it uncool to not be able to have sex? Because I think it's perceived as cool to choose not to have sex, but you know, it's not always clear that someone is making the active choice to be celibate versus just kind of being unable to get laid. You know, it's not cool to be powerless, right? It's cool to be in control. And I think like this is why people find the concept of virginity or the concept of being a virgin to be inherently embarrassing. Because like that is a state you can't change by yourself. I think what you're saying about people not wanting to admit to powerlessness, being powerless as being cringe and uncool is extremely true. So by, you know, saying by going out and saying, well, actually I'm choosing to be celibate or actually I am embracing loneliness and becoming a loneliness influencer. Or, you know, I'm de-centering men. I'm a heteropassimist, you know, taking on the label for yourself feels like a reclamation of something that you might have otherwise felt powerless about. That makes a lot of sense. And I've been thinking a lot about for this episode about sort of the difference between loneliness and solitude, which I think in part is a difference about choice. You're lonely because you have no choice. Solitude is about choosing your own company. But again, I think that that might also be a way of like reclaiming power over something that you don't have a choice over. I think that that's an entirely plausible theory. I wanted to talk about loneliness influencers a little bit. Carter, can you explain what a loneliness influencer is? Yeah, for folks who have not had this show up on their algorithms. First of all, I would love to know what makes you immune to this. Like, it does my phone just think I am very lonely. But basically what loneliness influencers are like oftentimes women, which I find very striking, who are coming home and are like taking off their shoes and making pizza, hanging out with their cat. And there's text on the screen that says like, this is what your Friday night looks like when you are single and have no friends. And it's very much like selling the idea of a full life without anyone else in it, which I find really fascinating and like sort of inherently contradictory because of course this is a person who is broadcasting their loneliness to the internet. And it's always very curious to me. It's like how much can I really believe that these people actually agree with the concept of loneliness? How much of these people are trying to like change their circumstance? And I think that they're just such a fascinating indicator of where we're at in modern life that these are an emerging system of influencers. I think the rise of loneliness influencers speaks to another trend about Gen Z and millennial dating. One thing that has become clear to millennials and Gen Z is you know, in a post sexual revolution, feminist inflected, if not feminist, you know, winning world, is that women? Definitely not feminist winning. That's a good. Yeah. I mean, I don't think the White House would identify as particularly feminist. But you know, a culture in which women are able to exist by themselves, where women have jobs, where women are going to college and graduate school at higher rates than men, where in a lot of major cities, women are earning more than their male counterparts. You don't have to get married or be in a relationship to make a life for yourself. And it's felt as liberating thing, at least, for younger women, millennials and Gen Z. And perhaps also for you know, these older married women who maybe didn't feel like they had as much choice in the matter. And so ended up with the husband and kids in a house and all this stuff to deal with as a way to feel like they were part of and accepted by society. So the sort of romanticization of loneliness, I think also speaks to a kind of romanticization of the idea that women can do it by themselves, that they don't have to be in a relationship to be happy. They don't have to have a boyfriend to be able to afford their frankly kind of alarmingly clean apartments. I think we would either seem the same woman. Yes, it's a little bit American psycho for you. Is this the woman to clean it? She does a lot. I mean, this is the woman, I think, of her thinking of the same person who takes off her lubricants, which she comes in the door, which speaks to again, her socioeconomic success, it seems like. But I do think that there is something worrying about the loneliness influencer, because humans are wired for connection, right? It's in our DNA to connect with people. You can become kind of physically and sort of psychologically ill by being touch-starved, by not interacting with other people. And also interacting with other people, whether in romantic relationships or simply friendships, is how you learn about the world, how you come to understand men or women or people in your office, how we know enough about each other to begin to create a civil society. The idea that we've decided that actually solitude is the best thing that you can have doesn't really speak well for the future of our kind of shared project. I mean, I just feel so conflicted about these influencers, because like the first time I came across a loneliness influencer, I was like suddenly flung back to when I was I think 23 years old and had just moved to New York and was working nights and did not have friends, like just straight up did not