Study: Who Are the Men Without Sex?

I few takeaways:

Sexless young men are substantially more likely to classify themselves as “never married,” and less likely to be married, than their sex-having peers.

A simplified interpretation of the preceding finding is that not having sex predominates among low-status men: the poor, unemployed, and students. An increase in sexlessness reflects a shift of young men into that group—for example, a declining male labor force participation rate.

Adding marriage allows us to nuance this interpretation. As Richard Reeves and others have noted, the decline of marriage did not happen equally across socioeconomic groups—higher-status groups preserve marriage rates similar to—if slightly less than—those of 50 years ago. Sexlessness is largely explained by being unmarried, but it’s much harder for men to get married if they’re unemployed or low-earning. Thus, the sex drop is an issue of marriage inequity.

There’s a separate story that dovetails with this one, but it is more specific to the 18-to-34-year-old demographic and may also help explain why college students and young men with advanced degrees are not having as much sex as they used to. Millennials are opting to delay marriage later and later, reframing it as a “capstone” accomplishment rather than a “cornerstone” of a stable (sex) life.

This pickiness is revealed, for example, in declining divorce rates among the 18-to-34-year-old cohort. Sociologist Philip Cohen has argued that this decline reflects an “increasingly selective nature” to marriage, which creates greater stability, but also makes marriage an “increasingly central component of the structure of social inequality.”

Young men’s sexlessness is mostly about access to marriage, and secondarily about economic disadvantage. But increasingly, these two go together. The “sex drought” is a marriage drought, and the marriage drought both reflects and perpetuates deeper issues of inequality.