Are we having less sex because of our phones?
Or are we doing less of everything?
There’s a scene in The Iron Claw where one of the three Von Erich brothers is masturbating in the shower when another brother bangs on the door because he needs to use the shared bathroom. The first brother is understandably flustered and yells back to give him a minute while he tries unsuccessfully to roll back the mental tape.
It’s a scene that couldn’t happen in 2024. Not because brothers no longer share bathrooms but because most of us would have pulled up some inspiration in a more private moment rather than relying on reverie during the morning rush.
Statistically speaking, even if he wasn’t using his phone in the bathroom, it’s likely that it would have been at arm’s length. According to a survey by Reviews.org, people checked their phones an average of 144 times a day and spent 4 hour and 25 minutes on them in 2023.
I’m not saying that we’re spending an alarming time using our phones to access pornography, but I am saying that the myriad functions our phones allow us to do in the privacy of our own homes is absolving us from the human contact that used to be required to bank or get directions or watch a movie and it’s leading to more alone time.
Take a recent study by The Atlantic, for example. It shows that the percentage of teens who get together with friends two-plus times a week has nosedived. Kids no longer need to hang out to hang out. They’ll never know the uncertainty of walking down the street to a friend’s house to knock on the door and find out if they’re home.
I’m not just picking on teens. Whether through photos and messaging on Snapchat and Instagram, gaming together on Twitch, or working exclusively through Slack and Zoom, contact has gone virtual, for teens as well as adults. Even when we’re in the same room, it’s easy enough to choose our own adventure by pulling out our phone.
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So how is it that in a world of constant communication, the US Surgeon General had to put out a report on an epidemic of loneliness where “approximately 50 percent of adults in the country are feeling lonely, and that people of all ages are spending significantly less time with others”?
If you remember from a previous report, time spent with our partner and by ourselves will increase throughout our lives while time spent with our parents, children, and friends will all decrease. If that decrease in in-person social activity is now beginning in our teens, at a time when it’s supposed to be peaking, we start to get a clearer picture of why loneliness is afflicting so many.
And whether it’s easier access to sexual imagery that’s leading to a decrease in actual sex or all the other things our phones let us do leading to a decrease in literally everything we used to do, it’s clear that these devices have had an irrevocable impact on convenience as well as socialization. Alone time doesn’t necessarily mean loneliness, but these statistics speak for themselves.