We're animals.
Haven't you ever heard of Darwin?
I'm Angela Duckworth.
I'm Steven Dubner, and you're listening to.
No stupid questions today on the show.
Why are we having less sex than we used to?
I think even masturbation is down.
I don't have that number handy.
I'm sorry.
So, Angelo, this is the third episode of our seven Deadly Sins series.
We're approaching the so called sins in the order we chose, not the way the Catholic Church listed them.
We started with sloth, then we solved gluttony, and now it's time for everyone's favorite of the seven deadly sins, which is lust.
It is a favorite.
I've read in a variety of sources that in the US, but many, many other countries as well, people are just having less sex, period, full stop.
And I'm curious why you think that is based on your knowledge of the psychological research based on this project you are working on now, this new book about self control.
And I'm especially curious whether you think the decline in sex may be due to the easier availability of substitutes for sex, including pornography, or whether maybe something totally different is going on.
I have been thinking about this for a little while because I was thinking about things that changed during the pandemic that might still be with us, you know, with social distancing and quarantining.
But it turns out, I think most of the research was done actually before the pandemic.
So you don't need to have a pandemic to stop having sex.
Thinking about one paper by Gene Twenge called declines in sexual frequency among american adults, 1989 to 2014.