have friends. And I thought about how if I had seen that content when I was that age, it would have really made me feel actually less lonely, because I would have realized that this is a life that other people are also living, other people also do struggle with making friends. And I think the other thing is like when we think about the concerns that we have around young people not getting into relationships, not getting married, not having babies, which is another whole conversation, people are really worried about for three right now. I worry about how much importance we place on sex and relationship sometimes, because they're really not a balm for all of the issues that plague us as a country or as individuals. It feels like there's so much like moral hand wringing and anxiety about the falling rates of people having sex. And I'm curious why it matters so much. I'm genuinely curious about it. We've been sold this one idea of a happily ever after for a very long time. But maybe if we move away from that, there's all other, there's plenty of other reasons to be happy ways to find happiness. People who say that they're intentionally not dating, say they're focusing on self-improvement, on paying down debt, on getting fit, on traveling. Maybe there's an abundance of other options for finding happiness. You know, one of the things that I wrote about in my book, Rethinking Sex, was a sort of critique of how sexuality, having sex and relationships and what kind of sex are having, became sort of a defining factor of our self-identity. It's something that people lead with. Our relationship status dating is one of the first things that people ask about. And one thing that we haven't talked about actually is how dating has changed for millennials, but especially for Gen Z. I think on dating apps, people get a volume of rejection of people swiping past them and not matching with them. That is honestly unparalleled in the history of dating. You might, you know, 20 or 25 years ago ask someone out and get turned down. On a dating app, you might swipe through and try to match with like 50 people and get turned down by 49 of them. That feels outside of your control and also feels awful. And of course, also doesn't lead to dates in the real world. So I think some of the stigma around not having sex and not being in our relationship might also be what it reveals about your sort of success in presenting yourself in this very specific fora. That is, you know, the dating world today where image matters a lot. Dating apps are very picture-forward where the ability to kind of transition from the app into the real world is is much harder and feels much more fraught for people. So I think that what I worry about when it comes to young people not having as much sex or young people not having kids is not necessarily the sex or the kids that might come from it, but actually just what it says more broadly about connection. The first step to having sex or having kids is, you know, ideally being in a relationship of some kind with some person, which starts with just talking to people, having friends, getting to know people outside of yourself. And whether that leads to sex or dating or anything else, just this idea of connecting to other people, I think is still really important. And it's something that we have valued as a society and should value as a society. And if our lower birth rates and our lower rates of sex and relationship are signals that we We have forgotten how to do that, or a whole generation is struggling to make friends. And that is what the statistics are showing us, actually. Younger people report higher levels of loneliness. They report higher levels of anxiety around relationships, but also around sort of their state and life and security, the stuff that would allow them to form relationships. That seems like a problem to me. And I think that is why I at least have been drawn to this question, because it speaks to the broader backdrop of kind of discomfort. I mean, I think that discomfort is a really important part of it, because I think our phones can do so much for us that makes our lives completely frictionless. We live in a world of instant gratification. Everyone can provide a sort of version of sex that involves no risk, that almost involves no desire, because there's not time to desire, before it's actively fulfilled. And now intimacy can be met by our phones in so many different ways. I mean, you can have a very intimate relationship with an AI chatbot. You can have an intimate relationship with an only fans creator who can be texting you all day. And you can feel intimacy from your phone, a sort of version of it. You can get your sexual needs met from your phone or a version of it. And I feel like if we want to make an argument for sex or dating, then we need to be able to make an argument that is actually like for rejection, for heartbreak. Like why would you put yourself through the friction and pain of these things? And I wonder, like, can I either of you make an argument for that? I feel like if I were talking to a young person who's like, I have my needs met in this easy way. Why would I risk the pain of getting rejected or getting my heart broken? I wouldn't quite know what to say. I actually have had something of an actual, like, this actual conversation with a young person before, which is about, I think it was a year or two ago now, I was following around a group