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Amy Hamm: Debra Soh’s Sextinction shows us how lonely our future might be 

There is a profound conflict between a hypersexual society that is becoming sexless

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In Aldous Huxley’s seminal Brave New World, published in 1932, the author imagined what terrible things advancing technologies might do to mankind. In Huxley’s created world, set in 2540, human beings are grown in labs — but not due to any cultural aversion to sex. The culture is hypersexual: the totalitarian government uses a slogan, “everyone belongs to everyone else” to brainwash its citizenry into a collectivist identity that makes taboo monogamy and even motherhood. Regular and extreme promiscuity are the norm, in Huxley’s world.

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In 2026, our culture is also hypersexual. But, unlike in Huxley’s vision, people aren’t having much sex at all. Especially Millennials and Gen-Z’ers. This is the paradox that Debra Soh opens her new book, Sextinction, with: “Society has never been more sexualized, and yet we are having less sex than ever before,” she wrote. She describes this fact as “not just a crisis of sexlessness, but one of lost intimacy, social cohesion, and common cause.”

Amy Hamm: Debra Soh’s Sextinction shows us how lonely our future might be  Back to video

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