One in Four Young Men Haven’t Had Sex This Year
And It’s Getting Worse
One in four young men hasn’t had sex in the past year.
Not struggling. Not getting less than they want.
None.
According to the General Social Survey, 24.9% of men between the ages of 18 and 29 reported zero sexual encounters in the past twelve months - that’s the 2024 data. In 2010, that number was 12%. It has more than doubled in fifteen years. The same survey shows women in that age bracket at 18.5%, and the gap between men and women on this is widening, not closing.
Sit with that for a second. One in four. That’s not the fringe. That’s not the basement-dwellers the internet likes to mock. That’s a significant chunk of young men in what should be the most sexually active years of their lives, getting absolutely nothing.
Here’s what the mainstream conversation won’t tell you about why.
The Math of Hypergamy
Women do not distribute sexual access equally across men. They never have, and hypergamy - the biological drive to select the highest-value male available - ensures that they never will. What dating apps have done is take a dynamic that always existed and put hard numbers on it. When the data shows that women swipe right on fewer than 20% of the men they see, and men make up over 62% of the users on these platforms, you don’t need a PhD in mathematics to figure out what happens to the bottom 80%.
The top men - the ones with the physique, the status, the social proof - get shared. Multiple women, casual arrangements, no commitment required. And the bottom of the marketplace? They don’t get rationed less. They get nothing at all. This is what hypergamy looks like at scale, and the modern dating marketplace has made it more transparent, and more brutal, than any other time in history.
Women are the selective sex. They receive the bulk of the attention and they do the choosing. And what are they choosing based on? Not your emotional availability. Not your communication skills. Not your ability to express vulnerability. They’re swiping on what they can see in the first three seconds - your physical presentation, your status signals, and how you compare to the other thirty men they looked at this afternoon.
“Women don’t swipe right on your mental frame,” I’ve said this on the channel more times than I can count. “They swipe right on the optics of your hotness.”
I covered this in depth on the channel a few years back - the mechanisms haven't changed, the numbers have only gotten worse.
The Wrong Prescription
If you listen to the mainstream conversation about the male loneliness crisis - and it has become a mainstream conversation, which tells you something - the solution being offered is therapy, emotional intelligence, and learning to communicate better. The relationship skills gap, as the experts like to call it.
This is well-intentioned, and completely wrong.
A man who learns to communicate better, to be emotionally available, to open up about his feelings, has not moved a single point on the sexual marketplace value scale. He’s just become slightly more articulate about his situation. Women respond to physical presentation, competence, status, and the social proof that other people find you valuable. The guy who spends six months in therapy is still overweight, still broke, still boring, and still invisible to the dating market - he’s just more comfortable with it.
The solution to one in four young men being shut out is not a feelings workshop. It is the gym, it is income, it is developing actual skills and interests that make you worth spending time with, and it is understanding how the marketplace you’re operating in actually functions.
This Is On Both Sides
I want to be fair here, because the data cuts both ways. Women’s standards have risen in direct proportion to the social validation they receive online, and a lot of those standards are completely disconnected from reality. A woman who insists on a 6-foot man making six figures while she brings nothing particularly exceptional to the table isn’t exercising discernment - she is pricing herself out of the market through delusion, and then blaming the market when the math doesn’t work.
But here’s the thing: none of that is in your control. What is in your control is whether you are in the group of men who get selected or the group who don’t. And the uncomfortable truth that nobody in the mainstream conversation will say out loud is that the vast majority of young men are not doing the work. They are overweight. They have no game. They have nothing interesting going on in their lives, and women can tell that within about ten seconds of meeting them.
The men getting results in this market are doing what most men won’t do. They are consistent at the gym. They are building income. They are developing skills and interests that make them interesting to be around. They understand how female nature and the sexual marketplace actually operate, rather than running on Disney programming and hoping for the best.
The Unplugged Alpha is where I lay out the full framework - the seven spokes, the sexual marketplace, the mistakes most men are making and how to stop making them. The information exists. Most men won’t use it, which is exactly why the men who do have an enormous advantage.
The Cold, Hard Truth
Never forget:
One in four men under 30 had no sexual encounters last year. The number has more than doubled in fifteen years, and it’s still rising.
Hypergamy does not distribute access equally. The top men are shared by multiple women, and the bottom gets nothing.
The mainstream prescription - therapy, emotional intelligence, communication skills - addresses the wrong problem entirely.
Women swipe on what they can see. Physical presentation, status, and social proof are the only variables that matter at the top of the funnel.
The solution is not a feelings workshop. The solution is the work - gym, income, skills, self-improvement across every spoke.
Most men will read this, nod, and go right back to whatever they were doing.
Don’t be most men.
Peace.
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