Oh no! Young men are having less sex! Should we be worried?

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Jordan Heath-Rawlings Today we have news that my teenage self would find impossible to believe. But it’s true. Young people today are having less sex than they were in decades past. I am not basing this off one new study, though there is one we’ll be talking about. I’m basing that on many, many studies over the past half decade. These are studies that come from dating apps. They are studies that come from respected institutions. They are self selected surveys. They are randomly selected samples. It doesn’t matter. They all agree. And crucially, they agree on one more detail. All demographics of young people are having less sex. Male, female, nonbinary, black, white, American, Canadian, doesn’t matter. There are actual reasons for that. It will get to them, I promise. But what we’re here to discuss today is not so much why are all these young people having less sex, but more why, in a world where all sorts of people are not having sex, does everyone seem to care about one specific type of person that is not having sex? And what does that tell us about our priorities politically and personally? I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Jude Ellison S. Doyle is an American feminist author. He’s written Trainwreck and Dead Blondes and Bad Mothers. And you can find more of his writing at Jude Doyle Medium.com. Hi, Jude.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Hi, how are you?

Jordan I’m doing well, thanks. Maybe we could start with some data today. We’re going to talk about all the implications and all the narratives that come out of this stuff when a study comes out. But first, just describe the study we’re going to talk about and the numbers that got everybody worked up about how much sex young men are having or not having.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Right. So we’re talking about the General Social Survey, which the data in front of us is tracking the rate of sex that Americans are having from the year 1989 to the year 2018. And normally there is a certain percentage of Americans who will report not having had sex in the past year. Normally those people are over 60 because in many cases they’re with. But there is a slight uptick in young people not having sex. And unfortunately, since the highest percentage of young people not having sex in the year 2018 was men, this got quite a panicked response. But the fact is that this survey is not really big enough to draw any big conclusions. Number one, the number of people not having sex has not gone up that much. It was 19% of Americans in 1989. It’s 23% in 2018. But the young men not having sex, there were fewer than 150 men under 30 even surveyed. And the number of young men who didn’t have sex in 2018 is 31. It’s 31 guys.

Jordan Right? Those poor guys.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Well, we’re assuming that none of them are in seminary school. We’re assuming that none of them are asexual. We’re assuming that none of them were in a coma.

Jordan Mostly I’m joking there, but this was a big story when it came out about a week ago. How was this data interpreted in the wider media?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Oh, it was these 31 guys are responsible for the downfall of society. We shouldn’t feel too bad for them. There was a lot of panic about how we are raising a generation of lonely young men. The great American sex, drought, which for some reason is only a problem when it affects men. Young women aren’t having sex as much either, but that’s not getting the headlines. There was commentary on social media about how the increase in male loneliness was leading to more domestic violence, to mass shootings, to the insurrection on January 6, to a lot of very terrible things that we currently have no data linking to these 31 men in 2018 who had a dry cell.

Jordan Where does that narrative come from, though? Because this isn’t the only time that a study like this has come out. And the link that you just described between men, young men not being able to find sexual partners and turning to things that range from abuse to terrorism, frankly, how does that link get made and who’s out there making it and why?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Right. This comes from a lot of really strange, essentialist ideas about masculinity. The idea that young men are necessarily defined by their drive to have sex specifically with women. We’re also assuming that none of these guys who, you know, struck out were gay, that young men need sex with women. Young men are entitled to sex and love and companionship from women. And when they don’t have that, they necessarily have mental health spirals. They necessarily become violent. They necessarily basically just stop functioning and become active ticking time bombs. It does not match up. Not only is it a pretty uncharitable way to see these kids, it just doesn’t match up with what we know about how this violence actually happens in the world.

Jordan Where are the links, if we wanted to make them, between that kind of violence and what’s happening? If it’s not driven primarily by not getting laid, do we know what drives it, or is it just listen? A certain amount of people are awful.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Well, I mean, I think there are sociological explanations for it. A tremendous number of for example, the rioters on January 6. They were 86% male, but they were 93% white. Incels and Mrs increasingly are in the fold of that white nationalist, extreme rightwing movement. Most mass shooters are white. There is not only an ideology of violence, but an ideology of specifically masculine dominance. Here where the people who commit these forms of violence, like domestic violence, which, by the way, you need a partner in order to commit, it’s not driven by sexlessness or loneliness or desperation. It is driven by a desire for power. Michael Kimmel has this concept of aggrieved entitlement that he uses to explain a lot of what we’ve been seeing. And it’s the idea that if you are a white man in America, you are sort of raised with the idea that everything should be easy for you and that even if things aren’t easy now, there was a time where you would have been guaranteed success and therefore if you are not succeeding now someone is taking it away from you. That ideology of entitlement is way more responsible for radicalizing people and turning them into terrorists than not getting a date could ever be. Aggrieved entitlement though, sounds somewhat similar to something that was proposed in a couple of places and has been before. I gather.

