Americans are watching more porn and having less sex during the pandemic, according to the latest data from the General Social Survey, a long-running barometer of American public opinion that's been administered every few years since the 1970s.
In 2021, fully 26 percent of adults reported having sex zero times in the past year. That’s a record high, with the share of Americans reporting past-year celibacy nearly doubling since the mid-1990s, according to GSS data. It’s up three percentage points over the previous reading in 2018.
Coincidentally, or not, the share reporting they viewed pornography in the past year has also hit a record, at 36 percent. That’s a jump of about 7 points over the 2018 level. Less physical intimacy, more jacking off: welcome to America in the 2020s.
Now, I should note that porn isn’t the primary driver of American sex-having or lack thereof. That’s marriage, believe it or not: despite popular narratives about dead bedrooms and the like, married people have quite a bit more sex, on average, than the unmarried. About 40 percent of married people report getting laid once a week or more, compared to about 30 percent of the never-married. The disparity is even greater once you account for age: more than two-thirds of married twenty-somethings report weekly sex or more, compared to less than one third of never-married people in the same age bracket.
Marriage is on the wane in the U.S.: roughly three quarters of GSS respondents in 1972 reported being married, compared to about 50 percent in 2021. And people are getting married later in life too. So it’s not surprising Americans are having less sex, on average.
The data suggest that porn is partially filling that intimacy void, particularly in recent years. People who’ve never married are more than twice as likely to have watched porn in the past year as those who are married. Nearly half of all men have , compared to about 25 percent of women. Adults under age 30 are about six times as likely to watch it as those over age 65. Democrats are more frequent porn consumers than Republicans. And — make of this what you will — cat owners are more likely to watch porn than either dog owners or people with no pets.
That leads us to the following: do you know an unmarried man under age 30 who leans Democratic? There’s an 84 percent chance he watched porn in the last year, according to the GSS (yes, the sample size is large enough to be able to conclude this). You can probably tack on a few extra percentage points if he owns a cat.
There are also some signs that porn is making inroads among demographics who don’t traditionally watch much of it. Among Republicans, porn viewing is up roughly 50 percent since 2014. Among women, it’s nearly doubled. Porn consumption among seniors has precisely doubled.
A couple things to note here, methodology-wise. The pandemic changed how the survey was administered, and while the pollsters behind the GSS have adjusted their weightings and methodologies to account for this, you should still exercise a bit of caution in comparing 2021 to prior years’ data. Given that the numbers are basically on trend from previous years I’m not too concerned about this, but it’s worth knowing.
The porn language question was also set in stone in 1972 and it hasn’t been updated since. The specific wording is, “Have you seen an x-rated movie in the last year?” which is a very 70s way of asking about this. My assumption is that respondents are interpreting this broadly in 2021 to include internet porn — people don’t typically go to peep shows or rent smut from the local adult shop anymore. I suspect if you asked a broader question like “Did you watch any pornography in the past year” you might get different results.
This all kind of makes sense in the context of the pandemic, which has made dating and mate-finding a lot more complicated than in previous years. One sign of this is that sex frequency among married people is basically unchanged from 2018 to 2021. Among the never-married, however, past-year celibacy is up by about 7 percentage points, to 33 percent overall. Conversely the share of the never-married reporting sex once a week or more has fallen by about 10 percentage points, to 30 percent. That makes 2021 the first time in the history of the GSS that celibacy is more common than weekly sex among the unmarried.
Pandemic stats seem to create a predicable course of events. More alcohol. Less (physical ability to have) sex. More porn. Makes sense to me.