Daniel sent us this one — he's asking about promiscuity, though he hates that word, and honestly I get it. The core question is whether people today actually have more sexual partners than in previous decades, or if that's just a story we tell ourselves. He also wants to know whether rising STD rates might be telling us something that surveys don't capture, and how major religious traditions have navigated this — where the doctrine says wait until marriage, but biology has other ideas. There's a lot to unpack here.
There really is, and I want to start with the data question because it's trickier than most people realize. When you ask someone their lifetime number of sexual partners, you're not just measuring behavior — you're measuring willingness to report, social desirability bias, and frankly, how people even define "sex" in their own heads. The Kinsey Institute has documented this for decades. You get different numbers depending on whether the survey is self-administered, interviewer-administered, or computer-assisted.
Whether the person filling it out thinks their spouse might see it.
But let's look at what we do know. The General Social Survey, which has been tracking this since the nineteen eighties, shows the median number of lifetime sexual partners for American men is about six point six, and for women about four point three. Those are medians, not means — and the means get pulled up by a small number of people with very high numbers. But here's the thing that surprised me when I dug into this. Those numbers haven't actually moved that much over the past thirty years.
Because the narrative is absolutely that everything changed with the sixties, then the pill, then dating apps, and now we're all living in some kind of sexual free-for-all.
The narrative and the data are not friends on this one. The CDC's National Survey of Family Growth shows that among adults twenty-five to forty-four, the median number of opposite-sex partners has been remarkably stable. For men it's been hovering around six, for women around four, across multiple survey cycles. There's some evidence that the numbers actually peaked for certain cohorts — Gen X, basically — and have been flat or even declining slightly for younger millennials and Gen Z.
The "hookup culture" panic might be exactly that — a panic.
But I want to complicate this, because there's a really important distinction between the median and what's happening at the margins. What's changed isn't the typical experience — it's the tail ends of the distribution. The people who have zero partners, and the people who have very high numbers. Both of those groups appear to be growing.
We're seeing a bifurcation. The middle holds steady, but the extremes get more extreme.
That's exactly the pattern that shows up in the data. And there's a fascinating demographic angle here. Among eighteen to thirty-year-olds, the proportion reporting no sexual partners in the past year has been creeping up. Some researchers call it the "sex recession." The Atlantic ran a big piece on this back in twenty eighteen, and the trend has continued. Meanwhile, a smaller slice of the population is having more partners than ever, partly enabled by apps, partly by urbanization, partly by shifting norms.
When someone says "people today have more partners," the honest answer is — which people?
And that brings me to the second part of the prompt — the STD question. Because if the median hasn't moved much, why are we seeing this massive spike in infections?
I was hoping you'd get to that. The numbers are genuinely alarming, aren't they?
The CDC reported that in twenty twenty-four, syphilis cases hit their highest level since nineteen fifty. Congenital syphilis — that's when it's passed from mother to baby during pregnancy — increased more than tenfold between twenty twelve and twenty twenty-four. We're talking about a disease that was nearly eliminated in the United States in the early two thousands. And it's back with a vengeance.
The disease that people think of as a sixteenth-century problem.
The disease of Henry the Eighth and Al Capone. And it's not just syphilis. Chlamydia, gonorrhea — all trending up. In twenty twenty-three, the CDC reported over two point four million cases of chlamydia, gonorrhea, and syphilis combined. That was a record.
If partner counts haven't changed dramatically for most people, what's driving this?
This is where the infectious disease angle gets fascinating, because it reveals something that self-reported surveys miss entirely. The issue isn't just how many partners people have — it's the structure of sexual networks. Public health researchers look at something called concurrency, which is having overlapping partnerships rather than serial ones. And they look at assortative mixing — whether people tend to partner within similar groups or across different ones. A small number of highly connected individuals in a network can drive transmission even if the average person's behavior hasn't changed.
It's not about everyone being more promiscuous. It's about certain nodes in the network becoming more connected.
And apps may play a role here, not because they make everyone have more sex, but because they make it easier for the people who are already highly active to find each other and connect across networks that wouldn't otherwise overlap. From an epidemiological standpoint, you're effectively increasing the effective contact rate in certain subpopulations.
Which means the disease spreads faster even if the average behavior looks the same on a survey.
And there's another factor that doesn't get enough attention, which is the decline in public health infrastructure. STD clinics have been closing or reducing hours across the country. Contact tracing has been underfunded. And we saw during COVID that a lot of sexual health services got disrupted. People stopped getting tested, stopped getting treated, and infections had time to spread silently. By the time the data caught up, we were already in a much worse place.
