Sex Recession: Are young people really having less sex?

[Regina] (0:00 - 0:07)
That figure was staggeringly high for Gen Z, of which 48% said they were virgins.

[Kristin] (0:08 - 0:32)
Wait, half of Gen Z are virgins and we're talking about people up to age 29? That seems implausible to me.

Welcome to Normal Curves.

This is a podcast for anyone who wants to learn about scientific studies and the statistics behind them. I'm Kristin Sainani. I'm a professor at Stanford University.

[Regina] (0:32 - 0:38)
And I'm Regina Nuzzo. I'm a professor at Gallaudet University and part-time lecturer at Stanford.

[Kristin] (0:38 - 0:43)
We are not medical doctors. We are PhDs. So nothing in this podcast should be construed as medical advice.

[Regina] (0:43 - 0:51)
Also, this podcast is separate from our day jobs at Stanford and Gallaudet University.

Kristin, today we're talking about sex.

[Kristin] (0:51 - 0:55)
Well, Regina, when are we ever not talking about sex on this podcast?

[Regina] (0:56 - 1:11)
Okay, true. Good point. But this time we're not making just bad metaphors about it.

This time we're talking about actually having sex. We're going into people's bedrooms.

[Kristin] (1:11 - 1:17)
Okay, so this episode is going to make me blush is what you're saying. But maybe not as much as the male equipment size episode.

[Regina] (1:18 - 1:21)
Yeah, there will be fewer penises this time. Promise.

[Kristin] (1:22 - 1:24)
And if I don't have to say that word ever, then thank you.

[Regina] (1:25 - 1:36)
You're welcome. Today we will look at a claim that I've been hearing about for a while. Young people are having less sex these days than they used to.

[Kristin] (1:36 - 1:45)
You know, Regina, I just heard this claim. I was listening to Real Time with Bill Maher, and he said exactly this, that young people today are having too little sex.

[Regina] (1:45 - 2:25)
It is all over the media. Yes. It even has a name, Kristin.

They're calling it a sex recession. A great term. As far as I can tell, it was coined by a journalist, Kate Julian, who was writing for The Atlantic in 2018.

The title of her article was great. Why are young people having so little sex? Same thing.

But I see this headline all over the place, right? Like recently I saw sexual activity in young people is on the decline. I saw why aren't young people having sex anymore?

But Kristin, this one is my favorite. Sex is dying out. That's what they said.

[Kristin] (2:26 - 2:31)
Somehow, I doubt that sex is actually dying out. That seems a tad exaggerated, Regina.

[Regina] (2:32 - 3:34)
I'm thinking somewhere someone might actually do a little research and find out, you know, hey, sex can actually be fun. And then they're going to spread the word, and then they'll be publishing stories. The stories will say sex, fun.

Who knew? Yeah. So today we're going to fact check this claim.

Not that sex is dying out, but that young people are having less sex than they used to. We're going to look at the data behind the headlines. And Kristin, I think it's worth us spending time this episode on this, not just because we want to go into people's bedrooms and be nosy about what they're doing, but because like we mentioned in that male equipment size episode, we often end up using these kinds of statistics, right, to judge whether we're normal or not.

Everyone wants to know, are other people having more sex than me? Are they having less than me? Who's winning?

[Kristin] (3:35 - 3:41)
No, that's true, right? I mean, we want to compare ourselves to others. And of course, we are kind of fascinated by other people's sex lives.

Yeah.

[Regina] (3:42 - 4:02)
Right. So I did find some solid published papers on this topic, and we're going to walk through them today and some fun statistical issues just for you to look forward to. Ordinal variables versus quantitative variables, means versus distributions, and a tiny bit of logistic regression.

[Kristin] (4:03 - 4:03)
Oh, excellent.

[Regina] (4:04 - 5:04)
But before we get into the peer-reviewed research, Kristin, I want to do one quick fun fact-checking statistical flu thing to show you how you don't really need to be a statistical wizard to get to the bottom of some of these headlines we're seeing, right? So there was a Newsweek article that I found from 2025. It was specifically about Gen Z.

Gen Z, usually defined as those born between 1997 and 2012. So right now they are between 14 and 29 years old. So the headline was this in the Newsweek piece, nearly half of Gen Z adults have never had sex.

The article says across America, one in five U.S. adults said they never had sex. That figure was staggeringly high for Gen Z, of which 48 percent said they were virgins.

[Kristin] (5:04 - 5:13)
Wait, half of Gen Z are virgins, and we're talking about people up to age 29? That seems implausible to me.

[Regina] (5:13 - 5:27)
It does, and you might believe it even less, Kristin, after I tell you where it came from. So the Newsweek piece said this was according to a new report from datingadvice.com.

[Kristin] (5:28 - 5:43)
Okay, datingadvice.com does not sound like a reputable source. They have a total conflict of interest. They want people to think that this is a problem, so they'll come and buy their, like, dating help services?

[Regina] (5:44 - 6:31)
Exactly. This site lets dating coaches and matchmakers advertise on the site. So they might be a little biased, yes.

Now, they do say, Kristin, they partner with the Kinsey Institute, which is a reputable institute, Indiana University, and the site hires companies to do the surveys, but still not peer-reviewed research. Yeah. So I was able to find the virginity survey, and it reported that 48 percent number.

So that's good, but they did not give any methodology other than it was an online survey in spring 2025 from a nationally representative sample of 2,000 single U.S. adults ages 18 to 91.

[Kristin] (6:31 - 7:07)
Whoa, whoa, wait a minute. Single adults? They only surveyed single adults?

The Newsweek headline did not say that half of single Gen Z-ers were virgins, right? They said that half of all Gen Z-ers are virgins. So Newsweek was totally misleading, because of course more singles are going to be virgins if you restrict to just that group.

And also, if you're allowing all ages up to age 91, then how big is the 18 to 29 subgroup going to be? It's probably not huge. So that 48 percent, which again, only in singles, even that number is probably unreliable just because small numbers.

[Regina] (7:08 - 7:25)
Absolutely. So this is, it's really misleading to see this in this Newsweek piece, and I think it's a great example of how it just takes two clicks back to the source, right, to realize that this media article isn't really correct. They're not really doing the right thing here.

[Kristin] (7:26 - 7:28)
Yeah, Newsweek really should know better, Regina.

[Regina] (7:28 - 7:32)
Yep. Okay, ready to talk about actual peer-reviewed papers now?

[Kristin] (7:32 - 7:35)
Yes, please. No more datingadvice.com surveys, please.

[Regina] (7:37 - 8:00)
So first up is a 2017 study, and I think this is the one that really kicked off all of those headlines about sex recession. It was by Jean Twenge and colleagues, published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior, which is a good journal in the area, and it uses data from something called the General Social Survey, the GSS.

[Kristin] (8:01 - 8:06)
You know, I've heard of that survey and I know it's well regarded, but Regina, you're going to have to remind me of the details.

[Regina] (8:07 - 8:33)
Yeah, I had to look it up too. So the GSS had been running for a long time, since 1972, out of the University of Chicago, very reputable. And I'd like to talk about the GSS for just a moment, Kristin, because remember in our male equipment size episode that I'm going to keep referring to, there was that one study where they interviewed men at the Daddy Rock nightclub in Cancun.