Jordan As I sort of looked into this narrative going back a while, which is the idea of a right to sex, what is a right to sex and how the hell would that actually work? Has anybody actually proposed practically or just as an idea?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle I think the person who first proposed this on Twitter is a political candidate who was trying in a roundabout way to argue for the decriminalization of sex work. But her argument was, look, these young men are not having sex. They’re going nuts, they’re hurting women. Clearly we need to establish a right to sex so that we’re defusing the ticking time bomb. The problem is that this is a fundamentally this is a conservative argument that’s been made in the past. Ross does that after the 2018 incel killings in Canada, he argued that sex workers and or sex robots should be conscripted basically to service the insult so that they wouldn’t lash out. And the problem is that we don’t have functioning sex robots but we do have human sex workers and we would be forcing them to literally just absorb these guys’violence. The odds are that if they are violent and driven by the need to dominate and humiliate and hurt women and girls, they’re not going to stop that. Once they’re in the room with a sex worker, that’s likely to be a violent encounter and it removes choice from the sex worker. Ideally, if you are working in relatively safe conditions, you get to choose who you see. There’s no way to argue for a right to sex without essentially establishing a class of rapable human beings and throwing them at the problem.

Jordan When we talk about things like that, whether somebody is using it as a hyperbolic example or not, what are we really talking about? And I mentioned this here because we’re going to talk about incels in a second and there’s a lot of lament, I will say around that group that it’s not like it was in the when women needed to find a man in order to thrive in society and shouldn’t women be required to find a partner and stick with a partner and blah, blah, blah. There’s not a huge leap from right to sex to that viewpoint.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Exactly. I mean, these kids, these guys, they are they’re not all kids. I mean, there are many, many unhappy, middle aged incels and Mrs. And in fact, a lot of people will tell you that it’s older, divorced men who really drove the movement in its early days and still take up a lot of space within it now. But the incel logic is that men are owed sex, and it’s not really sex that they want in itself. They want sex as a symbol of as a symbol of dominance, rather a symbol that they are winning at life. That’s why it’s important to not just have sex, but to have sex with a specific class of women that they call a Stacey, who is very traditionally blonde and white and thin and feminine and pretty and known for only dating high status men. The idea that men are owed women not so much as partners, as people to talk to, as people to sleep with, but as possessions that show that their masculinity is intact and that they’re at the top of the heap.

Jordan When we talk about these guys that you just described, we use the term incel, and I feel like that term has grown and evolved in even just a matter of its visibility in the years since most of us became aware of it, which I guess was probably for most listeners either around the Elliot Roger shootings in America or up here in Canada, the Toronto van attack.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Elliot Roger was the first sort of widely known incel killer. And like the columbine killers, he’s become sort of an outlaw hero for a certain set of really scary people. There were sort of incel ish or incel killings before Elliot Roger, but he sort of catapulted that into the mainstream. And there has been significant growth in the subculture. Again, internet culture has really facilitated the rise of the manosphere and the rise of these really extreme organized ideological misogynists. They were around in the 90s, but there was not nearly enough of them to make a dent in the culture. There’s a lot of them now, and they have popular media platforms, they have their YouTube channels, they have their reddit boards, and they are increasingly, again, I would say ever since 2014 in gamergate, the manosphere has been basically an extension of the fascist internet. This has always been a really potent way to recruit young people to fascist ideologies is to start with the more intimate forms of domination. There wasn’t a great in your grandpa’s day when your grandma couldn’t work and she was required to give your grandpa whatever he wanted. You know. And then just to sort of to work on that white entitlement and to draw them further and further into the sort of organized violence that does lead to January 6. That does lead to mass shootings. That does lead to. You know. Driving a van into a crowd of people or going on a spree killing.

Jordan When we see these kinds of studies and the discussions that come out of them that inevitably, like ours just has takes a turn towards incels and mass killings and all sorts of misogyny. Are the studies showing us a demand for physical sex that’s not being met? Or is this about loneliness? And we interpret it to be sex because, frankly, it’s a better headline and a narrative, right?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle I mean, the way the study was interpreted was these young men aren’t having sex and that means that they’re having mental breakdowns. And I mean, the other way you could interpret this is that people who are struggling in life are having trouble finding relationships which is a much more commonsensical thing. We operate on this assumption that men are like these sort of they’re, like, fueled by sex. Like, you have to just keep a steady stream of girlfriend and specifically sex with women coming in or they’ll break down and malfunction and it’ll be Westworld. They’ll just go berserk and kill everybody. That entitlement. And that myth that there’s only one proper response to being single or rejected or lonely and it’s to lash out violently. That specific idea of masculinity and the idea that you can either assert yourself by having sex with a woman in a dominating, you know, often kind of violent way or by literally just committing violence on whoever you can lay hands on that is where the violence comes from. We need to challenge that ideology because the idea that young men or anyone for that matter automatically breaks down and experiences massive consequences if they don’t have sex it just doesn’t line up with any view of reality. There’s no causality that’s been established there.

