Why are fewer young adults having casual sex?
journals.sagepub.com
journals.sagepub.com
Notice that the per the article, the population of "sexless" men has grown nearly three times as much as the population of sexless women. Fewer men are having more sex; it's practically on-demand for them, and they are usually tremendous specimens when compared to other men.
If you are not aware of this, I would bet that you do not know any men who are on the "winning" side of the new dating economy. If you do know men like this and you disagree with me, please elaborate.
I have heard a great deal of insight into "the dating market" ranging from the perspective of attractive athletes (both male and female) to the perspective of unattractive nerds (both male and female) and this pattern is clearly visible through their stories. The women tend to retreat from casual sex because they don't want it (and not only because the pickings are subjectively slim, but also because the expectations for them to 'put out' are very high); the men tend to retreat from casual sex because they can't have it.
The modern dating market sounds like one of the most depressing aspects of modern adult society.
there were periods i would have 0 matches, and then out of nowhere would get 10 in a day. the algorithm is extremely inconsistent and i would play the game of deleting my account/restarting to get that boost to be on top of people's feeds. ultimately I've found the best combination of pictures that worked pretty consistently/well.
something i've noticed from people that didn't have much luck on these apps is that they fall into two buckets. unfortunately for some, it's really tough since they might not have the social skills/looks that dating apps really select for which i truthfully have no answer to. hopefully one day someone smart will solve for this. there's a reason that most of /r/tinder (or at least 4 years ago they did) subscribes to the "two steps" aka "1. be attractive 2. don't be unattractive" ... unfortunately that's just how these sites operate. i would argue, however, that's how real life tends to work a large percentage of the time. good news is you can do some really really basic stuff to look better even if you're not "conventionally attractive." I currently work for a major dating app and we are trying to help people from posting pictures that are honestly just really really bad. mirror selfies, blurred pictures, low light ones, in their cars neck up looking at a camera, etc.
the other bucket are people who have looks to get matches but don't get any luck because they have little experience interacting in a flirtatious/interesting way and therefore just give up or become extremely jaded/salty and start creating a negative persona which provides even worse results. for this group, which i think i fell into for a period of time, i can say that the only way out is to just play the game and put on a fake smile until you start seeing results. you can moan and groan and complain all you want, and it's your prerogative but don't expect any results if that's the path you want to go down in the dating app world. broken? sure. no ones forcing you to join these apps, but my hypothesis is this: a very not insignificant distribution of the people complaining and having 0 success on the apps probably also fall into the type of person that wouldn't have much success in real life scenarios as well.
Furthermore, the fact that you actually work for a dating app will likely make it very difficult to convince you of any of its potential secondary negative effects on what's left of society. I've had similar experiences with discussing the military-industrial complex and economic imperialism with acquaintances of mine working for defense contractors or serving in the armed forces.
Overall, we agree on this point:
>a very not insignificant distribution of the people complaining and having 0 success on the apps probably also fall into the type of person that wouldn't have much success in real life scenarios as well.
The claim I and others on this thread are making is that this subset of people would not have had such a hard time in real life before the advent of social media and dating apps.
you're not wrong. i think a lot of people feel this way on dating apps. it's far too disconnected from real life and removes any sort of mutual respect you've agreed to give people in a society.
> Furthermore, the fact that you actually work for a dating app will likely make it very difficult to convince you of any of its potential secondary negative effects on what's left of society
trust me, my eyes are very open to all of the negative consequences of dating apps, but i think this argument can be extended to a lot of the rest of the internet, general media, etc.
> The claim I and others on this thread are making is that this subset of people would not have had such a hard time in real life before the advent of social media and dating apps.
i'm not convinced on this. i'm not putting my hands over my ears. i'm open to hear an argument, but i don't see why someone who sucks at dating apps and can't write something relatively interesting to somebody would magically turn into a different person in real life. i would guess very few people are this way and the majority that are boring online are boring face to face
I'm not sure I follow. Women don't want casual sex because their potential partners do?
Not particularly gender-specific, people say what makes them comfortable, which isn't always the truth.
I think your hypothesis is mostly correct, except for the idea that the men who are having more sex are “tremendous specimens”.
I don’t think they need to be especially attractive or powerful. It could be cultural or psychological differences that make some men put more energy into their pursuits. For example, compare Jimmy Carter to Bill Clinton.
