The Body Politic in the Bedroom
There is a particular kind of conversation that begins with data — percentages, recession curves, generational slopes — and ends somewhere much more personal, much more embarrassing, much more true. That is exactly what happens when Carter Sherman sits down across from Dax Shepard to talk about why young people have stopped having sex. The statistics arrive first, tidy and alarming: 38% of 18-to-29-year-olds hadn't had sex in a year by 2019, up from 22% in 2013. Two and a half times more sexual dormancy in a single decade. But the numbers dissolve quickly, because Dax cannot stay in the abstract for long. He is constitutionally incapable of it. Within minutes, Monica is admitting she lost her virginity later than average and didn't tell the person until minutes beforehand — 'chore play was over' — and Dax is recalling how being a virgin in high school 'crippled my last two years.' The sex recession stops being a trend piece and becomes a confession booth.
What this conversation reveals about humanity is something deeply uncomfortable: we have always been terrified of sex, and we have always pretended otherwise. Every generation looks at the next and invents a panic — first they're doing too much, then too little — and in doing so, reveals its own unresolved anxieties. The moral panic over millennial hookup culture was happening at the exact same moment that millennials were actually having less sex than almost any generation since the Greatest Generation. We were panicking over an orgy that wasn't occurring. Carter Sherman, who was herself interviewed as a Northwestern sorority girl for a New York Times piece on that very panic, noticed the journalist wanted her to perform victimhood. She declined. Years later, she wrote the book instead.
What Dax brings to this — beyond his usual anthropological restlessness and his addiction recovery framework applied to vulnerability — is a kind of democratic suspicion of all ideological capture. When Carter suggests conservative women might be lying about their orgasm frequency to confirm their family-values worldview, Dax pushes back hard: you can't selectively distrust one group's self-reporting. When she frames sex as always political, he resists, not because he disagrees with the substance but because he hates what politicization does to human beings — it turns personal desire into team sport. His prescription, delivered with the exhaustion of a man who has watched every human experience get flag-planted by one side or the other, is almost plaintive: just go to a bar. Just pursue your actual desires. Don't check in with your party first.
The fact check section — which sprawls into a boat adventure involving sixty-foot locks, lightning storms, a naked woman watering flowers, Monica's unkempt feet, a reneging incident at Spades, and a fourteen-hour hose left running on Kristen Bell's birthday — is its own kind of essay about connection. These are people doing life together, imperfectly, getting soaked, getting embarrassed, dancing at the bow like Lieutenant Dan in the storm. If Gen Z is retreating from vulnerability, these adults are wallowing in it. Maybe that's the answer Carter is circling but can't quite prescribe: you have to be willing to be wet and cold and lost and still dancing.