America, it seems, is on the verge of “sextinction.”
People are experiencing extended periods of sexlessness. In the US, a staggering 1 in 3 men and 1 in 5 womenhave not had sexin the past year, according to the General Social Survey. Testosterone levels are plummeting. Loneliness is at record highs.
Like so many problems, social media is at least partly to blame.
“The idealization of impossibly high standards has coaxed men into believing that social media influencers with millions of followers may one day show interest in them. It has persuaded women to give the time of day only to men who are over six feet tall and astronomically wealthy,” sex neuroscientist Dr. Debra Soh writes in “Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy,” out Tuesday.
Social media is not the only so-called advancement that’s clashing with our biology.
“I think just like any technology, our evolutionary psychology has struggled to make sense of dating apps. Swiping through hundreds of partners in one sitting — at no time in the past was that ever possible,” Soh told me.
That much choice isn’t a good thing. In her book, Soh calls it a “mismatch between our ancestry history and our tech-saturated environment [that is overwhelming] our evolutionary sensibilities.”
It’s so bad, she writes, that “‘survival of the fittest’ is now on steroids and sidelining even the best of us.”
Soh also blames porn for the sexual drought — noting that ready availability iswarping young people’s desirefor sex by conditioning them to respond to screens and even nudging them towards certain desires, like choking or violent sex.
“My views on porn have changed a lot,” she admitted. “Previously I thought porn was just benign entertainment, and there are no long term repercussions from it, but I do think, especially for younger generations [it is] really warping their sexuality, unfortunately.”
Source: Drudge Report
