Bad romance | 7 February 2019

I interviewed a prominent 1970s women’s liberationist recently and ended up discussing the sexual culture of her political heyday. ‘Everyone was sleeping with everyone,’ she said. ‘You had to have a good reason not to sleep with someone.’

I felt a stab of envy, a sharpened version of what I feel browsing black-and-white snaps from back in the day. There is often a dishevelled sexiness. There are the gleefully knowing expressions from women newly unafraid of unwanted pregnancy, and the ‘why not?’ insouciance of slouching shaggy-haired men and their slender sheepskin-coated girlfriends leaning against doorposts.

What a dreary distance we’ve travelled to get to the present dating landscape. How pleasure-free it all seems as Valentine’s Day approaches. Dating apps and online porn have bred numbness and indifference.

The quality of sex is getting worse, but so is the quantity. Rates of sexual intercourse are plummeting across a relatively wide bracket of young people — including those meant to be having babies. According to a recent report by the Global Burden of Disease study published in the Lancet, Britain is in the midst of a ‘baby bust’ with births at below replacement level. Meanwhile, in the US the birth-rate has fallen to a 30-year low. Birth control is partly to blame — but so is the decline of any sense that sex is to be enjoyed.

Given our long history of loucheness, booze-fuelled mischief and (since the 1960s) our famously liberal law, it’s just sad that there’s so little joy in 21st-century British sex. What’s to blame?

One survey found that nearly half of Britons say their sex lives are derailed by ‘stress’. But perhaps the real trouble is that young and youngish people are more obsessed with smartphones than with each other.