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Megyn Kelly’s recent conversation with Dr. Debra Soh cut straight to a crisis too many in the media refuse to name: young Americans are having far less sex, and that decline is reshaping relationships, family formation and our national future. Soh, a neuroscientist turned public intellectual, laid out the argument plainly on The Megyn Kelly Show — this isn’t a moral panic, it’s a measurable cultural shift.
Soh makes the case in her new book Sextinction that modern success for women — greater economic power, independence, and social mobility — has changed mate selection and raised standards in ways that many men struggle to meet. She ties those social changes to real shifts in desire and behavior, arguing that the institutions that once channeled courtship and family formation have been hollowed out.
This isn’t just punditry; social scientists have been flagging declining sexual activity among young adults for years, with peer-reviewed research showing cohort effects and rising rates of sexual inactivity in recent birth cohorts. The academic work confirms what conservatives have feared: cultural rot and technology are having measurable demographic effects.
Soh and other commentators point to predictable culprits — social media-fed unrealistic beauty standards, hypersexualized online content, the comfort of digital substitutes and even nascent AI companions — all of which blunt incentives for real-world courtship. Conservative listeners should not be surprised that when you replace face-to-face courage and neighborly communities with screens and algorithms, young men and women lose the scaffolding of intimacy.
The raw numbers discussed on these programs are sobering: in recent discussions experts have cited figures like roughly one in three young men and one in five young women reporting no sex in the prior year, and other snapshots showing high rates of sexual inactivity among Gen Z. Those are not abstractions; they point to a generation drifting away from family life.
Other national surveys back up parts of this picture, with long-running instruments such as the General Social Survey and the National Survey of Family Growth documenting declines in partnered sex and shifts in sexual behavior over the last decade and more. Policymakers and citizens alike must stop treating family formation as a private quirk and start seeing trends for what they are: signals of national weakening.
If you care about the future of this country, there’s a policy angle conservatives can champion: rebuild communities, remove perverse financial incentives that punish marriage and childbearing, and fight the cultural industries that profit from substituting pornography and commodified intimacy for real relationships. We need to recover a cultural ethic that values commitment, responsibility and intergenerational bonds.
Let’s also be blunt about responsibility. Feminism’s gains were hard-won and worth defending, but when success becomes a pretext for discarding the civil institution of mate selection and raising a generation shielded by screens, conservatives must demand better: teach virtue, celebrate fatherhood, and restore the rites of passage that produce confident, marriage-ready men. This is about renewing virtue, not policing private life.
Hardworking Americans see the consequences in their towns: fewer stable marriages, fewer babies, and weaker communities. It’s time to stop shrugging and start rebuilding the social architecture that produces flourishing families, because a nation that cannot make more of itself will not remain prosperous or free for long.
