The sex recession is real, it is measurable, and it started long before anyone wanted to admit it. A neuroscientist just explained why.
There is a statistic that tends to stop people mid-conversation when they hear it. In 1990, 55% of adults reported having sex at least once a week. By 2024, according to the General Social Survey, that figure had fallen to 37%. Not a dip. Not a blip. A sustained, accelerating decline that has now been documented across multiple countries, multiple age groups, and both inside and outside of committed relationships. The sex recession is not a theory. It is a trend line, and it has been heading in one direction for more than two decades.
Dr. Debra Soh, neuroscientist, sex researcher, and author, is one of the clearest voices currently explaining what is happening and why. In a recent episode of the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson, she delivered something that has become increasingly rare in conversations about sex and relationships: a scientific framework, stated plainly, without the usual performance of reassurance that nothing is really wrong.
Something is wrong. It is also, she argues, fixable. But only if we are honest about the causes.
When Did the Sex Recession Begin?
The data has a shape. It is not a gradual slope. It is more like a cliff edge with a long flat run-up, and the edge appears around 2010 to 2012. This is the same window that Jonathan Haidt identifies in his book The Anxious Generation as the Great Rewiring, the years when smartphone ownership became near-universal among adolescents and social media moved from optional to ambient. The coincidence of timing is not a coincidence.
Between 2010 and 2019, the average time young adults spent with friends in a given week fell by nearly 50%, from 12.8 hours to just 6.5 hours. The pandemic pushed this lower still, and while numbers recovered slightly, young adults were spending just 5.1 hours a week with friends by 2024. Institute for Family Studies Less time in physical social settings means fewer opportunities to meet partners, fewer chances to develop the social fluency that relationships require, and considerably more time spent in digital environments that offer stimulation without intimacy.
Among young adults aged 18 to 29, the share reporting no sex in the previous year doubled between 2010 and 2024, from 12% to 24%. Institute for Family Studies One in four people in their twenties went an entire year without sex. That is not a niche phenomenon. That is a generation.
The Role of Pornography: What the Neuroscience Actually Shows
Dr. Soh is careful to be precise here, because the pornography conversation tends to generate more heat than light. The question is not a moral one. It is a neurological one. Pornography, consumed frequently and from a young age, trains the brain’s reward circuitry in ways that can make real-world intimacy feel comparatively underwhelming. The novelty mechanism that makes pornography so compelling, the endless variety available at no social cost, is precisely what makes it neurologically disruptive over time.This is not speculation. The neuroscience of compulsive pornography use shows patterns of reward desensitisation similar to those observed in other behavioural addictions, where the real-world equivalent of the desired stimulus loses its ability to produce the same dopamine response as the artificial version. For some users, the practical consequence is reduced sexual interest in actual partners. For younger users, whose reward systems are still developing, the implications are more significant still.
This does not mean pornography is uniquely responsible for the sex recession. It is one factor among several. But it is a factor that the conversation has largely avoided, and Dr. Soh argues that avoiding it is not serving anyone well.
Hypergamy, Dating Apps and the Mating Market Shift
One of the more uncomfortable threads in this conversation concerns hypergamy, the well-documented tendency for women to seek partners of equal or higher social status. As women’s educational and economic outcomes have improved significantly relative to men’s over the past two decades, the pool of men who meet women’s partnership criteria has, statistically, narrowed. This is not a value judgement. It is a demographic observation with measurable consequences for partnering rates.Dating apps have amplified this dynamic in ways their designers did not fully anticipate. The architecture of swipe-based matching concentrates attention on a small number of highly desirable profiles while leaving the majority of users with poor outcomes and, over time, declining motivation to engage. One of the biggest predictors of sexual activity is simply whether you live with someone, Newsweek as Professor Nicholas Wolfinger of the University of Utah has noted. The share of young adults living with a partner, married or cohabiting, fell from 42% in 2014 to 32% in 2024. The Daily Jagran Fewer people living with partners means less sex, almost by definition.
The Looksmaxxing Phenomenon and What It Reveals
The rise of looksmaxxing, the practice of optimising physical appearance through often extreme means including bone-anchored jaw expanders, aggressive skincare protocols, and surgery, is a cultural symptom that Dr. Soh connects directly to the pressures of a visual, image-saturated mating market. Young men, in particular, are investing significant effort and money into physical transformation in response to the perceived demands of online dating, where first impressions are made in under a second and physical appearance carries disproportionate weight.
This is worth sitting with for a moment. A generation of young people is pursuing surgical and quasi-medical interventions to compete in a mating market that is itself a product of technology that did not exist fifteen years ago. The response to the problem has become part of the problem. The more the mating market is mediated by screens and images, the more appearance dominates, and the less the social, intellectual, and interpersonal qualities that sustain long-term relationships get a look in.What Can Actually Be Done
Dr. Soh is not pessimistic, but she is clear-eyed about what the solutions require. Individual behaviour change matters: less time on screens, more time in physical social environments, a willingness to tolerate the discomfort of early-stage in-person connection that no amount of app optimisation can replicate. The social skills that lead to intimacy are built through practice, in person, and they atrophy in their absence.
At a broader level, the conversation about pornography regulation, social media design, and the developmental environments we are creating for young people is one that societies are only beginning to have seriously. The sex recession is, in this sense, a downstream consequence of decisions made about technology and public space that were not framed as decisions about intimacy at all. They were, nonetheless.
The data is not going to reverse itself without something changing. What needs to change, Dr. Soh argues, is not complicated. It is, however, difficult. And the first step is being honest about what is actually happening, rather than finding reassuring ways to explain it away.
Listen to the full episode: ‘Dr Debra Soh: Why Nobody is Having Sex Anymore’ on the Modern Wisdom podcast with Chris Williamson, available on Spotify, Apple Podcasts and YouTube.
