What Is Sex? Ask a Boomer, a Millennial, and a Gen Z and They’ll All Say Something Different

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Published 6:30, December 3, 2025 Thirdman/Pexels

“I AM SO DONE with penetrative sex.” This statement from T surprised me. There was T herself: a fit, sexually charged woman with an easeful life, well married to a man whom I’d describe the same way. There was the news that Gen X women, which T was, were having the best sex, and a lot of it, as reported by Montreal journalist Mireille Silcoff for The New York Times Magazine. T and I were discussing that article as we walked through Toronto’s lavishly treed ravines just before she made her surprising statement. I was miffed the Times story—cover line “The Joy of X”—had ignored my generation of boomers like stale crumbs left on the table after a lively dinner party. “Who says boomers aren’t having sex constantly?” I’d said to T. “You should write ‘What Is Sex,’” she said before we parted. Our walking conversations were mostly about writing and reading—we were former colleagues and followed the work friend’s rule of rarely straying into the private. Until this conversation.

“Me? Write ‘What Is Sex’? That’s never going to happen.”

But this question of “What Is Sex” prowled in the background like someone determined to prove themselves right in a pointless argument. It took me back to an impasse from fifty years earlier. I’d joined a university English course in which the sole assignment was to write an essay entitled “What Is Literature.” As I failed to complete or even begin the essay, I had a minor nervous breakdown, taking to my bed for two months—although no one would have described that episode as a breakdown in 1975. Any more than they would have described me having sex with the professor who assigned “What Is Literature” as an abuse of power on his part. I didn’t then, and I don’t now. I had plenty of agency, most of the teachers weren’t much older than their students, and learning is sexy, it opens you up. This professor was maybe thirty, he talked about uncovering archetypes and entering paradise, and his hair got in his eyes. I don’t remember how I landed in his apartment to discuss my progress on “What Is Literature.” I do remember padding down his hallway to an airy room with a double bed. Did it please me to imagine that legions of students wished to be where I was? Likely. A crucifix hung over the dresser, the sex was gentle and remarkable only in its brevity, and orgasms during sex were an anomaly for me at nineteen and for some time to come. I never wrote the essay. I got an A in the course. An A in sex. This also pleased me.

Fifty years later, I think the important thing about the “What Is Literature” assignment—aside from the lesson that sex is often transactional—is that the question is more interesting than the answer. “Whatever you do, don’t have an answer, period,” wrote Miriam Toews in my most beloved book of 2025, A Truce That Is Not Peace. Then Toews took it further, as she is wont to do. “Also: douchebag to even know the question in the first place.”

I won’t answer “What Is Sex” any more than I answered “What Is Literature.” What an idea to think that anyone could. But I’d like to understand why the question feels so important as we cusp the quarter mark of the twenty-first century—and as I move into the three-quarter mark of my own century: What the heck is sex in the year 2025, anyway?

Boomers are not having masses of sex, I’ll pause to say, at least according to my own personal research. Stand down, those who put the lie to that, and good for you after forty years in your super-hot marriage, or your thrilling late-life romance that keeps you up until 9 p.m. To explain why the rest of us aren’t in the masses category means delving into words like dysfunction, dryness, disease, and the end of desire, so let’s leave that off this magical mystery tour.

I ASKED GEMINI how many news articles and studies had been published on sex in 2025. “The sheer volume of content published across countless platforms makes a precise number unattainable,” it replied in a rare moment of AI defeat, so I reverted to a more dogged search engine—myself. There was that New York Times Magazine cover splash in March, with a photograph of a woman’s not-young back, red bra strap slipping down her shoulder. It was an old-fashioned image of wantonness in the middle years of the 2020s when, as Silcoff said, you could swing by the pharmacy for milk, deodorant, and a cock ring. Modern Love Podcast’s follow-up—“Gen X? More Like Gen Sex”—offered the “juicy back story” of the widely read article, which included middle-aged women in mom jeans talking about “licking someone’s butt.” That article resulted in a book deal, adding to the hefty pile of writing by women who have upended the taboo that to put sex on the page is to risk being ridiculous: Sally Rooney, Sheila Heti, Annie Ernaux, Miranda July, and the entire loins-on-fire romantasy genre, which Bloomberg estimated is worth $610 million (US).