It's a perfect storm. Network effects plus reduced public health capacity plus a period of disruption.
I should add — there's also evidence that condom use has been declining in certain populations, partly because of the success of PrEP for HIV prevention. People feel protected against HIV and may be less vigilant about other infections. It's what public health people call risk compensation.
Which is such a clinical term for something that's basically human nature. You feel safer, so you take more chances.
It shows up everywhere. Seatbelt laws, bike helmets, sunscreen. Give people a safety technology and some fraction of them will adjust their behavior to absorb some of the safety margin.
The STD numbers are a kind of truth-telling mechanism. They reveal patterns in the sexual network that people either don't report or don't even know about themselves.
The infections are a biological record of what actually happened, and they don't care about social desirability bias.
Let me ask you something about the religious angle, because this is where the prompt gets really interesting. The major traditions — Christianity, Judaism, Islam — all have some version of "wait until marriage." And yet, if you look at the data, religious people are not actually waiting until marriage at dramatically higher rates than non-religious people.
The gap is real but it's smaller than you'd think. Research from the Guttmacher Institute, looking at National Survey of Family Growth data, found that about eighty percent of unmarried evangelical young adults have had sex. Among Catholics, similar numbers. The differences between religious traditions are measurable — more conservative Protestants do wait longer, on average — but the overwhelming majority of people in every religious group are not following the formal teaching on this.
You have a situation where the official doctrine says one thing, and the lived experience of almost everyone in the community says another.
That creates a really specific kind of tension. I've seen this from my years in practice — the shame and anxiety that gets generated when people's behavior doesn't match their stated values. It's not just about the sex itself. It's about the secrecy, the compartmentalization, the sense that you're living a double life.
Yet these traditions persist in maintaining the teaching. Which suggests they think there's something worth preserving even if adherence is low.
Let's be fair to the traditions here. The "wait until marriage" teaching isn't just arbitrary rule-making. In a pre-contraception, pre-antibiotic world, linking sex to marriage was a functional way to manage paternity certainty, property inheritance, and disease risk. The religious frameworks encoded genuine wisdom about how to organize a society around reproduction and family formation.
The problem is that we don't live in that world anymore, but the frameworks haven't updated.
That's the tension. You have traditions that were shaped by material conditions that no longer apply — reliable contraception, effective STD treatment, DNA paternity testing, women's economic independence — and they're struggling to articulate why the old norms still matter when the old reasons don't hold.
I think some of them have tried. The Catholic theology around the "theology of the body" — John Paul the Second's writings — that's an attempt to build a positive vision of sexual ethics that isn't just "don't do it." It's about integration of body and soul, sex as a total gift of self, all of that.
It's sophisticated stuff. But I wonder how much it actually reaches the average person in the pew. The gap between the theological articulation and the pastoral reality is enormous. People aren't reading encyclicals. They're trying to navigate relationships, desire, loneliness, and they're getting their formation from culture, not from dense theological texts.
Judaism has an interesting approach here. The traditional framework doesn't have the same "sex is inherently sinful" strand that you get in some Christian traditions. Sex within marriage is a mitzvah — it's actually a commandment. The pleasure is part of the point. But the boundaries around when and with whom are extremely specific.
Islam similarly — there's a strong affirmation of sexual pleasure within marriage, and a very clear boundary around it. What strikes me across all three traditions is that they share a core insight that the broader culture often misses, which is that sex has consequences beyond the immediate moment. Emotional consequences, relational consequences, communal consequences. The religious traditions take those seriously in a way that the secular "consenting adults" framework sometimes doesn't.
Though the secular framework would say — that's what consent is for. We manage the consequences by making sure everyone is a willing participant.
Consent is necessary but it might not be sufficient. There's a growing body of research on the emotional aftermath of casual sex, and it's complicated. Some people are fine. Some people aren't. The predictors of whether someone will have a positive or negative experience aren't just about consent — they're about motivation, expectations, the relational context, and individual psychological factors.
Which brings us back to the "body count" language that the prompt mentions. And I have to say, I share the revulsion. It's a term borrowed from murder statistics. It frames sexual partners as conquests or casualties.
The language we use matters enormously. "Body count" turns intimate encounters into a tally, a score. It's gamification language. And it's almost always gendered in its application — the same number means very different things socially depending on whether you're a man or a woman.
The double standard is so durable. Study after study shows that men and women are judged differently for the same sexual history. And it's not just external judgment — people internalize these standards. Women report more regret about casual sex than men do, on average, but when you control for the circumstances — whether the sex was actually pleasurable, whether there was pressure involved — a lot of the gap narrows.