Do you remember that?

[Kristin] (8:33 - 8:44)
I remember nothing about that study other than that it was people at the Daddy Rock nightclub, which we pointed out in that episode, clearly not representative of men in general.

[Regina] (8:45 - 8:57)
Absolutely not. So I wanted to contrast that with the GSS, which is better, because they do identify a truly random sample of households across the U.S. Right.

[Kristin] (8:57 - 9:03)
So the results tell us about the whole U.S. and not just people visiting the Daddy Rock nightclub. Excellent.

[Regina] (9:04 - 9:29)
And here with the GSS, they have an interviewer come to your house and ask about all kinds of things, not just sex. So it's attitudes and behaviors and demographics and politics. It covered a whole wide span.

But yes, sex stuff as well. Like one of the questions they ask, have you ever cheated on your spouse? And as we'll talk about today, how often do you have sex?

[Kristin] (9:30 - 9:42)
Okay, so wait a minute, Regina. This is an interview where they're coming to your house. Are they asking you these sex questions out loud?

Because if they're asking this out loud, I'm really going to be worried that people might not be honest, especially about like cheating on their spouse.

[Regina] (9:44 - 9:57)
No, they did not interview out loud about sex. For the sex questions, they save those for the end. And then you go answer those in private, on paper, and then you give it back to the survey worker in a sealed envelope.

[Kristin] (9:58 - 10:02)
Okay, that makes a lot of sense. That's definitely going to make it easier for people to be truthful. I'm glad they did it that way.

Right.

[Regina] (10:03 - 10:56)
So they have been asking about sex in the GSS basically every other year since 1989. And here's the question they ask. Ready?

About how often did you have sex during the last 12 months? They give you seven categories to choose from. And I'm going to read you all of those categories right now because this is going to come up again and again today when we're talking about the stats.

And because I want everyone to be following along and thinking about how they would answer the question themselves. Okay. How often did you have sex in the last year?

Not at all. Once or twice. Once a month.

Two to three times a month. Once a week. Two to three times a week.

Or more than three times a week. I'm going to give you a moment to think about that.

[Kristin] (10:56 - 11:19)
That's actually not that easy to answer if you start to think about it. It's kind of assuming that people have consistent behavior over the entire year and that's not always the case. So like what if you had sex three times a week for six weeks and then broke up with your partner and then had no sex the rest of the year?

I mean, this is asking people to like do averages in their head. It's not that simple.

[Regina] (11:20 - 12:04)
It's not easy. I think it does require people doing some mathematical weighting, like you said, to figure out which category they're in. And Kristin, side note, did you know that sometimes sex therapists recommend that people keep a sex journal?

Like how some people track their workouts or food. You can track your sexual encounters and you can even buy online some pre-formatted sex journal workbooks. Yes.

[Kristin]
No. Like a running log?

[Regina]
Yes.

I found some great sex journal books online. One was called Your Daily Sex Logbook. Or this one, more provocative, Your Sex and Cannabis Logbook. Quite specific.

[Kristin] (12:04 - 12:12)
Okay. Well, okay.

I'm going to give them credit because they're collecting data. We're pro-data on this podcast.

[Regina] (12:13 - 12:32)
We are absolutely pro-data. And if it comes with cute figures, because I want to tell you about my favorite, it was a notepad. And on the cover, it had the words, it's magic with a cute little cartoon magic wand vibrator character with rainbows and clouds all around it.

[Kristin] (12:33 - 12:45)
I can see keeping track of your daily steps or calories, but like, really? What's the purpose of that? I mean, I understand steps because you're trying to increase them.

Is it you're trying to increase? Like, what's the goal there?

[Regina] (12:45 - 12:59)
I think maybe just reflecting on, oh, like you can rate it on a scale of one to 10. How magical was that last encounter? You could do all kinds of self-quantification for this.

[Kristin] (13:01 - 13:06)
So if you're keeping one of those, that's going to make it a lot easier to answer the GSS survey though. They should hand them out.

[Regina] (13:06 - 13:43)
Absolutely. That's what I think. So maybe the GSS people should just distribute them widely ahead of time so people can have some data.

So, okay. Fun digression back to the site. So you can see already that we might have some, oh, let's say measurement accuracy issues.

If people don't already have their magic wand spreadsheet, right? Ready to go. Yeah.

So what did the researchers do? They looked at this GSS question and they looked at responses from 1989, the first time they asked it, through 2014.

[Kristin] (13:44 - 14:04)
Right. You said this paper was published in 2017. So they're only using data through 2014 because, of course, it always takes a while to like download, analyze the data, write up the paper.

That does mean though, Regina, that the data we're talking about today are actually over a decade old. So they don't apply to the last decade, which might be of more interest to us.

[Regina] (14:04 - 15:05)
Right. This is an excellent point, Kristin. So I went looking for more recent peer-reviewed papers that use the general social survey or other high-quality data set.

And I did find a couple of solid papers that go up through about 2018, which we'll talk about next. But there's not really much beyond that in the peer-reviewed literature.

Not yet anyway. It's not super surprising. There's always going to be a lag. But I do want to say some of those recent sex recession headlines you might have seen, many didn't actually come from peer-reviewed research.

I mean, maybe they're from places like datingadvice.com, like we talked about. But I also saw many of them coming from a particular think tank called the Institute for Family Studies. And they post a lot of non-peer-reviewed analyses as blog posts on their site.

And the media pick those up.

[Kristin] (15:06 - 15:18)
Yes. And, Regina, this episode led us to find their website, which has some interesting statistical takes. And we're actually going to tackle some of their claims in a future episode, which is going to be a lot of fun.

So stay tuned.

[Regina] (15:19 - 15:59)
A lot of fun. But for today, we're just going to stick with the strongest evidence we have, which mostly takes us through the late 2010s. And it's actually tricky to make solid conclusions for the early 2020s anyway, because the data are messy then due to the pandemic.

[Kristin]
Oh, sure.

[Regina]
Okay. So let's talk about the data for this analysis.

What did the researchers do? They divided all people 18 and older into age groups. So we're just going to focus on the 18 to 29 group.

And I'm just going to call them young people, just to make it easy.

[Kristin] (15:59 - 16:01)
Those are young people for sure. Yes.

[Regina] (16:02 - 16:14)
Okay. So they also grouped the survey data into basically half-decade eras. So you have the early 90s era, the late 90s era.

I'm picturing the fashion and music in my head already.

[Kristin] (16:15 - 16:15)
Yes.

[Regina] (16:15 - 16:19)
Early 2000s, late 2000s, early 2010s.

[Kristin] (16:19 - 16:23)
I think it all peaks in the late 1990s. That's the peak of fashion and music, Regina.

[Regina] (16:25 - 16:28)
Yes. That's when we were in grad school together.

[Kristin] (16:28 - 16:29)
Yes, exactly.

[Regina] (16:29 - 16:32)
Yes. Was that peak civilization right there?

[Kristin] (16:32 - 16:33)
Peak civilization, absolutely.

