It’s a thought perhaps shared by the author Katherine Rundell, who won the Bailie Gifford non-fiction prize for her 2022 biography of the poet John Donne. She said in an interview afterwards, having rather fallen in love with Donne’s lusty, dirty Jacobean verse: “I do think a lot of the visions we have of sex and sexuality today are profoundly depressing. You tap them and they ring like money.”

That’s certainly true of British porn star Bonnie Blue, who lined up 1,000 men to have sex with her in a deeply profitable stunt that has also profited her parents, who are on her payroll. Yet intercourse with a legion of men in a day isn’t sex so much as an endurance marathon: where you’re the track and endless strangers are running over you. I wonder how much erogeneity those strangers experienced, having waited like nervous schoolboys queuing up to aim their pee at a target on the wall. It’s not half as fun an image as that created by the humourist Dorothy Parker, way back in 1934, who said of the Yale prom that “if all the girls who attended were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.” 

Now she’s back leering suggestively at the camera while dandling a newborn on her lap; it hardly stirs the loins. If Bonnie Blue can plausibly be accused of having so much sex it loses all meaning, most of her generation is, perhaps, not having enough. The numbers here are stark, with one recent poll finding that just 30% of Gen Zers had lost their virginity. Another found that almost 30% of those aged 18-24 had not had sex at all in the previous year.

Philip Larkin might have claimed that sexual intercourse was invented in 1963, between the lifting of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. But when was it uninvented? When did it die? Was it when Marvel conquered the cinemas? As the film director Richard Linklater said in an interview with The Times in 2024: “Superheroes don’t have sex. They don’t have genitalia, frankly.” Or was it when the political gap between young men and women became a gaping abyss, perhaps crystallised on the day that Andrew Tate, currently facing charges of rape and sexual trafficking, was described by Nigel Farage as “an important voice for men”? 

If Tate became popular online, technology could also be responsible in other ways. Perhaps real intimacy is too scary for a generation who have never really been left alone with their imaginations, always having a device to look at instead, and who have always been seen in those devices themselves. Too much of one’s own reflection is never good. Bonnie Blue is from a generation deeply concerned about their looks; girls who are rarely seen without a full face of make-up, having grown up watching YouTube tutorials of how to plaster themselves in industrial quantities of slap every morning. 

I mean, the last time I saw my 14-year-old without her enormous false eyelashes and thick foundation — honestly, months can pass between sightings of her actual face — I immediately took a photo of her. When she protested, I explained it was important for me to have a reference to give the police in case she goes missing. (She responded that even in a hostage situation she will never be seen without the lashes, so I suppose it’s good that they give her an impetus to escape?) 

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How vanilla is your sexual fantasy?

By Kathleen Stock

But whose fault is this really? Because I have to admit that my daughter was photographed every single day of her early childhood. I always had an iPhone in my hand, and if she asked to see the picture, there it was. There was no waiting for weeks to develop a blurry camera film. So isn’t it pretty rude of us to ask her generation to forget about their image and stop being so vain — when we’ve been the paparazzi all along? We didn’t even need a long lens to see them on their beach lounger; we’d plastered the close-ups of their childhood holidays all over social media before the plane had even landed at Heathrow.

Still, at least now that my daughter has a smartphone herself, I seem to be alone among my fellow parents in not tracking her every move via GPS. My generation, it seems, are not content with being paps; we’re stalkers too, knowing where our kids are at all times, even once they’ve gone to university or fully moved out of the house. It’s not the greatest conducement to developing a private life, is it — your mum being able to see if you’ve been a dirty stop-out; your dad able to track your walk of shame all the way home. How are our children to develop an erotic hinterland if we never leave them alone? 

Not that the situation is necessarily hopeless. For at least one prominent Gen Xer has shown herself more than happy to teach the kids how it’s done. In the last month alone, the actress Gillian Anderson has published More, the second in a series anthologising women’s sexual fantasies, and released a film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in which she stars as an older woman who teaches a younger woman to experience sexual pleasure. All this after Anderson’s hit role as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education, a Netflix show beloved by teenagers around the world for the way Anderson’s on-screen son secretly shares her tips with his classmates. 

