(Reverse Moral) Panic! In the Bedroom

This paper takes interest in the converging discourse surrounding a perceived 'great American sexlessness' from two seemingly incompatible sides: right-wing pronatalists on the one hand, and sex-positive progressives on the other. Over the past few years, countless studies and op-eds have explored the now widely-accepted notion that generation Z is not having sex, a reverse kind of moral panic which turns deprioritizing sex into a diagnosis of puritanism and stokes pronatalist fears of declining birthrates. What sets of cultural anxieties do these twinned discourses articulate? And how is religion differentially wielded to the same end? While articulating very different political orientations, I argue, both pleas to have more sex index a cruelly optimistic set of shared national fantasies rooted in the goods attributed to sex and sexual desire, and the formations of whiteness, heterosexuality, and able-bodiedness which subtend them.