Jordan How do we challenge that in the face of such a dominant narrative? How do we get news outlets when a story like this comes out to look at those 31 men or however many and try to figure out what they actually need rather than take this story and run with it?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Right? And I mean, one way you can do it is to point out all of the people who aren’t getting violent. Women have committed almost no mass shootings ever. If you look at the grass at something like 97% male shooters because we don’t expect women to lash out violently when they’re marginalized. We expect women to tolerate that men of color are not committing the majority of mass shootings men of color were not there on January 6 because they’re not served by this ideology of white patriarchal dominance. There’s nothing that you have to gain from it. We expect people who are on the bottom rungs of society or who are marginalized to learn how to tolerate distress and learn how to tolerate marginalization. And in fact, we expect them to tolerate it so well that we can pretend they’re not actually suffering. There’s got to be there’s no way that every single, single man who is not having sex in the United States of America under the age of 30. They can’t all be white straight guys, but it’s the white straight guys that we associate with that number because they’re the ones whose comfort and happiness we are conditioned to care about more than anything else. And it’s them that we are all sort of societally encouraged to coddle and just, you know, treat it like a spoiled toddler, give it whatever it wants, or it’s going to have a tantrum. Like, if we were actually operating under the assumption that every human being reaches adulthood and becomes morally culpable for their own actions and every human being hopefully is able to develop some level of distress tolerance so that having a bad day doesn’t wind up in murder territory, then we would not be freaking out about these men. We would be freaking out about the violent ideologies that are trying to recruit men with the idea that they are owed sex and deference. That brings us to the last thing that I wanted to talk about, which is, are these men being used by the political movement that you kind of just described? Because there is a reason that they are the loudest voice in the room when we talk about who is lonely and who is not or, you know, who needs sex and care and who gets it. And there’s no question that they’re valuable to a core constituency of your politics in the US.

Jordan Right.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle And I mean, I think that this is something where, as a trans person in the United States of America, sort of the battle to restore traditional masculinity has been very visible and very frightening to me for some time. There is sort of this boys in peril, men in peril mend disenfranchised and end of men narrative that just it kind of keeps cropping up no matter what. Christina Hoff Sommers has pedaled it, and there’s some new book out there that’s just like The War on Boys the End of Men and Boys. It’s every few years somebody publishes that specific sociological analysis that it’s no longer super easy to be a white man in America and therefore every white man is having a mental breakdown and what can we do to save them and help them? And again, most of those analyses are not actually looking at gender in any way. They’re not actually looking at the many ways in which people of all genders are struggling. They are making a soft pitch for let’s restore let’s make men great again. Let’s make white guys great again. Let’s restore a version of the world where these men were comfortably, assured a safe, happy, successful, middle class lifestyle and a family at everyone else’s expense. You know, the idea that if that’s not happening again, it’s a grieved entitlement. It’s the Kimmel concept. If that’s not happening, it can’t just be that the world is changing. It can’t just be that things are tough on everybody and outcomes are more equally distributed now. It’s just that someone is taking away what these white men deserve. And nobody’s actually asked these poor 31 single guys what they think of this. They don’t really have a voice in this. Nobody has come forward to be like, yes, that’s me. I was overseas in 2018, and I didn’t speak a language, and I didn’t get a date. So we have no proof that these young men would support the ideological conclusions being drawn from their existence. We just sort of assume that if young men who we unconsciously think of as young, straight, CIS white men aren’t getting everything they want, something has gone terribly wrong.

Jordan Okay, well, it’s funny to mention talking to those 31 men specifically, but to look at it from a larger point of view, how do we talk to, I guess, the men that are in these movements or maybe even not going that far, the men who are vulnerable to this kind of narrative? You drew an analogy a little while ago about a toddler throwing a tantrum, and I think I know from following you on Twitter, you have a toddler, so do I. You have to deal with the tantrum somehow, and there’s a whole bunch of different ways you can deal with it. But one thing you can’t do is give in. So what do you say to them to try to pull them out of the narrative? That’s not you’re. Right? It should be like it was in the 50s. Let’s try to figure out a way to get you exactly what you need, buddy.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Right. I’m not an incel whisperer. I don’t know.

