Check out this chart. I wanted a visual understanding of the data from this well-known survey that people can’t stop talking about.
The numbers come from one of the few reputable sources out there (NORC runs the General Social Survey, or GSS), and purport to tell us a story about Americans’ sex lives. In 2014, about 26% of American adults reported that they didn’t have sex in the past year. By 2024, 32% of American adults reported no sex in the previous year. The Atlantic coined the term “sex recession” in 2018, and people are still talking about it. But is the claim true?
There are plenty of ebbs and flows throughout human sex history, but we only began to measure the rate of sexual activity in the late 1930s, with the entry of the legendary Dr. Alfred Kinsey.
As you may already know, Kinsey started out as an entomologist studying wasps. During that career, he wondered what would happen if one applied rigorous scientific methods to the study of human sex. And so, a new chapter began in sexology: data-driven sex science.
Before Kinsey, there was virtually no scientific data on the sexual habits of everyday Americans. Rumors, myths, taboos, outright lies, and Freudian theory abounded, but there were precious few facts about sex or sexual health in the U.S.
New Sexual Paradigms
Yes, life has changed substantially, even radically, in America in the past 25 years. Young adults are living with their parents longer, with some so financially strapped that they move back in after school, if their parents allow it. Bringing lovers to mom and dad’s basement for a quick shag is not the sly adventure it was in the 70s. Today, it just reinforces that your adulthood kind of sucks.
Meanwhile, the advent of the Internet has mesmerized us all and kept many of us indoors, on our phones and laptops, to unhealthy degrees. Add the instant gratification of dating sites, porn sites, kink sites, and live-interaction sites, and traditional dating is less relevant in general. That doesn’t mean sex has stopped. It means people have found new ways to get it.
This raises new questions for me. For example, do surveys count the millions of Americans who find people online, have free or pay-for-play encounters, and never tell anyone (except, perhaps, their sex therapist)?
What Makes Sex Sex?
An even bigger question that has never been resolved: what counts as sex? If you pay a phone-sex worker, for example, does that count? If you subscribe to an OnlyFans model and pleasure yourself while they share their charms, does that count? You may remember Bill Clinton’s claim that oral sex didn’t count as sex. The legal system disagreed.
Is watching porn sex? Or do you have to touch yourself to make it sex? Is watching porn more or less moral than having an affair, or does watching it make it adultery? Does sex have to be partnered to count as sex? Does it have to involve intercourse? Does anal count? These questions come up fairly often in therapy. And to every question, there are many different answers, often depending on context (such as consent) and the individuals themselves.
I’ll stop the crazily incessant questions. But, no, seriously, how are researchers claiming they know exactly how many people are or are not having sex when they are not telling us what they, the researchers, mean by sex? Do they include people who have sex with Real Life-type dolls? Or perhaps they don’t believe that sex with a doll or other toy counts as sex.
In sum, research today must clarify how both researchers and subjects define sex to obtain accurate results.
Ironically, studying BDSM is easier: we have easily labeled activities. Bondage, check. Spankings, check. But when you say “sex,” what do you really mean? Plus, for some of us kinky/fetishistic people, what we do may not even involve genitals, yet it feels like sex.
Rethinking the Sex Recession Data
No disrespect to NORC, because they do genuinely difficult work. They study far more than the frequency number everyone cites: number of partners, the sex of those partners, whether partners were spouses, friends, casual pickups, or paid, and even whether a condom was used. That’s valuable research!
Still, the survey does not define sex consistently. NORC’s frequency questions, the ones reporters keep citing, ask how often you engaged in “intercourse.” Yet other questions on the same survey pause to specify that by “sex” they mean vaginal, oral, or anal. That’s confusing. It also excludes couples who prefer digital sex, use toys on each other, or manage other types of intimacy without engaging in anal, oral, or intercourse.
Compare that to Dr. Kinsey, who distinguished cleanly between masturbation, petting, oral sex, and intercourse as separate categories in the late 1940s. Even today, the Kinsey Institute maintains careful distinctions between different types of sexual activity in its research. We NEED that kind of work. We can’t understand the true complexity and diversity of human sexuality by excluding people who find their sexual pleasure in different ways. Perhaps we need a massive study on how people define sex, rather than assuming people automatically share the same values.
The GSS study omits enormous territory: phone sex, cam sessions, paid online encounters, solo use of porn, and the kind of kink and fetish play that, for many people, is the most intense sex they have. None of that gets counted.
So when a headline announces that Americans are having less sex, it might be a recession. But more likely, millions of people are having sex that the survey never asked about.
Source
General Social Survey, NORC at the University of Chicago (gss.norc.org). Figures cover all adults 18+. Numbers from 2021 on reflect a change in how the survey was conducted, so read them with that in mind.
Chart created by Dr. Gloria Brame
photo credit: Tima Miroshnichenko@Pexels