A common theme in much of the reporting on sex this year was that people in their teens and twenties, the Zs, weren’t having any: they were too depressed, anxious, and messed up by their pre-teen access to porn. The olds’ flipping out about the youngs’ sex lives was nothing new: murderous hippie sex cults, depraved gay bathhouses, and heartless millennial hookups were the panicked headlines from my lifetime (I likely wrote some of them). But worrying about the youth having too little sex was a modern twist in our age of anxiety.

New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino said she was “not personally inclined to wring my hands about what young people are doing with their genitals” in her June review of two non-fiction books on sex. A New Guide to Sex in the 21st Century (easy sex devalues women) and The Second Coming: Sex and the Next Generation’s Fight Over Its Future (sex is a “tortured dance between backlash and progress”) were authored by thirtysomething journalists on the right and left of the sexual culture war. Tolentino’s thoughtful article led her through the quantifiables: who’s having sex, what kind of sex, how much sex, wrong sex, right sex, political sex. But by the end of her New Yorker review, she was as frustrated as I was, longing to “read something about desire, and pleasure, and connection—and what it feels like to be a person who’s still learning how to be a person when those things begin to flicker and disappear.”

E’S LAUGH WAS high and happy when I explained that their porn-saturated generation was not having sex. “I’ll have to tell my friends that.” E was twenty-three, and our conversation reminded me of what I’d learned from forty-five years in journalism: there’s what studies say, and there’s what people say. They often had little in common, especially when the topic was sex or money. In my quest to ask what sex was, it would be conversations more than statistics that showed the way. The people I spoke with ranged in age from twenty-three to seventy-three, but most were heterosexual women who expanded and challenged my own thinking. Except in a couple of instances—in which people discussed sex in a professional rather than personal way—I consented to using initials instead of full names. Because even in our age of everything-on-the-table sex, people—especially women—are still targeted and harassed for speaking openly about their sexuality.

“It is true,” E continued, “that you have to unlearn the porn standards of what sex is going to be: blow job, penetration, fake orgasm, fake orgasm face.” I often spoke to E to find out what the Zs were thinking, because they were fiercely smart, broadly read, and often surprising. E studied and worked in Montreal, where they had a wide circle of friends, both queer (as E was) and straight. “It became necessary to redefine sex completely from those porn tropes,” E said. “To learn that intimacy and vulnerability are where sex lives,” not women screaming in pretend ecstasy.

E worried it was stating the obvious to say Sally Rooney was one writer who got sex right. “Sex is the conversation, and the conversation is sex.” Rooney’s sex on the page often included porn-normalized rough sex, but E was suspicious of studies that said choking was on the rise among millennials and non-celibate Zs. “It’s not that the studies are wrong,” E said, because they knew people who were having choking sex “with women, with men, and with non-binary partners.” It’s that the studies reflect “our current zeitgeist of extreme openness about sex. Did anybody do choking studies forty years ago, and what would they have found if they did?” (As E talked, I remembered reading a long-ago interview with a rabbi, or maybe it was a priest, about successful relationships: he said a paddle on the bedside table had saved many a marriage.) E was a non-judgmental observer of sex, although their friends often talked about how the boundaries between choking for pleasure and choking for violence could quickly blur, especially with men, and especially in a “sex positivity age in which people feel free to say out loud whatever is on their mind and also to do it.”

In the second episode of Lena Dunham’s Girls—E watched the six-season series once a year, partly for its depiction of “next-level unhinged sex”—Adam (played by Adam Driver) vigorously banged Hannah (Dunham), while inventing her back story as an eleven-year-old street “junkie” with her “fucking Cabbage Patch lunchbox,” and came after holding her in a choke grip. “That was really good,” said Hannah, and then, with brilliant comic timing, “I almost came.” E noted how neither Dunham the actor nor Dunham the director got in the way of Adam’s “dirty little girl whore” fantasy. (Many women aren’t shy around that fantasy either. Throw in a school uniform and we’re off to the races.) “In all of the Girls sex scenes, there was an awkwardness that acknowledged the separation between people, sometimes especially while having sex.”

