The Performative Male Epidemic - Louise Perry & Mary Harrington - #1021

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
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Americans are having a record low amount of sex, even less than they did during COVID. Just 37% of American adults have sex weekly, down from 55% in 1990 Does this count to the view that sex is becoming more casually accepted than ever before?

**Louise Perry** (1:13)
Here goes first.

**Mary Harrington** (1:15)
Do you wanna go first? I think I glanced at these statistics, and what I thought was interesting, and sort of haven't really had a chance to borrow into, is how does it split between the long-term partnered and the casually and the un-partnered? Because that's been, generally, that's where the commentary gets interesting, and people have often, the conservative side will say, no, actually, the not getting any is very much the people who are not married. And actually, the married are getting any. And if I remember rightly, the recent headlines were, no, actually, the people who are not, who are married are also becoming more panda-like.

**Chris Williamson** (1:53)
Sex recessions happening across the board.

**Mary Harrington** (1:55)
Yeah, it's happening across the board.

**Chris Williamson** (1:56)
Relationship agnostic.

**Louise Perry** (2:00)
So I think that the paradox where people are simultaneously having less sex and apparently being at least more permissive towards casual sex, whether or not they're having lots of it, I think is solved by that marriage issue. So if people are less likely to be in long-term partnerships, and people in long-term partnerships have more sex. So I think there's a model that works where say Gen Z are having casual sex, but they're only having casual sex. So like one hook up a year, for instance, works out as very little sex. But it's also not to say that casual sex culture doesn't exist.

**Chris Williamson** (2:33)
So you're able to have both of these things happening at the same time.

**Louise Perry** (2:35)
I think that those things work.

**Chris Williamson** (2:36)
And they might actually be causing each other.

**Louise Perry** (2:37)
Yeah. But I also think it's plausible that even married people might be having less sex. And that might be to do with things like obesity, things like, I don't know, Xenoestrogens, like there could be biological things going on. Or people just looking at their phones too much.

**Mary Harrington** (2:49)
I think people looking at their phones is at least as plausible at a practical level as Xenoestrogens or any of the sort of exotic biological explanations. I mean, it's very absorbing. And at the end of the day, a certain amount of action happens, just nothing to do, nothing on TV.

**Chris Williamson** (3:12)
Spontaneously, out of boredom.

**Mary Harrington** (3:13)
You're here, I'm here.

**Louise Perry** (3:16)
You know, Alice Evans, who's an academic at KCL London, she blames smartphones for the birth rate crisis.

**Mary Harrington** (3:23)
I mean, the line starts going down.

**Louise Perry** (3:27)
They certainly track.

**Mary Harrington** (3:28)
Sometime before smartphones. Well, it depends on what country you're looking at.

**Louise Perry** (3:34)
It depends on which country you're looking at. But she notices, and I think this is true, that all the parts of the world that are seeing and have seen and are seeing the greatest drops in fertility, this does track with smartphone usage. The places where fertility is clinging on in, say, Sub-Saharan Africa is where people are least likely to have smartphones. I think probably the third factor that those things correlate with is actually modernity and affluence and that's more complex. But it's interesting. I mean, her theory is that people are just so besotted with the joys of limbic capitalism delivered by their phones, that they just forget to behave like normal human beings and reproduce.