The Real Rise in Male Sexlessness: How Today Compares to the 80s and 90s
By Derek Kane
In Part 1, we broke down why the dating app math is stacked against most men right now. One stat got a single line in that piece and deserved its own article: the rise in men reporting no sex at all in the past year. This is Part 2, and it’s that number pulled apart by decade, so you can see the actual trend line instead of just today’s snapshot.
Where the Word “Incel” Actually Comes From
Before the numbers, a word needs untangling, because it gets thrown around inaccurately. “Incel” was coined in 1997 by a Canadian college student named Alana, as shorthand for “involuntary celibate.” She built a small, gender-neutral support site for anyone who felt shut out of dating and wanted somewhere to talk about it honestly. It was not political, and it was not hostile.
That changed once the community migrated to forums like 4chan and Reddit through the 2000s and 2010s. What had been a support space turned into an online subculture built around resentment toward women, and it’s been tied to real, deadly violence, including the 2014 Isla Vista attack and the 2018 Toronto van attack. Reddit banned its main incel forum in 2017, and organizations that track hate movements now classify the online incel community as part of the broader “manosphere.”
That subculture is a small, extreme minority, and this article isn’t about it. What follows is about a much bigger, much less discussed group: the millions of ordinary men who simply aren’t having sex or dating right now, tracked by mainstream government and academic surveys. Getting lumped in with an online hate movement because you’re going through a dry spell is inaccurate, and it’s the exact kind of framing that keeps men from talking about this honestly.
The 1980s and Early 90s: What “Normal” Used to Look Like
Start with the baseline. According to the General Social Survey (GSS), the gold-standard tracker of American sexual behavior, 55 percent of adults aged 18 to 64 reported having sex at least weekly in 1990. Separate research pulling from the same GSS data found that in the early 1990s, more than 80 percent of people around age 25 reported sexual activity at least once a month.
For young men specifically, the earliest cohort data is even more striking. Among men born in the 1960s, the generation dating and coming of age through the 1980s, only about 6 percent reported having had zero sexual partners by ages 20 to 24. Sexlessness at that age was rare enough to barely register as a trend worth studying.
Britain’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles, fielded in 1990 to 1991, backs this up from across the Atlantic: just under 31 percent of men reported no sex in the past month, a figure that would actually go on to improve slightly before it later got worse.
The Shift Through the 90s and Into the 2000s
The next cohort tells the story of the slide. Men born in the 1970s, who were in their early 20s through the 1990s, saw their sexual inactivity rate rise to about 11.5 percent. By the 2000s, men born in the 1980s were reporting almost the same rate, around 11.7 percent. It wasn’t a dramatic jump yet, more of a slow drift.
Nationally, by around the year 2000, roughly 19 percent of all American adults reported no sex in the past year, according to a Washington Post analysis of GSS data. That figure would end up looking almost quaint by comparison to what came next.
The 2010s: Where the Line Bends Sharply Upward
This is where the trend stops drifting and starts climbing. A widely cited JAMA Network Open study tracking the GSS from 2000 to 2018 found that past-year sexual inactivity among men aged 18 to 24 rose from just under 19 percent to almost 31 percent, nearly doubling in under two decades.
By 2018, the numbers had gotten enough attention that the Washington Post ran a standalone analysis: 23 percent of all American adults reported no sex in the past year, a record high at the time and up from 19 percent two decades earlier. Broken out by age and gender, 28 percent of men aged 18 to 30 reported no sex that year, compared with 18 percent of women in the same range. The same report noted that since 2008 alone, the rate for men under 30 had nearly tripled.
Cohort data lines up with this too. Men born in the 1990s, who were turning 20 to 24 in the 2010s, saw their sexual inactivity rate hit 15.2 percent, more than double the roughly 6 percent GenX men reported at the same age in the 1980s.
It’s not a coincidence that this is also the exact stretch when the online incel subculture broke into mainstream news, following Isla Vista and the Toronto attack. The visibility of that hateful, extreme fringe rose in the same years the actual, much larger statistical trend rose too, which is a big part of why the two got tangled together in public conversation. They’re not the same story.
The Most Recent Numbers: 2022 to 2023
The newest nationally representative data comes from the National Survey of Family Growth. Comparing the 2017 to 2019 wave with 2022 to 2023, past-year sexlessness among men aged 18 to 24 jumped from 32 percent to 40 percent. Among men 25 to 34, it roughly tripled, climbing from about 6 percent to 18 percent.
