To understand the collective sexual repression of today’s youth, we must first understand the social structure we grew up in.
I. Compressed Modernity: The Background of Our Generation
In traditional Chinese society — especially in the villages of the Ming and Qing dynasties and beyond — people’s lives were deeply shaped by the dual constraints of clan and morality. People lived in clustered communities, bound by personal connections and clan kinship. You were born into a village surrounded by relatives; marriage was a matter for two families, even two villages. In this structure, people were not isolated atoms but nodes in a network. Your loneliness was held by others, your desires were seen — but it must also be said that the same system controlled and punished your desires: arranged marriages, widowhood, clan penalties, and the strict subjugation of women were the other side of the same coin.
After the Reform and Opening-Up, and through the 2010s when industrialization reached its peak, two major transformations occurred: urbanization and marketization.
Marketization demanded that work become a universal norm. Competitive hiring made relationships between people tense — you were no longer a brother working alongside you in the production team, but a competitor. Urbanization turned clustered village life into atomized families sealed in apartment buildings. You could live next door for three years and never know your neighbor’s name. The great collective had collapsed, replaced by rows of locked security doors.
By the 2010s, China’s industrial system had matured. The generation that grew up during this time — the post-80s and post-90s — found that the experience of their parents had become completely obsolete. Your father couldn’t teach you how to survive in an internet company; your mother couldn’t advise you on renting an apartment in a first-tier city, job-hopping, or managing social insurance. Family relationships shifted from support systems to burdens.
Crucially, the phenomenon of “left-behind children” grew increasingly common among the post-80s and especially post-90s. According to the Ministry of Civil Affairs, at its peak, the number of left-behind children in China exceeded 60 million. This continued into the 2000s in rural areas, and remains common today. Parents’ life experience could no longer support their children’s growth. Family bonds grew thinner. Most left-behind children grew up never having truly felt loved.
How can someone who was never properly loved in childhood learn to love others? How can they dare to ask for love?
This is the first layer of our collective predicament: many of us were never given the tools to love.
II. The Loss of Social Skills: We’ve Forgotten How
I only truly understood this after attending a classmate’s wedding in Xinjiang.
The Uyghur people are natural dancers and singers. But that’s not talent — it’s culture. In their culture, social interaction is part of daily life. Gatherings, song, dance, expressing emotion — these are ingrained habits. They don’t need to learn “social skills” as a separate discipline; they’ve been immersed in a social environment since childhood.
And us?
Traditional Chinese society actually had an extremely elaborate system of social rituals — the exchange of favors, the art of guanxi, banquet hierarchy, wedding and funeral ceremonies. But the problem is: this sociality was formalized, hierarchical, and功利-oriented. It was based on status and interest, not on equal emotional expression. Confucianism emphasized “restraining oneself and restoring the rites” — teaching suppression and concealment, not expression and connection. Ordinary families taught their children: “Speak less, do more,” “Don’t cause trouble when you’re out.”
Our generation has it worse. Left-behind children had no one to teach them. City children were locked in their rooms doing homework. The cultivation of social skills was left almost entirely to self-study. And after 2010, smartphones and social media further eroded face-to-face communication — you can send a hundred messages on WeChat, but you can’t sit in a café and hold eye contact with someone for three minutes. Yet intimacy is the most complex form of social skill. If you can’t even talk to a stranger, how can you build an intimate relationship?
So we see a strange phenomenon: online, everyone cries out for love and connection; in real life, men and women sit across from each other, scrolling through their phones, unable to say a single word.
III. The Impact of Western Liberal Culture: The Collapse of Trust
From the study-abroad wave of the 80s and 90s, to the Korean Wave, to the introduction of Western feminism — our cultural environment has undergone violent upheaval in just a few decades.
China’s humanities education deserves special mention here. It has long lagged behind, lacking indigenous critical thinking on gender issues. Trust between men and women has been severely eroded.
On one hand, the traditional moral system is under immense pressure. The divorce rate rose from 0.96‰ in 2000 to approximately 2.6‰ in 2023. Stories of property division disputes, marriage fraud, and using marriage for profit flood social media every day. The problem is not that the cost of exiting marriage has fallen — it’s that the more the law tries to regulate property and rights within marriage, the more marriage becomes a tool to be exploited. Property division clauses can be used for profit; bride price disputes can become a business; calculation and scheming creep into intimate relationships. Yet the law is almost powerless here: intimate relationships inherently resist over-regulation. The more finely they are regulated, the more marriage resembles a conditional commercial contract, or even slides toward a transaction tacitly permitted by the law. Who would still bet their entire life on it?
On the other hand, when Western feminism was introduced to China, it underwent a peculiar distortion online. Without indigenous digestion — without a history of Chinese women’s movements to ground it, without the social conditions of a middle-class feminist movement — it devolved into a gender war on social media. Dialogue between men and women became mutual accusation and attack. Men think women demand too much; women think men aren’t good enough.
