Why are young people having so little sex? (2018)
theatlantic.com
theatlantic.com
In my mid-30s I ran through a spate of recent divorcees who all had almost exactly the same complaint. Their husband of 10 years hadn't slept with them in 5+ years, and was always in the basement playing video games or watching porn. Which he didn't want to watch with her. Two of them - totally separately - told me they would dress up in lingere and go to the basement and the husband would say he was too tired. A third said she felt "unfuckable" and started crying recounting it. (I said, oh no! You're totally fuckable! I also said, I would never play a video game rather than lay in bed with you. And it was like... holy shit) This is literally what's going on.
Not a significant thing
> An inability to have basic conversation.
Not a significant thing
> And the boys are totally ineffectual and terrified of trying to kiss a girl; it's been made faux pas to show any inclination. It's hard enough as a teenager to get up the courage to kiss a girl.
I mean you shouldn't kiss a girl without consent, but I assure you, plenty of teenagers are kissing
> Imagine if you think there's a 50/50 chance she'll completely destroy your life on social media, rather than just say "no thanks".
It's really not a thing. This one is just stupid. This time of thinking is OCD level anxiety of about unrealistic outcomes.
> In my mid-30s I ran through a spate of recent divorcees who all had almost exactly the same complaint. Their husband of 10 years hadn't slept with them in 5+ years, and was always in the basement playing video games or watching porn. Which he didn't want to watch with her. Two of them - totally separately - told me they would dress up in lingere and go to the basement and the husband would say he was too tired. A third said she felt "unfuckable" and started crying recounting it. (I said, oh no! You're totally fuckable! I also said, I would never play a video game rather than lay in bed with you. And it was like... holy shit) This is literally what's going on.
As a late 20's, moderately sexed, east coaster, the quote here is weird, dude. Both the content and the fact that it's being shared at all. People being depressed and having low sex drives and maybe just not liking their wives is bad and definitely a thing. Guys who can't comprehend not prioritizing sex as the top item at all times is also weird. I don't have interest in fucking more than maybe 3 times per week on a good week. Other than that and I would almost certainly prefer playing a game with my wife.
I agree with OP. People around my generation (middle of the road millennial) and especially those younger have laughable basic social skills. The median 25-year-old can't talk on the phone, walk up to someone at a party and start a conversation, or act like a human being with a cashier or server. They also flake out on plans some huge percentage of the time. Drugs, porn, games, and social media are preferred to face-to-face interaction. Normal interactions, which are obviously often slightly awkward, are "cringe," and obsession with them produces a neurotic paranoia in daily interactions. And then we wonder why there's a mental health crisis, and why our communities are disintegrating, or why no one trusts society or one another.
The point is that social skills - properly understood - are learnable and developable skills, and adapt creatively to changes in social norms. It's not for bad reasons that "trying to kiss a girl" has become so cringe. Why are you trying to do something that intimate when you have no clue how the other person will react? It makes no sense. Work around all that crap instead, focus on being attractive on your own terms and on showing off the best side of yourself in ways that are not inherently threatening if the other person doesn't like it. Plenty of creative possibilities there. The rest will follow if you do it right. If it turns out that she expects you to take risks you're not comfortable with (which is the only reason anyone ever could have thought that the cringe thing made any sense at all), that's her loss not yours. Even then you can still be friendly, and maybe she'll change her mind after all.
Oh cringe, is it? I'd say your generation cringing at the thought gets directly to the reason it has no sex.
>> Why are you trying to do something that intimate when you have no clue how the other person will react?
Possibly precisely because you don't know how they'll react. Whoa, crazy right? You might initiate something without prior consent and see what happens? Holy fuck!
You aren't trying to do anything against someone's will. You aren't going to kiss the girl unless she wants to kiss you. But when you're 15 years old and you go on a first date, you do already know you'd like to kiss that girl. And you also know she isn't going to kiss you first.
It takes risk. No you don't take that risk if you think the girl doesn't like you, but it's still scary and risky all the same if you think she does. Having no clue how she's gonna react and taking a leap -- that's what you need to do to learn, both ways, to grow up. A lot of the problem with men not respecting women is down to men not learning when they aren't invited for a kiss.
But ya can't learn until you've tried. And when you're 15, trying to kiss a girl you like is pretty much the most important thing on earth. And if you don't know that, never experienced it or don't remember it, all I can say is I feel sorry for you. If you ever go on a date and carry through for a couple hours - and you're still interested, without thinking "how should I kiss that girl"? Then you're missing one of the better parts of life.
In any case, intellectualizing it to the point of obliterating all unplanned activity in the name of policing everyone's behavior and telling them they're dirty or wrong for kissing strangers is a victorian, petit bourgeois fascist little conceit which like most of your generation's ill-formed ideas will be trodden over by your children who are gonna go hog-wild fuckin' every cock in sight in return for your closed-minded, terrified little incel ideas about life.
My point is that your anecdata is garbage. Older folks saying young people don't know how to communicate is a centuries old trope.
Most people can communicate just fine. Given that you are citing people flaking, one might assume that the traits you're applying to an entire generation of individuals may just be your shitty friends. Little bubbles at the top of reddit don't matter either.
Congrats on finally being old enough to start blaming the younger generations. Here's your tropey millennial participation trophy.
Many people aren't good at phone calls. You know why? Because they don't talk on the phone.
OP was offering a theory that more communication moving to media that transmits communication with less or no physical/verbal context might cause difficulties transitioning to intimate physical activity.
He has the stats on his side, so he is not trying to persuade us that there is a trend that requires an explanation in the first place.
I think you provided a good enough theory why it's okay that there isn't as much conventional sex happening; the next step is to see how it might not contradict his theory.
Yet another of your points that sucks, since it wasn't their "anecdata": You're replying to two different people.
> Older folks saying young people don't know how to communicate is a centuries old trope. [...] Most people can communicate just fine.
So you've missed all the myriad "I hardly ever answer when my phone rings, and never initiate any phone calls myself" comments in various threads here on HN?
> Many people aren't good at phone calls. You know why? Because they don't talk on the phone.
Yeah, exactly. Or perhaps the other way around: They don't dare talk on the phone because they know they suck at it.
So... Do you think all those "I never use my phone for actual phone calls" comments on here are made by oldsters much more than youngsters?
By my experience and observation, porn is really bad for oneself, and it’s really addicting. I’m a millennial male, and at some point, all four of us in my friend group realized and mentioned we are addicted to porn.
I still have addiction issues, but I’ve managed to reduce my use on average to once every 2-4 weeks from 4-5+ times a week, and the benefits to my entire life and being have been immense immense immense.
I definitely believe you, and well aware you are not alone in the peergroup, I just personally can't imagine my relationship to porn ever winning out over real sex. Even bad sex is better than the best porn.
If you’re a porn user, I would suggest that you give it a try and observe what happens in your direct experience. Take a break from porn and masturbation. I think that if your discernment is subtle and sensitive enough, you will definitely notice something. What’s the harm in a fun little experiment?
