Nan Wise posits in her book Why Good Sex Matters that the ever-increasing external stimuli in our environments are not conducive to feeling more of anything, let alone satisfaction. Some researchers cite this anhedonic wave as one of the core phenomena fueling the sex recession, as it becomes harder to justify the work of coordinating sex when the experience doesn’t even feel pleasurable. The COVID-19 pandemic made things considerably worse across all populations.

Studies suggest young people are experiencing growing rates of anhedonia, or the reduced motivation and capacity to feel pleasure. “I’d say most of the casual, consensual sex I’ve had was in the meh-to-bad range,” a 28-year-old cis straight woman told me, citing “jabby fingering, lackluster oral, and flipping me over every two seconds because they watch a lot of mainstream porn.” Then there is bad sex among single people, wherein lack of comfort and familiarity is one of the biggest issues. “I can tell the times we get short with each other are usually because we haven’t been intimate in a while, and when we do I definitely notice a positive difference in mood.” “It’s the days where maybe neither my boyfriend nor I feel super excited about having sex, but it’s sort of an acknowledgement of maintaining intimacy,” she said.Ī 31-year-old cis gay man told me something similar. In fact, Laurie Mintz, a professor of human sexuality at the University of Florida and author of Becoming Cliterate, suspects millennials and Gen Z-ers are the most sexually misinformed generations of all time, due to the unprecedented accessibility of misinformation. Over the course of hundreds of interviews with sexually active millennials and Gen Z-ers, I’ve found that sexual dissatisfaction is nondiscriminating, though the “badness” of bad sex varies wildly. I now know I am not alone in enduring medium, bad, to very bad sex again and again, even though I know better even though I own good vibrators even though my therapist is this close to leaving the field because I “don’t want to be helped.” No amount of sexual know-how or progressive personal feminism could salvage the majority of my sexual encounters. As a professional sex writer whose latest research is on maximizing pleasure, communicating with partners, and exploring sexual autonomy, I, too, grapple with the disconnect between the sex I know I could have and the sex I actually have.

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