[Regina] (16:33 - 16:54)
Right, right. Palo Alto. The survey is cross-sectional.

So it's not like we're following any one group. We're not following the Gen Xers like us. Over time, we're just asking whether young people as surveyed in the early 90s had more or less sex than young people who were surveyed in the early 2000s or whatever.

Right.

[Kristin] (16:54 - 16:59)
Important to keep in mind. So, Regina, did they find that sex in young people declined over these time periods?

[Regina] (17:00 - 17:03)
Well, yes and no, actually.

[Kristin] (17:03 - 17:06)
That's not a very definitive answer, Regina. Explain.

[Regina] (17:06 - 17:19)
No, it's not. Right.

So it's an interesting story, of course. First of all, from the early 90s to the early 2000s, there was an upward trend of young people having sex.

[Kristin] (17:19 - 17:28)
Oh, okay. Well, sex in the city, that was a late 1990s, early 2000s thing. Sex was definitely in the air.

So that kind of checks out. Yeah.

[Regina] (17:28 - 17:41)
You and I were young, right? We were living that. But then what happened?

From the early 2000s to the early 2010s, sex in young people declined. It decreased, went down.

[Kristin] (17:41 - 17:51)
Okay. So this is interesting because when you hear those headlines that we talked about earlier, it sounds like it's just like young people, sex going down. But it's not quite that simple.

It sounds like it went up and then it went down.

[Regina] (17:52 - 18:21)
It's like a hill. They climb the hill and then they fall off the hill. Yes.

Yes, that's exactly right. But that did not make it as interesting a headline, though, when you say it like that. That's true.

Much more interesting to say decline. But when the researchers compared that first and last time point in the data, young people in the early 90s, young people in the early 2010s, there was no statistically significant difference or, as I say, no statistically discernible difference. Nothing.

[Kristin] (18:22 - 18:33)
Doesn't that kind of undermine all of the headlines then? So it's not that sex has really declined because it's no different than it was in the early 1990s. And as far as I remember, there was plenty of sex during the early 1990s among young people.

[Regina] (18:34 - 19:21)
There was. But saying again, there's no real change in sex behavior does not sell newspapers. So here is what the researchers did when they compared that peak time point that I talked about in the early 2000s, peak civilization to the most recent time point, the early 2010s.

Then there was a statistically discernible drop. So if you look at first time point to last time point, the effect goes away. But if you cherry pick the maximum, then it is there.

So at best, we can say that young people in the early 2010s are doing worse than the early 2000s, but not worse than the early 1990s. Okay. But Kristin, we have to talk about how much sex, how much did it drop?

[Kristin] (19:22 - 19:22)
Right. Effect size.

[Regina] (19:23 - 19:56)
Okay. To do that, we have to think about how sexual frequency was measured. And remember, people picked one of those seven categories, and what the researchers did was assign a number code to each of those categories between zero and six.

So it's a seven point scale. So like having sex once a week was coded with the number four, for example. And this is called an ordinal scale or an ordinal variable.

So pop quiz, Kristin, explain what an ordinal variable is.

[Kristin] (19:56 - 20:25)
Right. An ordinal variable is categories like sex once a month or sex never. But those categories have an order because some of the frequency is obviously higher than others.

But the thing about ordinal variables is those categories are not necessarily evenly spaced out, like in these sex questions, they're not evenly spaced out here. It's not uncommon, though, for researchers to assign ordinal variables numbers like they did here, zero to six, and then treat them as if they're a number can be a little dicey to do that.

[Regina] (20:25 - 20:53)
Exactly. And we will see what happens when they do that. And of course, when you assign them these numbers, you can take an average of the numbers, you can find the average sexual frequency rating in each survey time period.

So all those codes, zero to six, add them up, divide by N. So that maximum drop that we talked about, the average rating goes from about 3.5 to 3.3.

[Kristin] (20:53 - 21:09)
OK, wait a minute. That's a 0.2 drop on a seven point scale, which, first of all, does not sound that big. It does not sound to me, Regina, like a sex recession. And secondly, it's hard to even know what that means because these are categories.

So what does a 0.2 category drop translate to?

[Regina] (21:10 - 21:59)
Exactly. This is part of the problem of assigning these numerical codes. So 3.5, all we can say is that it's in between a category three, which is two to three times a month, and category four, which is once a week. But we can say the same thing about 3.3, which is also between the two. So the researchers realized this, that it was a little incomprehensible to use these average ratings. So they tried to make the numbers more interpretable by presenting them in a different way, by transforming them.

So they took those seven categories and converted them to an estimated number of sexual encounters per year. So if you are in the once a week category, that would be 52 times a year. Once a month would be 12 times a year.

[Kristin] (21:59 - 22:00)
OK, those actually seem reasonable.

[Regina] (22:01 - 22:37)
But here's where it gets weird. The top category, remember, that was more than three times a week. So what number do you assign to that?

Four, five, six, seven, eight? The researchers here picked five times a week. So five times 52 is 260 times you are having sex per year.

But if they had chosen four, it would have been 208. Big difference. If they had chosen seven, that would be, what, 365 times a year, sex every day.

No break, no vacation.

[Kristin] (22:37 - 22:48)
OK, so wow, that is really arbitrary. And that arbitrary choice, that's probably going to overwhelm the rest of the scale, because that is so much compared with, you know, 52 times a year or 12 times a year.

[Regina] (22:48 - 23:09)
Exactly. OK, so the researchers then used this new numeric scale and looked at that maximum drop that we talked about, and they found that drop to be eight. So they said there was about, on average, eight fewer sexual encounters per year in this age group.

[Kristin] (23:09 - 23:38)
Right. Even that is not that huge. Eight fewer per year is less than one fewer per month.

That does, again, not sound like a, quote, sex recession. And of course, that number is totally dependent on how they weighted those upper categories. So it's not even very reliable, because if you plugged in 180 there instead of 260, it would totally change the number.

And Regina, actually, I wanted to point out one thing, because when you sent me the paper and I was skimming through it, there was one thing that jumped out at me, and I wanted to point this out.

[Regina] (23:38 - 23:52)
Right, right. So I love this part. I want to just point out to everyone, it's not specifically about young people, but it is definitely worth a quick statistical detour, because it has such a great paradox and lesson at the end of it.

[Kristin] (23:53 - 24:58)
Yeah, it does. Because as I was skimming through the results, they were talking about all adults at first, and they stated that, overall, in all adults, married people had more sex than never married people. And that made sense to me, that it's like, OK, you have somebody in the bed next to you, sure.

But then almost in the next sentence, they stated the opposite. They said, never married people had more sex than married people. And that seemed like such a huge inconsistency that I immediately stopped and said, whoa, wait, what just happened?

And I tried to puzzle this out. And it turned out that what happened is, if you use the original, that 0 to 6 scale, then married people were higher than never married people. But when they translated that ordinal scale into the number of sexual acts per year, then it totally flipped.

Suddenly, never married people on that scale were having sex more times per year, on average, than married people. And so when I first read this, I just assumed there were two separate questions on the GSS survey. They asked two different questions about sex frequency, because it was totally counterintuitive to me that a single question could yield the opposite results.

