There is no shortage of coverage telling us that people are having less and less sex. The serious sex and relationship experts line up to explain why, and they reach, almost without exception, for the same answer. The phones.
Everyone Blames The Phones
The picture is always the same. A couple lost in their screens. Sitting side by side on the sofa, or in bed, glued to glass and light. No wonder, the argument goes, that there is less sex, because there is simply less attention left over for each other. This is the heart of the so-called sex recession that Kate Julian named in The Atlantic, and the data behind the trend is real enough. The share of adults having regular sex really has been falling, inside marriages as well as outside them.
But is the phone really the villain? I am not so sure.
The Farmhouse In Winter
Look at a painting from the nineteenth century. A rural scene, evening, deep winter. The farmer and his wife at home. She is knitting. He is reading a book, or quietly repairing a clock. Two people in a room, each absorbed in something in their hands, barely speaking.
Is that really so different from looking at a phone? Or from reading a book today? Or the newspaper? Or watching the telly? Or sitting with a Walkman pressed to your ears in 1985? Human beings have always sat near each other while attending to something else. The screen is not some unprecedented intruder into intimacy. People have been quietly busy in the same room for centuries.
So no. I do not buy the idea that the phone, simply by existing in your hand, is killing your sex life.
What You Watch, Not That You Watch
But I do not let the phone off the hook that easily either. Because I think it has a very large role to play in all of this. Just not the role everyone assigns to it.
It is not the fact that you are looking at the phone. It is what you are looking at.
And here I will lay the blame squarely on men and on the pandemic of internet pornography. The evidence is no longer fringe. A widely cited review of the clinical research links heavy internet porn use to a sharp rise in erectile dysfunction, delayed ejaculation and lost desire in men under forty. It rewires arousal. It trains the brain to respond to an endless feed of novelty on a screen, and then real sex with a real partner simply does not register the same way.
Because it is a completely different thing. Watching porn on a phone and getting yourself there alone is nothing like getting into the groove with a woman who is actually in the room with you, with her own moods and her own timing.
The Quiet Opt-Out
And let us be honest about the other half of it. Women are complicated. Wonderfully so, but complicated. It takes effort, patience and presence to nurture a relationship to the point where sex happens easily and often.
Porn asks for none of that. It is instant, frictionless and always available. So a great many men, quietly and without ever admitting it, simply opt out. They take the easy substitute and let the real thing wither.
Where The Pills Stop Working
This is the part that should worry us. When the problem is in the wiring and the habit, and not in the plumbing, the usual fixes fail. Even the pills will not help. You cannot medicate your way out of a brain that has been trained to prefer a screen.
So blame the phones if you like. I would look a little harder at what is on them.