We could perhaps simplify the hypothesis to say that modern dating, enabled by apps, has made it easier for men who have a high desire to sleep with many women to do so.
Clinton is a well-know womanizer whose exploits were known long before his presidency.
They are both powerful, and influential. But one seemed to put a whole lot more effort into getting laid, to the point of destroying his career.
To him, I'm the strange one for bothering with the hotel. I don't think that the attractiveness 1% are much less oblivious of their privilege than the financial 1%.
But, wow, that's putting oneself at a lot of risk.
Granted, when I was that young, risk wasn't a four-letter-word, so to speak.
Where it is not true is that attraction is a multi-dimensional process that is very poorly captured by online dating. Men in particular are disadvantaged by it. This is well studied.
The false conclusion to draw is that if you fail at online dating, you will fail at real life dating. This false conclusion stops many young men from even trying in the real world. There are so many dimensions on which attraction is developed that many, many who are currently alone could easily and successfully find partners. It makes me sad.
I have absolutely seen 5'4" men who would catastrophically fail in the online dating market meet, date and marry successful, intelligent, kind, beautiful women. I have absolutely seen many nerdy men, goofy men, brown men, asian men succeed effortlessly with women. It all requires real-world interactions though.
In the real world, people respond to so many more signals. You have to go out there, meet people, learn and develop yourself.
This is the process I encourage my single friends to follow: become the person someone else would be thrilled to meet, proud to befriend, excited to date and overjoyed to marry.
But to do so, you must first go out in the real world and make friends. Don't go out with any expectations of getting a date or a hookup. Learn to make friends with a diverse array of people. This is key. Each different type of person will help you learn about yourself.
Dating will emerge naturally as you get beter at making friends.
The 3 most recent exes of mine all had begged me to marry them at some point in the relationship. One even offered to buy me a ring and propose.
But in the last 6 years I haven't had a single relationship... The enormous contrast in outcome has me totally bewildered.
Have you seen these "conventionally unattractive" men that you describe succeed in a totally open and free dating market as young 20-somethings, or are there extenuating circumstances (early 30s, string of failed relationships, etc.). I will fully admit that you are observing something I am not observing and that my rationale must be flawed if you're witnessing 5'4" nerdy, goofy men lacking in charisma and stature experience consistent success in real life dating between 18-26. Of those I saw who did achieve some success, I've witnessed a lot of them get cheated on by their "girlfriends", but I haven't witnessed a lot of them experience free-market success and dating freedom of choice, at least not compared to the 6' high-power athletes I know.
I disagree with you on a few other counts here, but most strongly with the statement "dating will emerge naturally as you get better at making friends". That is patently false. Dating will emerge naturally as the peer-relative superior status of your reproductive and companionship potential becomes obvious. Dating is not a process by which to make friends, it is a process to determine who will have a chance at impregnating whom. "Getting better at making friends" will net you a fraction of the returns that "getting muscles that show through a t-shirt" will, all other things being considered equal.
Overall, I do agree with you that men who fail on dating apps need to try different approaches in real life, though.
If by open-and-free dating markets of 20-somethings you mean places like bars in the Marina or the party scene of Isla Vista. You are correct, to succeed there you have to be conventionally attractive. In the low light and hormone fueled club scene of Miami, even more so. Status, social proof, money...it matters.
But there are many other places to find great partners. My 5'4" friend is a musician. Girls approached him. He has done well over the years. Other successful guys I know sail, scuba-dive, rock-climb, ski, fly, hike, surf, etc. Each of these activities has its own social scene with interesting people.
My statement about dating and friends was inaccurate. I actually agree with you: dating =/= friendship. It has been been my observation that my struggling single friends didn't know how to be social. I encouraged them to befriend people and learn about themselves. An example of what I meant by "dating emerges..." my friends who sail will periodically send out open invitations to get 5-10 people together for a day of sailing. The goal is to invite fun interesting people. By being friends with social people, you get exposed to more people. People click in person. Another friend regularly rents big houses for ski weekends - again with the goal of pulling interesting people together.
Regarding muscles: agree. Fitness improves everyone's chances in everything. I encourage all of my single friends to be physically active and fit.
You are right on point that given a choice, most women would most likely rather date a 6'ft tall Brad Pitt however that choice is not always present for them and different women prioritize different things, you can't just lump them all in a single category..
Further attractiveness is only one of _many_ factors that they look at when making a selection and most of them will gladly compromise if you have other higher qualities.
