Why Gen Z Is Having Less Sex

Rowan Pelling on the Erotic Review, the death of the tease, and why desire needs saving from pornography.

Rowan Pelling founded the Erotic Review on a single bet: that the sexiest organ is the brain.

The young are having less sex than any previous generation on record. Pornography is free, instant, and infinite. The tease has disappeared. The accidental workplace romance, the fumbled first kiss, the slow build that nobody was filming, none of it exists in the same way anymore. And Pelling, who has been writing about desire, intimacy, and the culture of eroticism since she was 13 and writing her own problem pages, has a great deal to say about where it went and whether it can come back.

This is a wide-ranging conversation that earns its runtime at every turn. What follows covers the Navy ship that subscribed, the '90s lads' mag world Pelling loved for its craft and its excess, the memoir she has been writing for 20 years, and the case for a ministry of sex, which she has offered to run. James Kirkham gets her to slow down on the things that matter: what was actually lost when the tease disappeared and why the inability to make mistakes is the thing that worries her most about young people right now.

"If men and women are constantly at loggerheads and frightened, there's not gonna be another generation.", Rowan Pelling