Some of the data is starkly depressing: one US study from 2023 found that 24% of adults aged 18 to 29 reported no sexual activity at all in the past year. A global sex habits survey by Feeld and Kinsey’s the following year found that 37% of gen Z reported no sex in the last month, compared to 19% of millennials and 17% of gen X. In the UK, only a quarter of people across all age groups said they had had sex in the past week in a 2020 YouGov poll – compared with the Danish figures of nearly half of straight men and 43% of straight women, again across all age groups (Denmark’s survey data on sex is, predictably, the best in the world). The trend has its own vocabulary – “heteropessimism”, “voluntary celibates”, “boy sobers” (that’s girls who have sworn off boys; the boys aren’t sober). In Denmark, the age of becoming sexually active has remained constant since the 1950s, at 16.4 (the age of consent is 15, in common with a lot of Scandinavian countries). Gen Z Danes are having no less sex than previous generations, and most people report satisfaction with their sex lives.