‘A woman's right to operate by her convictions should never be questioned, especially when it comes to sex,’ Pennsylvania-based lawyer Fumi, 32, tells ELLE. She’s been celibate for over five years and says it’s brought her greater romantic satisfaction, not less. ‘The glorification of hook-up culture is often little more than a facade,’ she says. ‘Dating while celibate gave me the freedom to be free from expectations and with a mindset focused on finding a bond built on genuine friendship. We are so much more than our bodies.’
At a time when hook-ups are available at the swipe of a screen, you’d expect that we’d be having more of them than ever. But Fumi is one of countless young women who have chosen to turn away from sex either largely or altogether.
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Barely a month seems to go by without a headline declaring that Gen Z are stuck in a ‘sex recession’. Studies show that, across the UK and US, Gen Z (those born between 1996 and 2012) are more concerned about tightening their belts rather than undoing them. One, from 2017, found that just 24% of people aged between 18 and 23 said they were having casual sex, compared to 38% in 2007. In another, 31% of young single women reported having sexual intercourse during the past month in 2007, versus 22% in 2017.
Gen Z is experiencing a distinctly different kind of sexual revolution from previous generations such as millennials or Generation X (1965-1979); it’s one where the approach to sex is more pragmatic and personal. It's something actor Julia Fox has touched on countless times in recent years, revealing that she’d chosen to abstain from sex in response to a TikTok featuring two new Bumble adverts. 'We’re just happy alone!' she wrote, adding to praise from fans: '2.5 years of celibacy and never been better tbh.' In May, during an appearance on Watch What Happens Live with Andy Cohen, she added: 'Nothing good comes from sex with men, including children,' noting that her celibate living is a personal protest against the overturning of Roe v Wade. Musician Lenny Kravitz, meanwhile, recently said his own sexual abstinence is 'a spiritual thing'.
Scott South, a professor of sociology at the University of Albany in New York, says the stats showing a sex famine have caught many researchers ‘by surprise’. ‘While there has been a good deal of speculation as to why people were having less sex, there are few rigorous studies testing these explanations,’ he says. Following their 2021 study Why Are Fewer Young Adults Having Casual Sex?, South and his co-researcher Lei Lei, the Dean of Rutgers Business School, found that waning alcohol consumption plays a ‘substantial’ factor, as does the decreasing frequency of informal dating relationships and increasing economic precarity.
There are also the factors more likely to be revealed in anecdotes than data: a backlash against hook-up culture, changes in people’s approach to intimacy post-pandemic (decreased sexual desire, irritation at less privacy, tiredness from feeling overworked), and even helicopter parents. And let’s not forget the ubiquity of porn, which has skewed the expectations of sex, resulting in disappointment and disillusionment when the ‘real thing’ can’t compete with its fictional other.
Sex might be more readily available than ever before, but our appetite for it appears to have swung to its limit on the pendulum. Has the abundance of it made it boring? Or has the casual attitude towards it (think ad-hoc Tinder matches, d*ck pics and subsequent ghosting) made us question what we really want from intimacy, and feel more empowered to remove ourselves from situations that don’t satisfy those needs?
Modern society owes a lot of its perception of sex to the sexual-liberation movement of the 1960s. It gave rise to the normalisation of contraception, pornography, premarital sex and masturbation. It helped to legalise homosexuality and abortion. It also portrayed sex, especially casual sex, as both a means of and an indication of female empowerment. Many of those ideas persist to the present day, after the Jilly Cooper ‘bonkbusters’ of the 1980s and the popularity of 1990s TV shows like Sex and the City and Ally McBeal, which portrayed intelligent female thirtysomethings enjoying no-strings-attached sex. But the realities of hook-up culture – which has grown exponentially in recent years thanks to dating apps – and the complex issues that can be involved in it have left many people, especially women, feeling anything but empowered.
ANDREW GARFIELD
IN ORDER TO PLAY A JESUIT PRIEST IN MARTIN SCORSESE’S 2016 FILM SILENCE, THE METHOD ACTOR STARVED HIMSELF OF SEX AND FOOD. ‘I WAS CELIBATE FOR SIX MONTHS,’ HE SAID.
JUSTIN BIEBER
BEFORE MARRYING HIS NOW-WIFE HAILEY, THE SINGER SAID THAT HE’D HAD A SELF-IMPOSED PERIOD OF NO SEX AS A WAY OF FEELING CLOSER TO GOD.
AMBER ROSE
THE MODEL RECENTLY DECLARED ON A PODCAST THAT SHE WAS FINE WITH BEING SINGLE FOR THE REST OF HER LIFE: ‘I DON’T WANT TO HAVE SEX... IT’S SO GROSS. I DON’T WANT IT’
DREW BARRYMORE
THE ACTOR AND TALK-SHOW HOST REVEALED IN AN ESSAY THAT SHE HADN’T HAD SEX SINCE HER DIVORCE SIX YEARS BEFORE. ‘I’M NOT A PERSON WHO NEEDS SEX,’ SHE WROTE.
