Will we survive the sex war? The era of eros is coming to a close

Throughout history, the happy convergence of men and women — and their by-product, children — has driven human civilisation. No less than Freud saw this need for family as intrinsic: “Eros and Ananke [love and necessity],” he writes in Civilisation and its Discontents, “have become the parents of human civilisation too.”

Yet today we are lurching towards a society where sexual intimacy and family life are being undermined at the most basic levels. The impact can be seen in shifting dating patterns and declining rates of marriage, family formation and childbirth. And this is no longer a Western disease; a majority of the world’s people live in countries with fertility rates well below replacement level; by 2050, some 61 countries are expected to experience population decline.

To some extent, the roots of this war between the sexes is economic, exacerbated by the global “cost-of-living” crisis stemming from house price increases relative to incomes, higher energy and food costs. With hopes of a steady career and home ownership fading, many young people now choose to, or are forced to, adopt a lifestyle incompatible with marriage and family. 

This is most evidenced in the West by the rapid shift away from not only family but heterosexual engagement overall. But in East Asia, the breakdown in male-female relations is if anything, starker. In Japan, for instance, the harbinger of modern Asian demographics, one in four people in their twenties and thirties are virgins. Indeed, the Japanese even have a term — herbivores — for the passive, desexed generation of young men.

So too with China, which, despite once being renowned for its strong familial culture, is now home to 200 million unmarried adults. Once virtually unimaginable, the proportion of adults aged 17-36 living alone in China has risen to nearly 70%. Marriage and childbirth, notes one Chinese Gen Z, have become “almost synonymous with the stress of life for us young people”.

And this does not simply represent a demographic crisis — but inevitably a political one too. We cannot know the political implications of the current war of the sexes in societies such as China and Russia, where civic life is strictly controlled. But in the US, new fractures are becoming more pronounced. Most obviously, women, particularly single women, now provide the base for progressive politics. Similarly in Canada, according to a 2020 poll, women favoured the Liberals by two to one while men slightly tilted to the conservatives. 

Now, the existence of a political gender gap is nothing new — but, according to recent Gallup surveys, it is now five times bigger than in 2000. Survey data has found that from 1999 to 2013, about three in ten women aged 18 to 29 consistently identified as liberal but rose to 40% in 2023. And crucially, Gallup interprets these changes as “stronger-than-average pro-liberal shifts”, particularly in elite colleges. 

In sharp contrast, an increasing proportion of men, particularly in the working class, are embracing Right-wing causes. Just like their American counterparts, who are increasingly supportive of Donald Trump, European men under 30, are also shifting to the Right. Meanwhile, in Korea, the Right-wing shift among young males was sufficient enough to put a Right-wing “anti-feminist” into the Presidency. 

Likewise, a post-sexual society in the West will not be a pretty picture. For one thing, the breakdown of sex relations undermines the traditional focus on long-term wealth creation within families. Married people, for example, aided by the mingling of spousal resources, account for 77% of all US homeowners. But when society no longer places the same value on such a traditional focus, calls for government assistance can be irresistible.

Rather than seek to bolster the prospects for young families, there are growing calls to expand such things as rent subsidies or direct transfers. At a recent campaign stop in Atlanta, speaking to over 10,000 supporters, Kamala Harris pledged to “take on corporate landlords and cap unfair rent increases”. This latest statement mirrors her earlier position before Biden withdrawal where Harris shared on X her belief that “Every American deserves affordable housing”. This refers to the Biden administration’s call to cap rent increases by 5% on landlords with 50 or more rental units or risk losing federal tax breaks. She has also called for Medicare for all, essentially replacing employer-based healthcare , until she decided to backtrack from this unpopular stance.

For many, the idea of family solidarity has all but disappeared as a primary source of support. Rather than being progressive, as is often suggested, the sexual war and the decline of familialism seem likely to accelerate societal decline, mirroring the plague-cursed Medieval period when as much as 15% of the population was estimated to have been permanently celibate and when classical values about the primacy of family tended to fade before theological concerns. As Richard Reeves has noted: “You don’t upend a 12,000-year-old social order without experiencing cultural side effects.” 

The future, it seems, will belong to those largely disconnected individuals who somehow find a way to negotiate what the US Surgeon General has described as an epidemic of loneliness. Already by 2020, 28% of all occupied homes in the US were one-person households, up from just 8% in 1940. Three years later, Pew found that 10% of Americans had no close friends. 

But this is not just an American tragedy. Japan, Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong and now China are evolving similarly. In Japan, the number of people living alone is expected to reach 40% of the whole population by 2040. Already, there are estimated to be 4,000 “lonely deaths” in Japan every week. 

Changes in sexual relations are of course inevitable and, in some ways, liberating for individuals. But on a mass basis, the sexual war represents a critical civilisational challenge. As one seminal study from Singapore has noted, family buttresses not just society but serves as “the primary source of emotional, economic and financial support” for individuals and as the best way to “protect society from the negative fallouts” of a competitive economy. Without a strong family structure, individuals can be cast adrift, looking to material pleasures, government aid and virtual worlds for comfort.

If not addressed, the decline in sexual relations suggests a very dystopian future, in which only the elderly population grows, while children and families become rarer and more stressed. Governments — whether in America, France, Japan or Scandinavia — have not found an effective way to slow this process. That may be because this is more a matter of spirit, than just incentives. What is needed is nothing less than a rediscovery of romantic love and embracing the value of nurturing offspring. Freud may have exposed the seamy side of family life, but he still understands that it stands at the centre of any successful human civilisation.  

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Joel Kotkin is a Presidential Fellow in Urban Futures at Chapman University and a Senior Research Fellow at the Civitas Institute, the University of Texas at Austin.

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