Sometimes, science lags behind a bit on describing and explaining the phenomena of this universe. This doesn’t invalidate the occurrence of the phenomena themselves or make them inexistent. Sometimes, science just needs a bit more time to catch up, and improve its sophistication and paradigms.
What would the science explain? that people like sexual activity, alone or with partner? that's not exactly new. A habit becomes a problem when it is compulsive. This is rare. It's also not an entirely new situation. For most of history prostitution was widely available, even state-regulated for low prices in cases. But it s not like they all became sex addicts, it was rare.
And porn has only been ubiquitous and effortlessly available for what, maybe a decade or two. It stands to reason that the scientific examination of the consequences is not completed yet.
Not meeting people anymore, because of the pandemic, had a much bigger impact for me. I never was particular successful with dating apps, real-life worked magnitides better.
I have started to look into sexuality and tantra, and it really seems like there are some effects people will only see after 5-6 days abstinence.
And yes, the added energy will definitely also make men more willing to do the hunt, if they don't ejaculate 2 times a day.
Porn, however, seems to be the enabler of so much ejaculation.
Then again: The risk / unknowns of getting a partner can definitely also outweigh the cons of abstinence.
You know this sounds creepy right? Misogynistic?
Women are more than trophies to be won in a hunt. They're people, just like you and I.
And this comment is also a prime example of the derailment that leads to the vanilla meeting between the genders.
(I expect people to be able the read "masculine core" for men and "feminine core" for women)
Do you also take issue with the phrases like "How to win his heart" or "You need to win her over"?
Perhaps it is you with your interpretation that is misogynistic. The person was writing focusing on men, but both men and women are on the hunt for a compatible partner with which they could build a fulfilling relationship.
Is this not begging the question? A cursory glance through pubmed doesn't show evidence for this.
If you were to say you did most other tasks four to five times a week you would call it a habit and not an addiction.
Certainly compulsive sexual behavior, hypersexuality disorder, and sexual addiction have many hits in pubmed but the requirements seem to require significant negative impacts on one's life and not the actions themselves (or necessarily even the frequency) as the issue.[1]
But not from a scientific perspective. ... But go on, go on...
> it’s widespread porn use, which has extremely detrimental effects on your dopamine system, which leads to something you might term ‘lack of charisma, confidence and vital energy’, which leads to less people having sex due to confidence/charisma issues and lack of any drive.
Your perspective is wrong and your individual direct experience means nothing and cannot be generalised to others. If you (and your pear group) decide porn is bad for you and you don't watch it anymore, that's your perfectly fine decision -- no one forces porn on you! But do not generalise, please.
Say: 'I was an addict and porn was bad for me.' Do not say: 'porn is highly addictive and bad.'
Porn is quite unlike alcohol. More like chocolate, maybe, but don't cite me on that.
If I could give 2 pieces of advice to all young people (men in particular) it would be to stay off dating apps and leave the porn alone. Go talk to women in real life, as long as you're not trying to get laid with a 30 second conversation you can build those connections up over time and you'll see the difference it makes.
What is rarely talked about is that a lot of porn consumption is done by married men, which leads one to think that the problem is not changing morale norms amongst the youth, but in fact porn itself, better yet: instant access to free algorithmically formulated dopamine stimulation.
The public discourse on sex is also mostly negative and discouraging. And this is what we meditate on a daily basis -- when you hear more about women feeling the need to wear, well weapons, when going out than you hear them wanting to be courted, well then I'd rather go and drink a bear and play some billiard with my mates.
I have recently started reading the works of John Gray (the one with Venus and Mars) and David Deida. Men that provide a somewhat coherent narrative and definitely provide material better to mediate on than the mass media.
Does anyone have some recommendation on literature supporting men courting women?
That would basically lead to ignoring anyone expecting to be courted, but I don't think I'd lose much in that.
Following stupid dating game rules is stupid.
Women do it all the time and quickly learn the intricacies of dating at a young age. Friendship and courtship are two different beasts and I bet women would like to be able to go on great dates with men who know have at least done a minimum of research in this area.
Sure, there are many snake oil dating "gurus" out there but I think many men could genuinely benefit from _some_ form of this.
Women also have those intricacies thrust upon them, and often at a young age.
Most of the reasonably attractive girls I've known, as friends or more than friends, have been getting creeped on since they were like 12. I can think of at least one girl who got pregnant in 8th grade.
For women it's more of a survival strategy, while for dudes it's more of a hunting strategy.
> Sure, there are many snake oil dating "gurus" out there but I think many men could genuinely benefit from _some_ form of this.
In theory I'm okay with this, dudes could use a lesson or two, but in practice as you said there are a lot of snake oil types, and the culture that comes with it is often toxic as fuck. I used to bartend in college and a lil bit after and I saw some shady behavior come out of what were clearly PUA bros. Plus I don't want any well spoken, put together, respectful competition.
If it was just so simple as to be a good listener. Then I think a lot more of the classic "nerds" would have hit it of hard with the ladies ;)
It's pretty difficult to fail to classify kind behavior imo, barring people with exceptionally poor empathy skills
Instead, although “nice” almost certainly has some culturally specific Shibboleths, I would say the basic test is where someone is on the selfish-empathetic scale, and further to empathic is a good thing in a partner.
This is generally a great way to make friends. This is not how you court a partner. People will tell you about exceptional circumstances but they're just that - exceptional circumstances.
Evidence? Many friendships have a way of turning into relationships, because it's so easy to show off things to your friend that make you attractive and desirable as a partner. It even happens without people intending it!
The stats back this up. You might be living in a world of survivorship/confirmation bias. You’re only acknowledging the ones that worked and not all the ones where the guy/gal never had any advances accepted. I know many women in my own personal life who seem to think no one was attracted to them until I ask them, “how many men asked you out?” They then realized there were plenty of men who were attracted to them - just none that they wanted…
So they all got together/started to date as complete strangers? Even if they were loose acquaintances for some time, that's plenty enough for the whole "get to know each other" dynamic to get going. 'Dating culture' is an anomaly, people were never intended to court each other like that.
Yes or as loose acquaintances (they would never call each other friends or anything of the sort - just that they knew of their partner but that's about it). Not everyone was like random bumping into people off the street but almost all of them were not that far off from that.
I know dozens and dozens of relationships and none of them were friends before they got together. After all - they all needed to find each other physically attractive. If they didn't - it was never going to work. That is one thing that is remarkably common among all of them too - they all distinctly find their partner when they met them and now as physically attractive. There is no bridging that gap and no amount of "power of friendship" will fill that hole.
There's plenty of ways in a real-world context. No, friendship alone will not do it of course, but having the right attitude will. She really needs to find you intuitively compelling in a general sense, and this will be practically interchangeable with physical attractiveness in her mind. One reason I know this is that it works just fine the other way around. Many guys have experienced finding a woman very 'plain' and uninteresting, but then radically changing their mind about her after she got the chance. That woman has just become "attractive" to them in a very real sense, even though nothing physical about her has changed.