In this environment, trust has become a luxury.
IV. The Cost of Sex
The Male Predicament
From 1949 until the Reform and Opening-Up, under the state’s strict control, sex was almost entirely compressed into the framework of marriage. For ordinary Chinese men, sexual access was highly dependent on the channel of marriage. And the cost of that channel was the cost of marriage.
From the earliest “marry a man, marry a meal ticket,” to requiring a bride price, to needing a car and an apartment — this happened in just forty years. According to data from the Zeping Institute, in 2023 the price-to-income ratio (total housing price / annual household income) in major Chinese cities ranged from 20 to 50 times, with Beijing and Shanghai exceeding 40 times. This means an ordinary young person would have to go without food for 40 years to buy an apartment. The cost of marriage has become something ordinary men simply cannot afford.
It’s not that these men don’t want to marry. In 2023, the number of registered marriages nationwide was only 7.68 million couples — the lowest since 1980, compared to 13.47 million in 2013. Over a decade, the marriage rate dropped by more than 40%. Many of them simply cannot afford to.
What are the alternatives? Sex workers, mistresses — these have become options for some. But far more common is internet pornography — the primary daily outlet for most young men’s sexual repression. According to studies published in journals such as the Chinese Journal of Human Sexuality, over 90% of young Chinese men have consumed pornography, and a significant portion have developed dependency on it. It is a hidden, free, and always-available substitute — but it addresses physiological release, not the yearning for intimacy.
Meanwhile, a considerable portion of low-income men face a harsher reality: after deducting rent and basic living expenses, there is little to nothing left. According to the National Bureau of Statistics, the median per capita disposable income in 2023 was approximately 33,000 yuan per year, and about 600 million people of working age still earn less than 1,000 yuan per month. For these men, sexual repression is not about “can’t afford a house to get married” — it’s about not even having a ticket to enter the dating market.
The Female Predicament
Women’s unmet sexual needs are a real but often overlooked problem.
First, sex is often not prioritized as a primary need for women. This has both physiological and social conditioning causes. Women are taught to be “reserved” and “not too forward,” so many never admit to having sexual desires. A survey by the China Population and Development Research Center found that over 60% of women believe “it is inappropriate to be sexually assertive” — this is not nature, it is the result of conditioning.
Second, media-driven de-masculinization has taught women that masculinity equals danger. On social media, negative news about men is amplified infinitely — domestic violence, cheating, PUA, femicide. These stories are real, but algorithmic amplification creates the impression that all men are potential threats. A natural distrust arises between the sexes.
Meanwhile, the media promotes idealized male images, raising women’s standards. What they see online are carefully curated images; when they meet ordinary men in real life, they feel these men “don’t measure up.”
This creates a vast demand gap.
But there is a fundamental difference between the male and female predicament: women have more choice, but also more risk. Women can choose not to enter intimate relationships — this is not the disappearance of need, but rational risk avoidance. In the post-pandemic era of economic downturn and rising employment pressure, more and more women are choosing to “not date,” “not marry,” “not have children.” In 2023, China’s total fertility rate dropped to around 1.0 — among the lowest in the world. This is not a “leftover women” problem. It is women calculating the costs and concluding that the returns on intimacy are insufficient to cover the risks.
The gap is filled in various ways. Men’s sexual needs can be met through sex workers and pornography. Women’s sexuality, in social reality, is inherently a scarce resource — and those with economic capital naturally take their share. This includes the market for male sex workers, as well as economically privileged third parties covering part of the demand. Women’s sexuality is inherently a resource — this is not a moral judgment, but a market fact: in a supply-and-demand imbalanced dating market, sexual attractiveness is a scarce capital that women can leverage.
The remaining ordinary women live in the gap between fantasy and reality — neither daring to take the step of trust, nor able to find a matching partner in reality, satisfying their emotional needs through celebrity worship, TV dramas, and shipping fictional couples. This is not “lambs to the slaughter” — it is a rational choice within a structural trap.
V. Conclusion: The Mismatch of Sexual Resources in an Atomized Era
Sexual repression is not the problem of any one person or any one gender. It is the result of layered structural collapse in the social relations of our era.
When people are stripped away from clans, villages, and collectives, becoming isolated atoms, our social instincts do not disappear. We still crave intimacy, love, and the touch of body and soul.
But the reality is: we lack the ability to build intimate relationships, we lack the trust to sustain them, and we lack the resources to obtain them.
The mismatch between the expectation of social instinct and the reality of sexual resources has led to this collective sexual repression.
It is no one’s fault. It is the problem our era has given to our generation.
And we can only learn to solve it ourselves.