Views expressed in opinion columns are the author’s own.
The Atlantic wants to know when you’re finally going to give it some grandkids. In a feature article in the upcoming issue — which I’m sure is the first from any prestigious American publication to include the word “fucksaw” — Kate Julian somehow cranks out more than 12,000 words on the decrease in partnered sexual activity among young people, which she tellingly refers to as “the sex recession.”
The article is bad.
What Julian calls the “sex recession” has three main elements. First, the percent of high schoolers who have ever had sex declined by 14 points between 1991 and 2017. Second, from the late 1990s to 2014, the average adult went from having sex 62 times a year to 54 times a year. Last, Julian has found that in interviews, young people express a sense of dissatisfaction with the modern dating scene: They feel like the places and rituals that allowed people to meet have mostly gone away without any replacement. And when people do meet other people, Julian argues, they’re not really sure how to interact with them.
Now, in truth, I don’t think this is a topic for national discussion. Population growth might be a matter of concern for future economic planning — although given how quickly this usually shades into eugenics, I would avoid it. But the subjective quality of people’s sex lives just doesn’t seem to me like something worth talking about as if it’s the kind of national concern that sexual assault, abortion law, the Supreme Court, voter suppression and other things are.
Even if it were a major issue, the change here is not that significant. The number of high schoolers who have ever had sex is still “about half,” and the average adult’s decline from 62 sex acts per year to 54 is a decline of… 8 sex acts. Julian offers the worst logic I’ve ever seen to persuade you that this is actually a big difference: “A given person might not notice this decrease, but nationally, it adds up to a lot of missing sex.” Millennials have apparently ruined America’s sex GDP.
What compels The Atlantic to spend 12,000 words in your bedroom? The answer, I submit, is the same as the answer to the supposed “sex recession”: capitalism.
The Atlantic has been, for many years now, the house journal of extremist neoliberalism. (Remember when they argued that the New York City subway should be replaced with a series of private hoverboard companies?) Whenever you read something in The Atlantic, the first question to ask — after you stop laughing — should be, “How does this help capital?”
In this case, it’s straightforward enough. Neoliberal capitalism has rendered meaningful relationships increasingly difficult in a variety of ways. The zero-sum game, instilled in many of us from childhood, tints all interactions with other people with fear and opposition. It’s hard to love someone when your only model of interaction with other people is one of domination.
At a more material level, capitalism has just rendered it far more difficult for young people to become independent: The most common living arrangement for millennials is to live with their parents, and I don’t think anybody really needs it explained to them why this can make dating difficult, let alone starting a family.
People need to have some sort of connection to others, and neoliberal capitalism thought it had found a way out of that: absorbing the sexual revolution of the ‘60s into a bizarre corporate culture. The sexual revolution was premised on ideals of liberation, but combined with neoliberalism, it ended up offering cheap, meaningless sex as a replacement for the real connection that it deemed too expensive and hard for business to manage. It’s telling that birth control is one of the only health products that American society has found ways to offer to large numbers of people for free and that women are expected to just handle it, even when it is subjectively horrifying.
When it turned out that cheap sex didn’t work well for many people, capitalists offered the even lesser replacement of internet porn. As Mark Fisher writes in the brilliant essay “The Slow Cancellation of The Future,” “the combination of precarious work and digital communications leads to a[n]… insomniac, inundated state,” in which “culture becomes de-eroticised.” And then, “desperately short of time, energy, and attention, we demand quick fixes,” like porn and retro art and everything else that’s easy and low-effort (i.e. “cheap”).
If you doubt that this is what’s going on, notice that Julian’s article expressly views sex as a commodity. The decline in sexual activity is “the sex recession,” right?
In one particularly shocking moment, Julian writes that “the recession metaphor is imperfect” because “most people need jobs; that’s not the case with relationships.” It’s hard to imagine a more neoliberal idea than that — it’s exactly the opposite of the truth. Jobs are good to the extent that people can contribute to society and get the things they need, but relationships are what actually matter in most people’s lives, and plenty of people with lives worth living go without jobs. The Atlantic can’t admit that, because it would mean that serving capital isn’t the point of human life.
So, memo to The Atlantic — if you want young people to have sex again, they need free time and money and the space to start families. I suggest you lead by example: Shut down your awful magazine and put the proceeds from selling the office space into a fund for expectant mothers.
John-Paul Teti is a senior computer science major. He can be reached at jp@jpteti.com.
