Now, pretty much in the middle of my second half of life, I am often asked – or ask myself – whether it would not be desirable to be young again. For example a late teenager or early twen, that is, in the middle of the first half of my life. To quote a former German foreign minister, I would probably answer: I’m not convinced. You ask why I am so undecided? Read this:
On Tiktok and in social media, you can see what numerous studies have also shown: more and more young people are voluntarily abstaining from sex. Many of them have probably never been happier, if you believe the posts. The hashtag “celibacy” has more than 195 million views on Tiktok.
Is this a “celibate generation” talking here? Is this a kind of informal global sex strike? What has become of the legacy of the sexual revolution?
Many young people today seem rather disillusioned with the sex-positive movement of the 1990s and 2000s. With the idea that good sex is always possible. With the so-called dating culture. The new abstinence, the choice of voluntary celibacy, not for religious reasons, also seems to be an answer to this. Bored by hook-up culture, this generation is rewriting the rules of intimacy.
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Ladybird-Coccinellidae-mating (You and me, baby are nothing but animals..)
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What is left of life if you voluntarily forgo sex? Even if I were always cautious about making the “…most beautiful thing in the world” judgment, I would say that life without sex is possible, but pointless. And I don’t just mean life in the biological sense, but also life as our very individual existence, from birth to death.
Without sex, every night would be a nightmare, a dreamless preliminary stage to death or a neuro-toxic insomnia. Nothing is better than a night with good, fulfilling sex to begin the new day with limitless optimism and love for life.
Furthermore, sex is the only way to build a real family, with your own children, whose development you can follow and who often remain the people you trust and love most throughout your life. Of course, if you are childless, there is also the option of adoption, but stepchildren are also conceived somewhere, at some point, in the course of a sexual encounter between a man and a woman. Sure, from my daily work in the laboratory with mice I am quite familiar with reproduction technologies such artificial insemination and somatic cloning. But because of the various inherent hurdles of these procedures I strongly doubt that they will ever develop into an alternative for sexual reproduction in human society, even if Generation Y with their new dream of a sex-free future may fantasize about it.
And finally, as a dyed-in-the-wool positivist I strongly believe that sex has been “invented” by nature (or some might say by God) not to test neither to destroy us, but rather because it appeared as the most efficient and clever way to combine genetic variability with positive selection and robustness against environmental challenges. Organisms that rely on asexual reproduction can expand their population much faster, a process we could follow recently during the Corona-Virus epidemic (with R-values of around 3 and infection doubling times of 1-2 weeks), when you observe how a few bacterial spores can rapidly spoil a bowl of potato salad, or when you follow the spreading of sumac tree rhizomes, which can occupy large garden or forest areas.
In terms of quantity and speed, asexual reproduction might be quite advantageous, but when nature (or God) was looking for quality and sustainability, sexual reproduction was the new “must have”.
No generation Y, no twitter or Tik-Tok would have ever been seen in the world without Sex.