[Regina] (24:59 - 25:08)
It totally contradicts our intuition. But Kristin, let's talk about how this can even happen mathematically, because you came up with a nice toy example here.

[Kristin] (25:09 - 25:44)
Yeah, I had to convince myself that this could be true, that a single question could give opposite results. So I just made up some simple numbers to see how this could happen. Imagine that 50% of married people picked Category 2, that was the sex once a month, and 50% picked Category 4, that was the sex once a week.

That would average on the ordinal scale to 3, right? Halfway between 2 and 4. But imagine that never married people are more extreme.

So let's say two-thirds of never married people are at 0, they're having no sex, but a third of them are in Category 6. They're the ones out partying, having all the fun. That averages out on the ordinal scale to just 2.

[Regina] (25:45 - 25:54)
Right. So married people would have a higher average on that ordinal numerical code scale than never married people, which is just like what the researchers saw.

[Kristin] (25:55 - 26:22)
Exactly. But if you then translate those categories into the number of sexual acts in the way that they did, the married people's average comes out to be 32 times per year, right? Because half of them are at 12 once a month, and half are at 52 once a week.

That averages to 32. But the never married, because you're averaging in this huge 260 value in Category 6, their average works out to be 86 times per year. So suddenly you get a bigger number for never married than married.

It flips completely.

[Regina] (26:23 - 26:47)
And we do know that something like this happened because it did flip in the actual data. So Kristin, thank you. Great teaching point, which is how you treat your variable.

It literally can change your story. Okay, Kristin, there is one more analysis in this paper that's worth talking about, because you and I thought it was a bit, let's say, unusual.

[Kristin] (26:48 - 27:42)
Hysterical, Regina. That's the word you're looking for, hysterical. And actually, it was so good, it involves time travel, actually, that I think we got to dangle this out as a teaser.

And we're going to get into it after the break.

Welcome back to Normal Curves. Today, we're talking about is there a great sex recession among young people?

And we were about to finish up this 2017 paper by talking about the most fun and also ridiculous analysis in the paper. And Regina, why don't you set it up for us?

[Regina] (27:42 - 28:13)
Yep. Okay. What they did here was some fancy models where they try to compare sexual practices in different generations of young people.

But we are talking very different generations, Kristin, like comparing millennials born in the 1990s to people born in the 1930s, basically these millennials' grandparents or even people born in the early 1900s, their great-grandparents.

[Kristin] (28:14 - 28:42)
Yes, this analysis was just wild. So they were basically saying, hey, here's how much sex young millennials were having, say, in the early 2000s. And we're going to compare that to how much sex we think, we're guessing, that young people were having back in like the early 1900s.

Of course, we don't have data on what young people in the early 1900s were doing. There was no GSS back then. So this is just a wild extrapolation from the data.

[Regina] (28:42 - 29:12)
All right. I love this. Okay, just to think through, what kind of data do they have?

How did they even try to do this? So remember, they're using data about sex that they started collecting in 1989. So think about those millennials' great-grandparents.

They're in their 80s answering these GSS questions about their current sex life in their 80s. And the grandparents are doing the same thing in their 50s about their current sex life.

[Kristin] (29:13 - 29:39)
Right. So the researchers are taking data about what these people are reporting for current sex in their 50s, 60s, 70s, or 80s, and also data on what young people are reporting today. And they are using that to make a fancy model.

And they're extrapolating all the way backwards to estimate what people who were young in the early 1900s, 1920s, 1930s, how much sex they were having 30 to 60 years ago. So you just can't do that.

[Regina] (29:40 - 30:17)
I love this visual image, though, Kristin, because it's feeling to me like those erotic time-traveling romance series, you know, like, I don't know, Bridgerton, right? Or Outlander or something. Except, Kristin, okay, here's my idea.

Picture this. I'm going to pitch this to you. Instead of a hot Scottish dude or a, I don't know, young, beautiful Scottish woman, it's a hot sex survey researcher with a clipboard.

And they're time-traveling back to the 1920s, and they're going around to these flappers parties, you know, these great Gatsby parties, and they're asking people about sex.

[Kristin] (30:18 - 30:26)
And it's awesome. That would totally make an excellent Netflix show. I would totally watch that, Regina.

And yeah, maybe they were during the flapper era having more sex.

[Regina] (30:27 - 30:29)
So I'm going to call Spielberg now. Be right back.

[Kristin] (30:31 - 30:50)
So hopefully that will make Netflix, Regina. But the part that was really wild about this is it made their abstract, in their abstract, they claimed that their data show that young millennials are having less sex than young people did back in what they call the silent generation. Those were people like in the, you know, basically around World War II.

[Regina] (30:51 - 31:02)
Kind of wild. It seemed like a little overreaching to make the result of your very fancy extrapolation model the centerpiece of your abstract. I don't love it.

[Kristin] (31:02 - 31:37)
Yeah. This is just so outside of the bounds of what you're supposed to do in statistics that, yeah. You know, Regina, I actually do believe that maybe it's true.

Maybe younger people are having less sex. It's my anecdotal impression that teenagers today, compared to when we were young, they seem to be dating and having sex later in life. So if more people were delaying sexual debut past 18 years of age, that would mean that we would have more zeros in the data set.

So could more zeros explain the small average drop we're seeing in young people?

[Regina] (31:38 - 32:05)
Absolutely. It could absolutely be more zeros in there. And actually, that is exactly what the next paper I want to talk about gets into.

So the next paper, it was published in 2020 in JAMA Network Open. And the senior author, Kristin, is Debby Herbenick. And you might remember her name from the male equipment size episode.

She was the one who did the condom fit and feel study.

[Kristin] (32:06 - 32:22)
Okay. Sadly, I don't remember her name. Sorry.

But I do remember the condom fit and feel study, which is why it's so important to have a good name for your study, because that stuck in my memory. And I do remember also, Regina, that we liked that study. So I'm going to assume that she does good research.

[Regina] (32:22 - 32:41)
She does. I like her very much. I follow her work.

So she and her team, they are using the General Social Survey, that GSS again, but they had access to more recent surveys because they were publishing a few years later. And so they looked at data from 2000 to 2018.

[Kristin] (32:42 - 32:46)
Okay, so they're looking about four years later than that previous study we talked about.

[Regina] (32:46 - 32:54)
Right, right. And they categorized young people a little differently. They said 18 to 24 is a young person.

[Kristin] (32:54 - 32:56)
Oh, wow. So that is a really young person. Okay.

[Regina] (32:57 - 33:24)
They are. Now, here is the main emphasis of their paper. I love how they basically say this right in the introduction.

Hey, previous studies have looked at the average number of times people have sex every year, but that average might not tell us what we actually care about. They were basically calling out that 2017 paper that we just talked about. They said, so in our paper, we are doing the stats differently.

[Kristin] (33:24 - 33:25)
Oh, excellent.

[Regina] (33:25 - 33:57)
So instead of focusing on averages, what they do is focus on sexual inactivity first. Like you were saying, Kristin, the zeros, the celibacy, people who reported having no sex at all in the past year. So remember that zero to six scale that we talked about with the seven categories?

