Alone on Valentine’s Day? You’re not alone!

Welcome to Sex and the State, a newsletter about power. I’m a writer working on decriminalizing and destigmatizing all things sex. I synthesize empirical evidence, stories, and personal experience to interrogate existing power structures to propose new, hopefully better, ways of relating. To support my work, buy a subscription, follow me on OnlyFans, or just share this post!

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Are you alone this Valentine’s Day? No? Well you can fuck right off then! Go have a wonderful evening with your significant other. 

This post is for the gorgeous, gorgeous girls, gays, and theys who find themselves without a sweetheart on this day dedicated to the institution of romantic love.

As a sex nerd, I wanted to do a little dive into the stats around sexlessness in the US, something I wrote briefly about last month. 

Remember 2019, when we (okay, maybe just me and my horny friends) talked excitedly about the upcoming “whoring 20s?” That… did not end up happening. I mean, I did start my OnlyFans in 2020 so it wasn’t a total bust in the whoring department. But due to entirely unforeseen circumstances, 2020 and 2021 ended up being the driest years of my post-divorce life. And 2022 isn’t looking a lot better in that department. 

Turns out I’m hardly alone in my less-sex-having. The Cut called 2020 “the sexless year.” 

While people continue to push the “hookup culture” moral panic, the data suggest we actually have the opposite problem. First, there’s no evidence the average person has more sex partners than previous generations. If anything, we have fewer. Most Americans have between four and six sex partners in their whole lives. Even on college campuses, which are supposed hotbeds of “hookup culture,” just 19% of men and 8% of women said they’d had “casual” sex in the past month. The average person kisses 20 people their whole lives. A small minority of women do a lot of hooking up in college.

Even pre-pandemic, sexlessness was on the rise in the US. In a 2019 study, nearly one third of men between 18 and 24 reported no sexual activity in the past year. The study also showed significant declines in sexual activity among men and women ages 25 to 34 years old. The trend especially impacts young men, with men who are not in education, employment, or training (NEET) especially likely to be sexless. These men make up a growing percentage of the male population. Interestingly, adults in my age bracket (35 to 44) did not see a decline in that period. 

The good news is that unwanted pregnancies, teen pregnancies, and sexual assault are declining as well.

Some interesting facts about sexlessness from the IFS post: In 2018, women in their 20s with four-year college degrees were up to ten percentage points more likely to be celibate than their non-degreed peers. Married women with unemployed husbands were 11 percentage points less likely to have sex at least once a week compared to wives with employed husbands. In this research and this research, Black Americans are less likely to be celibate than white Americans. Interestingly, last I checked there wasn’t a big difference between the average number of lifetime sexual partners between Black and white Americans. 

There’s also been a sharp spike in sexlessness for men without high school diplomas ages 45 to 50. 

These men are about 20 percentage points more likely than all other men to have gone without sex for at least a year. This is a startling finding. These men—high school dropouts in their mid to late forties—are smack in the middle of the “deaths of despair” demographic: white men with deteriorating attachments to the labor force, to marriage, and to social institutions in general, and whose life expectancy has fallen in recent years. 

Another, earlier multivariable analysis also showed that sexlessness was associated with providing less than 20% of household income. 

There’s nothing inherently wrong with sexlessness.

More shocking than my near celibacy (at least relatively speaking), is the fact that I’m actually pretty cool with this state of affairs (or lack thereof). With the prospect of free drinks and easy sex with little risk of catching a deadly virus off the table, I stayed the fuck home and got on my sigma female grindset. I wrote more columns, got published elsewhere, and established a regular yoga practice. I also started dating myself, in a sense. I got more comfortable spending time in my own company without all the fomo I’d faced in the before-times. 

Sex can be a big responsibility. There are good reasons to handle it with care and consideration. Taking into account the abysmal state of sex education in the US, it might be best for people between 18 and 24 to wait until they’re a little older and more mature to make their sexual debut. 

However, I do worry that socioeconomic factors are forcing younger generations to wait longer to achieve the markers of adulthood, like partnership and employment. That alone will slow economic growth and mean people will be able to have fewer children than they’d ideally want. 

But also, relationships give our lives meaning. I do think American society emphasizes monogamous, lifelong romantic partnerships to a problematic degree while relatively undervaluing the role other types of bonds play in creating a full and fulfilling life. I think it’s worth thinking about the systemic reasons we seem to be having less of it. At the very least, we should focus on long-term unemployment trends, especially for low-education native-born men. We need to address stagnant wages for the bottom half of earners and rising costs for basic needs like education, shelter, and healthcare. 

Plus, sex is fun and offers many benefits. Some studies show having sex is associated with better health and more happiness. However, at least one multivariable analysis showed no relationship between reported happiness and sexual activity. There’s also data showing that people who have regular sex are actually smarter than those who don’t. 

Causation is hard to establish. Happier, healthier, smarter people are also probably going to have an easier time having sex. But at least when it comes to health impacts, there is some evidence of a causal relationship. 

Ultimately, sex, like having kids, is something I don’t think is necessarily or inherently good or bad. I’d like to see less moralizing around these choices and more work going into setting up systems that make it easy for people to have as much or as little of them as they want.