There's a really interesting paper on this — the "orgasm gap" in casual sex. Women in heterosexual encounters are far less likely to orgasm in first-time hookups than men are. The pleasure differential is real. So some of the "regret" that gets attributed to female psychology or social conditioning might actually be about — the sex just wasn't that good.
People enjoy things less when they're less enjoyable.
Groundbreaking insight, I know. But it gets lost in the moralizing. And this connects to something I want to flag about the STD data, which is the racial and socioeconomic disparities. The syphilis surge we talked about — it's not evenly distributed. It's concentrated in communities with less access to healthcare, less access to testing, more barriers to treatment. The same communities that have higher rates of basically every other health disparity.
It's not just about individual behavior. It's about structural access to the tools that make sexual activity safer.
And that's where the public health conversation often fails. It focuses on individual responsibility — get tested, use protection — without acknowledging that for a lot of people, getting tested means taking time off work, finding transportation to a clinic that might have limited hours, navigating a healthcare system that isn't designed for them. The barriers are real.
Let me pull on a thread from earlier. You mentioned that the proportion of young people reporting no sexual partners has been increasing. The "sex recession." What's driving that?
There are multiple hypotheses and they're probably all contributing. One is economic — young adults are living with parents longer, delaying marriage and cohabitation, and financial precarity doesn't exactly set the mood. Another is digital — people are spending more time online, more time in screen-mediated interaction, less time in physical social spaces where romantic connections form.
The decline of third places. Bars, clubs, parties, community spaces.
And there's a third factor that's more speculative but interesting — the cultural conversation around consent and sexual harm has made some people more cautious, possibly to the point of avoidance. If the perceived risks of a sexual encounter include not just disease and pregnancy but also social and reputational consequences, some people may decide the expected value isn't worth it.
The same cultural shifts that have made sexual activity safer in some ways — better understanding of consent, more awareness of coercion — might paradoxically be contributing to less sexual activity overall.
It's not necessarily a bad thing if people are making more intentional choices. But the data on loneliness and mental health among young adults suggests that some of the decline might not be entirely voluntary. There's a difference between choosing celibacy and being isolated.
Okay, let's step back and look at the big question the prompt is really asking. Is there something happening in our culture around sex that the numbers — both the survey numbers and the disease numbers — are pointing to, but that we're not articulating well?
I think there is, and I think it's this. We've largely abandoned the traditional religious frameworks for regulating sexuality, which is understandable given how much the material conditions have changed. But we haven't really built a replacement. What we have instead is a kind of ad hoc hybrid — we kept the liberation without the ethics, or we kept some of the ethics but in a fragmented, inconsistent way. Consent became the bright line, which is important but also very thin. It's a floor, not a ceiling.
The religious traditions would say that sex needs a container. Marriage, covenant, something that holds the intensity of it.
The secular response has been — we don't need that container, we just need communication and condoms. And for some people, that works fine. But the rising STD rates, the emotional aftermath that shows up in the research, the persistent regret gap — all of that suggests that for a lot of people, it's not working as well as advertised.
I'm wary of that narrative, because it can slide into a kind of "everything was better before" conservatism that doesn't hold up to scrutiny. The nineteen fifties weren't actually a golden age of sexual health and happiness. They were a time of widespread silence about abuse, enormous stigma around unwed pregnancy, and a lot of private misery behind the public facade.
I'm not advocating for a return to the nineteen fifties. What I'm saying is that the current arrangement has its own costs, and we should be honest about them rather than pretending everything is fine. The STD data is a form of honesty. It's telling us something about the sexual network that we might prefer not to hear.
The religious communities aren't exactly models of success here either. The "purity culture" movement in American evangelicalism — which was huge in the nineteen nineties and two thousands — produced measurable harm. People who went through that often report sexual dysfunction in marriage, shame that doesn't magically disappear after the wedding, and a framework that reduced women especially to their sexual status.
The research on purity culture is pretty damning. Linda Kay Klein's work, for example, documents how the messaging created lasting psychological damage.
The religious approach, as actually practiced rather than as idealized, has its own failure modes. And the secular approach has its failure modes. Nobody's winning.
Which suggests that the real question isn't "which framework is correct" but rather "what are the conditions under which sex is actually good for people." And good here doesn't just mean pleasurable in the moment. It means psychologically sustaining, relationally healthy, physically safe.
That's a much harder question to answer. It requires nuance. It requires acknowledging that different people might have different answers.