The researchers changed this to just zero or one. Zero means no sex, that first category, and one means everything else, at least some sex.

[Kristin] (33:58 - 34:09)
Okay, so they collapsed this all into a binary variable, which is probably going to be more accurate. And then they are answering a very specific question then, how many people are having sex at all versus how many people are not having sex?

[Regina] (34:10 - 34:19)
Right, which means they are now using logistic regression to do their analysis, which you and I love. So Kristin, remind everyone what logistic regression is.

[Kristin] (34:19 - 34:52)
Yeah, I teach a whole class on this, actually. Logistic regression is the regression technique we use for categorical variables. So instead of modeling an average, now we are modeling the probability of being sexually active versus sexually inactive.

And the nice thing here, Regina, is in that last paper we looked at, they were comparing different pairs of years, which we don't have to do if we are using a regression. If we're using a regression, we can put year into the model as a predictor, and we can look at all of the trends over all of the time periods and not just isolating to two arbitrary time points.

[Regina] (34:52 - 35:04)
Exactly, Kristin, yes. So they also did a secondary analysis where they collapsed the data a different way. This one was into weekly sexual activity versus everybody else.

[Kristin] (35:05 - 35:12)
Okay, so very sexually active versus less active. I like how they're preserving the categories here and not trying to translate them into numbers.

[Regina] (35:13 - 35:23)
Exactly, I love this too. Another nice thing they did is analyze men and women separately because they suspected that trends might differ by gender.

[Kristin] (35:23 - 35:25)
Oh, that could be really important, actually.

[Regina] (35:25 - 35:44)
It could, it could, and we will see that. Okay, so let's start with the young men first. I want to give a visual just to help us all picture the results.

And Kristin, since you and I were in classrooms at Stanford in the early 2000s, that is exactly what I'm picturing in the med school.

[Kristin] (35:44 - 36:03)
Oh, you're picturing like M106, Regina, that awful lecture hall in the med school that we used to teach in? You know, it's still there, and I'm still teaching in that room. It hasn't changed a bit.

I always book that room, though, because it's way easier to book than the newer rooms. Plus, it's right across the courtyard from my office, so it's a very, very short walk, and I'm lazy.

[Regina] (36:05 - 36:31)
You are bringing back so many memories. I taught my first course in that auditorium. Okay, M106, we've got 100 young men in the classroom here, ages 18 to 24.

It's early 2000. They're in a classroom, and we asked them all, hey, you guys, who has not had sex in the past year? Stand up and go to the back of the room.

You're picturing it, right?

[Kristin] (36:32 - 36:36)
Yep. They're walking up those steep stairs to the back of the top of the auditorium. It's a really steep room.

[Regina] (36:37 - 36:47)
Exactly. So I'm using easy round numbers here for visualization, but we're going to have about 19 guys out of those 100 stand up and go to the back.

[Kristin] (36:48 - 36:50)
It's like the opposite of the walk of shame, Regina.

[Regina] (36:52 - 37:20)
I guess it kind of depends on your perspective and your goals in life, maybe. Okay, so let's look at the 81 guys that are still sitting down who are having sex, and we ask, hey, how many of you have been having sex at least weekly in the past year? Come on down to the front of the classroom.

Stand up here with us, and the researchers found that about 52 of those 100 guys would then come walk down to the front.

[Kristin] (37:20 - 37:32)
All right, so we have 19 celibate, no sex, standing in the back of the room. 52 having weekly sex, standing in the front of the room, and that leaves 29 still in their seats, and those are the ones having some sex, but not weekly. Got it.

[Regina] (37:33 - 38:21)
Exactly. Okay, now we're going to fast forward. We're going to do our time travel thing again.

Late 2010s, same classroom, different guys, but now since it's the 2010s, right? I told you I was picturing like fashion. I am now picturing them with little man buns.

Remember that trend, the man buns? I do not remember. I'll share pictures with you.

You remember this. Okay, now the classroom is switching up, so we've got those 52 in the front of the classroom having weekly sex. Two of them are going to go sit down in the middle because they're having less frequent sex, but 13 of those 52 in the front, they're going to have to walk to the back of the room because instead of having regular weekly sex, they are now celibate, 13 of them.

[Kristin] (38:22 - 38:35)
Okay, so basically you're saying there was a reshuffling and about 15% of men went down in their amount of sex, which is a lot, but it's not like everyone changed. It's not like everyone's having less sex. Right.

How does that compare with the women?

[Regina] (38:36 - 39:07)
Right, young women, very different story, actually. So let's go over to, let's pretend there's an M107, women's classroom, segregated by sex, women's classroom. All right, we're back in 2000 again.

Now out of those 100 women in here, we've got 15 celibate women in the back of the room and we have 55 having weekly sex in the front and about 30 having semi-regular sex sitting down in the middle.

[Kristin] (39:07 - 39:15)
Regina, that actually looks a lot like the male classroom back in 2000. It was 1929 and 52 for men, so they're very similar between the sexes back then.

[Regina] (39:16 - 39:58)
Very similar back in 2000. All right, now we're going to fast forward again, late 2010s, different women again, but now we've got to update them. So now I'm picturing them wearing skinny jeans, right?

You remember the skinny jeans. Okay, here is the crazy part. We fast forwarded, but the numbers for the women don't look much different.

So there's women in the front who are having weekly sex, right? Two decades ago, there were 55 of them. Now there's 52.

That's it. Three of them have walked back to the celibate group, but the middle 30, pretty much the same. Again, I'm rounding numbers here, but it is not drastically different.

[Kristin] (39:58 - 40:05)
Okay, so the young women haven't really changed. So when we're talking about the sex recession, are we just talking about young men then?

[Regina] (40:06 - 40:49)
No. I feel like this is the big cultural story, right? Young men having sex, the way that we think of them and the way that they're having sex has really shifted over just two decades, but not so much for women.

It hasn't really changed for them. Also, let me get back and talk about the stats for a moment. I can't help myself.

But notice that in the previous paper, when we're talking about averages over the entire population of young people, we weren't really getting the full story like we were talking about here. So I like what you said. What the researchers did here was leave the ordinal variable as ordinal.

They kept the categories instead of forcing them into numbers because when you do that, you can change the picture.

[Kristin] (40:50 - 41:35)
Right. Instead of us now saying like, oh, everybody's having eight sexual acts less per year, which is kind of the picture that came out of the other paper. It's, oh, 15% of young men have shifted categories.

So it's a much finer, nuanced, more accurate picture. Regina, let's take a moment to recap. So far, it looks like there may have been a small drop in sex frequency in young people from the early 2000s to the late 2010s, but it looks like it's isolated to young men, not young women.

I actually, again, find this plausible because we are looking here only at 18 to 24. This is a really young group. And if some men are postponing sexual debut, maybe starting at 20 rather than 18, couldn't this explain what we're seeing?

[Regina] (41:35 - 42:26)
That might be part of it. You're right, Kristin, because there are some data that seem to suggest a small rise in the age of sexual debut in men, especially over the past two decades. But it looks like that change may not be enough to explain this trend that we're seeing across all young men.

