21st CENTURY RELATIONSHIPS: The truth about sex: we are not getting enough.

How comforting this sex-positive vision is. How sophisticated and liberal we are.

Except. A paper in a recent issue of the British Medical Journal summed up the findings of three huge national surveys into sexual attitudes, called Natsal, the latest of which was in 2012. Natsal is British in focus, but some of its findings are reflected globally: worldwide, we are having less sex less frequently and are more upset about it. In Britain, most of the decline in sexual frequency is in people aged over 25 and in long-term relationships. In the US, the over-50s reported the largest decline in how often they had sex, though Finnish middle-aged men reported they were getting sex more frequently. In Japan, the most sexual inactivity was in young single people. Millennials are having less sex than their parents; young people, we are told, are in a “sex drought”.

We have reordered our customs in order to satisfy a noisy minority, and it seems to have made the majority less happy.