LexingtonNo sex please, we’re millennials

TO UNDERLINE HIS theory that sexuality is a construct of human discourse, the philosopher Michel Foucault noted that people talk about sex a lot. “We convince ourselves that we have never said enough on the subject,” he wrote in his (four-volume) “The History of Sexuality”. “It is possible that where sex is concerned, the most long-winded, the most impatient of societies is our own.” After a three-hour discussion of sex and dating with 30 students at Northwestern University, on the rainy shore of Lake Michigan, your columnist felt he knew why. Few fields of human behaviour—and none more important—are so hard to explain.

Lexington’s visit was spurred by the latest evidence that young people in America—as in Japan and some other rich countries—are having much less sex. The portion of Americans aged 18 to 29 who claim to have had no sex for 12 months has more than doubled in a decade—to 23% last year. That is, counter-intuitively, despite the removal of many impediments to sex. Young Americans are less religious and more relaxed about sexual orientation than they have ever been. They are also readier to experiment, in part owing to the deluge of free porn they receive on smartphones. “You have access to the entire body of porn in your rucksacks!” marvelled Alexandra Solomon, a clinical psychologist who runs Northwestern’s renowned “Marriage 101” course, in a subsequent lecture.