of young people who were at the Jersey Shore, and they were preaching the value of Chastity, which is obviously a big sell to be making at the Jersey Shore. At the Jersey Shore. Yeah, I was like, I've got to go, like, report on this. This is so fascinating to me, but I was talking to one of the young men. And he was not interested in having sex until marriage for religious reasons, which, you know, I think that that is great. I think that people should obviously have sex according to their values. But what was fascinating to me is he wasn't even dating. And he was saying that that was one of the things he was thinking about was that if you aren't dating for marriage, you're dating for heartbreak. And that made me really sad because I do feel like heartbreak is such a, as you're pointing out Naja, like, formative experience. Like when I have had my heart broken, I have learned so much about resilience. I have learned so much about anger. I have learned so much about art. Like I suddenly understood what all those Taylor Swift songs were about. I just, I feel like it turned me into the person I am today to have gone through heartbreak. And to be able to feel that depth of feeling is, I think, a really special experience that I would, I mean, I don't want people to get their heart broken, but when it happens, it can be so enriching to your life. And I do think that young people are interested in more friction than they're currently getting. Like I do actually think that there is a yearning for community. Like I don't think we have to be making the argument that I was making to that young man. I think that there is an acknowledgement and acceptance that, like, friction is good for us. It's better for us. And to what you were saying, Nadia, about, you know, the idea that you can get your needs for intimacy met through AI or on only fans. The question that was running through my head was like, can you really, like, is that sort of real intimacy? And I think the thing with AI companions and only fans in particular, and this is my argument for friction, right, is that they're meant to make you happy. They don't fight you. They don't push back like your AI flatters you and does what you want. It doesn't get mad at you or tell you off or say that it's fine, but you know, it's not fine. And then you have to kind of figure out what's going on. But when you're, those are the things that you have to learn to be in relationship with real human beings. It's how we learn how to move through the world with others. And without friction, you just don't learn that. And I think that's actually a pretty scary prospect. I want to keep pushing back just because I'm curious, like, but why? Like, why? If it's enough for people, like, if it could be enough for people, then like, why do they really need to learn about all of the ways you can be hurt and unfulfilled by other people? The argument for friction is the argument for life, you know? Like, it's the argument for being out in the world, for experiencing anything. And I understand that it's scary and not always fun and feels rough, frankly, to make a pun using the word friction. But I do think people understand the inherent value of difficulty. And I think people understand that when I accomplished something that scared me or made me hurt or was just beyond what I thought I was capable of, like, they feel good. And in addition to that, I would make an argument around political power. And I would say that, like, many young people are very fed up with our politics as it is. They feel very nihilistic. They feel like things are not going in the direction that they would like. And you know how to, like, make political change? You got to build community. You got to organize. You got to talk to people. Of course, being on the internet can be helpful for that, but, like, truly being in community with other people and meeting them and talking to them and being able to have fuller conversations and you could possibly have on a screen. Like, that is all essential to political power. And so if you don't want to do this because you feel very safe at home and you really love your AI boyfriend, like, that's fine. But if you do want to change politics, maybe you should also try to experience other people. I mean, I'm interested because I feel like I heard you say an ability to be in community together is essential to politics. It's essential to any kind of change. And, like, from both the right and the left, there's this feeling of, like, we can't just become completely atomized and isolated. We need to know how to interact with each other in order to have a society, a country of any kind. And yet, I'm also interested in the left divide, I mean, in part because I think it's one of the things that's going on with why young people are in having sex. Like, Gen Z has the largest political gendered gap of any generation with the men moving to the right and the women moving to the left. But I'm also curious because I feel like, you know, when I was growing up, I associated the right with these Christian ideas of purity, of waiting for marriage, of abstinence, and I associated the left with, like, a more pro-sex-sex positivity attitude. And to me, it feels like maybe there's a bit of a reversal now. Like, the right wants people to have more babies, to have traditional values where the left is moving further away from marriage and having children and making more room for