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The sexless lives of millennial feminists

By Poppy Sowerby

And, beyond TV, Gen Z and Gen X really do seem to be meeting in the middle (forget Millennials). I’m certainly not the only single middle-aged woman who recently dabbled in the dating apps, and found men in their twenties only too happy to swipe right. When I struck up conversations, and even went on dates with them, I was fascinated to know why. (They should never have dared approach a journalist; I see everything as a potential interview.) 

More than one told me that with women their own age, they worried about saying the wrong thing, whereas they were so unlikely to even be able to impress someone of my generation that it almost took the pressure off. It seemed that anxiety towards their female peers was fuelling their interest in women who were not their peers — as well, no doubt, as the desire to learn something about sex from someone more experienced. 

One 20-something bloke even told me that he had been on a recent date with someone his age who sat down in the pub and immediately asked him where he stood on Israel and abortion. It didn’t feel like a conversation so much as a test: one he now didn’t want to pass, whether he turned out to share her views or not. “But people your age are so much more open-minded,” he added, with a hopeful look in his eyes.

Back then, heterosexuality looked as easy as falling off a log. They say that onlookers see most of the game, and I found the push and pull of it all, the simple animal processes overlaid by human sophistications, endlessly interesting. I still do.

Today, though, heterosexuals are an endangered species. A recent survey uncovered that 21% of young adults (born between 1997 and 2003) in America identify as “LGBTQ+”. It also reported the frankly incredible stat that the number of self-identifying non-heterosexuals in the American population as a whole has doubled since 2012, from 3.5% to 7.1%.

It is, of course, vanishingly unlikely that a fifth of a population has turned spontaneously away from heterosexuality overnight. The rise of the insubstantial concepts of TQ+, which have little to do with sexual orientation but have been bolted on to LGB for some reason, obviously accounts for some of this. “Queer” is a particularly slippery category; it now seems to include anything from straight chaps wearing eyeliner to straight girls dyeing their hair shocking pink. Thus, it has elevated attendees of a Rocky Horror night or a Depeche Mode concert to the status of a persecuted minority.

But still, the survey finds that 57% of the respondees (of all ages) claiming to be non-hetero say they are bisexual. So, either this was always the case, but people concealed their sexuality due to social stigma. Or — and this is the far more likely scenario, in my opinion — heterosexuals are becoming socially embarrassed by their heterosexuality and trying not to be déclassé.

The reason I believe this is the more likely scenario is that heterosexuality, among the great and the good, now seems more fraught than being bisexual did a decade ago. The grim academic neologism “heteronormativity”, thanks to Tumblr and Twitter, is everywhere. The last few days are representative: Trisha Greenhalgh, a Professor of Primary Care and a member of independent SAGE, exhorting her followers to avoid “preaching heteronormativity”; an Indonesian magazine telling its readers that heteronormativity was the creation of Dutch colonialism; and Dr Nick Gah of Harvard stating that history isn’t called “herstory” because — well, you’ve guessed it. (This will come as a surprise to anybody who knows the Greek word histor meaning witness).

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The death of British television

By Gareth Roberts

The powerful organs of the LGBTQ+ movement have spent the last decade saying, “let’s end stigma, break taboos, and stop judging”. What this actually means is “let’s move stigma, place taboos around other things, and carry on judging people but for different reasons”.

Who would want to be “normative”, when you can catch a little of the glamour previously hoarded by the gays? A “normative” identity is increasingly seen as ethically dubious in the West; to be socially acceptable, to gain cachet and status, people have to identify as some kind of minority. Race is increasingly rigidly policed and culturally segregated, with white people cast as original sinners because of what they look like. But fear not! Anybody can identify into some spicy high-status oppression at the drop of a rainbow-striped Stetson by claiming to be non-heterosexual, no questions asked.

