Hacker News Reader

Comment by damagednoob | Hacker News Reader

> Did you know that teens are having substantially less sex than the previous few generations? It’s true! And generally interpreted as a good thing. But Ronson suggests that this is in large part because porn is replacing sex, and, in fact, making real sex with real woman seem alienating and difficult.

Further down the author specifically mentions the correlation/causality fallacy but there are surely other explanations for this. The rise of cheap entertainment in the form of online gaming or Netflix come readily to mind.

View on HN

There’s also been a shift due to online and apps that give women an unlimited choice of men while giving the majority of men nearly no choice — the dating world for most men has become a lot more difficult over the last couple of years.

I see my male friends really struggle and I see my female friends have unlimited options.

Females only have the upperhand until their 30s, when the pool of suitable men begins to dry up. After this point they must become increasingly attractive and prurient to maintain the same level of options as the average young 20 something.

I’m not sure this disproves the comment you’re replying to. There will always be the ‘reject pool’ from previous years, but women in their 30s seem to be better at moving on with their lives. Men seem to resent it and demand the world provide them a partner and blame women when they say (collectively) “nah mate, we’re good”.

Women have plenty of resentment too, especially when they see men their age going after girls several years younger, something they didn’t really experience when they were young.

Because they were the ones dating the older guys. Oh, the irony.

I have met plenty of bitter older single women.

> There’s also been a shift due to online and apps that give women an unlimited choice of men while giving the majority of men nearly no choice

How can that be? Why would it be empowering for one gender but not the other? What would the underlying reason be to explain that kind of social phenomenon?

> I see my male friends really struggle and I see my female friends have unlimited options.

I can counter your anecdata with my own...many of the women I know are having great difficulty finding men online because, in their experience, they're very picky. Speaking as a man, I would say I've also become more picky over time, not less. Here we're trading localized experience, but I think that there should be an accountable cause that would explain only men being adversely impacted.

I don't see an obvious reason why online dating would make things harder for men but not harder for women and vice versa. I think the broader trend in online dating is that it's harder for unattractive people to find partners, regardless of sexual identity or preference; conversely it seems to be getting progressively easier for attractive people to find partners. People are presented with significantly more options, which makes me hypothesize that they're willing to say no to many people they would otherwise settle for. I don't think that's particularly harder on men than it is on women.

>>I don't see an obvious reason why online dating would make things harder for men but not harder for women and vice versa. I think the broader trend in online dating is that it's harder for unattractive people to find partners, regardless of sexual identity...

On dating sites, men rate 50 percent of women as below average (in line with the statistical expectation), while women rate 80 percent of men as below average.

It is a fact that women are pickier than men on average, and that women are less willing to marry down and to settle for less, than men are.

This is why there is gender assymetry in how increased information efficiency in the dating market affects SMV (sexual market value) of men and women.

>> There’s also been a shift due to online and apps that give women an unlimited choice of men while giving the majority of men nearly no choice

> How can that be? Why would it be empowering for one gender but not the other? What would the underlying reason be to explain that kind of social phenomenon?

Because there are large social differences between how the genders date. Given such differences, a change in how dating is done may favor one gender more than another.

In practice, the most noticeable difference is that men are expected to message women (barring rare exceptions like Bumble). In current online dating, that means women receive a great many messages and can pick between them, while men must send a great many to have a chance at a response.

At least that initial stage of dating has shifted in women's favor in recent years, but as you said, that's not the whole picture and despite all the messages women may have a hard time finding someone they like, depending on what they are looking for.

Women have always had the upper hand in terms of choosing a mate. What's changed now is that their selection pool has gotten a lot larger than just the people they encounter and interact with in person.

I don't think so. I mean, that is a change that has occurred, but I think the more important change was women's liberation. Society used to enforce that women could not attain social status or sustain their own quality of life except via a husband. Now that women can have careers and operate independently in society, they have significantly reduced pressure to couple and consequently tend only to do so on their own terms.

This is good if you believe in egalitarianism, as I do, but it does have consequences. It would seem, though I'm not sure to what extent available data backs this up, that women will tend to couple only with a relatively small percentage of men, and without societal pressure to behave otherwise, are either willing to share them or simply not couple at all.

Unfortunately for them men who aren't in that category, their hormonal drive to mate is significantly stronger, and our culture still ostracizes and humiliates men who are unsuccessful with women. The upshot of which seems to be that there are an increasing number of sexually frustrated young men in society, and they are held in very low regard because of it, which one has to imagine is a very dangerous and destabilizing trend.

> Society used to enforce that women could not attain social status ... except via a husband.

That is such as 21th century culture perspective when viewing history. Take any litterateur work of art and reduce all the women in it down to their husband and what you get is nothing like what is described. The classic definition from 19th century when we read about what they viewed as the most respectable upstanding woman of highest degree usually refereed to family attributes such as class, titles, blood line, heritage, honor, grace, and wealth. A husband and his family would add to that equation but social status would still combine the attributes of both families. A woman from a low class that married up was still seen as coming from a low class family, and I see this as a common trope in many old dramas. The common scene is that the new wife joins the other women in that social class and she instantly get put at the bottom of the social status because of her heritage regardless of her husband.