So that's not the entire story, let's say. But another theory or another guess that some other people have proposed is maybe it's a shift in sexual practices. Maybe young people have been spooked about intercourse and pregnancy and STDs, so maybe they're changing the type of sexual fun that they're having.

Maybe the less sex is really just less intercourse, but not less sexual fun, broadly defined.

[Kristin] (42:26 - 42:42)
Oh, yeah. I mean, that GSS question really doesn't specify. And actually, when you first asked the question, Regina, it did go through my head, what counts as sex?

That was my immediate question. And people might interpret that differently, and that could affect these results.

[Regina] (42:42 - 42:50)
Absolutely. So luckily, the next paper I have for us gets into exactly that. It's kind of philosophical.

What is sex?

[Kristin] (42:51 - 43:28)
All right. Sounds great. But after the break.

Welcome back to Normal Curves. Today, we're looking at the claim that young people are having less sex than ever before the Great Sex Recession. And we were about to talk about what do we mean when we ask if people are having sex?

How do we define sex?

[Regina] (43:29 - 43:35)
This, I think, Kristin, is going to be the most sexually explicit part of the episode right here.

[Kristin] (43:35 - 43:38)
Oh, no. Are we going to lose our PG-13 rating here, Regina?

[Regina] (43:39 - 44:06)
I will do my best to keep it clean for you, Kristin. But there might be some clinical terms. Just fair warning.

Because as you pointed out, the GSS just said, how many times have you had, quote, sex? Leaving sex up to you to interpret, which could be confusing because I don't know about you, but I can imagine a few variations, right, of sex. And I'm not sure whether that counts or not.

[Kristin] (44:06 - 44:27)
Yeah, I'm definitely with you. I'm hazy on what counts here. Of course, all of this is reminding me, Regina, this is dating ourselves, but Bill Clinton, right?

I did not have sex with that woman. I think that's the philosophical touchpoint on what is sex that we all remember. I'm not sure how he would answer the GSS survey, but he might answer it differently than others.

[Regina] (44:28 - 45:40)
I think from his testimony, we know exactly how he would answer the GSS survey. Okay. And the scientific idea behind this, the reason that we're looking into it, not just because it's fun and we get to talk about different types of sex, it's because this was a serious sociological hypothesis that maybe people are having less penile vaginal intercourse.

Kristin, do you like how I slipped in the first technical term in there for you? It makes it sound so unfun when you say it that way, doesn't it? Penile vaginal intercourse, PVI.

How about some PVI tonight, honey? Hmm. Hubba hubba.

But yes, maybe young people are doing other things with their genitalia instead, but that would be part of this whole sex recession story. So the title of the paper is Changes in Penile Vaginal Intercourse Frequency and Sexual Repertoire from 2009 to 2018. And I just got to say, sexual repertoire is such a great term.

It makes it sound like concert performances or something, doesn't it?

[Kristin] (45:40 - 45:43)
Okay. That is a great title. I'm going to give them that.

Yes.

[Regina] (45:44 - 46:14)
So this one is led by Debby Herbenick, again, published this time in 2020. I know she's good, right? I'm a fan girl.

Published in 2022 in the Archives of Sexual Behavior. They are using a different data set here, though. They are using the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior.

So the researchers have data from this NSSHB from two surveys, one in 2009 and one in 2018.

[Kristin] (46:15 - 46:25)
Okay. I have to say I'm really glad that we are getting to a different data set because that GSS survey, as nice as it was, I think it had some serious limitations. So I'm happy we're looking at some independent data.

[Regina] (46:26 - 46:41)
Exactly. And this one, unlike the GSS, however, does not have someone coming to your house and asking you about your sexual repertoire. It is conducted online, but it's through a survey firm called Ipsos.

[Kristin] (46:41 - 46:54)
And we should point out that Ipsos is a reputable company. They do a lot of online surveys, and they are good at getting representative samples. So this is definitely nothing like the datingadvice.com survey that we saw earlier.

[Regina] (46:55 - 47:46)
Right. Professionally done. And Kristin, one of the strengths of this study is that in addition to having data on adults ages 18 to 49, this data set actually includes adolescents ages 14 to 17.

And this is valuable data because they needed special permission from parents, you can imagine, to ask their adolescent kids about their sexual repertoire. Not easy. So, Kristin, you might start to blush at this next part.

Just warning. The survey is asking a bunch of questions. Are you ready?

I'm ready. They ask, how recently have you had penile vaginal intercourse? How recently have you masturbated alone?

Masturbated with a partner? Given oral sex? Received oral sex?

Had anal sex?

[Kristin] (47:47 - 47:53)
Okay, yeah, I am definitely blushing, but I do appreciate the specificity. It does lead to better data.

[Regina] (47:53 - 48:51)
I need to point out that at least it's still in relatively neutral terms, because I looked this up in the olden days when people historically talked about these sexual acts. They had some really creative euphemistic terms for this kind of thing, and I made a list of them just for you. You know I've got to share them with you.

Okay, so guess which practice this refers to. This is like sex jeopardy right here. To self-pollute, to digitate, to fight one's turkey, to dash one's doodle.

In the 1600s, they actually called this frigging from the Latin term for scrubbing or cleaning, and one author in the 1800s noted that this practice was also known as keeping down the census.

[Kristin] (48:52 - 48:57)
Oh, I like that one. I can guess what you're talking about. That would definitely keep the census down.

[Regina] (48:58 - 49:57)
Okay, the next one was harder to find PG-13 versions of like these historical terms. Sometimes they were a little visually explicit, but I managed to find some good ones here. Okay, larking, carnal knowledge of the mouth, oral congress.

Okay, but my favorite is this one, gamma hoosh, which comes from the medieval Latin for going below the base note in the old musical scale. Gamahuche, isn't that great? Or you can just call it gama for short.

I love this one. I did a whole deep dive. It's from 19th century France, and a couple of online entries actually said it's still considered vulgar in British English today maybe, so I apologize to like our British listeners if that just hurt your ears.

Okay, back to the science. I wanted to give you that nice little digression in there just to make you blush a little bit more.

[Kristin] (49:58 - 49:59)
That did make me blush completely.

[Regina] (50:02 - 50:18)
Okay, considering that all of these things are clearly embarrassing because people have to give them really creative names, you really need to wonder how accurate are these people and how honest are they being when they're answering these questions, right?

[Kristin] (50:19 - 50:32)
Right, we definitely have to worry about social desirability bias again. Now, this is online, so that might help, but you know, if you're asking young teenagers, 14 to 17 year old, I mean, do they even know what these things are? I don't think I did when I was 14.

[Regina] (50:34 - 50:37)
I'm not sure I did. I was definitely a late bloomer, I confess.

[Kristin] (50:38 - 50:50)
I think I learned these terms actually, Regina, when I took a medical anthropology course in college. I actually wrote a term paper where I had to use these terms in the term paper.

[Regina] (50:50 - 50:54)
Wait a minute, you did a term paper about oral sex? Is that what you're telling me?