Stability, financial security, appearances, social network, education , interests,.. all come in to play.
Basically, what I'm saying is that dating & relationships are a lot more complex than they seem.
I know any number of guys who are not tremendous specimens who have no trouble at all getting dates or meeting new women for hookups. Each brings something to the table - something that attracts partners. Each guy has learned about themselves and works to develop themselves.
The thing is that nowadays the expectation is that you date using an app, and the apps are absolutely 100% one dimensional single-faceted gamified systems. Ideally the solution is to stop using apps, but the problem people run into there is that they don't really know how to interact any other way because they never learned.
Do things. Organize activities. Invite friends. Encourage them to invite friends.
Learn to be social. Learn to make friends. Be fit. Be active. Be interested in other people and become interesting yourself. It all seems kinda cliche. But it works.
"Among young women, the decline in the frequency of drinking alcohol explains about one quarter of the drop in the propensity to have casual sex. Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex."
It's plausible that the former variable is "stealing" some of the statistical significance of the latter, leaving the researchers with the impression that the latter is irrelevant.
If you have two independent variables that are highly correlated, and you include both into the model, it's going to be pretty arbitrary which one ends up with statistical significance.
If we're dealing with weak effects and small data, there's very little one can do. That's why epidemiological studies like this kinda suck.
When that's what your data looks like, proper study design either involves testing that hypothesis, or staying the fuck away from making conclusions that take one of those as significant and one as non-significant.
> find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances
I... uh... can’t make sense of these two statements together, both of which seem quoted from the paper.
It might be that society is changing as a whole, and that individual variations of internet use don't contain any relevant information.
So I think the focus is about what forces were not present in previous generations, and the Internet is certainly the most conspicuous factor. I'm not saying it's the decisive factor, but I'm not surprised it's a prime culprit.
Note that in many countries, teenagers owning cars (and related activities) are not as prevalent as in the US. When I was a teenager, almost nobody I knew owned a car, and we all used public transportation, so there was no (dating) car culture around this.
Like I said, other countries don't have the same car-centric culture of the US. We've been managing to successfully have sex -- and find sex interesting -- without such an early access to cars!
Where you would have had it, if you lived alone, you wont bother overcoming the "more challenging to find a private space" situation.
I think in a century we're going to be looked upon as barbarians by our ancestors for some of the things we did to our bodies, just as we look upon the earlier generations who leaded gasoline, or smoked pervasively.
They found that higher sexual activity correlated with greater levels of depression, especially in men. Sexually active women also correlated with decreases in mental health, but the authors' interpretation was that that decline primarily stems from higher rates of victimization among that population, which would obviously lead to negative mental outcomes.
[0]: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-019-014...
Really? If there's anything Game of Thrones kept reminding us of, its that males find defeating/killing other men in battle (and the "in battle" part is important, human warfare is very ritualistic just like Chimpanzee warfare) and fucking women equivocal if not related activities. Our ape brains don't appear to make much difference between virtual and physical, at least not enough to make one a lot less addictive than the other.
Bar culture always sucked (and still sucks) and I wasn't pretty enough for Tinder. The music scene I was involved with was fading out and I wasn't part of the core clique anyway.
Would I have liked to go out and meet people to have casual sex with? You bet I would have. But it was such a chore to even put myself in a position where such a thing was even a possibility (make new friends who hosted parties and invited single friends? go out and take nicer photos for a dating site?), that it seemed like it wasn't worth the effort.
The flipside is that, while I was at a 4-year university with a nice campus, the setup for making connections for casual sex was a lot better. But I also was a lot more willing to put myself in weird grimy situations, so I don't know if it's a fair comparison.
Moral: beware the direction of causality. Some people aren't having casual sex because they are gaming. Other people are gaming because they aren't having casual sex, whether it's by choice or for lack of opportunity.
We used to have civil-society. It facilitated a lot of these things. Read Robert Putnam's books and research if you're curious.
Introduced by a mutual friend is the traditional way.
Before an average guy used to be able to get a date without a problem, but now the bar is set much higher for a male, due to quick and easy access for women to dates via technology. (This in reverse applies to men less so because men are polygamous not hypergamous by nature and by definition are the pursuers and have less standards.).
So there's less casual sex as a whole because a small group of people are having more casual sex.
This is evidenced by stats from the above article and by numerous studies on dating sites that shows a small pool of men having much more success with women.
