Say goodbye to the sex drought! What the Danes can teach us about making more love

Copenhagen on the Thursday before Valentine’s Day is intoxicatingly romantic. That’s not hyperbole – you could breathe in and be drunk on it. The canals have frozen over, which only happens about once every 13 years, and couples are skating on them. You can see cosy bars from miles away because they’re strung with fairy lights – apparently not just a Christmas thing here. Everyone is beautiful.

But none of that comes close to explaining why young Danes in Denmark, unlike gen Z across the developed world, are still having sex. Winter isn’t even their frisky season. “You feel the atmosphere in the springtime,” says Ben, 35, half-British, half Danish. His friend Anna, also 35, originally Hungarian, says: “Post-hibernation fever, you can feel the sexual energy. Everyone is on. Everyone swims in the canals, a lot of the women will be topless – they’re like herrings.” (Which is to say: they are typically Danish, they love the water and they don’t wear clothes … I think.) Ben and Anna are millennials, of course, rather than gen Z: they provide the outsiders’ perspective.

Some of the data is starkly depressing: one US study from 2023 found that 24% of adults aged 18 to 29 reported no sexual activity at all in the past year. A global sex habits survey by Feeld and Kinsey’s the following year found that 37% of gen Z reported no sex in the last month, compared to 19% of millennials and 17% of gen X. In the UK, only a quarter of people across all age groups said they had had sex in the past week in a 2020 YouGov poll – compared with the Danish figures of nearly half of straight men and 43% of straight women, again across all age groups (Denmark’s survey data on sex is, predictably, the best in the world).