America Is Having Less Sex Than at Any Point Since 1990. Sexy Stories Are Booming. These Two Things Are Not Unrelated.

I launched a platform for people who read sexy stories, which means I spend an unusual amount of time thinking about desire — who has it, what they do with it, what happens when the culture makes them feel bad about having it — and recently I read a statistic that caught me completely off guard (a little embarassing to admit when you consider that understanding desire is, technically, my job).

I was shocked because it directly contradicts what every television show and viral TikTok has been telling us — which is that young people are out there having more sex than ever, that desire is everywhere, that the only problem anyone is having is having too much of it.¹

This is what the statistic said:

Americans are having less sex right now than at any point since 1990, and that number has been declining, more or less continuously, for thirty-four years.

By 2024 — not some dystopian future date we're still working our way toward, but like, last year — the share of adults having sex at least once a week had dropped from 55% to 37%. This is not an blip but a sustained, structural shift that the researchers who study it are describing as, and I shit you not, a sex recession.²

And yet, in an apparent contradiction, the market for sexy stories is growing. Romance is the bestselling fiction genre in America. Indie platforms are expanding. Readers talk about these books the way people talk about therapy, pickleball tournaments or church. (I say this with affection since I've built a platform for exactly this purpose. 😏)

I don't think it's a coincidence that people are having less sex while reading more about it, and I don't think the explanation is as simple as "people are using books as a substitute for sex." It's more interesting and human than that, and it says something about desire that I think we don't have quite the right language for yet.³

Meanwhile, the Library Is Packed

Before launching Theo Reads, I ran a reader survey — talking to people who regularly read steamy or erotic stories, asking them about their habits, their preferences, what they were looking for, what they weren't finding — and one the number that has stayed with me ever since is that romance readers consume an average of 2.71 steamy stories a month, or about 32 a year, compared to the national average of 12.6 books a year across all genres.⁸ These readers are reading nearly three times more than the average American, and that's only counting this one category of book, the category they're apparently embarrassed to mention at dinner parties.

These are not casual readers dipping into something occasionally, but people with a practice, something they return to consistently and with intention. Something is being provided here that people actually need, not just want.

The finding that stopped me, though, wasn't the reading frequency. It was this: 78% of readers said they read sexy stories primarily for entertainment, not as a lead-up to sex or orgasm.⁹

More than three quarters, reading for the experience of the story itself. For the emotional content of it, the feeling of it, the particular thing that happens when you spend time inside a narrative about desire and intimacy and being wanted — which isn’t so different from why anyone reads anything, except that this version comes with the additional weight of cultural shame that most other genres don't.

The Bored Housewife Has Left the Building

The social judgement around steamy fiction readers is so pervasive that I think most people who read these books have just absorbed it as background noise: these are women with nothing better to do, substituting fiction for a real life, probably watching too much television or TikTok.

Our data says otherwise.⁴

Only 5% of readers in our survey are homemakers. 78% are employed in some capacity. They are more educated than the average American — 56% hold a bachelor's degree or higher, compared to 47% nationally, and their household income tracks the national median. Translation: These are people with full lives, demanding jobs, probably more on their plates than they can manage, who have made a deliberate choice to carve out time for this kind of reading. This is not what escapism looks like — escapism is passive and accidental, and this is neither of those things.

And then there's the writer side of this, which surprised me even more: roughly a quarter of the authors writing these stories are men.¹⁰

If you're still reading this post (I'm self-aware enough to know I'm rambling a little, ok?), this bears repeating. A quarter of the writers working in a genre that the culture has decided is exclusively about and for women are men — writing romance, writing erotica, writing across the full emotional and explicit range of what these stories can be — and nobody talks about it, because it doesn't fit the narrative.

The readership is similarly broader than the conversation around it suggests, and as Theo Reads grows I'll be sharing more of our platform data on this. What I can say now is that the "bored housewife" is not the reader in front of us, and may never have been.

She don't live here anymore.

So why are people reading more romance and erotica?

