Published 6:30, December 3, 2025

“I AM SO DONE with penetrative sex.” This statement from T surprised me. There was T herself: a fit, sexually charged woman with an easeful life, well married to a man whom I’d describe the same way. There was the news that Gen X women, which T was, were having the best sex, and a lot of it, as reported by Montreal journalist Mireille Silcoff for The New York Times Magazine. T and I were discussing that article as we walked through Toronto’s lavishly treed ravines just before she made her surprising statement. I was miffed the Times story—cover line “The Joy of X”—had ignored my generation of boomers like stale crumbs left on the table after a lively dinner party. “Who says boomers aren’t having sex constantly?” I’d said to T. “You should write ‘What Is Sex,’” she said before we parted. Our walking conversations were mostly about writing and reading—we were former colleagues and followed the work friend’s rule of rarely straying into the private. Until this conversation.

“Me? Write ‘What Is Sex’? That’s never going to happen.”

But this question of “What Is Sex” prowled in the background like someone determined to prove themselves right in a pointless argument. It took me back to an impasse from fifty years earlier. I’d joined a university English course in which the sole assignment was to write an essay entitled “What Is Literature.” As I failed to complete or even begin the essay, I had a minor nervous breakdown, taking to my bed for two months—although no one would have described that episode as a breakdown in 1975. Any more than they would have described me having sex with the professor who assigned “What Is Literature” as an abuse of power on his part. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. I had plenty of agency, most of the teachers weren’t much older than their students, and learning is sexy, it opens you up. This professor was maybe thirty, he talked about uncovering archetypes and entering paradise, and his hair got in his eyes. I don’t remember how I landed in his apartment to discuss my progress on “What Is Literature.” I do remember padding down his hallway to an airy room with a double bed. Did it please me to imagine that legions of students wished to be where I was? Likely. A crucifix hung over the dresser, the sex was gentle and remarkable only in its brevity, and orgasms during sex were an anomaly for me at nineteen and for some time to come. I never wrote the essay. I got an A in the course. An A in sex. This also pleased me.

Fifty years later, I think the important thing about the “What Is Literature” assignment—aside from the lesson that sex is often transactional—is that the question is more interesting than the answer. “Whatever you do, don’t have an answer, period,” wrote Miriam Toews in my most beloved book of 2025, A Truce That Is Not Peace. Then Toews took it further, as she is wont to do. “Also: douchebag to even know the question in the first place.”

I won’t answer “What Is Sex” any more than I answered “What Is Literature.” What an idea to think that anyone could. But I’d like to understand why the question feels so important as we cusp the quarter mark of the twenty-first century—and as I move into the three-quarter mark of my own century: What the heck is sex in the year 2025, anyway?

Boomers are not having masses of sex, I’ll pause to say, at least according to my own personal research. Stand down, those who put the lie to that, and good for you after forty years in your super-hot marriage, or your thrilling late-life romance that keeps you up until 9 p.m. To explain why the rest of us aren’t in the masses category means delving into words like dysfunction, dryness, disease, and the end of desire, so let’s leave that off this magical mystery tour.

I ASKED GEMINI how many news articles and studies had been published on sex in 2025. “The sheer volume of content published across countless platforms makes a precise number unattainable,” it replied in a rare moment of AI defeat, so I reverted to a more dogged search engine—myself. There was that New York Times Magazine cover splash in March, with a photograph of a woman’s not-young back, red bra strap slipping down her shoulder. It was an old-fashioned image of wantonness in the middle years of the 2020s when, as Silcoff said, you could swing by the pharmacy for milk, deodorant, and a cock ring. Modern Love Podcast’s follow-up—“Gen X? More Like Gen Sex”—offered the “juicy back story” of the widely read article, which included middle-aged women in mom jeans talking about “licking someone’s butt.” That article resulted in a book deal, adding to the hefty pile of writing by women who have upended the taboo that to put sex on the page is to risk being ridiculous: Sally Rooney, Sheila Heti, Annie Ernaux, Miranda July, and the entire loins-on-fire romantasy genre, which Bloomberg estimated is worth $610 million (US).

A common theme in much of the reporting on sex this year was that people in their teens and twenties, the Zs, weren’t having any: they were too depressed, anxious, and messed up by their pre-teen access to porn. The olds’ flipping out about the youngs’ sex lives was nothing new: murderous hippie sex cults, depraved gay bathhouses, and heartless millennial hookups were the panicked headlines from my lifetime (I likely wrote some of them). But worrying about the youth having too little sex was a modern twist in our age of anxiety.

New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino said she was “not personally inclined to wring my hands about what young people are doing with their genitals” in her June review of two non-fiction books on sex. A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (easy sex devalues women) and The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future (sex is a “tortured dance between backlash and progress”) were authored by thirtysomething journalists on the right and left of the sexual culture war. Tolentino’s thoughtful article led her through the quantifiables: who’s having sex, what kind of sex, how much sex, wrong sex, right sex, political sex. But by the end of her New Yorker review, she was as frustrated as I was, longing to “read something about desire, and pleasure, and connection—and what it feels like to be a person who’s still learning how to be a person when those things begin to flicker and disappear.”

E’S LAUGH WAS high and happy when I explained that their porn-saturated generation was not having sex. “I’ll have to tell my friends that.” E was twenty-three, and our conversation reminded me of what I’d learned from forty-five years in journalism: there’s what studies say, and there’s what people say. They often had little in common, especially when the topic was sex or money. In my quest to ask what sex was, it would be conversations more than statistics that showed the way. The people I spoke with ranged in age from twenty-three to seventy-three, but most were heterosexual women who expanded and challenged my own thinking. Except in a couple of instances—in which people discussed sex in a professional rather than personal way—I consented to using initials instead of full names. Because even in our age of everything-on-the-table sex, people—especially women—are still targeted........

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