Chapter 1: The New Contraception CHAPTER 1 The New Contraception There''s someone for everyone," as the old saying goes. But this may not be true in the dating market today. Social media promised to make us more interconnected than ever before. And yet each innovation in digital communication has enveloped us in a dreamy cocoon, never to return to life as we once knew it. Are we more enmeshed in a social web or more isolated in an algorithmically calculated bubble? The answer, it seems, is both. Game-changers include the arrival of the first smartphone, created by IBM in the early 1990s, followed by Facebook in 2004, the iPhone in 2007, and the first geolocation-based, swipe-able dating app, Tinder, in 2012. Fast-forward to the present day, and online interactions have all but replaced in-person socialization. Humans spend more time staring at screens and devices than talking to other people.

An entire generation of children grew up with free access to the online world. At first, the consequences of these changes seemed innocuous, but the chickens have come home to roost. In 2016, a study published in the academic journal Archives of Sexual Behavior revealed a peculiar trend in Americans'' sex lives.1 An analysis of self-reported responses to the General Social Survey (GSS), a nationally representative poll published on a near-annual basis since 1972, found that young people were having less sex than their preceding generations. Millennials (born from 1980 to 1994)2 in their early twenties were more likely than previous generations at the same age to report having no sexual partners since turning eighteen. These surprising results were expected to continue for the Millennials'' successors, Generation Z (or "Zoomers," born from 1995 to 2012). Articles in The Atlantic 3 and The Washington Post 4 raised the alarm on this emerging sexlessness. The Atlantic ''s December 2018 cover story coined the term "sex recession" to describe the paradox of a time when taboos around sex have been eviscerated and premarital sex has never been more socially acceptable, and yet data show that young people are engaging in less sexual activity than in the recent past.

The Washington Post ''s 2019 investigation offered corroborating evidence that the findings weren''t a fluke: Among American Millennials between the ages of eighteen and thirty years old, about 30 percent of men and 20 percent of women hadn''t had sex in the past year. Another study, using GSS responses between 2016 and 2018 from more than 4,000 men and 5,000 women, unearthed almost identical statistics: roughly one in three men and one in five women aged eighteen to twenty-four (which would make them Millennials and Gen Z) reported being sexually inactive in the previous twelve months.5 For this age cohort (eighteen-to-twenty-four-year-olds), sexual inactivity almost doubled in men since the early 2000s. Back then, only about one in five men reported not having sex in the past year. For women, the rate of sexual inactivity remained appropriately the same. Among twenty-five-to-thirty-four-year-olds (who would have been Millennials at the time of data collection), rates of sexlessness increased for both sexes, with a sharper increase found among men. Contrary to tropes about marriage like the seven-year itch, dead bedrooms associated with middle age, or frazzled parents lacking time or energy for anything beyond work and childcare, sexual inactivity today is primarily presenting in younger, childless people. Although data do suggest that we''re all experiencing a decline in sex, Millennial and Gen Z men have been hit the hardest.

We know less about whether the current sex recession affects gay people, but it seems to be an issue predominantly affecting heterosexuals. A survey conducted by Stanford University in 2017 intentionally oversampled for gay and lesbian adults and found that these populations are more successful than straight people at using dating apps to find sexual and romantic partners.6 Considering that young men have, on average, a higher sex drive and greater sociosexuality (that is, enjoyment of casual sex) than women, their decline in sexual activity is the opposite of what one might expect. What led to this change? Fewer Americans today have committed partners, and by 2012, more than half of the country owned a smartphone.7 Both play a significant role in the decline of sex, but neither alone tells the entire story. Social media--typically accessed through smartphones--has accelerated our current sexless predicament by creating an illusion of connection and community while actually isolating us and pitting men and women against one another. Our evolutionary roots clash with twenty-first-century life because we face novel circumstances that our ancestors never could have anticipated or prepared for. Despite this, our biology has been pushing back in subtle ways.

Before I get to the barren wasteland that characterizes modern-day dating, let''s take a closer look at how we first fell into this situation, starting with the reasons why rates of sexual inactivity are more pronounced in young men than among their female peers. Marrying Up The modern age has produced a novel dynamic between the sexes, characterized by two turbines of change: Men are losing the social and economic characteristics that make them attractive partners to women, while at the same time, women are excelling along these very same vectors. Hypergamy (colloquially, "marrying up") is a simple concept from evolutionary psychology that explains a lot about human mating behavior, particularly in the contemporary dating market. Hypergamy states that women, on average, look for financial resources and status in a potential mate and will trade "up" to acquire the best partner they can find.8 This stems from sex differences in the parental investment required of women; sex is a riskier prospect for a woman because of the possibility of pregnancy. Evolutionarily speaking, if a partner couldn''t provide for you and your offspring, said partner would quickly become a liability. Procreating with a mate who couldn''t protect and provide was dangerous. In most cases, it meant that neither you nor your children could expect to live for long.

As a result, women typically look for partners who are at least as successful as they are. (Men, on the other hand, generally seek partners based on youth and physical attractiveness, which are markers of high fertility and reproductive value--basically, the ability to have many, healthy children.) But changes in our social environment have complicated things. We no longer live in the world that shaped our basic drives for millennia. Perhaps for the first time in history, women are succeeding at higher rates than men. Starting in adolescence, girls are more likely than boys to complete high school and continue on to higher education. For the past four decades, more women than men have graduated with bachelor''s degrees,9 and since the mid-2000s, the fairer sex has taken home the majority of doctoral degrees awarded. It is projected that, in a few years, two women will graduate university for every man.

A similar theme can be found in the workplace, where women account for over half (50.7 percent) of the college-educated US labor force.10 Women today not only can provide for themselves financially but they are, in many cases, making more money than their male counterparts. As women rise in socioeconomic status, so do their standards for a potential partner. Women are attracted to men who are more accomplished than they are. As women become more educated, going from an undergraduate degree to an MD, JD, or master''s or doctoral diploma, their pool of romantic candidates grows smaller.11 Women who are financially successful tend to seek a partner with even greater wealth and status. This makes it doubly challenging to find a suitable mate, because their standards will be that much higher, regardless of whether there are enough viable male suitors to go around.

Interestingly, higher education is associated with an increased likelihood of marriage in men but a decreased likelihood in women. Unmarried women are also more likely to have high educational and occupational status, while unmarried men are more likely to be unemployed and poor.12 Since men aren''t attaining as many secondary and postsecondary degrees as women (or any at all), this further intensifies the sexual competition. Of course, just because something is biologically or evolutionarily wired doesn''t mean it''s morally good or just. By pointing out these on-average sex differences regarding partner preferences, I''m not attributing any value to them, nor am I saying that every woman or man necessarily fits their expected profile. I don''t believe a woman''s worth should be based on her looks or her ability to bear children, nor should a man''s value be based o.