Also, anecdotally as an admittedly non Brad Pitt average guy.. if you've ever compared your dating apps to an average woman friend...it's insane the contrast.
Much like the economy that is also bifurcating and has a shrinking middle class... this reflected on the dating market as well.
Red Pill is the group of men who understand hypergamy and actively try to elevate themselves to be the "highest value" males so they can benefit from it.
Incels are the group of men who have tried to honestly attract members of the other sex, but continuous failure has lead them to a state of despair to the point where they withdraw completely and instead focus on things that actually make them happy like video games.
But even by mentioning those two groups, this comment is likely to get downvoted and I'm likely to be labeled as a misogynist for considering that they might be right about some things.
But science proved him right.
Science seems to make people uncomfortable because it lifts the delusion that humans are way further from animals than we actually are. Humans are formed in the image of GOD! And the universe revolves around us!
Not only does science show that the solar system does not revolve around humans, but also shows that men and women have primitive instincts on the dating market to maximize their genetic success...just like animals.
Polygyny, or the harem strategy, is the most successful mating strategy throughout all the mammalian class. One strong male with a group of females. And this pattern is seen repeated throughout many species of mammals.
The harsh truth is that as a male mammal, this is the framework you have to work in. Not being blessed with family resources, or natural good looks, or natural talent, or the ability to make a a baby, makes one disposable by default and having to fight for reproductive success.
There's exceptions to the rule but statistically it seems to be sound.
I don't know why people deny this. They simply have to compare the average guys Tinder to the average girls Tinder to see this mating selection in action. Women and movie stars can literally get casual sex at the push of a button.
People like to delude themselves that theyre better people than they really are I guess. Then they cheat on their spouse with a swimsuit model or a lawyer.
The harem strategy is the most successful reproductive strategy throughout all of the MAMMALS not just the apes.
https://www.tremr.com/Duck-Rabbit/primate-testicle-size-dete...
Everything from elephant seals, to fruit bats, to gorillas, form harems.
Monogomy seems the rarest of all bi-gender mating strategys.
Leading how to do them well means having relationships.
Casual sex for a limited time window is good for learning more about sex, but if you don’t shift to investing in relationship building, you may not learn those skills before it is too late.
I can't imagine a better world where sex is a pornhub search and socialization is a gaming PC - but it looks like that's the path we're on.
Consent conversations and alcohol can be quite confusing and scary to navigate now. This seems to suggest to me, that people are just not putting themselves in situations where casual sex might be more possible (alcohol + parties, etc) due to the fear of it being labelled as rape.
Also I read somewhere that only about 50% of men that have lived ever reproduced. And in societies with an unequal distribution, eventually devolves into being more violent. As the "incels", try to better their lot for reproduction.
I found something similar:
https://tierneylab.blogs.nytimes.com/2007/08/20/is-there-any....
Where up to 10 years ago one could meet people and exchange kisses without even considering exchanging phone numbers, that is now not even an option anymore.
With the exchange of telno/FB/Insta, instantly there is no more "casual" relation, you are traceable and identifiable. One nightstands turn in to creepy ghosting or stalking really fast.
EDIT: completion of a sentence.
we've retarded emotional development so nobody knows how to be interesting, and censored/surveilled all media that young people use so nobody can talk to each other.
we've normalized excessive parental control into adulthood and crippled everyone economically, so there's no place to go.
now nobody can fuck except rich people and broke ass queers who never gave a damn anyway.
the straights really done it to themselves
Tinder and other online dating options are pretty bleak and inherently extractive in nature, so I find it equally plausible that many young people are simply turned off from the whole thing.
They also weren’t seen as the primary purpose of sex.
Today, if you say something like “Sex is important and should only be done between people that are getting married, since it correlates with lower divorce rates”, most people will think you’re strange.
The birth control pill also enabled many of these attitudes, so it almost by definition wasn’t a return to their “true nature.”
But yes of course people like having sex. What’s new is that this pleasure-focused view of it has become the dominant one, to the exclusion of all others.
Traditional cultures would do a lot to control the sex of their unmarried daughters, because that would mean babies to care for and that means a lot of additional troubles.
