When the Supreme Court overturned Roe V. Wade in 2022, the ruling didn't just eliminate the federal right to abortion; it also ushered in "a generational change in the way that people approach sex," journalist Carter Sherman says.
Sherman is a reproductive health and justice reporter at The Guardian where she's covered the real-world results of abortion bans, access to healthcare for trans people, and how technology is reshaping our view of our bodies and our choices. In her new book, The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation's Fight Over its Future, Sherman writes that Gen Z — which the Pew Research Center defines as people born between 1997 and 2012 — are having less sex than previous generations.
Sherman conducted more than 100 interviews with teenagers, young adults and experts for the book. She says the decline of interest in sex goes beyond the issue of abortion rights.
"We have the rise of the internet, smartphones, social media, porn. We have Me Too, we have the pandemic," she says. "Oftentimes, we think about sex as a thing that happens between two or more people in a bedroom. But in reality, the terms of our sex lives are often set for us in schools and school boards and courtrooms and legislatures in Congress and in the White House."
Sherman notes that during the pandemic, many sex education classes were conducted over Zoom or eliminated completely: "The emerging studies that we have on this topic show that teachers became very nervous, that parents would hear what was going on and that they would object to it," Sherman says. "And indeed, it is true that parents got incredibly incensed over sex ed over the course of the pandemic. And we really see that take shape after the pandemic."
Sherman says that much of the sex ed that now exists in American public schools focuses on abstinence only, rather than offering a more comprehensive take on issues of consent and sexual health. But, she adds, "I don't think you can really roll back the clock at all given the technological inventions that we've seen since the 1950s, birth control, the internet, women's rights in many ways. ... Instead, I really hope that people can look ahead towards the future and see what it is that we're living in now, as opposed to trying to do what I call sexual conservatism."
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