At the further end of the culture, prominent heterosexuals such as Laurie Penny, Jameela Jamil and Demi Lovato now all claim to be “queer”. Heterosexuality now carries such low status, in their bananas world, that they’ve felt the need to disavow it.

There are further incentives for people to identify as non-hetero in Hollywood, the arbiter of our culture. Take the bizarre new “representation” quota for eligibility at the Oscars — where at least 30% of characters in a film must come from “underrepresented minority groups” or a main storyline must revolve around such groups or it won’t even be considered for an award. It would strike dead most of human culture accrued over millennia, but actors and writers must now obey this peculiar edict or lose their careers.

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It’s all deeply patronising, and borderline homophobic. There is a kind of fetishisation of non-hetero relationships going on here, an element of voyeurism not much different from straight girls who kiss each other at parties to get the boys’ attention. It is also artistically crass. It means that unalloyed heterosexuality can never be depicted, and has a trickle-down effect of making it culturally unacceptable.

It’s no coincidence that all this is happening where #MeToo came to a head — making heterosexuality seem not only embarrassing but frankly dangerous. But Hollywood is also representative of a wider social movement.

Beneficial changes in material conditions in the West have led, paradoxically, to increased angst and the sexes being increasingly wary of each other. So #MeToo plus the atomisation of social life, plus the grim commodification of reproduction and romantic love, plus the problematisation of male sexual desire for women and its expression have made heterosexuals of both sexes neurotic, jumpy and hyper-vigilant. It could be another factor in the so-called Sex Recession among Gen Z; the number of high school students in America having sex has dropped from 54 to 40% since 1991.

Every society has regulations and social standards around heterosexuality, often wildly variant. Ours have changed with dizzying rapidity. One might feel almost nostalgic for something as asinine as “Men Are From Mars, Women Are From Venus”. At least that didn’t come laden with drear politics and sweaty-palmed suspicion.

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Let me be clear, I’m not blaming heterosexuals for their current predicament; I am blaming the culture that’s increasingly scattering obstacles in their path. When I encounter a functioning straight couple nowadays, I want to cheer.

Because at a very basic level, heterosexuality is of major importance, as the great motor of humanity. Without it, nobody would exist. It is a responsibility and (I’ve observed) a great joy, to rear and to effectively socialise children. The devaluation of parenthood — and of stable heterosexual coupling — across the West has had serious social consequences, exacerbated by bad economic decisions taken by Western governments. It has become increasingly financially difficult to raise kids — the ONS reported in 2020 that the English fertility rate had reached its lowest recorded level — which should be the easiest thing in the world.

It is deeply foolish to ignore or wish away the material reality, and the importance, of heterosexuality, and wrong to judge different kinds of straight relationships entered into by choice. There is nothing wrong with traditional straight couples and nothing wrong with progressive straight couples. They don’t matter more than the rest of us, but they matter in a different and significant way. And they are, let us not forget, the majority.

Shame about innocuous things is dangerous. As a gay man (sorry) who came of age in the Eighties, I know that only too well. It should not be so boring or gauche to be heterosexual that people are desperate to deny it. So let us have more heteronormativity and end the stigma. Take it from a homosexual, you’re just fine as you are.

My yuletide impulse to latch on to the nearest warm body is, in fact, utterly par for the course. There is even a term for it: ‘cuffing’, defined by the Urban Dictionary as the season in which people look relationships, not just casual flings. The idea of cuffing isn’t rooted in empirical evidence, exactly, but it does capture a mood: according to Brand Watch, a social media monitoring firm, references to ‘cuffing season’ on social media sites begin to rocket as early as October.

The wintry urge to ‘cuff’ is partly associated with being actually cold, and wanting to stay in and cuddle rather than go out (see above). But just as important are the pressures of Christmas, and the dismal sense of failure that traipsing solo round festive parties and family events can bring. This, combined with the fear of facing a solitary and possibly dry January alone means dating sites are at their busiest between Boxing Day and Valentine’s Day, with 7 January — next Tuesday — said to be the busiest day of all. Match.com says 50 million messages are sent yielding 1 million dates during this peak season.

