America is saturated with sexuality. Advertising and the media endlessly promote sexuality through fashion, cosmetics, news articles, TV and online programs, movies, celebrity promotions and advice columns. The sexualized self in all its forms parades down city streets; poses at bars, cafes and restaurants; and is on display at the workplace, parties, dance clubs and all manner of public and private get-togethers. And the sexualized self finds excitement, if not pleasure, in privacy or with another, be s/he/them in the flesh or a media fantasy.
Over the last half-century, as the culture wars raged, the U.S. became a sexualized country. An unprecedented number of consenting adults are engaging in sexual practices that were once identified as immoral, perverse, and illegal. Pre-marital sex is common; couples living together outside of marriage is accepted; masturbation is now accepted as a normal activity if done in a non-obsessive manner; homosexuality is no longer illegal, a pathology; and even “sex work” – i.e., prostitution – is being decriminalized in some cities and states.
Armed with the relative anonymity of a credit card, a PC or smartphone and the Internet, sex has been mainstreamed. Most importantly, sex toys have been rebranded as “sex-wellness” products and major retailers are jumping into the growing market. They range from high-end specialty chains like Nordstrom and Brookstone, to mass-market outlets like Walgreens and Target, and even to crusty down-market Wal-Mart. And the sexual marketplace is estimated to be $75 billion business.
A recent YouGov survey of 1,107 adults conducted between May 22-25, 2026, offers a snapshot of America’s current sexual culture. It found that 81 percent of those surveyed have had sex and that nearly half (46%) had sex between the ages of 16 and 20 years of age. It also found that more than half (55%) report being in a relationship, be it marriage, with an unmarried partner or in casual relationships. Perhaps most revealing, half of the respondents reported having sex relations before marriage and over half (54%) reported having had sex with two or more partners.
However, the sex scene might be changing. A Kinsey Institute’s Dating Advice service survey, “The State of Us: National Study on Modern Love & Dating,” found in 2025 that one in five (22%) surveyed U.S. adults say they have never had partnered sex. It also found that more than one-third (37%) of young single people are not having sex and nearly two-thirds (64%) of Gen Z women who deliberately abstain from sex say they do so partly due to political reasons. Most surprisingly, roughly one-fifth of both Gen Z men and women are “involuntarily celibate.”
The University of Chicago’s National Opinion Research Center’s (NORC) the General Social Survey (GSS) found in 2024 that only 37 percent of adults 18-64 years of age had sex once a week, which is down from a high of 55 percent in 1990. A 2021 GSS report found that one quarter (26%) of adults had not had a sexual relation over the past 12 months.
Equally revealing, Pew Research found in a 2025 survey that between 2014 and 2024, the percentage of young adults (i.e., those between 18–29) who reported living with a partner — either married or unmarried – dropped by 10 points, from 42 percent to 32 percent.
A separate study published in the Journal of Marriage and Family found that single young men and women are having less sex.
The Institute for Family Studies reports, “The share of young adults who say they have not had sex in the last year has skyrocketed in the past decade, while the virginity rate for young adult males has more than doubled, according to a recent data analysis.”
Going further, it found although married people have sex more often than unmarried people (46% of married people report weekly sexual activity, compared with about 34% of unmarried people), there’s been a decline in sex among married people: between 1996-2008, nearly three-out-of-five (59%) of married people had sex weekly, but the rate of sexual engagement dropped to only about half (49%) between 2010 and 2024.
Are Americans experiencing a “sex recession”?
Signs of a “sex recession” have been percolating for a decade. In 2016, a scholarly study by Jean M. Twenge and associates published in the Archives of Sexual Behavior reported:
Americans born in the 1980s and 1990s (commonly known as Millennials and iGen) were more likely to report having no sexual partners as adults compared to GenX’ers born in the 1960s and 1970s in the General Social Survey, a nationally representative sample of American adults (N = 26,707). Among those aged 20–24, more than twice as many Millennials born in the 1990s (15 %) had no sexual partners since age 18 compared to GenX’ers born in the 1960s (6 %).
Jia Tolentino provides a good overview of the apparent “sex recession” in her New Yorker review of Louise Perry’s New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century: The Young Adult Adaptation of ‘The Case Against the Sexual Revolution’ (2025). As she pointedly notes, Perry’s analysis “is to present reactionary conservatism as simple common sense.”
Assuming that the scattershot “evidence” of a “sex recession” in the U.S. is accurate and that Americans – especially younger unmarried people – are having less sex, what does it reveal about what was once known as the “sexual revolution”?
Remember the sex revolution? It was a defining element of what was known as the ‘60s counterculture, along with drugs and rock & roll. With the profound exceptions of a woman’s right to having an abortion and the legitimacy of transgender identity, much of what people engaged in way back then has become – privately if not socially — acceptable.
Is “the sex revolution” over? Conservative Christian and Republican moralists well might be cheering news of a “sex recession” as a sign of the final end of the ‘60s. Sadly, the decline in sexuality may have more to the ceaseless commercial exploitation of sexuality that has taken place over the last half-century. In a nearly totally unregulated corporatist sex market, sex – and each individual’s sexuality – is being marketed as a profit center.
But, assuming a “sex recession” is unfolding, maybe people’s – especially young people’s – non-sexuality well might be a rejection of the commercialized, fetishized body erotic, a hyper-sexualized body-image endlessly saturating postmodern daily life. Is it an expression of the decoupling of all-to-human sexuality from what the Situationists identified as the commodity spectacle?
Perhaps, like the 1950s – with the Beats, rock & roll, and the civil rights movement – a new progressive, populist movement will emerge that separates sexuality from the marketplace and ensures that all sexual conduct is age appropriate, is truly consensual, with no coercion, with full conscious consent.