This is very much "power of friendship" put into different wording. It's the same thing, man. Stop saying this is normal - it's by definition exceptional. I'm not saying it can't happen. I'm saying it's hella unlikely and no one should rely on that as a mechanism because it generally doesn't work.
Also - just to let you know - never tell a woman that you are dating/married/whatever that you didn't find her physically attractive. (ever) This is how I 100% know you don't know anything about women in the USA. That woman would be bawling her eyes out as soon as you said that shit. Unbelievable that you're acting as if you're the source of all information about how to date women. JFC. Are you that out of touch with how much most women in the USA are deeply ingrained with associating their natural beauty with their own worth? Are you even remotely aware of it? If you were - you'd know that if you ever told your significant other that you grew to find her attractive but you didn't find her attractive to begin with - you'd be broken up with on the spot. That's incredibly insensitive.
Just because you don't want to phrase things like that to anyone does not mean they don't happen to people. What you said is just more evidence that our culture/"folk" worldview conflates physical attractiveness and general relationship-worthiness; you're taking this conflation at face value, just in a slightly different context, and saying that it's thus impossible to work on being more valued in the context of a relationship. (After all, how many people really want to date someone they don't find physically attractive? That's why she's bawling her eyes out - you've just said to her face that you wouldn't have wanted to date her in the first place!) Which doesn't make all that much sense now, does it?
(I'm not saying that your attitude is not common. It is both very common and quite dysfunctional. Including, of course, for the women who are drawn into putting so much reliance on their physical attractiveness, and so little on everything else that could make them more appealing and desirable. This is, by the way, a common complaint from feminist(!)-leaning folks - it's neither some sort of secret nor something that has ever marked anyone as "out of touch".)
> ... and no one should rely on that as a mechanism ...
It's not like you've proposed any alternative in this thread. You've even said that some non-trivial fraction of guys are basically seen as undateable, so even a fairly low chance of success would still be better than that.
That of course assumes that men and women work the same in this respect. There are so many differences between the sexes, both biological / hormonal and social / expectations, that this is not a given. (Though yes, personally I'd guess we're rather similar. Just pointing out that it's not a given, at least not just because it works that way for men.)
* On reading: For most people we need better role models than our parents. For sexuality this is probably even ore true. * Every person is not so different. It would appear that sexual dreams are in variation of 10 different "universal" ones. * Studying the underlying dynamics is not about trying hard, indeed it is the contrary. You probably don't even know why the comment "Don't try to hard, just listen and be patient." is merited? If you read you will ;)
You would probably be one of these people who find it natural to talk with women, court them, etc. Congratulations. It is like a heiress telling her poor friends not to study hard to get a job -- just get money from your parents!
All the books I have read could only demonstrate love, or try to articulate it, not outline a techne for it. I think in these matters music can be more instructive perhaps?
Either way, I still firmly believe that you cannot encounter each woman you meet as some token of the grand category "Woman," we are all just people, and our gender is defined by society, but love shouldn't be.
Remember with all things related to human passion and desire, the thing you should fear the most is actually getting what you want. The best you can hope for is to be surprised by people, to be understood by them, to be transformed by them.
EDIT: here is a book for you, its pretty good
https://www.amazon.com/Desire-Love-Lauren-Berlant/dp/0615686...
If anything, in your schema, it would make sense to read books on the subject that are written by women.
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/53720/53720-h/53720-h.htm
I read it and agree.
A feel like in my experience the one thing they don't teach in school is social skills.
Seriously, read the article, it's good.
To me, the article seems just a long collections of folks contributing speculations.
I might be biased because the wife of my cousing-in-law is researching these topics scientifically
- "Many -- or all -- of these things may be true."
- "Let’s consider this lure for a moment."
- "I can’t know that they were representative, though I did seek out people with a range of experiences."
- "Some observers have suggested..."
There's a huge amount of positing that something may possibly be a cause, often at best backed up with research that shows that it exists (as opposed to evidence that there's a strong correlation or any kind of scientific testing to indicate a causal relationship). There's also a ton of "person X says Y in their new book, could they be right?".
I don't understand where the praise for this article is coming from, if this is actually where the research on dating behavior is right now, then it's pseudoscience. I honestly would have expected HN to be a lot more critical of this, I've seen articles with less conjecture than this one get torn to shreds on here.
Kinda like Freud, enough kernels of truth to be kinda accurate in certain situations, but nothing that would stand up to any real scientific rigor.
Approaching or chasing women, purely to try to further the species, is now profoundly uncool and stigmatized. The best way to get sex now is To actually build or organize something meaningful which has the side effect of putting you in touch or opening reasonable conversation pathways to a wide range of people.
Unless you have a logical, justified reason to talk to a woman for “business purposes,” you probably shouldn’t bother. Everyone is too busy, and sex is felt to be a third place priority behind work.
I am married and don’t need to play this game anymore, but I have noticed that organizing a event to support a “for good cause” has enabled me to talk to any woman, anywhere, of every age.
If I were single, I would very much focus on building a business; startup; community which has a public good element to it.
Unfortunately, not everyone in society is a creative entrepreneur type.
For me, I am highly introverted and don’t want anything to do with most avenues for social interaction.
Another strategy: Learn to make friends with women and ask them for help. That’s how I met my wife.
Having several female friends who can give you advice and referrals is 10,0000x better than playing the tinder game.
Deep Friendship with women is something I have learned is one of the more important aspects of the Richness of my life.
Women will get you other women, trust me.
My best friends are women. Trust me, this doesn’t get you anywhere. I met my wife while I was out dancing and I seduced her. I found that method to be the best of anything I’ve ever seen and most of my male friends would agree.
Friends, in my experience, are completely worthless when it comes down to getting partners. Many friends don’t know single people or single people who are of interest to you. Advice from women is also incredibly bad - as it’s usually given with a lot of assumptions that the woman deeply loves you already. (I see this online a lot) Whereas men’s advice tends to be a lot more from the opposite side - and is a lot better for that.
I like the saying - you don’t ask a fish how to catch it - you ask a fisherman. It truly sums it up well.
My understanding is it's because nobody can afford their own place - either living with their parents or roommates.
They simply are struggling, very few have moved up in their career paths. And so far have been one of the most lazy generations.
There isn't much of a ladder to climb as Millennials are still there to fill the void. Millennials have work experience and work hard.
But there is a notable gap and a Gen Zer is easy to pick from the crowd.
Not all are bad though. In fact many didn't have to struggle like a Millennial did early in life. My first 5 years in the work force was slow moving up the ladder. Entering the workforce in 2008 was not pretty for me.
Problem with GenZ is they didn't eat the flintstone vitamins we Millennial ate, and it shows.
Fact of the matter is that people mature as they age, and gain responsibilities that require them to knuckle down.
https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
18- to 29-year-olds living with their parents was 46 before the pandemic, up to 52% now. Although it is more a regression to the mean, historically.