ideas like asexuality or intentional celibacy. And I'm curious if you guys agree with that analysis? Uh, I mean, I don't know that I think that that is necessarily a fair characterization of either the left or the right. Like, I do think on the right, you know, the right often gets painted as being anti-sex. And like, generally speaking, they're not. There is a rich tradition within, like, evangelical communities, for example, of promoting sex within marriage. You have the right kind of sex at the right time, but married, sexual, possibly procreative sex. Like, that is sort of the push among on the right, and like, evangelicals have written a ton of very famous sex guides to that point. Um, and I think the left, like, yes, there is this sort of feeling that like, they're not really pushing for sex really, but it's also like, these are the people who are pushing for pride parades. Like, these are the people who are pushing for a more expansive view of gender and sexuality. And I think what oftentimes a left is really pushing is like, that's just not have strictures around what kind of sex is correct. Like, that's, take those away and that's make it more possible for more people to have the kind of sex that they want. And if that includes not having sex, then so be it. I do think it is a major problem in our politics and in our life, how much emphasis we place on sex is being a separate activity as being something that is apart from the rest of our lives. And like, I just think that we all know that that's not true. Like, we do not, when I come home from work and it's been a bad day, like, it's not like I can just go and have sex. Like, my sex life does not exist in a parenthetical from the rest of my life. And I think we know that as individuals, and yet we seem to be unable to grasp that as a political concept. I think for some on the, you know, further right end of the spectrum, which, with which I do not identify, frankly, some of the kind of heritage foundation-esque project 2025-ish characters, some of the motivation behind worrying about young people not having sex is more about, like, the right kind of young people, wink, wink, are not making enough babies and soon will be outvoted. And so they need to get to it so that we can continue to have political power. I think there are other people who are really investing in this idea of, it's not necessarily the sex, it's the idea of a democratic society and people being able to interact with each other socially to build a politics in which we can live together. And we're losing those skills, and that's, that's really scary. And I think that's something that I identify with. I want to see if we can end in an optimistic place, and you're fully welcome to disagree with me. Because I wonder, is there a world in which having less sex can perhaps mean valuing other forms of intimacy, creating more platonic bonds with people, valuing a sort of plenitude and solitude, like figuring out other forms of happiness in the world that are not as focused as the millennial generation was on equating a rich sex life with the only way of being fulfilled? Yeah, I think for a long time, for most of its history, America has been focused on the relationship, the sort of two-person romantic relationship, and then the near-nuclear family as just sort of the main segment of society. And that meant that people who were not married or who didn't have kids felt like they were just sort of off in the wilderness. And I think perhaps that if Gen Z is having less sex and is less centered on romantic relationships, that actually does open up more space for people to explore relationships with their families, with their friends. We're seeing so much more discussion about people who are deciding to move in and build communities around their friendships, to have kids who have aloe parents, who have relationships with godparents, friends, people who are not part of the nuclear family, but who are still in relationship with them. And I actually think that that would be a great development. I think we have seen over the past several decades how the sort of closed-off, tiny sort of two-parents, 2.5 kids, where the only people who talk to each other has, you know, failed to support both individuals and the broader society. If having less sex means that we have more relationships with other people overall, stronger relationships outside of the two-person pair, I think that's a good thing. I mean, think we were complaining at the start of this conversation about phones and how much those have really impaired young people's ability to have sexual relationships. But think about how much time we all spend texting our friends now, or texting our parents, or texting the people who we care about in our intimate with. We are more connected to those individuals than we ever have been before. And I think that there's a way to see that as a really beautiful thing. It is not just that as technology develops, everything will get worse. We will become more friendless. We will not know our families. We will not know our neighbors. We actually are more connected than ever. And so it's just a question of, you know, how do we want to use that connection? What do we want to build with those connections? That is a perfect place to end. Thank you both so much. It's been a really fascinating conversation. It's been so nice to talk to both of you about it. Thank you. Thanks! [BLANK_AUDIO]