Sex Recession: Why Isn’t Everyone Doing It?

The age of technology and the internet provides constant easy access to sexual content and information about sex, for all tastes and curiosities. But survey data show that young people are having less sex than people of previous generations did at their age, and the experts are trying to figure out why. In this 2019 talk from the Aspen Ideas: Health archives, three professionals with inside knowledge talk to Atlantic culture writer Amanda Mull about the positives and negatives of keeping to yourself and delaying sexual experiences a little longer. Human sexuality professor Debby Herbenick conducts a national survey on Americans’ sexual behavior, and gets firsthand accounts of college students’ sex lives in her classes. Columnist and activist Dan Savage has been answering no-holds-barred questions from the public about sex for decades. And Atlantic editor Kate Julian wrote one of the magazine’s most-read pieces of 2018, “The Sex Recession.”