Why Aren't Young Men Having Sex?

Don't listen to the incels. Or to most critics of the incels, either.

• This went up on my Patreon not that long ago; I thought I’d reprint it here as I’m trying to see if I can make Substack a thing. Hope it is engaging!
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  The internet had another of its periodic arguments about incels and the trend of lonely young men who are rejected by women. The main problem with this discussion is that there is no trend. The whole back and forth is a moral panic, invented by the right and adopted, with a clumsy dialectical lack of skepticism, by everyone else. The depressing dialogue underlines how central sexualization is to the project of fascism, and how every part of the political spectrum is often suffused in stigma, shame, and counterproductive moralism when it comes to sex.

This particular round of ugliness was kicked off by Alexandra Hunt, a self-declared public health advocate who went on Twitter to say that young men are in crisis because they are not having sex. She pointed to the chart below from WaPo, and added, “We should be moving towards a right to sex.”  She said that we could help establish a right to sex by decriminalizing sex work.

You’ve probably noticed some problems with this framing. Lots of people on Twitter did as well, not least numerous sex workers. Decriminalizing sex work is important, per Human Rights Watch, because current law makes sex workers vulnerable to violence and prevents them from accessing legal and health resources. Decriminalization is necessary because criminalization violates the rights of sex workers, not because it violates the right of men to have sex.

Framing sex as a right means that someone has to provide sex more or less on demand. That’s a step towards justifying sexual assault, which is why it’s often promoted by violent misogynist incel communities. Incels are men who claim that they are being deprived of sex, and blame women who they claim are selfish, greedy, and shallow. Incel ideology is built on extremely volatile claims of male victimization and entitlement, and has led to a number of violent terrorist attacks.

Incels create an identity out of lack; they claim that masculinity and self-worth require that men have sex—and not just any sex, but sex with white, conventionally attractive women. They feel that they are justified in violence and hate because to be deprived of sex is to be deprived of full humanity.

The pushback correctly points out that incels and their ilk are not justified in violence and hate. But it counterproductively accepts and even doubles down on the idea that if you’re not having sex, you are broken and lesser.

For example, one typical commenter responded to Hunt’s tweet by saying, “It actually astounds me how this is treated as a problem society and specifically women need to fix, instead of a single person under the sun asking why young men are having trouble convincing anyone to engage in an act that most people enjoy and want to do - with them?” Former MMA fighter Jake Shields was even more blunt. “What are the reasons? They watch too much porn? Too fat? Socially awkward? It’s the easiest time in human history to meet people so seems odd 1/3 of men aren’t getting laid.”

These responses (some from progressives) insistently frame the problem of young men not having sex as an issue with the personal characteristics of the men in question. If only young men had better hygiene, or social skills, or took care of themselves, or weren’t misogynist assholes, they would be able to find sexual partners. Incels think they aren’t having sex because women are flawed. Anti-incels think men aren’t having sex because men are flawed.  Everyone agrees, though, that the issue is the personal failures of the people who aren’t having sex.

This is a perfect example of sexualization. We usually think of sexualization as sexifying—treating someone as sexually desirable first and foremost, rather than as a complete human being. But feminist critic Julia Serano argues that sexualization has broader application. “Sexualization occurs,” she says in her recent book Sexed Up, “when a person is nonconsensually reduced to their real or imagined sexual attributes (their body, behaviors, or desires) to the exclusion of other characteristics.”

Incels sexualize women by reducing them to their sexual behaviors; they aren’t offering up sex, so they are evil and broken. In response, those who (rightly!) reject incel philosophy tend to sexualize young men who (supposedly) aren’t having sex by creating a spectrum of imagined pathologies and failures which define them.

I threw that parenthetical “supposedly” in there because the fact is that a lot of self-defined “incels” do in fact have sex. People who track incel forums notethat posters often talk about having sex or being in relationships. Sex-having incels remain enraged, though, because the women they’re in relationships with aren’t sufficiently attractive, or sufficiently deferential. Incels say they are being denied sex, but that’s a lie. Why validate the lie by pretending that the problem is actually one of young men not having sex?

So, what about that chart? It seems to indicate that young men (and young women too) are in fact having less sex. What’s going on there?

Well, in the first place, as Twitter says in an appended note, the chart shows that people are having no sex in the last year. It does not indicate that all the respondents are virgins.

More than that, though, the original article at WaPo contradictsthe entire sexualized incel conversation. The main reason young people are having less sex is that they are forming long-term relationships later in life.

That’s in part because of societal norms that have pushed people to marry later. But it’s also because of a lack of resources. When you are poorer, you are less likely to have sex. According to the survey, 54 percent of unemployed Americans didn’t have a steady romantic partner, compared with 32 percent among the employed.

One big reason for that is simply space. You need money to own your own home or to rent an apartment. Otherwise, you end up (at best) staying with friends or, more likely, relatives, which means you lack privacy. In 1971, 8% of young adults lived with a parent; by 2021 the number had more than doubled to 17%. That’s a lot of young people who can’t take a sexual partner home.

Young men are even more likely than women to live with parents (in 2014, 35 percent versus 29 percent.) The decrease in men having sex, then, isn’t because men have become more misogynist or fatter or less desirable. It’s mostly because more men are living at home.

Why are men more likely to live at home than women? The Washington Post article doesn’t address that, but the answer seems fairly obvious. We still live in a culture where it’s more standard for older men to date younger women than vice versa. That means women are more likely than men to be dating older partners who have their own living space. If you have an older partner, you can go to their place to have sex, or you can even move in with them.

The issue here is not, then, that men or women are failing personally at sex. The issue is that contracting living standards for young people have turned sex for many into an insurmountable logistical challenge.

This matters for a couple reasons. First of all, it’s a sign of a real problem in the US. That problem isn’t a dearth of sex, per se. It’s a falling living standard for young people, which restricts their choices and their happiness in numerous ways. And the solution to that problem isn’t a “right to sex,” which erases women’s sexual agency and consent. The solution is a stronger social safety net, UBI, free college, forgiving student debt, and a housing market that isn’t inflated by speculative boondoggles and realtor greed.

Second, reframing the incel debate matters because sexualizing marginalized people buttresses a politics of inequality and fear that makes progressive change impossible. It’s hopefully easy to see this when incels target women for hatred and violence. It’s been a little harder to see in the pushback against incels. But when we understand that young people are having less sex because they don’t have their own place to live, it becomes clear that blaming those who don’t have sex for their lack of romantic partners is effectively a way to blame the poor—of every gender.

People—men, women, nonbinary—who can’t afford a place of their own are much less likely to have sex regularly. When you make sex a measure of worth, or declare that there must be something personally wrong with the behavior or bodies of people who aren’t having sex regularly, you are saying that people without access to their own place are somehow lesser people. This is another form of the myth of meritocracy, which tells us that people who lack resources are morally inferior. It reifies hierarchy. It’s a huge barrier for progressive politics.

Obviously, living with parents isn’t the only reason someone might not be having sex. People (of any gender) are sometimes shy; they’re sometimes unlucky. Sometimes they’re queer in a community where they feel they have to be closeted for safety. Sometimes they’re asexual. Sometimes they’re disabled. Sometimes for that matter they’re imprisoned. Making life more equitable for marginalized people is a good, and often doing that can increase pleasure and flourishing for them, and for everyone.

But sexualizing people who don’t have sex—that is, reducing them to their sexual behaviors and characteristics, and then creating an identity around their perceived failure or inadequacy—is not productive. It allows some of the worst people on earth to define gender relations and sexuality. We shouldn’t let them do that.