Politics are often an unwelcome bedfellow, but the impacts of sexually conservative legislation in recent years have been particularly marked. The so-called sex recession has been the topic of much research and reporting in the past seven years, as more of Gen Z, and now some of Gen Alpha, have aged into sexual maturity and sexual activity continues to falter at a historical low among the youngest Americans.
“There’s certainly no one single explanation,” said Carter Sherman, reporter and author of The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future. In the time she’s spent covering the issue for the Guardian and other publications, Sherman has noted the role that three political topics have played in generating anxiety surrounding sex for young people, all of which have found their legal and legislative testing ground in Texas: sexual education, age verification laws, and reproductive rights.
In a South by Southwest panel discussion on Sunday, Sherman brought Texas Tribune reporter Eleanor Klibanoff onstage to accessibly summarize her reporting with “Gen Z correspondent” Paxton Smith, a young board member of the Women’s Reproductive Rights Assistance Project who spoke out against Texas’ six-week abortion ban in her 2021 high school valedictorian speech.
“Texas, of course, is its own idiosyncratic place, but much of what happens in Texas paves the way for other red states in particular,” said Klibanoff. “Texas is known as a laboratory for sexually conservative policies.”
One of these policies took effect in 2022, when Texas legislators changed the public school system’s sex education method from opt-out to opt-in, meaning parents now have to proactively sign a form requesting in-school sex education for their child. This system quickly put what little valuable information is included in the state’s “abstinence-plus” curriculum behind further barriers for Texan teens, especially those who need it most. Smith, who received a limited, abstinence-plus sex education in middle school before the opt-in system was implemented, walked away from the minimal instruction she received filled with guilt and confusion, eventually turning to the internet, and women’s magazine Cosmopolitan in particular, for the neutral, in-depth information about puberty and sexuality that she’d craved.
“It really improved and really impacted my experience with sex,” said Smith. “I carried the shame from the initial sex education I got [at school] literally for years, and battled with that for years.”
“Often, we really demonize the internet when it comes to young people and sex, and the thing about the internet is it actually can fix some of these gaps in sex ed,” Sherman agreed.
More recently, when the Supreme Court upheld Texas’ legislation mandating age verification on porn websites, Klibanoff saw a door open to future internet censorship that would impact minors and adults alike, as the age verification law already has in regards to porn, pushing major “tax-paying porn websites” out of the state. Under the new SCOTUS ruling, individual states have the power to determine what counts as sexually explicit content that can then be subjected to age verification. States like Kansas, she said, have already adopted language broadening the scope of that content.
“Many of those definitions of explicitness include information about LGBTQ+ rights, people, and identities,” the reporter said.
Focusing sexually conservative policies on youth as a pathway to broader legal change has been a part of the conservative playbook in other areas, Klibanoff pointed out, especially when it comes to reproductive healthcare.
“It sounds more palatable to say: ‘What adults want to do, adults want to do, that’s your business – but we do think that if you’re under 18, there should be these restrictions on how you access abortion,’” she explained. Even before Roe v. Wade was overturned, Texas state legislators had begun to weaken its power by requiring parental consent for minors seeking abortions and, now, birth control, chipping away at nationwide progress lowering teen pregnancy rates.
Survey data shows that lack of abortion access has had a chilling impact on dating and sex among single adults, contributing to the recession just as a lack of education surrounding safe, consensual sex has – as well as an increasingly gendered ideological polarization. Though some concern about the sex recession has found bipartisan appeal, conservative Texan policies continue to ripple through red and blue states alike, these writers said, shaping the future of dating culture, sex, and generations to come.
