The 2025 Desire SurveyHere's how you're feeling about love, sex, and your bodies in the midst of rising cruelty and authoritarianism—as well as recent glimmers of hope.
The results of my desire survey are here. Last week, I asked readers to anonymously share their experiences around sex, desire, and their bodies. It was a followup to last year’s survey, which was prompted by the re-election of Donald Trump. This year, I asked two questions:
Dozens of you responded with answers that were qualitatively fascinating, but let’s be clear: this was not a representative sample. The respondents were overwhelmingly white and mostly straight, although there was a sizable segment of bisexual and polyamorous women. Only one man took the survey; the rest were women. Out of this non-representative mix, a few themes emerged. Our bodies checked out in 2024Here’s a sampling of responses to the question of how you felt in the immediate wake of the 2024 presidential election:
Many felt like their bodies and desire had gone on strike without consulting them. A 32-year-old woman in a long-term relationship said of that time:
This tracks with what I found in my previous survey. As I wrote at the time, a lot of people felt that sex was “undesirable and entirely out of reach in the midst of despair, anxiety, and fear.” People took a break from sex and datingThese post-election feelings often led to taking a break from dating or sex—whether it was for a couple weeks or many months. A 44-year-old straight woman who had volunteered to get the vote out in Pennsylvania in 2024 stopped swiping on the apps post-election because she was tired of matching with politically disengaged men. This summer, she started dating again and met “a smart, kind, deeply progressive divorced dad” who is “endlessly supportive” of her organizing work. “It feels like I won the PowerBall of finding a man,” she wrote. “It was worth holding out for the Real Thing and not compromising my values.” The numbness hasn’t disappearedFor some, those post-presidential election feelings of numbness have continued, or gotten worse. As a 58-year-old straight woman put it, “I feel even more pressure and fear, plus exhaustion.” A 51-year-old straight woman wrote, simply: “Still not trusting.” In some cases, the cruelty of the past year has brought a greater desire for companionship. A 49-year-old straight woman wrote:
Sex feels like a “fuck you” to TrumpA 43-year-old married mom, who is pansexual and practicing relationship anarchy, found that after the 2024 presidential election it was personally and politically “a deep time of reckoning [with] desire and to steal from a queer writer discussing Catherine MacKinnon’s work—‘are women truly ever free to have sex in a patriarchy.’” Now, ten months into Trump’s second term, she is feeling even more justified in “exploring the kink scene” and stepping “more into this [for] my own sake BUT ALSO AS A BIG FUCK you to white Christian nationalism.” A lot of folks turned to sex over the last year as a source of rebellion and connection. A 51-year-old woman in a monogamous relationship with a man said that she has felt determined to treat sex as an antidote to her political despair. Over the past year, she’s “gotten even more liberal and curious about sex,” she wrote. “Trying new role playing, watching porn together.” A 45-year-old man married to a woman—the lone man to fill out the survey—wrote that he hasn’t felt great in his body for a few years, mostly because of how his body has changed in his forties and the stress of caring for his father, who has Alzheimer’s. “But I distinctly recall wanting sex, pleasure, primarily as an escape from the hellscape that is post-2024 America,” he wrote. Over the last year, he’s had a growing sense of “love and relationships and sex being a more powerful vehicle for establishing a positive connection and feeling less isolated.” He wrote:
But also, we’re so damn tiredPost-election, a 38-year-old woman, who is married and polyamorous, said that sex with “partners I love and care deeply for felt like a healthy form of connecting when everything felt bleak.” All these months later, it’s much the same, only “we are all SO TIRED all the time.” She writes:
That election was a “breaking point” for relationshipsA 38-year-old woman married to a man wrote that the 2024 election was “a breaking point” for her relationship. They had gone a year without sex—in part because of issues within the relationship around addiction—and the “misery of the election was a turning point” that led her to go to her first al-Anon meeting, and her husband also started his own recovery. Together, they started learning about “mindful touch” and women’s arousal through books and sessions with a “pleasure coach.” She also started reading romance novels on her own. “I will die on the hill that women reading romance is radical liberation,” she wrote. “I swear I’ve never felt desire in the way I do now… sex and desire feels like LIFE and VITALITY in a way that I have never experienced until now.” Last week’s election shifted things, again“Still feel mostly dead inside, but had a little surge of vitality,” wrote a 44-year-old bisexual woman. A 32-year-old woman said that after Mamdani’s win it felt like her body came roaring back to life after a yearlong strike. “It wasn’t a switch flipping off but a main breaker being thrown, a jolt of raw voltage that brought my entire system surging back online,” she wrote. A few women expressed that they have seen too much to feel buoyed by the recent election results. A 44-year-old bisexual woman, who is married to a man, wrote:
It isn’t just politics that can dampen desireA number of people wrote about hurdles to desire and pleasure that have little to do with the current political moment. A 54-year-old bisexual woman in the midst of a divorce wrote about the difficulty of exploring a new friends-with-benefits relationship while still cohabitating with her ex. “I am very committed to hard launching a new era of sexual/erotic/emotional pleasure, it just can’t really happen in my current living situation with kids and spouse, where I have no privacy or real ability to carve out time/space for play,” she wrote. A 44-year-old bisexual married woman says she doesn’t have much sex with her husband, who is stressed out because of his PhD program. “I am horny all the damn time,” she wrote. “When we have had sex, he’s just mostly deliberately trying to get me to come, which he usually does—but he never does and I feel moderately guilty.” Other women wrote of struggling with feelings being undesirable and being troubled by a partner’s relationship to pornography. In conclusion!Thanks to everyone who took the survey. I couldn’t include everyone’s responses, but I was moved by them all (except for the lone troll whose responses were impressively imaginative, but he should probably find better extracurricular activities). My main takeaway is that even in “normal” times, sex and desire are complicated—by everything from work stress to ailing parents. A lot of women at midlife also find themselves reassessing a lifetime of love and sex in patriarchy. These are not normal times, though. A mix of numbness, anger, exhaustion, and resistance have been heaped on top of all those everyday complications. I’m just filled with a sense of tenderness for us all.
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četvrtak, 13. studenoga 2025.
The 2025 Desire Survey
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