When, in 2024, the fashion model Julia Fox said she hadn’t had sex since 2021, I found it interesting — but not at all surprising. Her aesthetic over recent years has been intensely sexualised — bony but busty; shaved-off eyebrows; big, enhanced rubbery lips — with something of the bored Russian pornstar about it. There is a disassociation with the body even while displaying it; the kind of semi-nudity that offers so much skin without ever really engaging with flesh. Laboratory erotica that isn’t carnal so much as dermal.
It’s a thought perhaps shared by the author Katherine Rundell, who won the Bailie Gifford non-fiction prize for her 2022 biography of the poet John Donne. She said in an interview afterwards, having rather fallen in love with Donne’s lusty, dirty Jacobean verse: “I do think a lot of the visions we have of sex and sexuality today are profoundly depressing. You tap them and they ring like money.”
That’s certainly true of British porn star Bonnie Blue, who lined up 1,000 men to have sex with her in a deeply profitable stunt that has also profited her parents, who are on her payroll. Yet intercourse with a legion of men in a day isn’t sex so much as an endurance marathon: where you’re the track and endless strangers are running over you. I wonder how much erogeneity those strangers experienced, having waited like nervous schoolboys queuing up to aim their pee at a target on the wall. It’s not half as fun an image as that created by the humourist Dorothy Parker, way back in 1934, who said of the Yale prom that “if all the girls who attended were laid end to end, I wouldn’t be in the least surprised.”
Now she’s back leering suggestively at the camera while dandling a newborn on her lap; it hardly stirs the loins. If Bonnie Blue can plausibly be accused of having so much sex it loses all meaning, most of her generation is, perhaps, not having enough. The numbers here are stark, with one recent poll finding that just 30% of Gen Zers had lost their virginity. Another found that almost 30% of those aged 18-24 had not had sex at all in the previous year.
Philip Larkin might have claimed that sexual intercourse was invented in 1963, between the lifting of the Chatterley ban and the Beatles’ first LP. But when was it uninvented? When did it die? Was it when Marvel conquered the cinemas? As the film director Richard Linklater said in an interview with The Times in 2024: “Superheroes don’t have sex. They don’t have genitalia, frankly.” Or was it when the political gap between young men and women became a gaping abyss, perhaps crystallised on the day that Andrew Tate, currently facing charges of rape and sexual trafficking, was described by Nigel Farage as “an important voice for men”?
If Tate became popular online, technology could also be responsible in other ways. Perhaps real intimacy is too scary for a generation who have never really been left alone with their imaginations, always having a device to look at instead, and who have always been seen in those devices themselves. Too much of one’s own reflection is never good. Bonnie Blue is from a generation deeply concerned about their looks; girls who are rarely seen without a full face of make-up, having grown up watching YouTube tutorials of how to plaster themselves in industrial quantities of slap every morning.
I mean, the last time I saw my 14-year-old without her enormous false eyelashes and thick foundation — honestly, months can pass between sightings of her actual face — I immediately took a photo of her. When she protested, I explained it was important for me to have a reference to give the police in case she goes missing. (She responded that even in a hostage situation she will never be seen without the lashes, so I suppose it’s good that they give her an impetus to escape?)
But whose fault is this really? Because I have to admit that my daughter was photographed every single day of her early childhood. I always had an iPhone in my hand, and if she asked to see the picture, there it was. There was no waiting for weeks to develop a blurry camera film. So isn’t it pretty rude of us to ask her generation to forget about their image and stop being so vain — when we’ve been the paparazzi all along? We didn’t even need a long lens to see them on their beach lounger; we’d plastered the close-ups of their childhood holidays all over social media before the plane had even landed at Heathrow.
Still, at least now that my daughter has a smartphone herself, I seem to be alone among my fellow parents in not tracking her every move via GPS. My generation, it seems, are not content with being paps; we’re stalkers too, knowing where our kids are at all times, even once they’ve gone to university or fully moved out of the house. It’s not the greatest conducement to developing a private life, is it — your mum being able to see if you’ve been a dirty stop-out; your dad able to track your walk of shame all the way home. How are our children to develop an erotic hinterland if we never leave them alone?
Not that the situation is necessarily hopeless. For at least one prominent Gen Xer has shown herself more than happy to teach the kids how it’s done. In the last month alone, the actress Gillian Anderson has published More, the second in a series anthologising women’s sexual fantasies, and released a film, Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma, in which she stars as an older woman who teaches a younger woman to experience sexual pleasure. All this after Anderson’s hit role as the sex therapist Dr Jean Milburn in Sex Education, a Netflix show beloved by teenagers around the world for the way Anderson’s on-screen son secretly shares her tips with his classmates.
And, beyond TV, Gen Z and Gen X really do seem to be meeting in the middle (forget Millennials). I’m certainly not the only single middle-aged woman who recently dabbled in the dating apps, and found men in their twenties only too happy to swipe right. When I struck up conversations, and even went on dates with them, I was fascinated to know why. (They should never have dared approach a journalist; I see everything as a potential interview.)
More than one told me that with women their own age, they worried about saying the wrong thing, whereas they were so unlikely to even be able to impress someone of my generation that it almost took the pressure off. It seemed that anxiety towards their female peers was fuelling their interest in women who were not their peers — as well, no doubt, as the desire to learn something about sex from someone more experienced.
One 20-something bloke even told me that he had been on a recent date with someone his age who sat down in the pub and immediately asked him where he stood on Israel and abortion. It didn’t feel like a conversation so much as a test: one he now didn’t want to pass, whether he turned out to share her views or not. “But people your age are so much more open-minded,” he added, with a hopeful look in his eyes.