I CLOSE MY EYES and cover my face with my hands whenever people have sex or even kiss on the small or large screen, speaking of awkward. “When did this begin?” asked actor and screenwriter Susan Coyne (Slings and Arrows, Blindness, North of North, and much in between). Coyne sounded mildly concerned at my prudery. I wanted to know what Coyne was watching, partly for her own experience as a writer and actor. And because she was not just a participant in but an eloquent observer of the streaming universe, where the grail of truth could often be found about the culture we live in right now.

“The first thing that happens in a sex scene in 2025 is the man goes down on the woman,” I said to Coyne on our call. We lived half a block apart, but I’d discovered it was easier to talk about sex on the phone than it was in person. “They’ve barely said, Hello, let me take your hat, when he disappears between her legs.” “Yes,” Coyne said. “It’s a new check on a box to show a man is sensitive without showing any actual sensitivity.”

It used to be the man who pushed a woman to her knees. Now women mimic the same loutish behaviour in scenes that play just as crass. Intimacy coordinators—a relatively new job in the film business—are there to help actors feel safe and protected by ensuring there is no actual intimacy. But who’s making sure the sex scene is crucial to where the characters and the story are going? “As an actor, I’m thinking, ‘Why film the woman from that angle? How many takes did that take? What was that day like on set?’” said Coyne. Instead of using sex to illuminate the relationship, “we’re tossed out of the story because the script direction was likely ‘and then they have sex.’”

When we’ve seen every possible version of physical sex on porn sites and on the popular screen too, where else can sex go but inward? Now we’re finally getting somewhere, I said to myself as Frank’s “Inner Thai Girl” speech in season three of The White Lotus got people doing that rare thing: talking about sex instead of commodifying it.

After having sex with maybe a thousand Thai women, Frank (played sublimely by Sam Rockwell), sat opposite his long-time friend Rick (Walton Goggins), in a Bangkok bar, said he wanted to be on the receiving end of his own unquenchable thirst. In an almost five-minute soliloquy that took you all the way to the end of the dock of desire and identity—without showing any sex—Frank explained his path to enlightenment was to become a Thai girl. He had three or four guys “rail the shit of me,” while he looked into a Thai girl’s eyes and thought, “I am her, and I’m fucking me.”

“Ya know?” he said to Rick in another bit of brilliant comic TV timing.

“Not really,” said a nonplussed Rick, standing in for us all.

Locating the “Asian girl” inside him led Frank to a calm place of Buddhist non-attachment. “The whole season was trying to understand desire from a Buddhist perspective,” said Coyne. “The ‘hungry ghosts’ of appetite: addiction, money, power, sex. Consumption without satisfaction.” The way boomers are charged with spending too much of their greedy adult lives. Frank lost his way on the path to enlightenment. His hunger won out. “But the episode opened a tender topic,” said Coyne, “and it took us down a dark path to a kind of sex that was all the more powerful for its ambiguity.”

Another series that followed the radical intimacy of sex as an internal rather than external journey was Dying for Sex. The show featured Michelle Williams as cancer patient Molly having “deviant” sex—bondage, pain, dog costumes. “‘Normal sex.’ Who decides what that means?” said palliative care social worker Sonya (Esco Jouley), in the second-best sex soliloquy of 2025. Molly, who had stage-four cancer, had just fractured her fragile femur while kicking a neighbour’s penis during sex in a scene that was much more tender than it sounds. “You think sex is just penetration and orgasms. Why?” said Sonya, who was the kind of palliative nurse I hope to have someday. “Sex is a wave. Sex is a mindset. Sex is the non-linear emergent phenomenon that arises when two or more beings”—Sonya beamed like an angel as her hands came together—“they touch energy fields.” Her advice at the end of her speech was deceptively simple: “Here’s the thing about your body. You have to listen to it.”

