Bangladesh, April 6 -- We are not living through a sexual renaissance. By the most basic empirical measures, we are having less sex than previous generations. What looks like liberation is something colder: the restructuring of desire itself.

Data from the General Social Survey [https://gss.norc.org/] show that the proportion of young adults in the United States reporting no sexual activity in the past year has risen dramatically since the 1990s. Among men under 30, the share reporting no sex in the previous year roughly tripled by the late 2010s, reaching around 30 percent. Similar patterns appear among women, though less sharply. Teen sexual activity has also declined substantially over the past three decades; CDC Youth Risk Behavior d...