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America, it seems, is on the verge of “sextinction.”
People are experiencing extended periods of sexlessness. In the US, a staggering 1 in 3 men and 1 in 5 women have not had sex in the past year, according to the General Social Survey. Testosterone levels are plummeting. Loneliness is at record highs.
Like so many problems, social media is at least partly to blame.
“The idealization of impossibly high standards has coaxed men into believing that social media influencers with millions of followers may one day show interest in them. It has persuaded women to give the time of day only to men who are over six feet tall and astronomically wealthy,” sex neuroscientist Dr. Debra Soh writes in “Sextinction: The Decline of Sex and the Future of Intimacy,” out Tuesday.
Social media is not the only so-called advancement that’s clashing with our biology.
“I think just like any technology, our evolutionary psychology has struggled to make sense of dating apps. Swiping through hundreds of partners in one sitting — at no time in the past was that ever possible,” Soh told me.
That much choice isn’t a good thing. In her book, Soh calls it a “mismatch between our ancestry history and our tech-saturated environment [that is overwhelming] our evolutionary sensibilities.”
It’s so bad, she writes, that “‘survival of the fittest’ is now on steroids and sidelining even the best of us.”
Soh also blames porn for the sexual drought — noting that ready availability is warping young people’s desire for sex by conditioning them to respond to screens and even nudging them towards certain desires, like choking or violent sex.
“My views on porn have changed a lot,” she admitted. “Previously I thought porn was just benign entertainment, and there are no long term repercussions from it, but I do think, especially for younger generations [it is] really warping their sexuality, unfortunately.”
Soh predicts things will only get worse as AI companions become more popular.
Testing more than a dozen different platforms that offer AI romantic partners, she noticed the technologies becoming more functional — and more realistic — in just a matter of weeks.
“Your AI partner can look exactly how you want them to look,” Soh told The Post. “You can fine tune their voice. You tell them how you want them to respond, and if they respond in a way you don’t like, you can tell them to redo it.”
As the tech develops, Soh worries that real people simply won’t stack up.
“It’s so dangerous, potentially because it’s very realistic in some cases,” she warned. “I can see many people in the future saying, ‘Well, why not just get an AI companion on the side? — and, over time, maybe preferring that to a real life person.”
Soh believes the sex recession is “going to worsen, because technology only advances,” and thinks everyone should be concerned — if not for themselves, then for the decline in fertility and the breakdown in personal connection that it causes.
“At the end of the day, most of us yearn for the same thing: to be understood and appreciated,” she said. “The more we try to deny this or displace it with glittering distractions, the worse it will backfire. Repercussions built into our biology will haunt us tenfold.”
But it’s not all about screens.
Soh believes that invisible factors in our environment are changing our hormones.
“This I find really disturbing, because in many cases, I don’t think we’re fully aware of the ways in which these toxins are affecting us,” she told The Post. “We see this happening in animals. So if animals are being exposed to the same toxins that humans are being exposed to, why would we not also have similar side effects?”
She points to studies from Kyushu University, Environment International and Aquatic Toxicology that found wild fish exposed to anti-anxiety drugs, birth control pills and antidepressants from human wastewater have been “feminized” and display altered mating behavior.
Components of soy, which can mimic estrogen, have been observed in a study, published in the International Journal of Molecular Science, to turn male eels female, Soh writes, and to cause monkeys to become aggressive and socially isolated.
“In addition to potentially feminizing men, soy can lower sperm count,” Soh said. “What’s particularly concerning is that some infant formulas are made from soybeans and are fed to babies in bottles containing endocrine disruptors.”
Research cited in her book reveals that exposure to BPA, a compound in everyday plastics, and synthetic estrogen found in birth control pills has caused fertility issues — not in fish that were directly exposed, but in their descendants two or three generations later.
“Human beings, as a species, need face-to-face interaction, to gaze into one another’s eyes, and to hear each other’s voices,” she writes. “We are not meant to be hiding behind screens.”