[Kristin] (50:55 - 51:12)
It was a term paper about different kinds of sex, and I don't know, I think this was assigned to me. I can't remember what the actual paper was about, but I do remember that I had to read academic papers about these different kinds of sex. I think I may have learned those terms from that term paper, actually.

[Regina] (51:13 - 51:24)
You were preordained to do this podcast. I just have to say, do you have this paper? Like, I'm wishing you could dig it up so we can find baby Kristin writing about oral sex.

[Kristin] (51:24 - 51:47)
I absolutely have this paper somewhere, but it is probably on an old, old floppy disc that I'm not sure we can read anywhere. I got an A in the class. Actually, I think I got a citation in the course because you could choose to do a term paper or take a final exam, or you could do both and then get the higher grade from the two.

I think just to make sure I got the higher grade, I did both, and I think I got a citation in the course.

[Regina] (51:48 - 52:25)
Oh, I love that it was the sex paper that pushed you over the edge to get the citation. Okay, getting back to the study, thank you for that lovely digression. You just have the best stories in there.

So, the survey then, instead of asking people how many times did you do this in the past year, right, which is what the GSS did, this time the survey asks when did you last do this? Like, have you done this particular sexual thing in the past 30 days, in the past 90 days, in the past six months, the past year, more than a year ago, or never?

[Kristin] (52:25 - 52:34)
I think that's easier to answer actually. So, we've got very specific behaviors and we've got finer time resolution, excellent data. What did they find?

[Regina] (52:35 - 53:17)
Right, so their results basically answered two separate questions. First, the researchers wanted to know did penile-vaginal intercourse actually decline from 2009 to 2018? And if so, then second question, did other sexual behaviors, like gamahuching, did those increase in compensation?

So, answer to their first question, did PVI go down? Yes, it did. For adolescents 14 to 17, about 21% reported some PVI in 2009, and that dropped to about 11% in 2018.

Statistically discernible.

[Kristin] (53:17 - 53:26)
That's actually not totally shocking because we know separate data that teenage pregnancy rates are going down and one might think that those two things would be correlated.

[Regina] (53:27 - 53:52)
Maybe even causal. Yes. So, for adults, now they only had adults 18 to 49, they didn't break it into finer groups, but intercourse for all adults went down.

In 2009, 76% had reported some kind of PVI in the past year. In 2018, that dropped a little bit to 72%. Also statistically discernible though.

[Kristin] (53:52 - 53:58)
Okay, so that lines up with what we saw before, a statistically significant drop, but frankly 4%, not that big.

[Regina] (53:59 - 54:45)
Right, okay. But now they asked the big question, what about all of those other forms of sexual activity for adolescents? All of those other activities went down over time.

I'm going to give the exact number because they're kind of fun. So, between 2009 and 2018, giving oral sex drops from 17% to 8%. Receiving oral sex drops from 21% to 10%.

Anal sex, 4% to 2%, so that was never high. Masturbation with a partner from 12% to 7%. But Kristin, this is the shocking one.

Even solo masturbation drops from 56% to 40%.

[Kristin] (54:45 - 55:00)
Oh, that is interesting. So, it's not just about not having a partner, like less people partnering up. It really is kind of going along with what my impression is that young people mature later.

Teens are taking longer to even become sexual, maybe.

[Regina] (55:00 - 55:42)
Exactly, which I find fascinating, just given the sheer prevalence of sex online right now. So, that was the adolescents. Let's just look quickly at the adults, 18 to 49.

It's showing the same trend in general, that everything was going down, except the solo masturbation. That one stayed pretty steady at like 73%. Yep.

Once you figure out how it works, then that's a good standby. So, it feels, Kristin, like it's just become a less, I don't know, sexy time all around. These trends are also fitting with what researchers have found in the UK and Japan and Germany and Australia.

I'll put some of those other references in the show notes.

[Kristin] (55:43 - 55:53)
So, if we think there is some decline, particularly in young men, and it's not due to this, like, shifting sexual repertoire, what are the other theories, Regina, which might explain this change if it's real?

[Regina] (55:53 - 56:46)
Well, if you go to Reddit, people have a lot of theories about why this is happening, especially if it is happening to them personally. But there's not a whole lot of definite answers from peer-reviewed literature, which is what we care about, of course. There was an interesting commentary, however, in that issue of JAMA Network Open that had that second paper we talked about.

The commentary was by Jean Twenge, who we've already heard from today, and she thinks the why behind this sex recession is two big things. And, yes, the first one, just like you said, delayed development. She said, as support for this, teenagers are less likely to drive these days, less likely to drink alcohol, less likely to leave the house without their parents.

Oh, goodness. Or to hold down a part-time job compared to back in our generation.

[Kristin] (56:46 - 56:53)
Interesting. Although, I have to say, Regina, some of that is good, right? We want them to drink less alcohol, so maybe this is not all bad.

[Regina] (56:54 - 57:20)
Okay, good point. But even when they do reach adulthood, where it's okay to do these sorts of things, the author points out that many people are still unemployed and living at home with their parents, particularly young men. And the employment part might be key, actually, because they've found that as employment rates go up, sexual frequency also goes up.

[Kristin] (57:21 - 57:29)
Oh, well, I mean, that makes a lot of sense, because if you can't afford to live on your own and you're still living with mom and dad, that definitely might put a damper on your sex life.

[Regina] (57:30 - 57:54)
Just a little bit. So maybe, I don't know, I'm thinking if young men go out and get jobs, their sex lives might get better, too. I feel like high schools and universities should work that into motivational slogan posters somehow.

Okay, so Twinge's second big possible explanation, the internet.

[Kristin] (57:54 - 58:03)
Oh, that actually makes a lot of sense, too, because the big change since the early 2000s, the rise of the internet and smartphones and all of that, yeah.

[Regina] (58:04 - 58:31)
She points out that the sex rates seem to be going down from, like you said, the early 2000s, right? That was what we said was peak civilization. That was when the internet started to be everywhere.

Social media, video games, streaming services. I'm wondering, maybe this is the real compensation story, Kristin. We're replacing sex with Netflixing one's couch, let's say.

[Kristin] (58:33 - 58:44)
Actually, that makes sense. Like, we're all sitting at home on our phones, you know, watching videos or Netflix or video games, so we're not going out to parties and meeting people. That makes sense to me.

[Regina] (58:45 - 58:58)
Exactly. Who goes to singles bars anymore? Do they even exist?

I mean, Kristin, for me, I think it's more that I'm doing podcasting instead of going out on dates in real life. And I feel like you owe me at least three boyfriends for this podcast.

[Kristin] (58:58 - 59:10)
Are you blaming me for your lack of dating life? You still have a great dating life. What are you talking about?

You're always going out. I have to, like, nail down the time so we can, you know, keep the podcast in between all of your dates.

[Regina] (59:10 - 59:47)
But just think of how many more I could be going out on if I wasn't spending all my time podcasting statistics. Twenge, she had a very apocalyptic perspective on all of this. She said, between the 24-hour availability of entertainment and the temptation to use smartphones and social media, sexual activity may not be as attractive as it once was.

She said there are now many more choices of things to do in the late evening than there once were.