Jordan Sure. No. You have to solve all their problems.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle No, I think if you put me in the room with them, I would probably make the problem worse. I’m not very good in that sort of situation because I think that once somebody has committed to an ideology of violence and hatred and dominance, you’re on your own. You made this choice. Let’s see you dig your way out of this one, buddy, because I’m not here to bring you to the light. I’m not here to show you Jesus.

Jordan What about the folks who are vulnerable to it, though, who are now seeing let’s assume that they’ve not gone down the rabbit hole. They’re not on Reddit, they’re not in these forums, but they are reading The Washington Post where this article appeared, and they are saying, I’m like one of those 31 guys. I have not had sex in a year. I would like to have a girlfriend, but I can’t get one. Maybe there is something to it. Maybe it’s a problem in society. That’s not me. How do we counter the narrative that comes out of these studies with the people who are vulnerable to that narrative? Right. And I think you mentioned earlier you have a toddler. So do I.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Right. These assumptions about sex and gender get baked in pretty early. And I think what we need to do is, A, continue to do feminist work, continue to make that publicly available. Men aren’t stupid. They can read feminist work just as well as anyone else can. Some of them will make the choice, driven by what they believe to be their own self interest, not to engage with it, but others are perfectly capable of doing the right thing. Again, I trust people to come to their own moral conclusions, and I think that don’t murder people is pretty much that’s one of the big ones. It’s about rewiring how we talk about sex, about gender, about what to do when you’re lonely, about what your entitlement is to another person’s body from I mean, it starts so early. My daughter, when she was two years old, had, like, a little boy following her around the classroom, yanking on her hair. And the teacher said, well, he really likes her. And we took her aside for a day and we told her, if he ever touches you and you don’t like it, scream as loud as you can, and it’ll be a useful lesson for him and it will be a useful lesson for you. Both of you are going to learn that nothing good happens when you don’t respect another person’s bodily autonomy. And that’s like teaching our kids from an early age to reject that idea of sex as dominance and sex as an entitlement and sex as a status symbol and other people’s bodies as essentially just resources for the most powerful person around to grab and use as they please. That’s going to be a lot more useful than me coming to you when you’re 23 years old and you’re already, you know, angry and bitter in the way that a 23 year old is and you’re starting to look at these shitty websites. All I can say at that point is, you’re an adult man. Get off that fucking website. Go talk to some people.

Jordan Jude, thank you for this. Really appreciate it. Very insightful.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Okay, thank you. I feel like I’ve just radicalized some of them right here because that was sort of a mean conclusion. Well, it’s not, though.

Jordan I mean, it’s a proper point that people of a certain age need to be able to make their own decisions and own those responsibilities. The whole idea for this interview came out of the thought that, why are we catering to people who have shown no interest in helping anyone else?

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Right? And, like, I absolutely sympathize and empathize with the desire for human connection. We all need that. Everybody needs community. Everybody needs care. Everybody needs people around them who are going to watch and see if they fall down. And the rising numbers of young people without friends, to me, is more concerning than the rising number of people without girlfriends, because we teach men that the only person you’re ever allowed to talk to about your feelings is your girlfriend, and that’s not a healthy model for either of you. So I think that encouraging young people to seek out that care and connection. That makes sense. Patriarchy dominance misogyny is not about care and connection. It’s about owning and possessing and controlling another human being. And if you have substituted your need for care with the need to do harm, then that’s a place where you are eventually going to have to come around on that yourself. You’re going to have to want to fix you, because expecting the culture to fix you is a little bit, you know, people are putting themselves out there to get hurt and there’s no guarantee you’re going to turn around.

Jordan Lots of empathy for loneliness, no empathy for sexlessness. That’s how I feel, anyway. Jude, thank you again for this.

Jude Ellison S. Doyle Oh, thank you so much.

Jordan That was Jude Doyle. If you liked listening to him, you can check out Jude Doyle medium.com. That was The Big Story. After our episode on grocery prices and inflation and profiteering. We got a few comments asking about gas prices and isn’t that essentially the same thing? It very well may be, but we try to stick to one subject at a time so we can get somebody who’s explored that in depth. In related news that I will let you judge for yourself. Shell yesterday reported profits of nine $5 billion in the third quarter, compared to four $1 billion in the same quarter last year. Interesting. You can find the Big Story at the Big Story podcast. Dot CA. You can talk to us anytime on Twitter at The Big Story FPN or by emailing us hello at thebigstorypodcast CA. And, of course, call and leave a voicemail so we have something to listen to when we’re not listening to podcasts. The phone number is 416-935-5935. If you’re listening in a podcast player, I think it’s probably Apple. At least that’s what the stats tell me. If it’s not, great and if it lets you leave a rating and a review. If you’re on Apple and you haven’t reviewed us by now, what are you doing? Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heathrowings. Have a safe weekend and a happy Halloween and we’ll talk Monday.