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Men Can Be Single Without Murdering Anybody
It’s not even hard. So to speak.
Friends, Romans, countrythems: They told me I would never make it. My ambitions were mocked; scorned; they laughed at me, and they laughed at you for believing in me. Yet I stand before you today as one of the most sex-having men in the United States of America. Do you doubt me? Behold the chart!!!!
That’s right, kids: I am having sex on a basis of “weekly or more,” along with approximately 40% of people surveyed. Please, try to contain your envy. I know this will be difficult if you are among the 39% (or so) of people having sex on a monthly basis, or the 23% who did not have sex in the past year.
I lead with these numbers (the same ones the Washington Post leads with) to make a point: First, despite headlines to the contrary, we are not in the midst of a sex drought. Most American adults are still having sex — or were, as of 2018 — except for the slight uptick in the number of people reporting year-long dry spells. That number has gone up less than five percentage points in three decades, from 19% of respondents in 1989 to 23% in 2018.
Most of the respondents who aren’t having sex are young people between 18 and 30. Experts quoted in the Post article cite a number of perfectly reasonable explanations, like the fact that young people are less likely to live with a partner. Unfortunately, the majority of the people who reported dry spells were also men, which means that, instead of a collective shrug, we got a round of panicked viral tweets like these:
It gets worse: Not only are our nation’s young men not knee-deep in it (a catastrophe in itself) we can assume — as both of these commentators do — that they will become virulent misogynists and start killing people as a…
