Books

If you could go back in time just one generation—if you could have told the teens of the Nineties or even the mid-aughts, that our children would seem to have comparably little interest in sex or dating, we would never have believed you. Had huge numbers of our progeny joined an order of religious celibates? What else could possibly explain why the vast majority of high schoolers weren’t dating?

To discover the answer, Abigail Shrier has conducted hundreds of interviews with a huge variety of specialists and vested interests, from sex researchers and sex workers to founders of pro-Natalist organizations and evolutionary psychologists. Together, they help explain why young people pass each other in school corridors and feel no butterflies.