I also believe it is a significant input to the trend of younger people not "bothering" to work hard. From the perspective of someone very young, it may well appear that working 40+ hours per week does little to increase their actual standard of living. This is historically demonstrated to reduce entry into the workforce so long as people are otherwise able to meet their needs (e.g., not starve or go homeless), and in the U.S. an 18 year-old used to be able to get a full-time job then with one or two buddies afford their own apartment (and own room). In many places across the U.S., they will be sharing rooms in an apartment which may be a reduction in standard of living from "mom's basement".
Both "mom's basement" and room sharing may be perceived as low class and undesirable, particularly for a young man, as status is one of the historically strong factors for attracting women.
This also contributes to the housing shortage as the wealthy buy up property as real estate investments and either rent them out, leaving renters with no equity to realise into deposits for better housing down the line, or leave them empty.
This is introducing some other topic into the discussion. The problem of housing price increases is unrelated to this, and more likely related to destruction of new-business formation. The American middle class has always been lead by small businesses, and new business formation has been steadily dropping for decades. Small businesses do not suffer the same issues as working in large corporations, so when large corporations make up larger and larger percentages of the workforce, they also shift other aspects related to employment and income.
> This also contributes to the housing shortage as the wealthy buy up property as real estate investments and either rent them out, leaving renters with no equity to realise into deposits for better housing down the line, or leave them empty.
The housing shortage is completely a regulatory problem where the supply is artificially constricted in ways it was never previously controlled. People often think of housing as somehow not falling into the same supply and demand price function problems as other products, but this simply isn't true. The "wealthy" could never hope to purchase all of the bread fast enough to make any real dent in the price because of how rapidly the production of bread would be increased with their artificial increase in demand. This scheme can only work with artificial constriction on supply that comes from the regulations on the construction of new residential units, because without these regulatory constrictions developers would build houses until either the investors run out of money or we are all working in the home construction industry.
I know supply side restriction constrains the creation of new housing as well, but the wealthy buying up properties in cities and renting them out or leaving them unoccupied restricts access to property in areas where land for new building is limited. You can build suburbs all day out in the stix (theoretically) but nobody who works in a city wants a 2 hour commute each way.
Depends on the city of course; I'm thinking Toronto, New York and London where empty houses are a big problem but I know that SF has a major issue with NIMBYism so YMMV.
People just don't need to get bored any more. There is always instant, easy comfort available. I think that's why it's harder to find motivation to go out and do things that are even more fun, and certainly more meaningful, but which are also more work.
As a Z-ennial, this was one of my confusions, growing up. I would read articles on dating that, in today's standards, I think would not hold up.
It appears as it is OK for people the merely point out how _not_ to court, and then men, automatically, knows how to do it right.
I have to imagine that pre-agrarian humans occasionally made the wrong choice there and the whole tribe starved, so genes for population regulation were likely selected for. Less sex as a response to less space (at your parents house or in the tiny apartment that you can barely afford) seems like the straightforward and favorable way for those genes to express.
> A mechanism for population self-regulation: Social density suppresses GnRH expression and reduces reproductivity in voles
I wouldn't expect an absence of food to do it, but instead a surplus of neighbors. By the time overpopulation starts affecting the food source it's a little late to do anything about it.
> percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent > U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high
Basically highschoolers are getting less pregnant (good) and having less sex, this might not extent to people between 20 and 30 years old.
Here is another article with more detailled data, they conclude that it is likely caused by US teens being less risk averse (correlation with less drinking, less smoking and less driving: teens are just being more responsible than their parents) : https://ifstudies.org/blog/fewer-american-high-schoolers-hav...
I have spent the last 7-8 years studying like my life depended on it, and I have little to show for it. I am autistic, so I haven't developed the social skills necessary. Every social interaction is a conscious process and I have to consciously read everything to interact "normally".
The effort is simply not worth it. Why should I even bother approaching a person when with high probability they will think I am a creep? Why bother ruining my mood and another person's? Is sex worth the effort? Is a relationship with a person who will end up judging me for being too weird worth it? Is the time and effort spent in all that "worth it"?
If my last 2 relationships are any indication, a relationship just isn't worth the hassle.
Relationships are hard, even with good people, so try to lower the stakes. Have a friendly coffee with no real expectations with more people. More dates with less expectation. This is what helped me. I said something completely stupid and autistic on my first date with my now wife, but she stuck with me because she saw potential.
Relationships are a numbers game. And to help decide who to keep and who to discard, I like the Secretary Problem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secretary_problem
While not specific to young people, it seems birth rates are strongly correlated to religiosity.
> Model 1 confirms that women for whom religion is important in daily life have higher fertility intentions (table 4). Compared to non-religious women, who intend two children on average, women for whom religion is somewhat important intend 0.31 additional children and women for whom religion is very important in daily life intend 0.69 additional children.
Its sad the article didn't address this topic at all. When you get finasteride for hair loss the first thing they tell you about is sexual side effects. My wife didn't know about the sexual side-effects of hormonal birth control until she was in her late 20's. And she had to learn it from me... No doctor ever mentions it. The article doesn't mention. The clinical literature is clear that hormonal birth control has an effect on libido and you can see thousands of forum posts by women complaining of this exact thing. Its bizarre to me that more people don't talk about it.
It absolutely suppressed the sex drive of my first girlfriend. I was the one to tell her about it (before we dated, even). Ironically for her that might not have been a bad thing in the end.
My wife? It turns her in to a raging, emotional, monster. The exact opposite of what she’s normally like. Luckily she didn’t go on it until we were dating for quite a while. I imagine that if she were put on it at age 14 she might have thought that’s just the way she is.
There has also been at least one study that showed that hormonal birth control can change your preference is mates. You’re put on it early, date people, and eventually marry. You go off of it to have a child, and suddenly you aren’t as attracted to your husband. Fun stuff.
Mine too. It was fairly difficult to convince her that it was not a "real" emotion and had an external cause.
Its given me a very negative few of hormonal birth control. The copper IUD has some downsides but seems to be the ideal option.
By the way, chocolate cravings due to high estrogen - or some knock-on hormonal effect - are absolutely real.
This is the shitty part about realizing how things change your mood
As someone else mentioned, there are those who see this as a feature, not a bug. Scary to think about.
A potentially larger factor from the medication angle is antidepressants - usage of those is up ~10 percentage points over the same time frame, and decreased libido is a common side effect of many of the most frequently prescribed antidepressants. (I think this is probably also a minor factor compared to cultural explanations, but I'm mentioning it for the sake of completeness.)
[0] https://www.un.org/development/desa/pd/sites/www.un.org.deve...
To enjoy sex, or to even have a sex drive, you have to be not taking anti-depression medication. Maybe it's the rise in depressed people[1]?
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[1] I am one of that number, and take meds, and suffer as stated.
I was one of those who took an SSRI and had a change in my sex drive. I took escitalopram and it killed my sex drive, doc switched me to trazodone and things returned to normal.