There’s a lot of judgment and misjudgment about the sex lives of others. I assumed people into bondage couldn’t get off without kinky pain. But instead of “and now the actors will take their clothes off,” Dying for Sex took us somewhere hidden and emotional. It showed pain was deep inside all of us, and that so-called deviant sex was one of the most intimate ways to uncover, listen to, and accept that pain.

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I SAW SARAH SILVERMAN perform live in Toronto; it would have been about twenty years ago. Part of her routine, as I recall it, was to describe her favourite porn categories: gangbang, anal, and (she whispered) cum in her face. The gag was why she whispered the last one and not the first two, but from my seat in the middle of the audience, all I thought was: Porn categories? Aside from CityTV’s Baby Blue movies in the early ’70s (late night; soft porn; my parents watched it), the only porn I remembered was an 8mm reel that featured a vacuum salesman and two bouncy blondes. That was in 1968; I was fifteen, dating an older guy (nineteen; decent; he taught me about pleasure), and managed to get home to my parents with my virginity intact. After the Silverman show, I immediately went online to find hundreds of alphabetically organized categories: hentai, hairy. Horses, which I watched. (My advice is: don’t.) Unlike Dying for Sex, in which the kink was meant to slowly open you up, the hyper-specificity of porn categories seemed designed to get you from A to B at light speed. Which was one way of listening to your body.

“Porn has sucked the life out of sex, so sex isn’t sexy anymore,” said Tim Pilgrim, a practising Jungian analyst who’d had clients addicted to porn and into S&M in his illuminating and long career (he was seventy-three). “Porn makes everything into objects. Everyone gets fixed up and fixated.” Sex is the best thing we have at our disposal to disarm, to strip down with another person, he said. But another, less limiting way to describe sex was as an access to what he called the GPES—the Great Psychic Energy System—“where the dynamism of sex is not just about penetration and orgasm, it’s about relationship and communion. Eros offers a wide world much bigger than penetrative sex.” He described a class with a teaching mentor, years earlier, who told her students she’d just had sex for eight hours. Her class was in awe, until she explained what had gone on: holding hands; talking; laughing. Maybe it culminated in intercourse, maybe it didn’t; she was reframing the idea for her students of what sex was.

Which presents a second question to add to the “What Is Sex” question: Do you have to have sex to have sex? “Is there a sexual response to life that is beyond sex itself?” This was H, who was sixty-seven, long divorced like me, and, after a few subsequent relationships, had decided to leave “the meeting of a suitable man to chance. Chance has not smiled upon me, or perhaps it has! My life seems complete without.” It was H’s unbounded joy at so many things in her life, and how we had found quick commonality in our way of thinking—we were later-in-life friends—that made me want to talk to her about sex.

“Society would have us believe that post-sex life is a deadened state,” said H. Like those widowed women who never take off their black gowns, which symbolized not only grief but also the absence of a sensual life; nothing going on under this getup. But can it instead be a time in life when we can have “an almost ecstatic response to everything—a new friend, nature, art—that is beyond sex, or perhaps even the essence of sex?” H asked. “I’m in the latter camp.”

H’s post-marriage world, which was often spent in the country, hoeing fields and hacking shrubs, was about freedom. “In a two-gendered relationship you tend not to go beyond your own self-imposed restrictions.” It’s mostly men who are accused of weaponized incompetence, as in, they don’t know how to load a dishwasher. But women are fully capable of not taking out the garbage for twenty-five years, as I know from my own marriage. “Now if there’s a mouse in a trap,” said H, “I have to dispose of it myself.” H found great satisfaction in breaking out of gender roles and said her whole post-sexual world was like that. Instead of being limiting because there was no sex, “it was wildly expanding because everything was sex.”

To give one example (she gave me several): H and D, eighty-nine, “met cute” at a country lunch. H was telling two uninterested men about her new hand-held chainsaw. “It’s like a little gun,” she’d said, to blank looks, when D leaned across the men and said, “I don’t want to butt in, but would it be a Stihl saw?” After an excited conversation about the merits of the saw, they exchanged numbers and since then an intense and heartfelt relationship visiting nurseries and working side by side in each other’s gardens had flourished. “It’s pure friendship but it’s also charged, passionate, and alive,” said H. It’s not the classical sexual response of clothes off, pressed against the kitchen counter, orgasm must happen, but H was always excited to see her new friend. “I wouldn’t put on just any old thing to go on an outing with D.”