It could still be the egalitarianism event after the second world war when women got equal rights in regard to work, but then the data is not that clear cut. Sweden have had equal work force of both women and men for decades now but the trend of lower marriage rates, increased loneliness, increased disproportional amount of childless men, has not topped off and is still worsening. The question is why it then hasn't stopped when equal amount of both women and men are working and sustaining their own quality of life. Is it just culture moving slow or is it possible that something else is causing the change?

It's just perceived selection pool, mostly consisting of guys they despise and use for feeling better about themselves and desirable (they will tell you openly once they are comfortable with you they would prefer those guys not to exist at all), or momentarily top guys that are difficult to reach even for the prettiest/smartest of them, and where there is a literally brutal competition between them.

If you are one of those top guys, you have to invent elaborate schemes how to reject a female so that she thinks it was her decision and leaves you alone ("how much nice/beta do I have to go until I start repulsing her?"), or just state/enforce expectations you have with them, maybe being shocked by mind-blowing admission that they would be willing to share you with other women only if you kept them as well.

The problem of this is that it leaves females that are used to one-time attention from a top guy thinking that's their attractiveness level for the rest of their life and anyone marrying them walks straight into hell of "being never enough". So overall for society enforced monogamy might be way better than what we have now, i.e. most females flocking to top guys and using the rest for money, validation or easy life until their attractiveness fades away and they become broken shelves of persons.

But hey, they front-loaded their life, trading exciting time in their prime for desolation of middle-to-older age. Just please don't force men to support them with taxes once they fall through the bottom. Those men didn't study/work hard to trade their prime years for supporting women that didn't give them time of day when they still were interested in them. That's not fair either; no wonder many of those men go for pathetic sex dolls and VR porn, or just leave society completely.

I’m not judging but this reads, to me, like you’re bitter. The majority of men and women may pursue mates based on superficial qualities but there are plenty who do not.

I separated three years ago, divorced recently and met someone a month after deciding to date. I used Bumble. It was easy. She’s beautiful, smart (smarter than me), kind, honest, athletic, hard working, loving and a wonderful mother to her 10 Y.O.

I live well below my means and only after commiting to a relationship did I realize just how poor she thought I was. My advice to you is that any women who would pursue a man for his looks and money isn’t worth your time. If you can’t find what you’re looking for you either need to work on your self or you need to look somewhere else.

Again, I’m not judging but the idea that enforced monogamy is better for society leads me to believe that you’re the problem.

Another element that i have noticed locally is that many more men pick up vocational work locally (because many vocational schools were established with support from local industry), while women leave for cities and such for education. And by the time they have finished that they have found a man that is also in that city for work or education.

Has there really, though? It doesn’t seem like that’s the case where I am.

And are you at least fifty years old and have the perspective of previous generations when you make this claim?

Your male friends potentially also have an unlimited choice in men ;)

IMO entertainment wouldn't be very high on the list of reasons. A cultural shift in the perception of sex maybe. Few decades ago it was a goal to liberate your sexuality, nowadays not so much, probably even the opposite.

Also, male sperm counts have been declining consistently for 30 years now (they are less than HALF what they were 30 years ago). Nobody has figured out why, but the best guess is chemicals.

This could a contender for reduced sex.

> making real sex with real woman seem alienating and difficult

I think the proper word is: boring

I don't understand why people try to understand sex through society's relationship with porn and other entertainment.

That's probably connected, but unless the topic first and foremost is society's relationship with sex, what the hell are we even talking about?

(edit: I'm not shittalking you, parent poster. You're just responding to an article perpetuating a trend that I noticed bugs me.)

There’s a lot of focus on how this relates to the happiness of men, but generally speaking hookups and pets aren’t an emotionally fulfilling alternative to a family for women, either. This is a worrying trend for everyone. Maybe a minority will be happier, but most are going to be lonelier and most likely more mentally ill. I suppose with legalization of marijuana we might not see a steady increase in alcoholism, but a quarter of the population being perpetually stoned probably isn’t really a good thing for society either. Oh well. Let’s just give them a UBI check and pretend everything is fine.

>Let’s just give them a UBI check and pretend everything is fine.

That has nothing to do with anything being discussed here.

It does insofar that UBI is touted as the cutting-edge social panacea of these times, but is simply a wealth redistribution scheme that doesn't address the atomization issues plaguing our society. UBI alone won't save us- more solutions need to be pursued.

As the other comment under this said, it does in that UBI is taken as being the solution to the social issues largely stemming from technological change. But the problems are much broader than just automation and economics, and an economic solution isn’t going to help with the destabilization of families and offline communities which has really begun to accelerate along with globalization and the internet. In many ways even our politics has been poisoned by some of the negative aspects of this, and we haven’t made a meaningful adjustment in any area of this IMO.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com