See: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5621592/
> Not all social influences are positive, however, and overweight young adults in particular are susceptible to the negative effects of weight-related bias [76]. Data indicate that overweight young adults are judged by others to be less likable [77] and less suitable sexual partners [78]—even when those making judgments are overweight themselves [77, 79]. Further, perceived weight-related social control has been linked to body dissatisfaction, low self-esteem, and infrequent physical activity among young adults, particularly when this social pressure to lose weight stems from their parents [80].
and: https://oatext.com/Adolescent-obesity-and-its-implications-f...
>Using a slightly different age range and time frame, Ueda et al. (2020) found that the percentage of sexually inactive men ages 18 to 24 increased from 18.9 percent in 2000–2002 to 30.9 percent in 2016–2018, and the percentage of sexually inactive young women increased from 15.1 percent to 19.1 percent over the same period.
The big increase is sexually inactive men and that is because women can more easily find highly attractive men on Tinder and other apps. The bottom of the male market has just fallen out completely. At least when you had to go to a bar as an unattractive guy, you could be the only one available or could woo women through other qualities. Now it’s 6 feet tall and fit with a good face or you get swiped left. And the high status men are more than happy to sleep with multiple women in a single week.
Same situation is happening in America, we just don’t call it polygamy because it has been reduced entirely to the physical act.
You can: move to a shack in the wood, be self-sufficient, don't use society's benefits, and hence don't pay taxes. Otherwise society is interested in baby taxpayers, regardless of who's raising them. Even if you don't use roads, your taxes are still used to build them. Ditto with children.
I view it more like: the thing that differentiates us from the other animals is our ability to create and exchange ideas quickly (latency) and thoroughly (bandwidth), and those ideas are a state of matter that seem totally dissimilar to our animal bodies. We talk about matter not being created or destroyed, so what is a new idea? What are ideas made of, and where do they exist? I don't know, but I believe my individual dense collection of ideas is my real "human" individual self if that makes any sense.
All of humanity's various -ists and -phobias, on the other hand, seem to be about protecting our animal bodies, the food they need to eat, and the spaces they want to occupy. How much racism has historically stemmed from fear of a group of people in worse financial condition than one's own, coming in willing to work for lower wages thus threatening one's own stability in jobs, housing, food, and so on? How much homophobia (especially towards men) stems from fear of a gay son threatening generational wealth that could historically only be passed to male heirs?
If humanity could collectively lose the need for all of that hate we can still have the "individual", and in fact many individuals at any level you could slice the One. The highest-bandwidth and lowest-latency links are (for now) obviously between the ideas in one's own brain, but similar densities form between people in committed relationships, between close-knit groups of friends, and so on. I just don't see any other path forward now that we humans have spread across the entire Earth and can communicate with any other person in realtime. So much land is "private" now. Where are people going to live? Depopulation should not be the answer, because that's like giving the One a lobotomy. We are all already neurons in a giant brain, like it or not, so I prefer trying to like it :)
In the case of bonobos, there's an Attenborough doc where he literally narrates a scene of a young Bonobo after being mobbed on though I understand it appears fallacious since I can't recall which.
But yeah, social hierarchy is endemic to, at the least, great apes like us, the difference just lies in how we deal with it. The most sexually successful Gorilla males appear to have figured out that you also have to show females that you're willing to give attention to kids even when they're not yours to demostrate real value as a mate, so our part of the animal family tree isn't without its improvements.
Society is so incredibly complicated and interconnected, it's pretty much impossible to say what would happen by changing something.
"Poly" folks are overrepresented on dating apps because they never shut their profiles down after meeting someone.
What's surprising to me is how much of it there is. I was on bumble/tinder and a couple of other sites when I was single, and it was so bad the first question I would ask was, "are you poly?"
I don't see any value prop in being poly for a man. Every time I've seen my friends attempt it, the woman is getting laid like crazy, and the man is struggling to find anyone. Imagine dating as a poly man-- what do you tell a woman you meet? "Well, there's no future for us because I have a wife and a girlfriend, but I'd still really like to get into your pants."
And then, there are issues of disease and pregnancy. You're trusting people you don't know to act responsibly as far as disease goes. And pregnancy is a nightmare-- I know a woman who has a husband and two boyfriends, and she turned up pregnant. It was a nightmare for everyone involved. Nobody knew who'd done the deed.
Sex is DANGEROUS.
I will get downvoted to hell for this, but, "poly" is just a modern version of Cuckoldry. If you're into that, that's your business. But all of the ephemera and justifications around it are just thinly veiled nonsense.