If your SSRI is causing you problems, talk to your doctor, they can switch it up. Everyone responds differently, you should be able to find one that won't mess with it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EXU0kRSV1rU
and believed it you might come to the conclusion that most people having casual sex aren't having sex because they want to have sex but because they want to influence their social standing in their group.
I'm particularly amused by the homosocial character of the pick-up and seduction industry, that is, it is men talking to other men about their conquests and attempted conquests. It's like they are doing it to prove they are not gay, not because they really want sex or other intimacy.
It is, literally, living with one's parents. If I had to live with my parents, not only would I never be able to have sex in my own house, but I'd still - as an adult - have to lie about going to someone's house to have sex. I couldn't do the above example. No matter how old I am, my mother treats me as a child, generally with horrible sayings like, "my house, my rules" and the amount of contribution doesn't matter. As you might have guessed, my mother is conservative. My dad was too, while he was alive.
- romance being segregated from the routines of daily life
- the game-ification of dating apps
- the fact younger generations seem to be unable to read other peoples emotions
- the most 1/3 attractive women got 2/3 of all messages
- the most attractive men got 11 times as many messages as lowest
- the way men and women are emulating porn
- women becoming anti-men from poor repeated sexual experiences
It feels like we are heading into a dystopia. I don't see how this continues on without an extreme reactionary events. Perhaps we already seeing this with new political movements like the article mentions some right wing groups are antiporn.
I'm beginning to think the sexual revolution and social media revolution together are just too much for the majority of humans. We aren't gods, we are primates. Comparing yourself to thousands of people is going to crush you. Treating people as commodities for sex or relationships is going to burn you out.
This is all super concerning, and gives me a lot of new insights into why I'm seeing so many young women and men become "revolutionary" albeit in very different ways.
Significant declines in sperm counts
Increased medicating; ADHD, Anxiety, Depression, Hormonal Birth Control
Childhood Obesity over 20% in the USGranted, the decline in sperm count is caused by something, but in relation to impact on behaviors, the decline will cause (as proxy) changes, and of those changes could be the increased medication, for example.
It may be the obesity decreases sperm count, but sperm count is dropping in people who are not obese. More than a decade ago there were reports on studies where the authors made simple extrapolations that sperm count would be zero by 2050, but these simple extrapolations are holding true in today's trends.
Some studies will bin people by BMI or some metric but fail to do any analysis on whether people aren't fatter within the bins. E.g. if the bell curve shifts right, the average weight of people within the slimmest band will still be heavier than before; even if the maximum BMI/weight is still capped at the same upper bound. And the deltas on sperm counts within healthy weight ranges are very small in most studies to begin with.
edit: searched in the past; not the few minutes since your comment*
Now present your evidence.
If you aren't good at sex or have bad sex, practice. That includes becoming physically fit to increase your stamina and strength during sex with your partner.
This philosophy is a recipe for a disastrous relationship. Every single person I've ever talked to in a long-running successful marriage has told me that sex is not a substitute for emotional intimacy, and that emotional intimacy is the core of their marriage that survives even as they age and even as they start to have sex less.
> Take for example the online hate and real-life violence waged by the so-called incels—men who claim to be “involuntarily celibate.” Their grievances, which are illegitimate and vile, offer a timely reminder that isolated young people are vulnerable to extremism of every sort.
Sure, the "remedies" some incels resort to are illegitimate and vile, but to dismiss their actual grievances as such feels a bit weird after having spent most of a long, long article describing exactly how the incels' grievances arose. Especially apparent in the section on dating apps: The overwhelming majority of guys get absolutely no responses. Sure seems to point towards women being much more choosy than men, which is what I've understood, in a nutshell, the incels' main grievance to be.
This article is filled with baseless pseudoscience and random cultural anxiety, and without any real substance the article just ties all of it to this phenomenon that isn't even really definitively bad. People look at anything different about teenagers and young adults, and this becomes an opportunity to air out every single grievance we have with younger cultures, even though we often have zero evidence that there's any causal link between our anxiety and the result exists, or even that the end result is itself bad.
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Oh, young people have less sex? This is definitely a problem, and judging by the article and some of the comments I'm seeing around it, the cause is:
- Too much hookup culture.
- Not enough hookup culture, nobody is hitting on each other anymore.
- The hookup culture is in the wrong place, people don't meet up in bars anymore.
- Those darn dating apps. You can't form a connection on a screen.
- Sexting doesn't count, but also why aren't people sexting enough?
- Young people just don't know how to shake someone's hand and look them in the eye anymore.
- They'd rather play video games, and the idea someone might like a video game more than sex causes me emotional stress for some reason.
- They're taking this too seriously, they expect everyone to be an expert at sex, and their standards are too high.
- They're not taking this seriously enough, the young expect to just be able to do sex really well out of the gate, because complaining about #$X&ing sexual work ethic is apparently where we are as a society.
- Have we tried training them to do sex better?
- Pornography. You know, just in general.
- Women are terrified of men who are bad at sex, and so now we all have to deal with the fallout caused by men who are bad at sex and giving the entire gender a bad name.
- It's the hormones/drugs, are we giving kids too much?
- It's too little chemicals, are they eating right?
- Advertising makes people uncomfortable in their bodies.
- Maybe people feel too comfortable in their bodies? We don't have evidence for this, but let's imagine if it was happening.
- Women aren't asking for specific sex acts that we think they should be asking for. Is it a problem with education, maybe they just don't know those positions/acts feel good? But at least we can all agree that it is definitely a problem that they're not doing sex the way I want them to.
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This is just a laundry list of everything older generations hate about the youth, with a thin premise tied to it to justify interviewing a bunch of people who are all like, "well, instinctively we feel like hitting on someone is now creepy, and we feel that's bad."
But really, you find out that the big objections outside of just general "everything is worse now" sentiments are that it might mean immigration increases to sustain the population, and also Toys R Us is having more trouble. Which... just heck off, now we're going to get mad at Millennials/Gen-Z for not supporting the toy market well enough? Throw in a dash of "it's the younger generation's fault that incels exist" and "the stuff I think is normal some people find creepy" just for flavor.
I want to complain that there's no way to win, that if Gen-Z was having more sex we'd be having the exact same conversation except coming up with reasons why increased sex was bad. But honestly, the specific argument is not the real problem. I just feel like people in the media need to take a chill pill and leave Gen-Z alone. I don't see solid evidence in this article that any of this is a problem, and as long as all of the researchers they interview can talk about their feelings, my feeling is that declining teen pregnancy is probably a good thing, and it's a thing that older generations have wanted for a long time.