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Why the young are falling out of love with sex

By Zoe Strimpel

The seasonal rush for intimacy gives pause for thought. What exactly are we doing? After all, we live in an age of plunging marriage and birth rates. Individualism and choice has taught us to pursue our own ends, making love hard and romantic relationships complex at best,  and often exhausting and disorienting. In their 1995 book The Normal Chaos of Love, the classic study of modern love in the West, the German sociologists Beck and Beck-Gernsheim captured this perfectly. “In the New Era, everything [is] a matter of choice…one of [modern life’s] main features is a collision of interest between love, family and personal freedom.”

As the Becks saw, the rise of choice in all aspects of life drastically reshaped the romantic plane. But if choice was already a way of life in 1995, today it has been encoded and enshrined in our intimate lives on a whole new scale. Being accustomed to rifling through thousands of faces, as dating apps allow, gives us the sense that we have infinite romantic and sexual options. But this has negated the very kinds of outcomes those caught up in cuffing season may think they want. Finding true connection and commitment in a sea of callous shopping is extremely hard.

But even if the governing effect of dating apps seems to be coldness, and a blithe sense of expendability, their popularity has normalised a kind of romantic quest and pointed to a big hole in the market for some kind of affection. There is the basic mammalian element to the search; the pleasure to be had in a familiar body who is also a companion.  But the Christmas scramble for relationships is the tip of an iceberg which it seems all the distractions and connections of digital life do not assuage: loneliness. Loneliness is not only unpleasant, it could be lethal: some studies suggest that those without long-term relationships are far more likely to die in middle age. Singleness is expensive, too: according to the Office for National Statistics, the 7.7 million people living alone in the UK spent on average £21 a week more than couples. There’s nobody to share the mortgage with, or the cost of holidays.

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There is nothing new about the loneliness of the modern single driven on to a frantic search for a partner. Indeed the solitary malaise of the modern and usually urban solo is a potent image that evolved along with the city itself after the Industrial Revolution. As cities became clearinghouses for an ever-widening assortment of people looking for work as typists, clerks, civil servants, railways workers and so on, they attracted those who — in seeking work — had moved away from their home towns and communities and wound up disconnected, untethered and alone.

In this way, the lonely partner-hunter became a symbol of an age of modernity and anatomisation. Commercial matchmaking, singleness and urban alienation have been linked since the nineteenth century. London had long been known as a lonely place; what WT Stead called ‘the city of dreadful solitude’. In 1890, General Booth, advocate of marriage bureaux, decried the impossibility of provincial courtship rituals in London, where “many hundreds, nay thousands, of young men and young women who are living in lodgings, are practically without any opportunity of making the acquaintance of each other, or of any one of the other sex!” But in the late 20th century loneliness, a ‘disease’ seen to face singles above all, extended far beyond the capital, sometimes even reaching a national platform. In the Crosby by-election of 1981, from an eclectic party mix, Donald Potter — the founder of a Young Conservatives lonely hearts group called Close Encounters — wanted to install a phone line for lonely people for The Humanitarian Party.

For the writer Jonathan Raban, the proliferation of dating services was a central image of the isolating experience of 1970s urban life. He noted that “coming out of the fog, making oneself visible and available, is prickly and difficult” but that “one can, if one is sufficiently bold or desperate, advertise one’s loneliness in the newspaper… Here loneliness has a solidarity, even a kind of respectability; fellow isolates are stacked neatly in columns of fine type.”

The launch and subsequent success of Singles Magazine (1977-1993), a lifestyle magazine for the unattached run by the owner of Dateline, the computer dating agency, testified to a new fascination with the psychological aspects of single life. The magazine was divided between the testimonies of people railing against what one called ‘couples’ society’ and attempting to bring about a kind of Singles’ Pride, and a more dominant strain concerned with the deprivations of going it alone.

