As such, the question must be posed: is the incel account of modern sexual life correct or not? Incel communities tend to believe a few key facts about modern mating practices. First, they tend to believe women have become very sexually promiscuous over time, and indeed that virtually all women are highly promiscuous. These left out men are the incels. This view is basically wrong. But it turns out to be wrong in an interesting and informative way.
First of all, we may wonder about the actual trends in sexual behavior. For this article, I will focus on individuals aged who have never been married, and particularly males within that group. Most groups of people age have broadly similar amounts of sex; probably something like sexual encounters per year.
Never-married people have the least sex, about encounters per year, while ever -married people have more sex, about encounters per year, on average. Historically, never-married men have reported higher sexual frequency than never-married women. However, in the and GSS samples, that changed: never-married men now report slightly lower sexual frequency than never-married women.
This is mostly because men are reporting less sex, not that women are reporting more sex. Female sexual frequency is essentially unchanged since The graph below shows what share of these young men and women had not had sex at all in the last 12 months, by their sex and marital status. The share of people of each status who report not having had sex in the past year shows interesting trends that seem to support the basic incel account of changes in mating markets. Recent years have seen increasing sexlessness for never-married men.
Celibacy is approximately stable among women. Notably, male sexlessness is also rising among married men. On the one hand, the incel story of rising male celibacy seems confirmed here; more and more never-married young men are experiencing long sexual droughts. But on the other hand, incels are basically wrong in suggesting that virtually all women are promiscuous: female sexlessness has been roughly stable over time and indeed has actually risen since the period from Their results do not confirm the trends seen in the GSS.