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I also can't even begin to express how frustrating paragraphs like this are:
> Humans’ sexual behavior is one of the things that distinguish us from other species: Unlike most apes, and indeed most animals, humans have sex at times and in configurations that make conception not just unlikely but impossible (during pregnancy, menopause, and other infertile periods; with same-sex partners; using body parts that have never issued babies and never will). As a species, we are “bizarre in our nearly continuous practice of sex,” writes the UCLA professor Jared Diamond, who has studied the evolution of human sexuality. “Along with posture and brain size, sexuality completes the trinity of the decisive aspects in which the ancestors of humans and great apes diverged.” True, nobody ever died of not getting laid, but getting laid has proved adaptive over millions of years: We do it because it is fun, because it bonds us to one another, because it makes us happy.
> A fulfilling sex life is not necessary for a good life, of course, but lots of research confirms that it contributes to one. Having sex is associated not only with happiness, but with a slew of other health benefits. The relationship between sex and wellness, perhaps unsurprisingly, goes both ways: The better off you are, the better off your sex life is, and vice versa. Unfortunately, the converse is true as well. Not having a partner—sexual or romantic—can be both a cause and an effect of discontent. Moreover, as American social institutions have withered, having a life partner has become a stronger predictor than ever of well-being.
There are other animals that have sex for fun. No, the fundamental thing that distinguishes humans from the beasts is not that we wear condoms, come on. There's this tone running through the article of "we're not saying you have to have sex to be emotionally fulfilled as a human being, but we are going to constantly look at you weird and act like you might be emotionally stunted because of it."
I'm aroace, so I may be over-sensitive to this kind of, "we're not saying there's anything wrong with you, we're just going to imply it over and over again" talk, but holy crud, could older generations stop using everyone else's sex life to validate whatever insecurities they have, even for just ten seconds? There's very little substance in this article beyond pop-science and people writing books about mindfulness, and then in very worried tones saying, "but maybe these two things are related, let's consider that." There's so many non-sequiturs and random jumps in logic. It really feels like just an excuse to talk about how the kids these days are all wrong.
A lot of the social articles that get posted on here are even worse than this one (and this one is incredibly bad - complete nonsense) but the discussion can be good.
> I'm aroace, so I may be over-sensitive to this kind of, "we're not saying there's anything wrong with you, we're just going to imply it over and over again" talk
That is literally what it is. I'm also ace and the first thought that came to my head was "oh boy, I can't wait to see what the article and comments say."
Well, judging from many of the quotes in the article, it seems to be a problem for many of these young people, according to these young people themselves. Just because you can do without doesn't mean everyone should have to.
> This is just a laundry list of everything older generations hate about the youth
Funny, to me it looked like a list of problems young(ish) people themselves were having, plus some possible explanations from more or less popular science. Or are you claiming the authors just plain made up all those quotes from interviewees?
> I also can't even begin to express how frustrating paragraphs like this are:
> > Humans’ sexual behavior is one of the things that distinguish us from other species: Unlike most apes, and...
WTF is wrong with that paragraph? It's just (a pop-sci resume of) simple fact. Your frustration at it indicates a fault in your frustrativity [You read it here first! (?)] more than in the article.
> There's this tone running through the article of "we're not saying you have to have sex to be emotionally fulfilled as a human being,
That's because the overwhelming majority of people do have to have sex to be emotionally fulfilled as a human being. And, you know, the overwhelming majority is "the norm", so defines what's "norm-al".
> but we are going to constantly look at you weird and act like you might be emotionally stunted because of it."
Just because you don't want to be called "emotionally stunted" doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't: I don't know what range of emotions you're capable of, and you don't know mine. But as I understand the concept of "emotions", they're fairly intimately connected to hormones and sex drives and stuff. So unless and until we can look around inside each other's heads and examine each other's emotions first-hand, it seems fairly plausible that a-sexual people as a group might have a more limited -- colloquially, "stunted" -- range of emotions than people who aren't have as a group. If you inist on taking that as a slur, that's your choice. If you don't, then it isn't.
> I'm aroace, so I may be over-sensitive
Yup.
And, hey, "aro-" means "a-romantic", right? But "romantic feelings" are emotions; so how the fuck could you think you're not "emotionally stunted" if you don't have those? Compared to people who are otherwise similar to you, but in addition are ro- without the a-, you obviously, logically, have a narrower set of feelings.
> but holy crud, could older generations stop... [yadda, yadda.]
Sounds like wild projection caused by over-sensitivity. (Then again, this free on-line psychiatric diagnosis is worth every penny you paid for it. My degree in psychiatry is from Has Watched Frasier On TV University.)
There are a couple of problems here:
- the plural of anecdote is not data, and I don't see any evidence that the specific unhappy people being interviewed need a widespread societal change rather than, say, therapy.
- the article is light on any compelling evidence that the levels of happiness being expressed are abnormal or atypical from previous generations. This is really just a general problem with the article, it throws out stats and fails to connect them to the overall narrative or to contextualize them, it just kind of assumes they are connected.
And again, just really sloppy data journalism here. From the article:
> In reporting this story, I spoke and corresponded with dozens of 20- and early-30-somethings in hopes of better understanding the sex recession. I can’t know that they were representative, though I did seek out people with a range of experiences.
Oh, you found a couple dozen teenagers that are unhappy and willing to talk to you? Color me super-impressed, that's definitely something I should take seriously. /s
> Or are you claiming the authors just plain made up all those quotes from interviewees?
I'm claiming that the author should be better at understanding how data works and how causal relationships work, especially since the article itself calls out how anecdotal interviews led to moral panics over largely non-existent issues like college orgies. To borrow the exact same terminology as this article: I feel like people should have learned something from those earlier moral panics about treating "I feel" statements as fact.
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> WTF is wrong with that paragraph? It's just (a pop-sci resume of) simple fact.
The pop-sci part. Humans aren't the only animals that masturbate or mate for fun. Humans also aren't the only animals to practice monogamy, and we're not the only animals to exhibit homosexual behavior. It's a "pop-sci" fact in the sense that it's just flat out wrong, our sexuality is not that special.
It's also pop-sci in the sense that it ignores a huge number of much larger differences between us and most animals in order to (with no evidence) assert that this is a fundamental difference that needs to be treated with a huge amount of reverence. It's just silly to say that sexuality is a bigger separator between us and apes than, just as one example, cooking.
But people have been living emotionally satisfying lives without sex since early human history. It's not just bad science, it's just flat out illogical to anyone who's ever looked at animals, or read a Bible/Other-religious-text, or studied any ancient history, or looked around them at the world. You don't have to be asexual for this, there have been celibate people for a long time.
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> [A bunch of nonsense about how "stunted" should be used in the broadest possible neutral sense whenever the word is questioned, and then used in its more common negative form whenever we evaluate the patterns of the youth].
:) I don't often get attacked this way nowadays, so it's in some ways kind of interesting to see. If we take your assertion at face value that "stunted" literally just means I experience fewer categories of emotion, then by extension, it's not clear why that's bad or why we need to be particularly worried about whether young people are boning.
