In Aldous Huxley’s seminal Brave New World, published in 1932, the author imagined what terrible things advancing technologies might do to mankind. In Huxley’s created world, set in 2540, human beings are grown in labs — but not due to any cultural aversion to sex. The culture is hypersexual: the totalitarian government uses a slogan, “everyone belongs to everyone else” to brainwash its citizenry into a collectivist identity that makes taboo monogamy and even motherhood. Regular and extreme promiscuity are the norm in Huxley’s world.
In 2026, our culture is also hypersexual. But, unlike in Huxley’s vision, people aren’t having much sex at all. Especially Millennials and Gen-Z’ers. This is the paradox that Debra Soh opens her new book, Sextinction, with: “Society has never been more sexualized, and yet we are having less sex than ever before,” she wrote. She describes this fact as “not just a crisis of sexlessness, but one of lost intimacy, social cohesion, and common cause.”
Unlike Huxley, Soh doesn’t use her imagination to foretell our future: she uses science and first-hand experience, including her testing out AI chatbot boyfriends and interviewing sex-doll manufacturers. She acknowledges that the science surrounding sexuality research — like most of academia these days — leans heavily to the left. Soh argues that leftist academics are worsening the crisis with “bogus research” to back ideological claims. (A problem that seems to be a recurring theme in our society, including with academia’s bolstering of gender ideology.)
The cost of not fixing the “sex recession,” argues Soh, is rampant loneliness and, potentially, the very end of our species. Clearly, Soh doesn’t skirt controversy. It’s why the journalist and former sex researcher walked away from academia entirely: it was too full of censorship-loving conformists for someone who is unafraid of a loud heterodoxy.
There are many examples of Soh’s necessary (for the common good) contrarianism throughout Sextinction. For instance, on pedophilia and child sex dolls (yes, they exist, but are illegal in several countries, Canada included), Soh wrote that she “wouldn’t be surprised if, in a few years, “coming out” as a pedophile will be celebrated by society. The view that nonoffending pedophiles deserve understanding is one I once foolishly supported as a result of my time in academia. It is now something I deeply regret.”
Soh is also refreshingly critical of pornography, a position rarely taken outside of religious or second-wave feminist groups. It takes courage, particularly as a female, to make anti-porn arguments. Porn has become so pedestrian in our culture that expressing even a hint of censoriousness about it commonly lands one accused of a very uncool, very backwards prudishness. Just as we are supposed to believe that “sex work (I hate the term and insist upon calling it what it is: prostitution) is work,” we are also supposed to believe that it’s empowering for heaps of young women to put themselves through university (or to at least attempt to) by sharing naked photos and videos of themselves on OnlyFans.
