Basically, the statistic I keep seeing is one in three men and one in five women have not had sex in the last year.

And this is especially pronounced among millennials in Gen Z. We are living in probably the most sexually permissive culture ever. You don't really have to look far. You can go on any mainstream social media platform and see essentially porn-a-hs. And so sexuality and hyper-sexuality have never been more celebrated. But then when we actually look at the numbers, it turns out that Gen Z is actually having less sex than any previous generation at that age. When sex is so overdone, they're not as interested in the taboo aspect of it. The average age at which a child sees bull-tie today is 12. One in seven kids sees a year of 10 or younger. They didn't even have a chance to really develop normally in terms of their sexuality. Are you saying there's something biological going on? Is it conditioning? Is it all those things? I think most people think people are having sex like 10 times a week, but it's like, you know, most people, more than once a week is not actually associated with more satisfaction in a relationship. I think there's this trend of younger men not doing as well. Young men are falling behind their female peers in terms of education and occupation. And I think part of that is due to the educational system, being biased in favor of girls and young women. Their lack of interest in sex is a reflection of a lack of connection more largely in society.

I'm Dave Rubin, and joining me today is a sex neuroscientist and author of Sexstinction,

the decline of sex and the future of intimacy.

Long-lost Rubin report guest, Deborah, so.

Deborah, how are you?

I'm well, Dave.

Thanks for having me back.

Yeah, it has been a long time, a bizarrely long time.

But as you just said to me before we started recording, when you're writing a book,

you hide out.

You disappear.

Yeah, I call it going into hibernation, basically. And I don't do anything but read scientific papers and write. And then when I'm ready to come out and talk about it, because I want to make sure I know what I'm talking about and that I know what my opinions are and that I can back them up for sure. And then when I'm ready to reemerge into the sunlight, here we are. Here we are. All right. Well, we are going to talk about sex for about 45 minutes, or at least, according to the book, the lack thereof when it comes to people having sex and why they are not having sex, et cetera, et cetera. But before we dive in for some of my audience that maybe doesn't know you, could you do a quick little bio? You've been on many times. We'll link to your earlier stuff down below, but it has been just a bit of time.

So I am a neuroscientist by training. My specialty was in human sexuality, and I used to do brain imaging,

basically of human sexual arousal. So I loved, you know, being a sex researcher, being a scientist,

but I found the academia, or climate in academia had to come too political. I wrote an op-ed about gender transitioning children and being very much in opposition to that and how the scientific

research showed that that was actually not the best way forward for these children. Most of them

grew up to be gay. When was that? That was very early on.

And that's when I first came across you.

And now everyone's taking that position. But you were way, way ahead of that. Yeah, I was pretty the first person to write an op-ed about this. So it was crazy. It was a firestorm at the time. That op-ed came out over a decade ago. And I remember you had me on the first time in 2018.

So I'm so grateful for you taking that chance having me on and seeing that I wasn't a crazy person in terms of what I was talking about. And then after that op-ed was published, I decided to leave academia just because I could see the direction it was going in. And I would say also in terms of the field of sex research, I definitely have friends and colleagues who are still in the field who do amazing work and who are apolitical. They're very ethical. But there are, I would say in some ways, certain taboo subjects or certain ways of talking about sex that you're not supposed to do it that way. And you're definitely not supposed to counter so-called sex positivity, which is what my book sex extinction does and basically says this idea that you should have sex with whomever

you want and we should live in this really hedonistic culture and deny biology, deny reality,

...