On top of that, this displays a lack of understanding about what sex drive is, and what the differences are between romantic and sexual attraction are. It's very odd to me to see someone categorize specifically sexual attraction as an emotion, if someone had a large appetite and ate a lot of food, we wouldn't say that was an emotion. Sexual expression is often connected to romantic feeling and sexual expression often enhances romantic feeling, but it is not itself inherently romantic. And it's kind of silly to argue that it is, because the whole debate about pornography and hookup culture is based around the fact that sex can be separated from romance.
This article doesn't really seem to understand that point.
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The TLDR of all of this is that the article doesn't offer evidence of anything, it doesn't even offer evidence that this is a problem. It interviews a bunch of book offers and some professors, and it interviews some younger people who are frustrated with romance/sex right now.
Well, congrats, people have been frustrated about romance/sex forever, it's not new. And it's an unscientific, unsubstantiated jump to say that just because younger people are having less sex that the "dozens" of people interviewed must therefore be representative of the entire demographic.
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> Sounds like wild projection caused by over-sensitivity.
To be clear, I'm not the person writing articles in a major newspaper complaining that millennials are killing Toys 'R Us.
Incels show up in stats but most everyone is suffering. I do know that victim blaming will continue while we learn the hard way why we had traditions in the first place.
I think, it's simply the patriarchy is crumbling. With virtually mandatory monogamy, women had to see where to get a mate after the "top 20%" were gone, now they simply share the "good ones", whatever that means.
The other side was obviously, the "bottom 80%" of men had to put in less effort, because they just had to wait for the women who didn't get "a good one". And now they wake up and nobody wants them anymore.
To me this is a temporary problem. Men will learn to adapt, and things will get to a less skewed distribution again.
In my opinion none of what you are proposing will happen. There will be a substantial uncontrolled reaction. In my opinion men and women need each other and if men withdraw and stop trying women will also suffer.
Women judged on appearence and men judged on financial success.
Women judge harshly on appearance as much as men. It's just that women tend to not be as forward with it. But women's behavior on dating apps clearly shows that women are actually far more picky than men when it comes to physical appearance.
Financial success is important too - but you gotta start somewhere and looks are an easy way to start.
For most men - this is unsolvable as the height standards are deeply ingrained in our culture and only 15% of men will ever meet that criterion.
Unfortunately - this behavior has cascaded over into the general environment. Most women I talk to now are very explicit about their beauty standards they have for the men they’re interested in dating - and they’re always quite a bit more harsh than the men I’ve talked to.
But I’ve also lived on the west coast where the gender ratios from 18-35 are the worst in the country. Any major metro in the US has more men than women from 18-35 but still - it’s really bad over here. Women can be picky because they’re fine with being alone (or having a dog). Most men aren’t (thus the incredibly high suicide rates).
> I don't believe that any sensible woman would only care about how handsome their partner is.
I've never said that. It's just that matters upfront the most. Most people are not interested in giving others a chance because we don't live in a world of scarcity anymore for dating. If a woman is interested in dating - she can open an app and get a date setup the next day. It almost doesn't matter who the woman is. The same cannot be said for most men. This leads to people in real life knowing there's an alternative and banking on that alternative. Yes, maybe they want to meet someone in real life but if real life isn't delivering what they want - they go online and can find something closer to what they want.
The data backs this up. The general narrative of dating currently backs this up.
Ultimately - the strategy doesn't work great for marriage or long term relationships (because the men they tend to match with are not willing to commit to them) but it does work great for casual dating and getting sex.
Again - you have to ask yourself - how many people really want to date someone they don't find physically attractive? The data says women are more picky about this. Most women find most men physically unattractive and they don't want to date physically unattractive men. This just isn't the case on the other side.
There are lots of factors that contribute to the gender gap in suicide in some countries, but this isn't one of them.
The older I get, the more I suspect I was probably right.
This is the biggest difference that people need to understand. Most men would have sex with most women. Most women would not have sex with most men.
Even men in the top 10% of attractiveness can easily find women who won't have sex with them. Meanwhile women in the top 50% of attractiveness can effortlessly find men who will have sex with them.
.
.
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It's 3. Other people have less sex than you think.
Paints a different picture doesn't it?
There's a bell curve but the shape of the bell and the length of the tails can really add up to a lot of area not near the middle.
One time a day only - here lies the problem.
The childless rates (25% men vs 15% women), the amount of incels (25%+ for young men), etc. it's all much higher on the male side. This isn't because men aren't interested (an incel is involuntarily celibate) but because the women aren't.
So, doesn't really follow with your theory...
One reason that isn't mentioned in the article is because the US is fundamentally based on puritanism and a lot of its values, especially concerning passion and sexuality are still prevalent in its culture.
The "All American" OJ and corn flakes breakfast and circumcision (used as a form of genital mutilation to prevent masturbation) by Kellogs is still practiced to this day. In the US, sex is heavily politicized.
On one hand, everything is hypersexualized, but there is nothing genuine about any of it. When you get to the basics of it — sex is wrong. "Look, but don't touch". Everything is relegated to the sphere of fantasy and imagination.
Especially teenage sexuality is something that's vilified to no end. You can't expect adults to have a healthy sex life if everything they know about sex so far is that it's some sort of forbidden fruit.
__________________
Eh sure. Might be wrong. This is my experience with people I've interacted with.
If circumcision had even the most tiny sliver of anything to do with it you can bet your ass that there would be an associated stereotype that's older than the US.
Teenage sex isn't vilified. It's all over in pop culture. See all the bottom of the barrel high-school drama shows that Netflix puts out for example. We don't talk about this because it's hard to reconcile with the "you're too stupid to make decisions because prefrontal cortex" message we bombard teens with at every opportunity.
Non of this is true in modern America for young folk
After the sexual revolution of that happened 60 years ago and the acceptance of casual sex even on television 40 years ago, OP is going with the “the puritans of the 1600’s are to blame”.
I LOL’ed.
I highly recommend the OP Google his closest dive bar and drink until closing time then go and change those stats personally.
They just won't admit to it openly or on surveys.
There are places where religion is common but isn't taken that seriously, and then there are places were it's common and it is taken very seriously. Sounds like your school was the former and that's fine. It doesn't preclude the existence of the latter.
The parent poster implied that people were highly bound by their religion; I simply offered a counterexample. I am not saying that abstinence until marriage never happens.
> and/or don't begin their sexual exploration until well into college
This is not relevant since the teaching is abstinence until marriage, not abstinence until college.
That isn't true. You offered a counterargument.
> This is not relevant since the teaching is abstinence until marriage, not abstinence until college.
A common effect of religious influence is delayed sexual exploration (i.e., later than what's natural given human biological development). The fact that you need this to be explained to you shows that you aren't aware of the phenomenon we're discussing. It's something that's very hard to understand if you haven't lived it.
One recurring thing in particular: religious men who have sex with men and consider themselves abstinent/faithful to their wives because "it doesn't count."
Also, the US is still super puritan, it is conservative outwardly and it makes up for it by being deviant privately, travel, most countries are much more open about sex. Be it public display of affection, legal sex work, sex education, down to just physical contact from kisses in greetings, and public nudity at the beach, etc.