We are touch-starved — and I mean that in the largest possible sense, not just the sexual one. Less physically close to people than we used to be, less likely to have the kind of sustained, embodied connection that used to structure daily life almost without anyone thinking about it, before everyone got their own screen and their own curated corner of the internet to disappear into.

Desire for touch doesn't disappear into that digital world with us. It keeps coming back, because it's not optional — it's not a preference or a hobby, it's a fundamental need for closeness and the feeling of mattering to another person. When that need doesn't have its ordinary outlets, it goes looking for others. For a lot of people right now, it goes into books, and I think this is not a failure or something to be ashamed of — I think this is exactly what storytelling has always been for.¹¹

The 44% of readers in our survey who said they love these stories because they let them "fantasize about things I wouldn't do in real life" — that's not dysfunction, that's imagination working correctly, that is the entire long history of human beings using narrative to safely experience things beyond the boundaries of their own circumstances.¹²

The gap between what people want and they’re allowed to want publicly

When I started Theo Reads, I had a thesis I couldn't quite articulate — something about desire and shame and the gap between what people want and what they're allowed to want publicly, something about a genre that tens of millions of people love and almost nobody will admit to openly.

The sex recession data gave me the words to describe it. If people are having less sex and reading more stories about intimacy and being wanted, then what these books are doing is keeping desire alive in the gap — giving it somewhere to live while people are waiting for the rest of their circumstances to make space for it.

I’m building Theo Reads because I think these stories deserve to exist without shame, without censorship, without the low-level embarrassment that follows them everywhere they go. And I think the people who read them deserve it too.¹³ No judgment. No wrong answers. Just good stories, and the particular relief of spending time inside a feeling that our lives just don't make room for anymore.

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Footnotes

¹ The statistic arrived via a research paper I had not gone looking for, which had linked to a second paper, which cited the General Social Survey, which is where the evening took a turn. I regret nothing except perhaps the hour.

² Institute for Family Studies, "The Sex Recession: The Share of Americans Having Regular Sex Keeps Dropping," 2025. The General Social Survey has been running continuously since 1972. ifstudies.org

³ To be clear: "sexy stories are a substitute for sex" is not my thesis. My thesis is that desire needs somewhere to live, stories are one of the places it lives, and we have somehow collectively decided to be embarrassed about the version of it that involves explicit content, which seems like a mistake.

⁴ Reader data throughout this post comes from a proprietary customer needs survey conducted by Theo Reads in July 2023, with 147 qualifying respondents (adults 18+ who regularly or occasionally read erotica or steamy romantic stories). Directional rather than definitive, but consistent with broader industry patterns.

⁵ Institute for Family Studies, "Sexless America: Young Adults Are Having Less Sex," 2024. ifstudies.org

⁶ NPR / WHRO, "Gen Z Is Afraid of Sex — and for Good Reason," July 11, 2025. whro.org

⁷ The causal picture is genuinely complex and still being studied. The digital displacement thesis is particularly well-documented; COVID's role in disrupting developmental milestones for young adults is more recent but widely considered a contributing factor.

⁸ The 12.6 books per year figure is drawn from Pew Research Center data and publishing industry surveys. The 2.71 steamy stories per month figure comes from our July 2023 reader survey.

⁹ Proprietary reader survey, Theo Reads, July 2023. 77.55% of respondents chose "I just enjoy reading them in my free time, not as a lead up to sex or orgasm" as their primary reason for reading.

¹⁰ Proprietary writer survey, Theo Reads, September 2023. Of 100 respondents who identified as writers of erotica or romantic stories, 25.93% identified as male. Small sample; read as indicative rather than definitive.

¹¹ "What storytelling is for" is a large claim that philosophers and literary critics have been arguing about for centuries. I am using it loosely. The point stands.

¹² Proprietary reader survey, Theo Reads, July 2023. 43.66% of readers cited "I can fantasize about things I wouldn't do in real life" as something they like about these stories.

¹³ The embarrassment, to be clear, is not the readers' problem to solve. It is a cultural problem, and one we are actively working on, one post at a time.