Between friends, family, and nature, H said as our conversation wound down, she had “much more sizzle” in her life than you would imagine. You don’t need another person, even. “It’s the heightened feeling of being connected not only to the world but of being alive within yourself. After a while you know what that frisson is—it’s for you.”

I WENT ALL THE WAY with H and Coyne and Pilgrim that immersive and charged sex doesn’t necessarily involve sex. (We were all over sixty, it’s fair to underline.) Then I broached the idea with J. “I couldn’t disagree more. I can have an orgasm. I want to have an orgasm. And I should have an orgasm. I absolutely do not believe sex does not involve orgasm.” J was thirty-nine, and a married mother of two. She lived her life with an expressed intentionality that I have admired since we met twelve years ago. I often sought her out to help me understand what I was thinking or perhaps remind me of what I once thought when I was cusping thirty and then forty, even though she now lived many miles and at least one time zone away. “The weight of the world is off my shoulders after I orgasm,” she added in case I hadn’t taken her point. “I don’t think that’s by accident. Orgasm connects me to my body, myself, and my husband. Orgasm is a relief.”

J was both a feminist and a practising Catholic. As a strictly raised Catholic myself, I wondered how J reconciled her sexual beliefs with a church that had for centuries demanded a role in the bedroom, largely to oppress women. “I cling to what I feel are deeper truths, not what the various popes say over the years,” she replied. “We are all absorbing our faith through this prism of being human.”

J was not raised in sexual shame, as I was by my own Catholic mother (who—hypocritically? Or merely secretly?—had an active sex life with my father well into her eighties). J’s mother said J’s body was a temple, and something she alone owned. That idea stayed with J. She specifically set out to have good sex in her twenties. “I was obsessed with how one could be a good person while having good sex with other people,” she said, because if you can’t care about someone’s feelings during sex, how can you outside of sex?

One of the first things she learned was that “the golden rule went out the window in sex. A lot of people lost their manners.” J once said to a man, “Don’t stop,” and the man said, “Of course I won’t stop.” “I thought that was a rude response.” You weren’t supposed to talk unless it was “uh uh porn talk.” When mild strangulation happened with another man, only afterward did he say, “Was that OK?”

J believed people were “repressed and depressed around sex because they hadn’t figured out how to be individuals in bed.” For her that involved a belief in her own spirituality and preciousness. In grade eight, when the cool kids were suddenly giving blow jobs, J knew “I didn’t want to do that.” I wondered aloud if my own sexual history, which included a keen desire to please and perhaps even stay on trend, might have changed if my mother had broached this temple idea with me. The only temple in my life was St. Joseph Church on the other side of the town where I grew up. A belief in the preciousness of our bodies would have been so simple to teach, instead of drawings of fallopian tubes and penises and condoms over bananas.

Now that J was happily married and intended “to stay married for my entire life,” sex remained important, even as it became layered by kids, work schedules, and low energy. Her baby chatted to himself and sometimes to J as we talked on the phone, and she often stopped to chat with him. “The amount of time I spend thinking about sex is dramatically lower!” she said. She did think about her kids and how to ensure they’d have good sexual health and authority over their own bodies. Sex was individual but also a community response, she said, “a place where we learned not just how to be part of a couple but part of society.” She wanted her children to understand that.

“The last thing I want to say about sex,” said J before she got off the phone—the baby was losing patience—was that it “doesn’t change all that much.” Sex is everywhere and always has been everywhere. “Our culture is wilfully ignorant of history, of the great expanse of time we all participate in.” I thought, as she talked, of an article I’d recently read in The New York Review of Books, called “Vexed by Sex,” which described how, “for much of the past 2,000 years, sexual images and fantasies came not from pornography but from scripture.” (The book under review was Lower Than the Angels: A History of Sex and Christianity by Diarmaid MacCulloch.) “What we consider to be erotic today seems so narrow in comparison,” wrote reviewer Erin Maglaque, “so hopelessly trammeled by the twin forces of pornography and marriage.” Unlike the early Christian writing, which saw eroticism in celibacy and the ecstasy of communal life. “How much freer our own sex lives might be,” Maglaque ended her review, “if the sources for our erotic imaginations were stranger: An inner voice. Dripping honey. The sweetness of flowers, and apples, and blood.”

