As a teenager growing up in Seattle, Carter Sherman was “pathologically obsessed” with the fact that she was still a virgin.
In her new book The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over Its Future, which chronicles Gen Z’s sex lives (or lack thereof), Sherman describes having a meltdown after one of her best friends has sex with their classmate, making her feel left behind.
“I fully broke down crying in front of my mom,” she tells me when I bring up the incident. She cried harder when her mom admitted she wasn’t a virgin at the same age. Fourteen years later, Sherman, a 31-year-old journalist (she works at The Guardian; the two of us also previously worked together at Vice News), has interviewed more than 100 young people about why they aren’t having as much sex as previous generations and, despite the narrative that they’re prudes, she found that many of them want to have sex—there are just a lot of complicated factors stopping them.
“Many of them are very horny. They would like to be having sex, and in fact they feel a lot of shame over the fact that they haven't had sex yet or that they’re not having sex enough.”
The numbers Sherman found in her reporting bear out the idea that young people are in the midst of a “sex recession.” One in four Gen Z adults have never had partnered sex, according to a 2022 survey by the Kinsey Institute and Lovehoney, while data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention shows that in 2023, around a third of high schoolers said they’d had sex—down from 47 percent in 2013. Even masturbating is on the decline.
As for why, Sherman says the ubiquity of social media and smartphones have definitely played a role in how young people engage with each other, but also in how they view themselves. Throw in stress over the overturning of Roe v. Wade and multiple presidential administrations that have collectively poured billions of dollars into abstinence-only sex education, and you can start to see how the answer to why young people are hooking up less goes far beyond just “they’re puritanical."
Sherman shared her eye-opening and sometimes troubling observations from the book in an interview with WIRED.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
WIRED: There is a perception that Gen Z are prudes or a “nation of virgins” to borrow a phrase from your book. What’s stopping them from having sex?
Carter Sherman: It is undeniably the case that they are having sex later and less frequently than previous generations. What is not true, from my reporting—and I talked to more than 100 people under 30 for the book—is that Gen Z isn't interested in sex. They're definitely not “sex negative.” They're sort of swimming in this miasma of anxiety from a lot of different sources that are contributing to a lack of desire or lack of ability to connect with people enough in order to have sex with them.