It requires looking at actual outcomes rather than ideological commitments. If your framework says sex should be consequence-free as long as there's consent, but the STD data and the psychological research show consequences, then your framework needs updating. If your framework says premarital sex is always damaging, but the data shows that most people have premarital sex and most of them turn out fine, then your framework needs updating too.
Let me ask you something as a physician. When you were practicing, how did you actually talk to patients about this stuff? Not the official guidelines — the actual conversation.
The honest answer is that most doctors don't talk about it well. Medical training on sexual health is surprisingly minimal. You learn to ask about partners, about protection, about symptoms. It's very clinical. But the questions patients actually have — about desire, about frequency, about whether what they're doing is normal — those don't fit into a fifteen-minute appointment.
Even the medical system, which should be the most evidence-based approach to all of this, is failing to address what people actually need.
The medical system is great at treating infections and managing contraception. It's terrible at helping people figure out what a healthy sexual life looks like for them. And that's not really medicine's job, but there's a gap in the culture where that conversation should be happening, and nobody's filling it effectively.
The religious traditions used to fill that gap — imperfectly, often harmfully, but they at least had a vision of what sex was for. The culture now doesn't really have a shared vision. It has a shared set of permissions and a shared set of warnings, but no positive account of what good sex looks like.
The warnings are getting more urgent. The congenital syphilis numbers keep me up at night. We're talking about babies being born with a preventable disease that can cause severe neurological damage, bone deformities, stillbirth. In a developed country with a functioning healthcare system, this should not be happening. And it's happening because we've failed to build systems that reach the people who need them.
That's the part of this conversation that doesn't get enough attention. The STD conversation in the culture tends to be either moral panic or dismissive — "it's all treatable, just get tested." But congenital syphilis is not just treatable. The consequences for an infant are devastating and permanent.
The rise in antibiotic-resistant gonorrhea is another one that keeps public health officials up at night. We're seeing strains that don't respond to first-line treatments, and the pipeline for new antibiotics is thin. If we lose the ability to treat gonorrhea effectively, the entire calculus around sexual risk changes.
We might be heading toward a world where some of the old religious restrictions start making practical sense again, but for entirely different reasons than the religions originally articulated.
That's a fascinating way to frame it. The material conditions that made "wait until marriage" functional in the pre-antibiotic era might be partially returning, not because of religion but because of antimicrobial resistance. It's not exactly the same — we still have contraception, we still have testing — but the risk landscape is shifting in ways that might make some of the old wisdom newly relevant.
Though I suspect the people who are most worried about antibiotic resistance and the people who are most invested in traditional sexual ethics are not the same people.
They're having completely separate conversations, and they don't realize they're describing the same problem from different angles.
Let me pull on another thread. The prompt mentions that the idea of waiting until marriage now sounds like "the preserve of fringe conservative groups." And I think that's basically accurate as a cultural observation. But I wonder if there's something else going on underneath that.
What do you mean?
I mean that the cultural mainstream has moved so far from that norm that even moderate religious people — people who are observant, who take their tradition seriously — often don't hold to it. And yet the teaching remains on the books. So you have a situation where the official doctrine of major world religions is being ignored by the majority of their own adherents. That's not stable. Something has to give.
Either the teaching changes, or the practice changes, or the tension just continues indefinitely. And historically, religious traditions have been remarkably willing to tolerate a gap between official teaching and lived practice, as long as the teaching is still being articulated and the community still nominally affirms it.
The Catholic concept of "graduality" — the idea that people grow toward the ideal over time, and pastoral care meets them where they are.
But graduality can also become a kind of permanent loophole. If everyone knows that the teaching isn't really expected to be followed, the teaching loses its force. And then you have to ask what the teaching is even for.
Some theologians would say the teaching is aspirational — it's meant to hold up an ideal even if most people fall short. The argument is that without the ideal, the culture drifts even further.
Empirically, that might be true. The communities that maintain the strictest teachings do tend to have later sexual debut, fewer partners, lower divorce rates. The question is whether those outcomes are worth the costs — the shame, the secrecy, the psychological harm to people who don't fit the mold.
Whether those outcomes are even caused by the teaching, or by other factors that correlate with religious observance — like higher education, higher income, more stable family structures.
The causal arrows are extremely tangled. This is one of those areas where ideology tends to fill the gap that data can't resolve. People see what they want to see.
Let me try to synthesize where we've landed. The data suggests that the median number of lifetime sexual partners hasn't changed dramatically in recent decades, despite the cultural narrative of escalating promiscuity. What has changed is the structure of sexual networks and the tail ends of the distribution. STD rates are rising, driven more by network effects and public health failures than by individual partner counts. And the religious traditions that used to provide the dominant framework for sexual ethics are now competing with a cultural default that emphasizes consent and autonomy, with mixed results that nobody is fully satisfied with.
