Why Is This Generation Having Less Sex?

When I look at kids today playing with their iPads and skilfully getting to the next level of Candy Crush on their moms' iPhones, it makes me sad. First off, no way should a 4-year-old have the intelligence and dexterity to beat me at any game, no matter the platform. But more importantly, those kids aren't playing outside, gaining social skills by making friends with neighbour kids. They're not exercising their creativity making pillow forts and pretending they're princesses and pirates. They're not getting exercise, fresh air, Vitamin D and all that. It makes me think, what is the world coming to?!

Well, for all the same distractions that these children are now inside staring at a screen, teens and twentysomethings are having less sex. Studies have shown our parents and grandparents had more regular sex at our age than we do. And I think the answer to "What gives?" is technology.

I think today we have an attachment to our phones and to constantly being "connected" that we can't shake. When we're having alone time with someone, we're wondering what we're missing on Facebook and Instagram, we're wondering if our friends possibly hit us up to get drinks, we're wondering if we got any emails we need to answer from our bosses. And along the same lines, we fear that if we are connected, we could find out there's something better to do. Maybe you thought all of your friends were staying in tonight, but they wind up going to a club and having the night of their lives and you'll be missing out on inside jokes for the next 3 years. Maybe your mom is going to a raffle and you could've won 2 weeks all expenses paid vacation to the Caribbean but you missed out cause you were faking an orgasm with some guy. And FOMO sets in.

Also, because we're growing up with all of this technology, we're less experienced with in-person social interaction. Once we're in person we're like fuck I don't know how to flirt and what happens if he asks me to go home with him? What do I say? How do we start having sex? What if we're awkward together? We're significantly less comfortable just entering into real relationships than our parents and grandparents because our parents and grandparents had to talk to people IN PERSON to actually have relationships. We've been arranging hook-ups on Tinder so we don't have to suffer the embarrassment of a first date.

Because we feel so connected to everyone else and everyone else likes to pretend they're off doing the coolest things while they're behind a computer screen, we think that's everybody is doing it, everybody has awesome lives, everyone is hot as fuck, and here we are, fat and awkward. We're scared we're not going to be good and when that anxiety and that pressure builds, the easiest thing is for us just not to do it. We see porn stars on our screens and they're sexy and they know what they're doing and we're terrified that we have to live up to everything we see around us.

Finally, with technology, we're used to high stimulation and instant gratification. We're using to finding an answer immediately on Google, hearing a song the second it's in our head with Spotify, or ordering something on Amazon with the touch of a button. We don't want to go through the sweating and the grunting and showering afterward to possibly not even orgasm. And given the amount of porn we watch today, sometimes real live people without crazy sexual plots just don't turn us on. We have to learn to purposely choose long-term satisfaction over instant gratification. Will the sex be great every time? No. But will an excellent sex life with a partner you love beat out watching porn alone in your bedroom at night? Yes. Every time.