T WROTE ME that she’d been thinking about what led her to say she was done with penetrative sex. She would be my first and last conversation. I wasn’t going to give the Bible the last word on what is sex, god knows.

“I think it was Trump and Epstein,” said T. “It was a meta response. The whole culture is to batter and bruise women.” We are poked and prodded continuously, and that was all tied in with Trump, and the Trump era.

T wanted me to know that she wasn’t saying penetrative sex can’t be pleasurable. “It’s the extreme focus on it that diminishes what sex can be. I must add that my husband is happy to do whatever I want; to lie and be naked with me if that’s what I want. This conversation I’m having is more in my head.”

When I said at the outset of this quest that T startled me with her statement that she was done with penetrative sex, a truer way to put it would be that she completely upended the way I’d thought of sex since I’d first had it at seventeen. That man who’d shown me the porn reel two years earlier, when I was fifteen, had also shown me how to orgasm, an extremely useful and gratifying skill I went on to excel at. Until I wrote this article, I would not have said that was life-changing sex, because—it wasn’t sex. There was no penetration. I remained a virgin for two more years. I don’t believe that anymore. I had sex at fifteen. It was great.

My conversation with E reminded me that for the old to think they understood anything about what the young were doing in bed was as ridiculous now as it had been when I was their age. And of the open mindedness of youth that I hope to recall and emulate as I age. I told E on our last call that a male friend explained to me that my story was really about the end of the penis. E laughed their high, sweet laugh again. “Or maybe just exploring options other than or as well as penises?” E said.

J took me back to the terrific womanhood of forty and the subterranean and explicit knowledge of your body that results in glorious, fill-you-up, let-it-go sex: we do deserve our orgasms, especially when work and kids and everything else want at us.

I thought about T knowing she could tell her husband anything she was thinking about sex, and I understood she must love him very much (and he her) to know that he was there for her desires and ideas, however they might move their bodies toward each other. Which brought me, finally, to review my own sexual history and ask, not for the first time: What on earth was I thinking? Now that I’m the age when looking backward is a professional occupation, I’m baffled by the choices I made and the risks I took. I was a sex idiot a lot of the time. Would I do it differently if I had a second chance? That’s an unsolvable mystery for the ages. I think not, though, because I wouldn’t want to lose the times when sex was part of unbounded, revelatory conversation. What I regret and hope I won’t repeat is when sex wasn’t considered or kind, when I wasn’t careful with someone’s heart, or they with mine. Sex without love is a diminishment of all love. (Ah, love. What is love, anyway? That’s another question.)

The other night, I sat in my backyard with two friends as a pre-rain wind hit the trees, and we marvelled at the sudden freshness of the air, and the wildness of the river birch swaying overhead. “Are we having sex right now?” I said, because we all felt a charged openness, and I’d just told them H’s idea that possibly everything was sex. The eighty-year-old nodded yes. The fifty-nine-year-old rolled her eyes. Was it surprising that the people over sixty I spoke with talked more about the emotion than the physicality of sex? Likely not. Sex happened in time and changed over time. It’s an ongoing movement, not just through the ages of humanity, but your own ages.

But here’s what might be new in our era of not just anxiety but longevity: many of us, from Zs to boomers, will live well into our nineties and beyond. By that measure, the everything-is-sex post-sex life could extend for thirty years or more. Those boomers I dismissed at the beginning of this story were at the forefront of an incredible sexual revolution in the ’60s, when the pill created the sustained possibility of sex without fear of pregnancy or back-alley abortion. Maybe those same boomers are not the stale crumbs left behind, but the early participants in a second, post-sex sexual revolution. The frontiers of the “everything is sex” movement are limitless. Let us find the way, or a way, and report back! It’s the least we could do for spending so long feeding the hungry ghosts of our appetites.