Zooming out across the full young-adult range, GSS data shows the sexlessness rate for all adults aged 18 to 29 held fairly steady around 15 percent for decades, then doubled between 2010 and 2024, going from roughly 12 percent to 24 percent. Researchers have compared the shape of that climb to a hockey stick, flat for years, then a sharp upward bend right around 2010.
Four Decades, Side by Side
| Time Period | What the Data Shows |
|---|---|
| 1980s (GenX men, ages 20-24) | About 6% had no sexual partner since turning 18 |
| Early-to-mid 1990s | 55% of adults had sex weekly; 80%+ of 25-year-olds were active monthly |
| Late 1990s (national, all adults) | About 19% reported no sex in the past year |
| 2000s (men born in the 80s, early 20s) | About 11-12% reported no sexual partner |
| 2016-2018 (men 18-24) | Rose to 31% reporting no sex in the past year |
| 2018 (men 18-30, national) | 28% of men reported no sex, vs. 18% of women |
| 2022-2023 (men 18-24, most recent) | 40% reported no sex in the past year |
| 2022-2023 (men 25-34, most recent) | About 18%, roughly triple the 2013-15 rate |
These numbers come from a few different survey instruments (the GSS and the NSFG mainly), so exact year-to-year comparisons have some noise built in. But every dataset, along with international data from the UK and Japan showing the same reversal, points in the identical direction: a rate that held low and steady through the 80s and 90s, then climbed hard starting around 2010.
Why the 2010s Were the Turning Point
A few things happened at once. Time young adults spent socializing in person with friends fell by nearly half between 2010 and 2019, from about 12.8 hours a week down to 6.5. Living with a partner, married or not, dropped among 18-to 29-year-olds too, from 42 percent in 2014 to 32 percent in 2024. Smartphones and dating apps became the default way people met, and as we covered in Part 1, that shifted the whole market toward a small percentage of men getting most of the attention. Employment plays a role as well: one federal analysis found 54 percent of unemployed Americans lacked a steady relationship, compared with 32 percent of the employed.
None of this is really about morality or effort declining. It’s about the actual mechanics of meeting people changing faster than most men’s approach did.
If You’re One of the Statistics, Here’s What Actually Matters
If any of this describes where you’re at right now, you are not an outlier, and you are absolutely not part of some online movement just because you haven’t dated in a while. You’re one of tens of millions of guys living through a documented, decade-long shift in how people meet and pair off. That’s a very different thing from an identity, and it’s not permanent.
The moves that actually change your odds are the same ones we laid out in Part 1: fix your photos, build the physical baseline, and follow through once you match instead of letting conversations die. If you want the deeper case for why physical training specifically pays off in confidence and body language, we covered that in Should You Practice Martial Arts Before Dating? We went deeper on the biological and psychological side of all this, testosterone and confidence specifically, in Part 3.
If you’d rather widen your pool while you work on the rest, AdultFriendFinder is built around people who are upfront about what they want, which cuts out a lot of the guessing games these statistics are really describing. And on nights when what you actually want is honest company and conversation without navigating an app at all, NiteFlirt is built around exactly that kind of upfront, paid exchange.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is the rise in male sexlessness real, or is it exaggerated online?
It’s real and well documented. The General Social Survey, the National Survey of Family Growth, and a peer-reviewed JAMA Network Open analysis all independently show the same upward trend among young men since roughly 2010.
How does today actually compare to the 1980s?
Sharply higher. GenX men reported around 6 percent sexual inactivity at ages 20-24 in the 1980s. The most recent data puts men 18-24 at 40 percent reporting no sex in the past year, though that figure includes a wider mix of factors than the older cohort measure.
Does this mean incels make up a bigger share of the population now?
No, and this is the important distinction. The statistical rise in male sexlessness reflects millions of ordinary single men. The online incel subculture is a small, separate, and hateful ideological movement. Conflating the two is inaccurate and unfair to the vast majority of men reflected in this data.
What’s actually driving the increase?
A mix of factors: less in-person socializing, fewer young adults living with a partner, dating shifting almost entirely to visual, high-volume apps, and economic pressures tied to employment.
Is this just an American trend?
No. The UK’s National Survey of Sexual Attitudes and Lifestyles shows the same reversal after 2010, and Japan’s National Fertility Survey found male heterosexual inexperience rising from 20 percent in 1992 to nearly 26 percent by 2015.
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