Am I Going to Be Replaced by a Sex Doll?

Sex shows up everywhere in American culture. Think: the Dallas Cowboys Cheerleaders; popular sex icons from Madonna and Britney Spears to Tate McRae and Sabrina Carpenter; the 75-foot Calvin Klein billboard on Houston Street in New York; the millions of “thirst traps” flooding social media; and popular TV shows, from Sex and the City to Heated Rivalry. Don’t get me wrong—I love both shows. But the point is, sex, hypersexualization, and eroticism are inescapable.

And yet, despite living in the most sex-saturated culture in history, people are having less of it. Among millennials and Gen Z, one in three men and one in five women report not having had sex in the past year. Among men in this age group, sexual inactivity has almost doubled since the early 2000s.

But why?

For an answer, I turned to Dr. Debra Soh, a neuroscientist and sex researcher, and the author of the new book Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy. In the book, she attributes the decline of sexual activity to forces like dating apps, social media, polyamory, the economic and social challenges facing young men, hormone-disrupting chemicals lowering testosterone, fewer Americans having committed partners . . . and the list goes on. In short, our modern world has produced a sex recession.

Filling this vacuum, Soh says, are artificial proxies for intimacy, ranging from the fairly standard—OnlyFans and parasocial relationships—to the bizarre: AI sex companions and high-tech sex robots, some costing upward of $100,000, with the ability to vocalize an orgasm in multiple languages . . . who knew!

So what is the future of sex? How is this environment distorting marriage and families? Is true intimacy possible without another human being? Are all of these techno-fixes solving a problem or enabling it? And how do we bring back real relationships?