That's a really clean summary. And I'd add — the thing that connects all of this is that we're not having honest conversations about it. The STD data is telling a story that the surveys don't fully capture. The psychological research is revealing costs that the liberation narrative doesn't acknowledge. And the religious communities are maintaining teachings that their own members don't follow, without being transparent about the gap.
The prompt used the word "promiscuity" and then immediately disowned it. And I think that instinct is right. The word is judgmental, it's gendered, it assumes a norm that may not exist. But the question behind the word — are we navigating this well as a culture — is worth asking.
I think the honest answer is: it depends on who you are. For some people, the current landscape works great. For others, it's producing measurable harm. The problem is that our public discourse can't hold both of those truths at the same time. We either have to say everything is fine, or everything is a crisis.
The middle doesn't make for good headlines.
The middle is where most people actually live. And the middle is complicated. It's people making choices that are sometimes good and sometimes not, in a culture that gives them very little guidance beyond "get consent and use protection," which is necessary but not sufficient.
If you were designing a better approach — not a return to traditionalism, not a full embrace of the anything-goes model — what would it look like?
I think it would start with honesty. Honesty about the actual risks, which include not just disease and pregnancy but emotional consequences and relational dynamics. Honesty about the pleasure gap and the regret gap. Honesty about the fact that sex is different from other activities — it involves vulnerability, it involves bonding hormones, it involves social meaning that doesn't disappear just because you decide it shouldn't.
A kind of sexual realism.
Not moralizing, not shaming, but not pretending that sex is just another recreational activity either. It's a significant human behavior with significant consequences, and people deserve to understand those consequences clearly before they make choices.
The religious traditions — what role do they have in that conversation?
They have a lot to offer, honestly. They've been thinking about this for millennia. They understand that sex has meaning, that it's connected to commitment and family and community in ways that the individual-autonomy framework struggles to articulate. But they also have a credibility problem, because they've often been more interested in control than in genuine human flourishing, and because the gap between their teachings and their own communities' behavior undermines their authority.
They'd need to earn their way back into the conversation by being honest about their own failures.
Which is hard for institutions to do. But the ones that can manage it — that can say "here's what we got wrong, here's what we still think is true, and here's why" — those are the ones that might have something to contribute.
I keep coming back to the congenital syphilis numbers. To me, that's the canary in the coal mine. It's not about individual morality. It's about whether we've built systems that actually protect the most vulnerable people from preventable harm. And the answer, right now, is that we haven't.
That's a collective failure, not an individual one. It's easy to moralize about individual sexual behavior. It's harder to build functional public health systems that reach everyone. But the latter is what actually saves lives.
The prompt asked whether infectious disease might be telling us something that doesn't get communicated in words. I think the answer is yes. The syphilis numbers are a biological indictment of our collective failure to take sexual health seriously as a public good, not just an individual responsibility.
That's where I'll leave the medical perspective. The infections are rising, the treatments are getting less effective, and the systems that are supposed to manage all of this are underfunded and overwhelmed. That's not a moral judgment. That's just the factual landscape that anyone making sexual decisions in twenty twenty-six needs to be aware of.
It's a heavy note to end on, but I think it's the honest one. The data doesn't support the panic about everyone being more promiscuous than ever. But it does support genuine concern about specific trends that are producing real harm, especially for the most vulnerable. And the cultural conversation — whether religious or secular — isn't doing a great job of addressing any of it.
Which is, I suppose, why we're having this conversation. Someone has to.
Now: Hilbert's daily fun fact.
Hilbert: In the nineteen sixties, the Canadian government relocated several Inuit families to Grise Fiord in Nunavut, where they encountered muskoxen for the first time. The Inuit observed that muskoxen and Arctic hares seemed to have an arrangement — the hares would dig through snow to reach vegetation, and the muskoxen would follow behind, eating what the hares uncovered. The hares, in turn, benefited from the muskoxen's presence deterring foxes.
The hares were basically running a small-scale excavation business with involuntary muskox security.
The muskox as the unintentional bouncer of the tundra.
This has been My Weird Prompts. I'm Herman Poppleberry.
I'm Corn. Our producer is Hilbert Flumingtop. If you want more episodes like this one, you can find us at myweirdprompts dot com or wherever you get your podcasts. Leave us a review if you're enjoying the show — it helps.
We'll be back next week with something completely different.
