There isn’t anything magical about it: Why more millennials are avoiding sex
washingtonpost.com
washingtonpost.com
Isn't the elephant in the room obesity? Is it possible we are less sexually active because people are turned off by unhealthy weights, and being in the "healthy" BMI band now makes you an elite minority?
It'd be easy to demonstrate this isn't true, if we had something like "obesity is mostly middle-aged people, young adults are roughly unaffected" or "weight and number of sexual partners are actually uncorrelated" or something. But I wonder.
No!no!No!!!! The 500 lb gorilla sits anywhere it wants. The elephant in the room is what people don't want to talk about. Nowadays not only has the gorilla's weight increased to 800 lbs, he is now in the room. This article goes further, now we have multiple gorillas in the room? Flee that room.
My point is, we need editors
"[Online life] ends up putting a lot of importance on physical
appearance, and that, I think, is leaving out a large section
of the population."You could also say that non-Tinder online dating i.e. OKCupid is actually putting less importance on appearance by matching people on preferences instead of "prettiest girl at the bar."
Having all that extra personal data on OKC might be useful in some edge cases in swaying someone to correspond with someone they might have skipped over, but it's only going to go so far. Maybe you'll go out on a date with a girl who's a "6" because she loves Firefly and AD&D, when normally you only date "7s", but some girl who's into a bunch of geeky things you like but is only a "2" is not going to be of interest to you, except maybe in the "friendzone".
I think the real explanation is the the curve in the graph, we had 3 for greatest generation, 5 for silents then jumping up to 11 during the boomers, then declining slightly during x and declining further during millennials.
I bet if we could extend the graph back historically we would see the vast majority of human generations were closer to the greatest generation in number of sex partners. This looks to me like there was an increase in sexual promiscuity during the sexual revolution, the effects of which are tapering off as humans return to their normal sexual habits.
The most attractive women have always, everywhere, had a waist-hip ratio of around 0.7 (http://www.scienceofrelationships.com/home/2013/11/11/curves...). That would rule out obesity as the new norm of attractiveness. I assume there is also a formula/ratio for attractive men that rules out their being obese.
Also, people are known to lie about the number of sexual partners they have had (http://archive.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2007/08/12/st...). Could that be a factor here?
Finally, the article focuses on age of first sex and number of sexual partners, not frequency of sex. It doesn't rule out millennials having more frequent sex with fewer partners.
Stop press: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2016/aug/03/large-number...
I blame porn.
They are called the parasite generation, the herbivores, etc.
Some good things about it, some bad. Good in that fewer neglected children of patents who were not prepared, bad in that our current economic model depends on pop growth...
I can see how all those facts could put a damper on having lots and lots of sex.
I don't see that as a problem and I bet many millenials don't know how to put their finger on why this is just not an issue for them. They weren't around when their parents were hooking up to figure out some basics and they just take their enormous access to information and life experience at their fingertips for granted.
Also I think that since it's so much easier now to get access to porn and even toys easily / privately that you don't need to go find an encounter to get off, unless you actually want to be social about it.
And if you want to be social, it's probably because you're thinking more long term from the outset.
Less hookup, more companionship.
That being said, I'd be interested in seeing this broken down geographically. I live in a big east coast city and let me assure millennials are having a lot of sex.
So what you're saying is, young people are having less sex, because they're having more sex?
(take this as tongue-in-cheek, I don't think you're really making that argument)
I thought that was because they spent their 20s-30s focusing on college and their careers, and just as they had extremely high standards for those, they also had extremely high standards for men they dated, so they ended up not "settling" for anyone.
I'm just over 40 and have dated a few of these urban-dwelling women who 40 and up, never married, no kids. There's a ridiculous number of them in DC. In my estimation based on personal experience, they're all incredibly picky and won't date a guy unless everything is absolutely perfect. In my case they tend to lose interest very fast because I live outside the city presently so I'm not conveniently located. To be snarky, they seem to all want a guy who's over 6' tall, looks like a model, dresses like he's on the cover of GQ, makes $300k/year, and lives across the street from her. And I actually meet a couple of these criteria to some extent: I'm over 6' (which seems to be very rare here on the east coast I've noticed...), I have a good-paying job (though not $300k/year good), and I'm told I'm very attractive, particularly for an over-40 guy as I'm thin and in great shape and frequently confused for someone 10+ years younger; my deficiencies are that I don't dress like a GQ model (more like an engineer who wears polo shirts all the time), I'm not outgoing and gregarious (I'm a software engineer....), and I don't live in the hip part of town these women all live in. The last such woman that seemed to be seriously interested in me (a 40yo lawyer) dumped me after a few weeks because of the distance, or so she said, even though this was something she knew about up-front. Oh yeah, these women also don't like guys who are separated or recently divorced (good lucking finding a decent guy at 40+ who's never been married or was divorced years ago). And AFAICT, they are not quick to jump into bed with someone, in fact quite the opposite (and these are not conservative religious women either, they're all liberal Democrats AFAICT, though really more like "limousine liberals"). Sorry for the rambling, but the thing about single, childless, pretty women in their 40s is something I have recent and direct experience with so I couldn't help going off.
Are these friends of yours in or near metro areas? If so, which one(s)? From my research, if you're a single guy in the Bay Area, you'd better be happy with celibacy, and Seattle isn't much better. But NYC and DC are full of single 35-45 women (but they're all incredibly picky IMO as I said before). The problem, however, is that if your friends are all software engineers, they're more likely to be in cities that have more men than women. NYC just isn't a very good place for a SW engineer, unless you love finance and HFT (and what I read about the work environments in those places is not good, and you'll have no free time for dating anyway), or web development. DC is mostly defense-related stuff, and in my experience there, the defense stuff is all well outside the city proper (defense contractors are cheap bastards I guess), whereas all the upper-middle-class single women live in Georgetown or near Dupont Circle or something, since they all work downtown or at the university, so you're looking at a minimum 45-minute drive to visit each other.