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Isolation could be seen on the physical features of particularly unsuccessful singles such as case study Bernard. The magazine’s in-house psychologist wrote in 1977 that: “One only has to look at Bernard to see the disturbed nature of his body movements during communication to realize … Bernard has [never] been loved . . . he wants to be married, but seems to be an entirely sexless person.” The evidence of a lonely life was etched into his visage: “He takes no pride in his face. Only the mouth moves when he talks. The muscles at the side of his mouth are still and short of exercise. He does not gesture… His tone of voice is monotonous.”

The psychologist was clear that social isolation was bad, but romantic isolation could be even worse: the deprivation of intimacy had long-term and short-term consequences. “In the chronic cases sexuality can become so badly damaged by ill-use or lack of use that it is permanently destroyed, and the person has no will left to live socially,” he concluded.

All this sounds pretty grim and worrying in a rather 1970s way. But while ‘cuffing season’ has a jaunty ring to it, those who find themselves single at Christmas often feel like they’re the one left without a chair when the music stops and this can be very painful indeed. Though, I would wager, probably not bad enough to leave one’s sexuality ‘permanently destroyed’ — if there’s one thing the internet has done, it ensures nobody ever has to feel entirely, totally alone. The Bernards of 2019 can at least find people to chat to online and an array of therapists and therapies offering to help too.

A relaxing in expectations around marriage and family have also helped disperse some of the most concentrated aspects of singles’ suffering. And yet as cuffing season makes clear, along with the dating site frenzy around Christmas and the New Year, the well of loneliness continues to rises up and threatens to engulf. It seems there’s (still) no connection like a physical one.

Nearly 60 years since the dawn of the sexual revolution, we find ourselves in a frosty romantic hinterland of wants and taxonomies, animated by power-play rather than passion; kink rather than personality, and in which only the most callous can survive.

Since it’s all become so much work, it’s no wonder nobody much can be bothered to have it anymore. The British National Surveys of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles (Natsal) — one of the world’s most thorough sex surveys, conducted once a decade since 1991 — released its latest findings for the period up to 2012, showing that British sex lives are on a long downward drift. The numbers of both men and women who had not had any sex in the past month rose to nearly 30 per cent; in 2001 it was 23% of women and 26% of men.

What’s most striking is that sex is dropping off among what was traditionally the horniest demographic — young men. The proportion of Americans aged between 18 and 29 who reported having no sex in the past year more than doubled between 2008 and 2018, to 23% — a bigger proportion than among the over-50s, according to the 2019 University of Chicago General Social Survey.

Over this same period, the share of men aged 18 to 29 who had not had sex in a year nearly tripled to 29 per cent, while the rise among women was a modest eight percentage points, to 18%. The male pullback from sex in America echoes well-documented trends in Germany and Japan. In 2010, Japan’s population of herbivores — men apathetic towards sexual relationships — accounted for 61% of those in their 20s and 70% in their 30s. And as any number of British women repeatedly flummoxed by male apathy or disregard will tell you, it feels the same here too.

The state of gender in a given society can always be read through the sex lives of its citizenry, and in that regard we are in the grips of a paradox. On the one hand gender differences are being eroded by warriors of woke, who see them as oppressive social constructions. And away from identity politics, the gulf between men and women has never been smaller, by technical, legislative, cultural, professional and social measures.

Yet as they encounter each other in the chambers of Tinder, Bumble, Hinge and OkCupid, the climate between men and women is frosty. Everyone is cross and fed up with everyone else for being so rubbish that they have to keep swiping.

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In 1996, Helen Fielding’s Bridget Jones helped women realise that half the human race (men) might usefully be called “fuckwits” when it came to dating and romance. The dynamics of internet dating, with its illusion of graspable sexual paradise, has either created a new tsunami of apparent fuckwits, or it has made the sheer extent of them inescapable.

