Is the Top Shortage Real? It Might Depend on Your Age

Each generation has had to grapple with its own existential challenges. For many of our readers, those include climate change, AI, and the rising tide of fascism. Add to that list the so-called “top shortage,” which according to certain hyperonline queer people is one of the defining issues of our times.Levity aside, the lack of tops has long been lamented and debated in queer spaces. While some claim there seem to be fewer tops by the day, others argue there are tops aplenty in the sea, but that people just want a specific aesthetic of top. It doesn’t help that some, especially in sapphic spaces, have conflated “top” to also exclusively mean masc-of-center, which is an entirely different issue in itself that this publication has written about ad nauseum. Though the “masc shortage” is decidedly constructed, science is now showing us that the top shortage may be in fact real — at least among certain young gay people who want to date within their own age range. A recent study published in The Journal of Sex Research found that among men who have sex with men, fewer younger men identify as tops compared to older men. While the definition of top societally varies, especially between gay men and sapphics, researchers defined top as “someone who prefers a penetrative role” during sex for the sake of this study.The study analyzed data from Surge, a dating platform with over 8.5 million users. The data, taken from 150,000 accounts created between January 2023 and January 2025, looked at how these new users identified their sexual role preferences on their profiles. Users selected from five sexual role options: top, bottom (or having a preference for being penetrated during sex), versatile, not into penetration, and unspecified. Of the 40,000 accounts surveyed that specified their sexual roles beyond “unspecified,” 38.5% identified as bottoms, 37.5% identified as versatile, 20.6% identified as tops, and 3.5% selected not into penetration. Though the l