Researchers are trying to figure out why people aren’t having as much sex as they used to, says Dave Pell in his NextDraft newsletter. What can possibly have changed, in the past couple of decades, to bring about this subtle but deeply consequential shift? Some think there must be poisons in the environment altering our hormones. Others blame rising rates of depression and prescription drug use. Still others reckon people are getting their sexual kicks from video games and porn rather than the real thing.
“Come on.” The obvious explanation is that we’ve all discovered something much better than sex: the internet. “It’s fun, it’s addictive, it’s always available, it never has a headache. It’s like sex without the clean-up.” People nowadays can’t even walk across the road without browsing the web. “We used to make out in the backseat of our cars; now we finger our phones while we’re driving.” No one wants to acknowledge this because no one wants to admit how addicted we all are – that we have become “slaves to the technology that we use all day for work and all night for fun”. But that’s the obvious explanation for the drop-off in bonking. “It’s almost laughable that we’d even consider any other factor.”