Gen Z ages, according to a Google search, are from twelve to twenty-seven, twelve being the average age of menarche for girls. Some of girls interviewed by Sherman admitted to being sexually active as young as fourteen. The author wanted to lose her virginity at seventeen. The age for marriage in the United States is eighteen, with exceptions in several states. Sherman cites statistics showing sexual activities among Gen Zers decreasing. You would think sexual activities are decreasing owing to sex education within the schools. Not so, sex education increasingly emphasizes abstinence. A small percentage will get the abstinence message, the rest of the young people will have sexual activities, for them sexual education must include information and mechanics of sex practiced safely and to say no when sexual activities are forced. Without an informative sex education, the young will find sex information, good and bad, on the internet. Unexpected and unwanted pregnancies happen. When they do happen, abortions used to be an option. With anti-abortion legislation, the only guarantee against pregnancy, except in cases of rape and incest, is abstinence. So the unasked question is, will young people have less sexual activities, and less unwanted pregnancies, with better sex education or with political policies banning abortion?

Sexual conservatives are pushing an agenda for the young based on the importance of chastity until marriage, a marriage between a man and a woman as a means of procreation.

For Sherman, sexual conservativism doesn’t stop with Gen Zers. She sees youth as targeted, the canary in the mine shaft, to be followed by a widening control of personal freedoms, sexual and non-sexual, by conservatives. Sherman’s argument isn’t the best or even the most persuasive. To her credit, she’s been writing and working as a sexual activist for a while. She covers a lot of issues, showing how they connect. She will be read by sympathetic voices. The arguments and the results will become clearer, the political actions more focused. However, there are sharp minds on both sides. Both sides believe they’re right and that right will triumph. What Carter Sherman has written is being played out in the moment. By now maybe that moment has passed.

My thanks to the publisher, Simon and Schuster, and NetGalley for a reader’s copy.

A well-researched, timely, informative explanation of how politics, technology, and the far-right culture wars are affecting the younger generations' relationships with sex and dating.