I don't know the real reason, but if I was to guess, the most obvious one is that there are so many interesting things to do, learn, engage in, that making considerable effort in order to have sex simply doesn't seem worth it, that's all.
I have another take: younger male are less attractive than older male for females between 20 and 26, or less rich?
It's not so much that it's easy to obtain but at least in Western cultures it's expected that the initiating side should be male, and females can either accept or refuse it. This creates a somewhat unbalanced economy.
I had Tinder installed for 3 days: it was really really awful, if that was the only option I would have happily given up dating. My view of Tinder is that it's the app for defective people who just want sex.
Bumble on the other hand seems fine. Relatively normal women and I met a great one that I've been dating for 9 months now. I'm sure I'm partially biased because it worked for me, but the difference really was incredible between Tinder and Bumble.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/02/06/10-facts-ab...
In any case, if we accept the stats as true[0] and 15% of people under 30 use Tinder, this still leaves us with a huge majority of people who don't use it, so explaining significant social dynamics changes by an app doesn't seem convincing to me. Yes, I know there are other dating apps, but they don't come close to Tinder in terms of popularity.
[0] https://www.statista.com/statistics/814698/share-of-us-inter...
What is required is that you try and don't get discouraged. It's a lot easier to stay home, play video games, and watch porn than it is to date. Plus, successful dating reduces time for video games.
This is true, but what you do need is access to women so that you can learn what they want.
If those women have a low incentive to spend time with less physically (or financially) attractive men, it’s going to be hard for the less attractive ones to develop the necessary capacities.
Exactly this. After hundreds of attempts and success rate 0 I simply lost any reference point. Should I invite her to museum or to the garbage dump? Come barefoot or in evening shoes? Say "hi beautiful" or "screw you"? I seriously have no clue.
I'm tired of this, "just keep trying and you'll land a woman" narrative. It's the same logic that capitalists use to tell poor people, "just keep working hard and you'll succeed". It expects people to keep facing failure after failure and never let's us admit that for some men dating is just not worth the pain involved. And then when they see the writing on the wall and give up, that's just used as more evidence that "men don't try hard enough" and aren't willing to face failure.
You don't have to be unattractive to find it excruciating, it's just generally excruciating by its very nature. Being in the top 5% or so of attractiveness is just the only way out. Dating apps are terrible and will one day rank among mankind's most awful crimes.
> I'm tired of this, "just keep trying and you'll land a woman" narrative. It's the same logic that capitalists use to tell poor people, "just keep working hard and you'll succeed".
Eh, I think in this case it is generally true though. If you approach dating from a perspective of finding potential mutual-goal life partners as opposed to some kind of sex-hunting or prize-seeking game, you probably can find someone. Society doesn't encourage us to think of relationships in this way though.
> It expects people to keep facing failure after failure and never let's us admit that for some men dating is just not worth the pain involved.
On this I will agree at least. If you find dating a damaging experience that makes your life worse, then it's ok to just not do it. Or at least find a different way to do it. Definitely not apps.
The other part which I forgot to mention is that social capital has been declining since the 60's (see the book Bowling Alone), so it's become harder to meet someone off of dating apps. The institutions which used to facilitate finding partners are no longer there so apps are becoming the only option.
Maybe this didn't come across well, but I specifically don't recommend using dating apps ever. Meeting someone in real life that fits those criteria is a matter of being places where people are that you're likely to get along with, and then, you know, getting to know at least one well enough to start dating them. It's not easy exactly but it is a heck of a lot more likely you'll find someone that way than trolling an eyeball-farming simulacrum of human interaction.
This is not a problem that can be solved on the individual level. We need networks that can facilitate forming social connections. And that (in my opinion) is a sociological project.
"The bottom of the male market has just fallen out completely."
It's not a market. People aren't commodities.
"you could be the only one available or could woo women through other qualities."
Isn't this just the "last man on the earth" respun as "last guy at the bar?" Since when has there been a shortage of guys at bars?
Social media has expanded the potential dating pool while removing anonymity. This changes behaviors.
It’s the distribution of sex, not the amount.
Technology has enabled the upper echelons of desirable men to sleep with many desirable women, and those down the pecking order are content with porn/toys, instead of settling for anyone other than the prized upper echelon.
It’s not just the technology but the social change that resulted from technology
The falling alcohol consumption seems much more plausible in my opinion.
Humans are not rational.
