“Casual sex can be arranged as efficiently as a burrito delivery from DoorDash.” So why aren’t young people having more sex? And, then, Atul Gawande on R.F.K., Jr.,’s dangerous defunding of global-health programs. Plus:
• Meet Elon Musk’s possible replacement at DOGE
• Leonard Peltier’s story isn’t over yet
• A new play fetishizes the British Royal Family
There is a hypersexuality to online life, which is largely built around images—and which turns individuals into commodities.Photograph by Lauren Greenfield / Institute / Fahey Klein Gallery
Jia Tolentino
A staff writer, covering news and culture since 2016.
As a certified former young person, my main belief about young people is that they can, should, and, most important, will do whatever the hell they want. This is an especially crucial thing to remember vis-à-vis subjects such as denim styles, college protests, phone behavior, and sex. Whatever normative thoughts any of us might have about how young people should be fucking—that they should be eagerly experimenting; that they should proceed with maximum caution; that unless they’re cisgender and straight and married they shouldn’t be having sex at all—mostly illuminate our own political beliefs, our own personal constellations of longing and smugness and regret.
For a piece in this week’s issue, I review two books: Carter Sherman’s “The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future” and Louise Perry’s “A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century.” Both were written by women in their early thirties, and both take as their subject the sex lives of Gen Z. Perry, a reactionary British writer in a somewhat radical centrist mold, believes that sexual freedom has gone too far, and that young people ought to reject modernity (kink, dating apps, even partying in mixed company) and embrace tradition (having sex only with people they could see themselves marrying, and only after a nice long wait). Sherman, a progressive journalist, centers her book on the so-called Gen-Z sex recession: the phenomenon of young people having significantly less sex than the generations before them did at their age. Do today’s teen-agers and twentysomethings actually want a more abstinent life, Sherman asks, or are they caught between the numbing hypersexuality of an internet that thrives on personal commodification and the repressive prurience of present-day conservatism, which is more than a decade into its latest campaign to police sex, gender, and reproduction?
I’ll show my cards here: I think sex is a sort of natural barometer of how welcome we feel in the world. Like Sherman, I want a world in which young people feel free enough to internalize the great lesson contained within sexual congress: that each of us is worthy simply for being a person with desires.
How Bad Is It?
The U.S. intends to end its financial support for the international vaccine alliance, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., announced this week. (He says the organization, Gavi, “ignored the science” in its work immunizing children worldwide.) We spoke with Atul Gawande, a surgeon who writes about medicine and public health for The New Yorker.
How bad is it?
Gawande: This is extremely bad, which is saying a lot, after the dismantling of the U.S. Agency for International Development and the cutting of U.S. funding to the World Health Organization. Kennedy is taking his attack on childhood vaccines global.
I served as the U.S. representative on the Gavi board when I led global health at U.S.A.I.D. during the last Administration, so I have had a direct view of Gavi’s operations and impact.
Gavi has lowered the cost of lifesaving vaccines across the world through its negotiations with manufacturers; it has vaccinated a billion children, saving nearly nineteen million lives so far. The U.S. helped found Gavi, and it provides fifteen per cent of its budget. Pulling that funding will mean that seventy-five million children do not receive vaccinations. According to Gavi’s estimates, more than a million are likely to die as a result. Kennedy should bear personal responsibility for these consequences. Furthermore, Gavi’s funding is mandated by Congress and directed to U.S.A.I.D., which is in Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s purview now, not Kennedy’s. So, if neither the G.O.P. nor Rubio acts to stop this inhumane decision, they will also share responsibility for the massive loss of children’s lives. Of all the global health programs cut, this one will likely mean more deaths than any.