54 THENEWYORKER,APRIL11, 2022
THE CRITICS
BOOKS
DOWN WITH LOVE?
Modern intimacy, modern loneliness, and the advent of the sex robot.BY ZOË HELLERA
t the beginning of the COVID-19
pandemic, some people pre-
dicted that lockdowns and
work-at-home rules would produce
great surges in sexual activity, just as
citywide blackouts have been said to do
in the past. No such luck. In Novem-
ber, a study published in The Journal of
Sexual Medicine found that the pan-
demic had caused a small but signifi-
cant diminution in Americans’ sexual
desire, pleasure, and frequency. It’s easy
enough to see how the threat of a le-
thal virus might have had a generally
anaphrodisiac effect. Quite aside from
the difficulty of meeting new partners
and the chilling consequences of being
cooped up with the same old ones, evo-
lutionary psychologists speculate that
we have a “behavioral immune system”
that protects us in times of plague by
making us less attracted to and less mo-
tivated to affiliate with others.
Not so obvious is why, for several
years before the virus appeared on our
shores, we had already been showing
distinct signs of sluggishness in the at-
traction and affiliation departments.
In 2018, nearly a quarter of Ameri-
cans—the highest number ever re-
corded—reported having no sex at all
in the previous twelve months. Only
thirty-nine per cent reported having
intercourse once or more a week, a drop
of twelve percentage points since 1996.
The chief driver of this so-called “sex
drought” is not, as one might expect,
the aging of the American population
but the ever more abstemious habits
of the young. Since the nineteen-nine-
ties, the proportion of American high-
school students who are virgins has
risen from forty-fi ve per cent to sixty
per cent. People who are in their early
twenties are estimated to be two and
half times more likely to be sexually
inactive than members of Gen X were
at the same age.
One partial explanation for this
trend—versions of which have been ob-
served across the industrialized world—
is that today’s young adults are less
likely to be married and more likely to
be living at home with their parents
than previous cohorts. In the U.S., liv-
ing with parents is now the most com-
mon domestic circumstance for peo-
ple between the ages of eighteen and
thirty-four. Even after accounting for
these less than favorable conditions,
however, the suspicion remains that
young people are not as delighted by
sex as they once were. Speculation about
why this might be so tends to reflect
the hobbyhorse of the speculator. Some
believe that poisons in our environ-
ment are playing havoc with hormones.
Others blame high rates of depression
and the drugs used to treat it. Still oth-
ers contend that people are either sub-
limating their sexual desires in video
games or exhausting them with por-
nography. (The dubious term “sexual
anorexia” has been coined to describe
the jadedness and dysfunction that af-
flict particularly avid male consumers
of Internet porn.)
For the British economist Noreena
Hertz, the decline in sex is best under-
stood as both a symptom and a cause
of a much wider “loneliness epidemic.”
In her book “The Lonely Century”
(Currency), she describes “a world that’s
pulling apart,” in which soaring ratesof social isolation threaten not only
our physical and mental health but the
health of our democracies. She cites
many factors that have contributed to
this dystopian moment—among them,
smartphones, the gig economy, the con-
tactless economy, the growth of cities,
the rise in single-person households,
the advent of the open-plan office, the
replacement of mom-and-pop stores
with anonymous hyper-chains, and
“hostile” civic architecture—but she be-
lieves that the deepest roots of our cur-
rent crisis lie in the neoliberal revolu-
tion of the nineteen-eighties and the
ruthless free-market principles cham-
pioned by Margaret Thatcher, Ronald
Reagan, et al. In giving license to greed
and selfishness, she writes, neoliberal-
ism fundamentally reshaped not just
economic relationships “but also our
relationships with each other.”
In illustrating its thesis, this book
draws a wide array of cultural and so-
cioeconomic phenomena into its the-
matic centrifuge. Hertz’s examples of
global loneliness include elderly women
in Japan who get themselves convicted
of petty crimes so that they can find
community in prison; South Korean
devotees of mukbang, the craze for
watching people eat meals on the In-
ternet; and a man in Los Angeles whose
use of expensive professional “cuddler”
services is so prolific that he has ended
up living out of his car. But is lone-
liness what chiefly ails these people?
And, if so, does their loneliness bespeak
an unprecedented emergency? Old
women get fed up with their charm-
less husbands, kids watch the darned-
est things on YouTube, and men, as ABOVE: PHILIPPE PETIT-ROULET