Meanwhile, the boredom and jadedness stitched into heavy use of apps (“nope”, “like”, “nope”, “nope”, “nope”, “like”) has produced a ubiquitous undercurrent of queasy unpleasantness. The result is that men, formerly seen as an alternating source of fun, trouble and heartbreak, become “men: ugh”. Women, once the promised land for many a Romeo, become bitches, gold-diggers, game-players, and, most significantly, for a depressing bloc known as “women: meh”.

This sexual stand-off, characterised by simmering distrust and putrid fatigue, oozes off internet dating portals. I’ve often found myself, after a night of binge-scrolling, surprised to remember that dating is filed under “romance”, which is supposed to be — at least at the start — a little about positive, fuzzy feelings or the potential to develop them.

Rather than sought after, one feels lectured, harangued and responsible for doing something terrible simply by existing. Anxiety levels rise, one feels nervous and in trouble. I remind myself, as if waking from a nightmare, that it’s ok; I never have to even meet these men, and never have to speak to them.

Here are some examples of the different types of anger a woman will encounter on a casual swipe-fest: explicitly cross, jaded, and wearing up front the belief that we are all too often more trouble than we are worth. It’s a style characterised by commands and bullet points.

So Joe, “27, entrepreneur” advertises as such
“- No drama (deal with your insecurities before we can engage in good convo)
– Similar morals (which we’ll more than likely suss out in person)
– Good head on your shoulders and is a pure grinder (someone who gets the essence of hard working from the ground up)
– NATURAL HAIR (colouring is cool)
– And most importantly, can dance
– If I’m not your type then do not swipe right’
– DO NOT WASTE OUR TIME WITH DEAD CONVO. BRING SUSTENANCE TO THE TABLE”

Why am I being shouted at? “No drama!” Sometimes I’m dramatic. And dancing — I can’t dance! Stressful scenes flit across my mind. Wellbeing plunges.

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Then there’s “Alo”, 23, who goes down the line of total mockery of the process (and by implication, those they expect to meet). Alo had stated as his profession “prime minister” (funny enough) and in the personal info section simply put “I downloaded this as a joke”. Right then. And there are countless more Joes and Alos.

These men were young — but things don’t necessarily improve with age. Among those old enough to remember the more earnest, excitable world of print personals, there’s still that telltale trace of aggression and of having been burned before by all those terrible women out there. Take Craig, a 41-year-old American who barks terrifying facts and veiled warnings at the women foolish enough to dawdle:

“Neuchatel 3/10-3/12
Cambridge 3/12-3/15
Vienna 3/16-3/19
Brussels 3/19-3/23
Non-monogamous Dom.
Old luddite; I don’t Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat etc. I will meet in person and buy you a drink. Furthermore, single dad, career, travel, etc. I have a complex schedule and place a high value on my free time’”

How you get from here to any encounter that relates to what was formerly considered erotic, intimate, loving or even sexy, beats me. Women have held out more than men against the end of sex — rates of female sexlessness have risen less — but in the end, even we will give up.

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A number of us already are, with women simply coming offline, choosing friendship instead. In 2017, the Canadian writer Sarah Ratchford wrote a piece called “Why I’m Giving Up Men and Just Staying Home” which explained the disillusionment with modern, digitally-enabled masculinity. “Alongside the wage gap and the emotional labour gap, the antics of softboys, f-ckboys, fading and ghosting constitute a pronounced communication gap,” she wrote.

She describes her choice to pack the whole thing in and focus on friends, and discusses the similar choice of a friend called Paola. “Now, because men can’t seem to hack interpersonal relationships, Paola identifies her friendships as her primary relationships — and she doesn’t see that changing.”

Getting laid has never been so complicated — nor so chilly a business. Attempts to pretend gender binaries don’t exist, the obsession with kink and labels, and the belief that you can gorge as much as you want, in just the way you want, from a digital cornucopia of sexual options, has spelled doom. It’s the end of the affair — with sex — at last.