Why are so many young people ‘asexual’?

Who could have foreseen that half a century after the sexual revolution we’d be facing its exact opposite: an asexual revolution? There’s a crisis of fertility across the West, with birth-rates and sperm counts in free fall. But this isn’t only about microplastics, oestrogen in the water or tight underpants. It’s also that the children of the West are choosing to have less sex – even no sex. A growing proportion actually identify as asexual, and rather than wait to see if the absence of lust is just a reasonable, youthful response to all the porn around in schools, they announce their asexuality solemnly to their friends and family.

A fortnight ago a Gen Z journalist, Freya India, wrote a fascinating piece for The Spectator’s Life website suggesting that the boom in asexual kids is being caused by antidepressants. More than half the people who take happy pills are thought to experience some form of sexual dysfunction, she said, and in the UK a third of all teens have had them prescribed.

Freya makes a good case, but peering down from a few generations above, it’s hard to see what wouldn’t push a teen towards asexuality these days. There’s the exciting new fashion for strangling during sex, all the deathly dating via text, the absolute terror of ‘toxic’ masculinity. If you’re taught that fight or flight is the appropriate response to what we once called flirting, asexuality would be an obvious choice. So the kids, mostly the girls, ‘come out’ as asexual and then find themselves stuck with it; pinned in place by the label like moths on a collector’s board. No wonder they’re not procreating.