LIL YACHTY
IN A RECENT PODCAST INTERVIEW, THE US RAPPER SAID SEX DOESN’T DO IT FOR HIM ANYMORE: ‘I JUST HAD SO MUCH SEX THAT IT’S, LIKE, DILUTED TO ME.’
Over the past two decades, millennials and Gen Z have been picking apart previous generations’ understanding of physical intimacy to work out what it should look like in a digital, consent-focused world. And while sex education was made compulsory in all British secondary schools in 2017 (covering everything from sexual orientation to the definitions of rape), today’s sex-curious are primarily being educated by podcasts, wellness apps and TV shows such as Sex Education, Fleabag and Big Mouth, where protagonists address modern sexuality in a way that’s honest, relatable and realistic.
According to sex educator and F**ks Given podcast host Reed Amber, it’s this improved exposure to, and availability of, conversations about sex, gender and sexual identities that is behind the younger generation’s new attitude. ‘Women are learning more about their bodies and know they don’t need to get the same amount of validation from sex as perhaps they once did... We are taking more control and responsibility for our pleasure and waiting for the right thing to come along, rather than f*cking anything that moves. Everyone now gets to decide the way they see sex and their bodies, rather than having someone else decide it for them,’ she says.
Some Gen Z-ers – who have been dubbed ‘puriteens’, a phrase used to describe young ‘sex-negative’ digital nomads – are going one step further and taking sex off the menu altogether. The hashtag #celibacy has been viewed over 165 million times on TikTok, with one user deciding to go celibate for a year to ‘reclaim’ her sexual energy. Another wants to break his ‘soul ties’ (a spiritual connection between two people that some believe forms after sex), for a ‘healthier soul’. Sexual abstinence is being used as a way for them to reconnect with themselves and disconnect from the social pressures around physical intimacy.
Life coach Victoria de Vall, 24, became celibate in 2020 after feeling ‘unsafe’ in the way that she viewed herself and male sexual partners. ‘I’d come to realise I didn’t know what intimacy looked like,’ she says. ‘I had been conditioned to perform and go along with whatever a boyfriend wanted, to self-abandon and people please.’ Just as addiction recovery and therapy programmes often encourage individuals to embark on abstinence in order to go back to basics, de Vall says not having sex for a period of time enabled her to do ‘inner transformation work’ and reconnect with her own sexual desire. ‘You have to “starve” yourself of another person’s validation and [stop] using sex to avoid your emotions,’ she says.
A period of abstinence is part of the framework co-founders Dr Anna Hushlak and Billie Quinlan use in Ferly, an app launched in 2019 that aims to change society’s relationship with sex and support women who experience ‘sexual difficulties’, such as low libido and the inability to orgasm. ‘It takes the pressure off,’ Dr Hushlak explains, ‘and also allows people to redefine what sex actually means to them.’
The idea that sex starts with oneself is of utmost importance for Dr Hushlak and Quinlan, who have both experienced sexual abuse. ‘I had the hands of other people know my body before I even knew myself,’ Dr Hushlak says. In a world in which you can get a hook-up faster than you can a takeaway, it’s crucial for people to eradicate the notion that the frequency of sex is a measure of how good it is. ‘As a society, we’re obsessed with the quantity of sex rather than the quality. Among the younger generation, it seems there’s an emphasis on quality – rather than having sh*t sex, they’d rather not have it at all.’ For de Vall, the power of ‘new celibacy’ largely comes down to how individuals choose to define it. She says it’s not about depriving yourself of pleasure, but focusing on opening yourself to the exploration of wider understandings of sex and identity. ‘I’m extremely pro-sex,’ she says. ‘Masturbation plays a big role in the celibacy I’ve experienced and that I teach my clients.’ Dr Hushlak agrees: ‘When I think about celibacy, I tend to think about [refraining from] sex with others, as opposed to refraining from sex entirely,’ she says.
We live in a time of apparent contradictions: waning interest in intimacy that doesn’t serve us, but increasing acceptance that everyone should be free to express their sexuality as they want. The queer umbrella is continuing to expand and Gen Z are gaining distance from obsolete expectations of what sex ‘should’ look like. They’re able to own their sexual identities in a way that has never been done before. The repercussions of the younger generation’s sex ‘drought’ remains to be seen. But there’s more than enough reason to believe the kids are alright. Perhaps a little more abstinence, when used to prioritise one’s own desires, might not be such a bad thing.
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Katie O'Malley is the Site Director on ELLE UK. On a daily basis you’ll find Katie managing all digital workflow, editing site, video and newsletter content, liaising with commercial and sales teams on new partnerships and deals (eg Nike, Tiffany & Co., Cartier etc), implementing new digital strategies and compiling in-depth data traffic, SEO and ecomm reports. In addition to appearing on the radio and on TV, as well as interviewing everyone from Oprah Winfrey to Rishi Sunak PM, Katie enjoys writing about lifestyle, culture, wellness, fitness, fashion, and more.