How though. Wouldn't you learn pretty fast that it isn't the case.
Many people don't learn.
Those that do learn would be dissuaded from trying alternatives for anticipation (fear?) of a repeat experience.
Then go to read some r/tinder advice and it makes sense. The Advice tends to boil down to creating your profile formulaic, attempting to be different or add much personality docks you points.
On another note if someone could please let me know how all these people are constantly affording retreats to all sorts of countries, please let me know ;)
Is the author suggesting that increased co-residence is not related to economic circumstances?
> Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex.
> The authors find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances, internet use, or television watching explain the recent decline in casual sexual activity.
Seems like co-residing with parents and declining drinking frequency (which I'd think of as just more care-free behavior) is a direct result of trends in economic circumstances.
And in the paper, they lay out some pretty good hypothesis:
> Many youth now work multiple jobs as part of the gig economic (Katz and Krueger 2019), which in turn might limit the amount of time available for casual sexual encounters (Lyons et al. 2014). High levels of debt, particularly student loan debt, might also lead to increased work hours and thus constrain the time available for engaging in casual sex.
Of course, this is what they set out to test, but it seems like they do find something to suggest that it's true, as it contributes to 10%:
> As shown in model 4, young men who live with their parents are significantly less likely than their counterparts who live independently to report having had casual sex in the past month, and controlling for parent coresidence reduces the coefficient for survey year from –.073 to –.067.
> The estimated odds that young men who live with their parents engage in casual sex are only 63 percent of the corresponding odds for young men who live independently (e−.457 = .63)
Co-residence and not being financially stable seem pretty tightly correlated to me. Feels like they're missing the forest for the trees -- you know what you do when you're not making enough money? Live with your parents, Stay in and maybe play video games instead of going to the pub and trying to impress and woo someone of the opposite sex.
This sounds odd. More women are employed but mean earnings didn't change? Debt of young people has declined in the past decade? Despite this they're more likely to live with their parents? I'm in the camp of expecting financial independence being the strongest factor in this trend personally.
People don't have sex when they're depressed, overweight, never go outside, and play video games all day.
I think the attention placed on STDs during our Sex Ed classes may have something to do with it. Learning about the horrible things that could happen to you through casual sex (with grotesque accompanying photos!) was a major part of our curriculum. And we were taught that condoms may not protect you. So I think there is some innate fear and shame embedded here.
yes you should take STD's seriously but to use STD's as your reasoning for not having Casual Sex is the opposite of how you should be handling this.
What we need is proper education about protection, risks, and just sex in general not making people afraid of sex!
You could just as easily get an STD from the first time you have sex after a date as you could with Casual Sex.
I have seen "sex ed" (in quotes because some places I would barely call it that), especially in the South, use STD's as a way to scare kids into not having sex which is so wrong.
Maybe, but people willing to have casual sex with you are probably also more willing than the median person to have casual sex with other people, which probably means they're likely to have above median number of lifetime sexual partners. Unless you're arguing that lifetime risk of getting an STD is uncorrelated with the number of lifetime sexual partners, I wouldn't so quickly declare the two risks to be equal.
Edit: I left the U.S. about a decade ago, and as I remember, they were considering allowing MSM to donate blood if they'd only had one partner in the past year. I was under the impression that was based on statistical risk modeling, but maybe it was plain old prudishness being dressed up in statistics. I still donate blood here, but I've lost track of US blood donation rules.
On the one hand there is the person that may have a lot of casual sex but they are also properly educated about sex, they get tested every couple months, they take precautions, etc. Maybe they are more used to having conversations with potential partners about STD's.
On the flip side you may have the person that rarely has sex, never really has those conversations with their peers or doctor and maybe only gets tested during their yearly physical.
And yes I know I am very strongly generalizing here. I know people in both camps that do the opposite of what I am saying here.
So that is why I say that yes obviously more partners increases your chance of getting an STD, but you also can't just say that because someone does not have a lot of partners that you can't also risk getting something from them.
Edit: By properly educated I meant about sex... not anything else. Making that more clear
Second Edit: Regarding the men who have sex with men blood ban, I think that has been proven many times that there is no evidence for it and is purely from a puritanical stance.
I think that's a straw man argument. My reading of the GGP doesn't include any claim that non-casual sex is risk-free, just an implicit suggestion that casual sex is riskier.
Though, the GGP isn't explicit about their claims, so I could very well be misreading them.
