“I have finally come to see that every game has a rule, and sex has rules. Unless you play by the rules, you’ll find sex can create a depth of loneliness that nothing else can.” — George Leonard, The End of Sex
Having taught about intimate relationships for more than a decade in the Leonard Pavilion at the Esalen Institute, I finally got around to reading a book by the man for whom the pavilion was named. Published in 1983, The End of Sex: Erotic Love After the Sexual Revolution argues that the sexual revolution produced a culture of physical gratification so efficiently delivered that it severed sex from anything resembling intimacy. Leonard’s concern was that sex without real intimacy generates a particular type of loneliness, one that casual encounters can’t cure and that multiplying partners only compounds. Unfortunately George did not live to see the logical endpoint of his prognosis, which is that a significant portion of the population has stopped having coupled sex at all. And this isn’t because of some form of enlightenment à la Lenny Kravitz; it’s because they’re scared, isolated, deluded by social media, and avoidant.
According to a study published in JAMA Network Open using General Social Survey data, the share of men aged 18–24 who reported no sex in the past year climbed from 19% in 2002 to 31 percent by 2018. More recent CDC data tells a grimmer story: by 2022–2023, 24% of men aged 22–34 reported having had no sex — up from just 9% a decade earlier. This is not a blip. From 2010 to 2024, the share of young adults reporting no sex in the past year doubled, from 12 to 24%, according to General Social Survey data compiled by the Institute for Family Studies.
In The Boy Crisis, Warren Farrell describes the sexual landscape that young men now must navigate: “His testosterone is surging with desire for perhaps half the girls in his class, but he fears that if he acts on his feelings too quickly, he’s a sexual harasser; if he acts too slowly, he’s a wimp.” What Warren is saying is that there’s a subconscious communication of “momentum” that is nearly impossible to calculate using today’s communications technology such as texting.
And I know this is controversal, but for all the good that the #MeToo movement accomplished and all of the rapes that it prevented, the fear it has instilled in many men is tantamount to paralysis. In my clinical psychotherapy practice, I’ve seen so many young men who have effectively decommissioned their erotic lives out of genuine terror – terror of being accused of something horrific. They are not pursuing women in the ways that would once have been called “chivalrous” — and that I described as “The Myth of Romance” in my first book — because the former “games” of dating and romance have become amorphous. I cannot even get young patients to say, “We’re dating” – instead they say, “We’re hanging out,” which essentially means that they’ll tolerate their current lover until they can upgrade. The overcorrection of the #Metoo movement has left both sexes stranded on opposite shores of the same river, neither willing to swim across.
In Notes on Being a Man, Scott Galloway frames the structural cause like this: “Men between the ages of twenty and thirty are spending less time outdoors than prison inmates right now… You’ve put a casino, a porn site, an arcade, Netflix — you’ve put it all in their pocket or on their computer. The temptation to just stay at home and get that constant dopamine hit from all sorts of different receptors online is just more tempting than going out and doing stuff.” He concludes that this is breeding “a new species of asocial, asexual males.”
The loneliness epidemic that Galloway, Farrell, and a chorus of researchers are now documenting is not incidental to a sex recession. We have traded the risks of connection – and I’d argue that risks equal eroticism – for the safety of no connection, which is engendering an abyss of loneliness that is soul-crushing.
