Gen Z is having a sex recession — here are the depressing reasons why

They can’t get no satisfaction — and TikTok may be to blame.

Gen Z is in the grip of a sex recession — and it’s largely social media’s fault, according to a new book, “Laid and Confused: Why We Tolerate Bad Sex and How to Stop.”

“Young people have been uniquely inundated with toxic messaging surrounding sex that has actually disrupted our abilities to feel pleasure,” author Maria Yagoda writes.

“TikTok and Instagram may have positioned young people to better parse their sexualities,but they are not necessarily closer to building affirming and pleasurable sex lives.”

In other words, the generation that invented spending large amounts of their life in bed — a lifestyle known as “bedrotting” — isn’t doing much with their supine time. And that may have to do with the way they’ve been inundated with titillating imagery from an early age, the veteran sex columnist said.

“Kids are getting sex info from TV, from magazines, from TikTok, and I don’t recall seeing a lot of discourse around sex that is not necessarily horrible, maybe just slightly awkward, maybe sort of ‘meh,’” Yagoda recently told Vogue.com.

“When I talk to people, what I hear is that a lot of them have already ruled out the idea that their sex life might feel great for them, which, of course, is a choice anyone is welcome to make, but I do have questions about the kind of information we’re receiving.”

But there’s another culprit, the author said — COVID-19.

“[The] pandemic made things considerably worse across all populations,” Yagoda wrote. “Some researchers cite this [lack of pleasure] wave as one of the core phenomena fueling the sex recession, as it becomes harder to justify the work of coordinating sex when the experience doesn’t even feel pleasurable.”

A 2021 Match.com study probing the sex habits of single men found that 81% said sex was less of a priority than it had been pre-pandemic.

In the book, Yagoda interviews a series of younger people, asking them to pinpoint the moment their sex lives ran out of steam.

One tired twenty-something describes her casual sex life as only existing on the “meh-to-bad” spectrum. She pulls no punches in calling out partners for “jabby fingering, lackluster oral, and flipping me over every two seconds because they watch a lot of mainstream porn.”

Pew Research Center data released earlier this year found that 60% of men under 30 are opting to remain single — up from 51% in 2019; experts cited sustained porn viewing as a leading cause.

Some young people are still coupling up and getting busy — but only out of a sense of duty.

“Maybe neither my boyfriend nor I feel super excited about having sex, but it’s sort of an acknowledgement of maintaining intimacy,” one woman confessed.