The men having to coreside with their parents seems to be an economic problem of our time though.
Time to expand the 40 billion love hotel market to the US?
Isnt the increase in coreside with parents due to economic circumstances...?
This young woman was flexible about casual sex, and didn't understand why her latest boyfriend was troubled that it'd only been 2 weeks since her last boyfriend. I told my passenger how women fundamentally get to choose who they have sex with (to screen their suitors), whereas men 'get lucky'. The evolutionary reason is that women have all the consequences of a pregnancy.
I also have an un-posted collection of anecdotes about "the predicaments of girls and boys", about women who were dissatisfied with their relationships. Women have to screen, but aren't trained in how to motivate their romantic interests to behave up to their standards.
From the submission:
> One of the strongest predictors of the likelihood of engaging in casual sex is alcohol consumption. [...] Because there is some evidence that alcohol consumption increases young women’s more than young men’s odds of engaging in casual sex, it is possible that the decline in alcohol consumption explains more of the decline in young women’s than in young men’s propensity to have sex outside of a committed romantic relationship.
Alcohol consumption is rather important to help women suppress their naturally-protective inclinations to avoid 'hooking up' with any man who expresses an interest in them. Other female passengers, whom I'm still in touch with, have told me of how they were very selective in their relationships...
Something I am curious about is the people they interviewed were they in more puritanical areas or did they gather data from a larger geographic area?
Speaking from experience and discussions with my friends (obviously the last year does not count due to Covid)... this is the opposite if what I have seen regardless of gender, sexual orientation, and relationship status. Obviously something can be said for my friend circle likely having similar ideals that I have which makes it more complicated.
That being said I am also in a big city.
Well, it's different than they way it was when I grew up, but I don't know if kids living with their parents necessarily indicates a "broken" society: humans more or less lived that way for millenia successfully until around the time of the industrial revolution.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
>this doesn't just effect young people
So I had assumed they meant what they said. The oldest members of genZ are mid-20s, which I would not consider to be not-young people.
Maybe I'm just getting old.
Gee, thanks.
/old
I'm not that far behind GenX. But it's definitely shocking to see someone claim that 78% of a generation that is over 40 years old is still "living at home"!
Actually, since GenX was probably the last generation where wide-scale home ownership was within reach I can see that fact being true if the home in question is the one they own.
My parents’ generation comes from a country where it’s common for married couples to live with the parents. All the cousins who are economically able to moved out to their own house. The only married couples living with their parents are the ones whose parents can’t afford to live alone, or who themselves can’t afford to live alone.
And unless more soundproof rooms become the norm, I can easily see why a young couple would not want to live in the same house as their parents. Most Americans houses are drywall, and nothing in between and sound really travels. As far as I can tell, having parents down the road, but in a separate house is the ideal.
But, even if you do live together, that work does not happen automatically by itself. Someone actually have to spend additional time doing that additional care work. Just living together wont magically provide care without someone spending additional effort.
But yes, you’re right that the weight of that family care role would typically fall on the woman. I’m hoping that continues to change. I’ve seen real movement in that direction through quarantine as families have been forced to face financial realities.
You also cant ignore gender in the aspect of "who is the one with income and who is the dependent one seemingly spending money he earned while seemingly not working". The ressentments the stemed from that and unsolvable dysfunction made too many families life into suffering.
Because, anecdotally: plenty of casual sex.
Theories of sex decreasing because of men being left out of the economy, the secular decrease in testosterone, men being addicted to video games and porn, etc. have to grapple with the likelihood that casual sex hasn't decreased among men-who-have-sex-with-men but rather increased. If that were confirmed, then why are men-who-have-sex-with-women in particular not having sex?
This line: "On the other hand, sexual inactivity may hinder young adults’ psychosocial development and diminish their physical and emotional gratification (Julian 2018)." is just bizzare. People have done without casual sex for most of human history, I think the young people will be just fine without it.
I know some cultures discourage it and some religions forbid it, but I also know that human beings love to have sex regardless of what’s good or reasonable or sensible. It’s hard to imagine us not doing it, if only hiding it better when society demands it.
People had to go to wars because you could get death penalty for treason (if you refuse to serve your empire, kingdom etc.) The things you are talking about were opportunistic, wars were always started by rulers motivated by expansionism and not by ordinary people motivated by greed and lust.
And yea all wars had mercenaries but they were minority not majority of the army.