I'm rapidly coming to the conclusion that software engineering is an absolutely horrible profession to get into if you're a hetero male who isn't an ultra-conservative churchgoer and wants to be able to date attractive professional women: it places you in locations that are far from these women, and keeps you in social circles that are completely alien to them, and in work environments that are devoid of any such women. I really wish I had gone into the medical field instead, honestly. In my experience, engineering is a great field if you're either an ultra-conservative religious person who wants a stay-at-home wife in a low cost-of-living region, or you're asexual and want to live in Silicon Valley and dedicate your life to work.
People of the socioeconomic strata that you tend to interact with and have direct knowledge of may not be represesentative of the entire age band, even in your region.
[a] some people who had more sex in the past have less sex now; or
[b] some people who haven't yet had sex are waiting even later to do so
These are somewhat different circumstances, even if the article conflates them, and even if some of the underlying causes apply to both groups.
I know it isn't the intention of the well-done article but the premise does feel like the jock making fun of the nerd who simply has different priorities and better things to do.
I wish these statistics cared less about generational changes and tried to plot sex-drive changes for everyone by decade. I'm sure we'd see it plummet after widespread acceptance of the internet and discrete shipping.
> “For an average date, you’re going to spend at least two hours, and in that two hours I won’t be doing something I enjoy,”
In my circles, a normal first date is somewhere casual in public where you can sit for a while, like a Starbucks or Panera, or equivalent coffeehouse in countries where coffeehouses actually exist. First impressions matter insofar as 10 minutes into the date you start to get an idea whether you and the other person is truly on the same wavelength, and about 30 minutes in, you know for sure.
If it's working, you're connecting with another person, and you can plan something more engaging for the next encounter, and if it didn't work, you're only out the price of a drink. Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile?
You mean like the US? If you're in any kind of decent city, there's plenty of nice coffee shops which aren't Starbucks. If the only coffee shops around are Starbucks, you're living in a shithole.
I usually propose to meet at non-Starbucks coffee shops for my first dates too. It's nice because even if the date is a bust (as it always is...), I now know of a new coffee shop.
>Is it truly a common sentiment that dates are too bothersome to make them worthwhile?
I really don't know because I don't hang out with Millenials that young (that guy in the article was only 18 IIRC), but I kinda doubt it. I think that guy was just a freak. He talked about how he just likes to sit at home in front of his computer with 3 different screens showing 3 different things at once (video game, movie, other) and focus on making money. I really don't think that's normal, I think the article's author managed to find one of the weirdest people possible and then try to present him as representative of all younger Millenials.
I don't disagree, but in my opinion picking a very mainstream, arguably mass-market, but still decent place for a first date over the one-of-a-kind local shop is useful signalling.
It makes it clear that you're not trying to impress by the choice of venue and you're not trying to project a particular lifestyle, and is a form of expectation management.
I don't believe that the hardcore multitasker in the example, gaming but somehow still money-making, typifies the average millennial either, but since the population of non- sexually active millennials is a subset, perhaps he's less of an outlier in that group.
At the risk of subjectively overgeneralizing in the other direction, perhaps that some of us perceive none of these anecdotes as very typical 'young people' behavior suggests that quirkier people have less sex than people whose behaviors and opinions wouldn't have stood out to us as much. Or we could just be too biased to what we think is 'normal' behavior. It's an intriguing point.
I was mainly objecting to your line about "countries where coffeehouses actually exist." We have those in the US, they're all over the place. Just not in small towns or shitty (usually smaller and Southern) cities. Just open Google Maps, pick any metro area with at least 1M people, and search for "coffee". You should easily find something that's not Starbucks or Panera (though I will admit Panera is pretty good, it's my favorite corporate chain by far, but make sure to go to the corporate locations and not the franchises if you can). They aren't all one-of-a-kind local shops; there are plenty of local or regional chains around. I'll take any of those over Starbucks.
But for your "useful signaling", that can be played different ways. Picking a Starbucks when there's better convenient alternatives, to me, says that you're possibly a mindless consumer drone who just buys whatever's popular without putting any thought into your consumption. Maybe I'm just biased, but from my own experience, Starbuck's product is generally sub-par, and their shops are generally too small and overcrowded compared to their competition. Not really the kind of place where you can sit down with someone and have a nice, quiet chat. Maybe they used to be years ago.
You're probably right about quirkier people. Maybe the Millenials have a higher proportion of quirkier people than previous generations. The internet certainly can be blamed for that.
I wouldn't consider phone sex (to go back to previous years) the same as having sex. It's like leaving a sexy note in your lover's or spouse's pocket to find at work or calling them up at lunch to ask them to guess what you're wearing.
It's definitely on the spectrum of intimate activities but if I've only had sexy video-call time or sexy Snapchat exchanges with someone (but not actually participated in anything in person) I would definitely not consider myself to have had sex with them.
I say this is a side-effect of Millennials forgoing pretty much a lot of comforts that boomers have come to enjoy, like owning a home or owning a car.
Austerity in every sense of the word.
Also, as a male millennial, I can honestly say that the climate to be promiscuous has never been less inviting.
I'm assuming it's for different reasons...
What do you mean by this? That you haven't heard anything original in music since you were a kid?
Every generation will say this (which is probably the point the GP was trying to make).
Dave Chappelle was ahead of the curve