[Kristin] (59:47 - 1:00:00)
I mean, actually, in some ways that doesn't really sound so bad. In other words, she's saying we have a lot of entertaining things to do in the evening and sex is just one of many choices. I don't actually think that's terribly apocalyptic, Regina.

[Regina] (1:00:01 - 1:00:07)
So you're saying we used to have sex because we were bored and cable TV streaming was not available?

[Kristin] (1:00:07 - 1:00:17)
Do you remember when we had to TiVo things? Do you remember that? And, like, what did we even do before TiVo, Regina?

Yeah, we have more options now and, you know, maybe sex is not always the best option.

[Regina] (1:00:18 - 1:00:34)
Okay, all right. You might have a little bit of a point, but I'm hoping that all these much more interesting things to do late night did not spell the end of humanity, right? Maybe that's why the dinosaurs went extinct.

[Kristin] (1:00:35 - 1:00:49)
Sex is dying out. That's the risk here. That was the headline, right?

So maybe that headline was correct. Humanity is doomed because so many good things to watch on Netflix. Not just Netflix.

I don't actually like Netflix that much. I want to say Hulu.

[Regina] (1:00:50 - 1:01:10)
Okay, Hulu. Hulu is responsible for the dying of humanity. Possibly, yeah.

So Twenge does admit that all of this is just her making up hypotheses and researchers just thinking about this because she says, hey, we can't really do a randomized trial. We can't definitively say what's driving all this.

[Kristin] (1:01:10 - 1:01:24)
That would be an interesting randomized trial, Regina. So what, we would randomize people, take away their phones and their social media and their televisions and see if they got bored enough to have more sex. That would be interesting, but I don't think we'd get a lot of takers.

[Regina] (1:01:24 - 1:01:32)
I think you could probably do this with college students, right? You are randomized for a month, no phones. Do you have more sex at the end of it?

[Kristin] (1:01:32 - 1:01:42)
Oh, wow. I mean, you maybe you could do this for extra credit in psychology class. Kids will do anything for extra credit, right?

But Regina, instead of having more sex, they might just read more books.

[Regina] (1:01:42 - 1:01:43)
You think they would read more books?

[Kristin] (1:01:44 - 1:01:49)
Yeah, yeah. If you didn't have the phone and television, you'd read books. That's what we did when we were young.

[Regina] (1:01:49 - 1:01:55)
Oh, you are adorable. Maybe if you lock them in their room, they'd read more books.

[Kristin] (1:01:55 - 1:01:57)
They'd go to the library.

[Regina] (1:01:59 - 1:02:12)
Not the bars. Oh, that is very sweet. Yeah, they are going to go to the library and read War and Peace instead of hooking up behind the book stacks.

That's exactly my hypothesis. Let's just say it would be a little different.

[Kristin] (1:02:12 - 1:02:43)
I think we got to do this study now, Regina. All right, back to the data at hand. I think now we are ready to wrap up this episode and rate the evidence for the claim today, which was that young people are having less sex these days than they used to.

And how do we rate evidence for claims on this podcast with our highly scientific smooch rating scale, where one smooch means little to no evidence for the claim and five smooches means a lot of evidence. So what do you think, Regina? Kiss it or diss it?

How many smooches are you giving this one?

[Regina] (1:02:43 - 1:03:12)
Yeah, I'm kind of torn on this one, Kristin, actually. I wish, for one thing, we had more confidence in our measures because we're just asking people to remember how much sex they had in the past year or whatever. And I want little implantable sensors like we have for watches and rings, right?

And it just does a little bloop every time you have some kind of sexual activity. And there you have it. Good data.

Okay, maybe that's just my wish list, right?

[Kristin] (1:03:12 - 1:03:14)
We're going to need that for the randomized trial, Regina, for sure.

[Regina] (1:03:15 - 1:04:00)
We've got it all planned out. We've got all the technology. But it actually does feel like something has been going on in the past 20 to 25 years.

And it's not that we can compare today's young people to like young people from 100 years ago or even back 50 years ago. That's kind of crazy. But it does feel a little like this whole free love thing has been swinging in the other direction.

And it feels like young people, especially young men, have very different sex lives now than maybe like 25 years ago. So I'm going to give it four smooches. And Kristin, they're chaste smooches, by the way.

No tongue. Because I want to fit in with the young people. What about you?

[Kristin] (1:04:00 - 1:04:33)
So I think I'm along the same lines as you. I'm going to go three and a half smooches, though. I mean, technically, if the claim is just there is somewhat less sex, it looks to me like I'm picturing the 15 men shifting around in the classroom.

So there's a very limited amount of less sex in some young men. That is probably true, which is why I'm going three and a half smooches. But like this whole dramatization, this great sex recession, I don't think there's any evidence for that.

Right. This has been overblown. So I'll do three and a half smooches just to reflect the fact that, yeah, probably some drop, but not a sex recession.

[Regina] (1:04:34 - 1:04:35)
Okay. What about methodological morals?

[Kristin] (1:04:36 - 1:04:59)
Okay. Hands down, Regina, my favorite part of this was when they were doing the statistical models to time travel and see what young people were doing sexually in the early 1900s. That was just ridiculous.

So my methodologic moral is going to be you shouldn't use data from people in their 80s to guess what they were doing in their 20s unless your data come with a time machine.

[Regina] (1:04:59 - 1:05:09)
Oh, I like this. A time machine with a very good looking person and a clipboard and they can go back and star in our Netflix series or Hulu series.

[Kristin] (1:05:09 - 1:05:17)
Well, I would totally watch that. But then, you know, I might be having less sex. So that show, Regina, might be contributing to the sex decline.

So we better not pitch it.

[Regina] (1:05:18 - 1:05:20)
That's very meta somehow, isn't it?

[Kristin] (1:05:21 - 1:05:22)
Very meta, yes. All right. What about your moral, Regina?

[Regina] (1:05:22 - 1:05:31)
Okay. How about this one? When extreme values drive the average, the average stops describing most people.

[Kristin] (1:05:32 - 1:05:38)
I love that one. When you average in 260 sexual acts, that really skews everything. Yes.

[Regina] (1:05:38 - 1:05:40)
It does skew everything. Yep. Yep.

[Kristin] (1:05:40 - 1:06:00)
All right. This has been fascinating, Regina. And I think we're going to have to send this episode to Bill Maher because I've always wanted to be on his show.

And I think he kind of got it wrong. And The Great Sex Recession is really much more nuanced and less dramatic than he's advertising. And he needs us on his show to tell him what the data actually say so we get the record correct.

[Regina] (1:06:01 - 1:06:16)
I'm going to leave that one for you, Kristin, just for you. I think my takeaway from this whole episode is this. Go out and have fun with people in person.

Whether you have sex or not, that's up to you.

[Kristin] (1:06:17 - 1:06:24)
Hmm. That is a great takeaway, Regina. Get off your phone.

Get off Netflix or Hulu. Go out and have social contact.

[Regina] (1:06:25 - 1:06:27)
Amen. So, thank you, Kristin.

[Kristin] (1:06:27 - 1:06:29)
Thanks, Regina. And thanks, everyone, for listening.