Americans are, in general, prudes in public and slutty in private. While much of the world is the opposite.
[1] yes, I know that article titles are dumb and aren't chosen by the editors, not the authors.
But I also don't really see it as an issue? Overpopulation has been a looming concern for the past few generations of human existence. Letting go of our "go forth and multiply" mindset has been a few decades in the making now, and loosening our regulation/criticism of the LGBTQ community coincides with that pretty nicely. Love is a matter of reciprocal fulfillment, and much to the chagrin of the self-proclaimed gigachads browsing Orange Site and /g/, that doesn't inherently necessitate procreation or family-building.
https://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-health-sex-idUSKBN23J...
> Sexual activity was largely unchanged among unmarried women, along with no notable decline among gay men, researchers reported.
As an almost middle-aged straight man, from Europe, I see the problem described and discussed here as _mostly_ related to young men, seemingly incabable of forming normal healhy romantic relationships. There also seem a growing number of young women who cannot find a suitable partner amongst their own age group, since there are so many young men that simply don't fit the profile they're looking for.
That's obviously just anectdotal, and possibly just an old man yelling at the cloud. After all, hooking up at bars is something old people do. :D
It's definitely an issue we need to look into though. At least if we're at all interested in keeping our own cultures alive. If we don't, it's not going to be the end of civilization itself; it's just going to be the end of our own civilization since other cultures without such issues will still be around.
And the article does not that other countries are seeing the same trend--though the ones that are mentioned are also historically protestant.
I think its probably the opposite. Historical dating has been stigmatized. The norm seems to be sex first, then a relationship. Young women, in particular, but also young men, are described as "needy," "clingy," or "creepy" if they expect monogamy from the outset of dating. I'd probably still be a virgin if I had to lose it during a one night stand.
Depends how you define "positive": Sure, it's not so much condemned on puritanical grounds any more (at least not openly). But if many of the kinds of (i.e. young, single) people who used to have lots of it are now all "meh" about it, then that's not much of a "positive view", now is it?
Women, on average, are doing perfectly fine in the sexual marketplace, along with the top 10-15% of men.
edit: The above was my reflexive response to the headline. Now that I've actually read the article, I have to say that the article is very good and quite comprehensive, but it seems that it merely dances around the above issue in the "Tinder Mirage" subsection, but doesn't actually directly confront it. An unfortunate oversight.
Edit: found it; institute of family studies 2022 of no sex in the past 5 years for under 35 year olds.
https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-faith-less-sex-why-are-so-ma...
I read the chart as indicating a jump from ~15% to 28% of men 18-30 not having sex, and women from ~13% to 18%. So perhaps the simultaneous rise could be due to factors like less promiscuity overall or more selectivity, but I find that GP's reasoning is plausible for explaining why sexlessness in men rose higher and faster than that in women.
Your other comment in this overall thread gives me the impression that you actually disagree though, so I think I'm missing something and would appreciate more explanation.
It dances around the point but the GP's logic seems plausible, if exaggerated. If the increase in sexlessness among young men is ~twice that of the increase of sexlessness in young women over the same timeframe, it is quite plausible that the same men are having sex with more women.
It just is more likely for a man to only have 1-2 partners before settling down with one. While a female may have had 2-10x that number by the time they settle down.
Its that 1/8 of men that have many partners, while 4/8 woman have many partners.
A man can be a sl*t too.
But you'll find that these days a young man is more likely to want to start a family than a young woman. And this has been proven over and over again by studies.
Do you really think that this matters in a discussion? An argument is either valid or not. It doesn't matter if it's used in a currently ostracized community or by people having unhealthy views.
I was bullied in elementary school which gave me a high sensitivity to social rejection. I was really afraid of dying alone in high school. Although I was not treated cruelly as a teen I heard a lot of "be yourself", "be a decent person", "it will get better in the sweet bye and bye".
That was the beginning of seven years of despair which still affect me decades later. In particular, a lot of guys seem to focus on "being a decent person" and find that what they get is a lot of listening to women complain about their bad boyfriends. (I didn't particularly fall for that --it but I have a tenant who tells me all sorts of things that women told him that he shouldn't be repeating to me.)
I think a lot of men are in situations where they see no path forward. The blackpill incel stuff is poison but I know I felt absolutely alone (couldn't get any recognition from adults and teens that I had a problem) when I was a teenager and if Wheat Waffles had been around back then I probably would have thought "here is a movement of people like me, for the first time I feel like somebody hears me"
(My son had a friend fall under Wheat's spell and he disconnected from my son Scientology-style because my son was taller than him and was concerned my son would "heightmog" him.)
Listen or not you're going to hear more and more from people who steal the vocabulary and discursive techniques of the incels.
If people pay attention they might discover the magic keys to solving problems like "blacks vs the police", "residential segregation of racial minorities", "women getting paid less than men" and "i can't afford healthcare" that never go away -- all of them have a structure similar to the incel problem in that people are making a demand which could seem reasonable in the abstract that becomes unreasonable or unsatisfiable when you expect that some particular person in some particular situation do something for you.
Quoting from the "Age at first sex" section:
The median age at first sex declined among women born in the 1950s and 1960s, but beginning with women born in the 1970s, this trend halted at about 17.0 years of age, and the median age actually increased by almost a year among cohorts coming of age in the late 1990s. Accordingly, the “current” median age (i.e., the median for the most recent cohort for which a median can be calculated) at first sex is 17.8 for women.
A similar increase beginning with the 1982 birth cohort was seen for men (Figure 2), although median age at first sex was stable for those born between 1960 and 1985, at about 17.0. The “current” median age at first sex for men is 18.1.
So young people start having sex about a year later, men 0.1 years later than women. Not really a huge difference compared to the overall change.
If you think that women must have a lot more sex than men because they'd have an easy time finding a random man who'd sleep with them, you should consider that most women don't want to sleep with just any random man. Similarly, if men who're not having sex were fine with any random partner, they could just pay a prostitute. But clearly people have higher standards than that.
> for men is 18.1.
> men 0.1 years later than women.
18.1 - 17.8 = 0.3, not 0.1
Now, I view it as a conspiracy theory that's meant to make young guys paranoid. And of course, many of those who come up with these theories, have books and courses to sell to those who believe them.
See this article [0] discussing a study, and specifically this quote in it which I think reconciles both your point and the GP's:
> Most women and men reported at least weekly sex, and most people reported having one sexual partner in the prior year. In the most recent surveys, men age 18 to 44 were more likely to have had no partners in the past year (16 percent) compared to women (12 percent). Men also were more likely to have had three or more partners in the past year (15 percent) compared to women (7 percent).
[0]: https://news.iu.edu/stories/2020/06/iub/releases/15-sexual-i...
[0] https://mobile.twitter.com/quillette/status/1105679979256389...
You are forgetting the 4th dimension.
Men:women are born at 107:100. There are about 7% more men than women in the world at birth. This only evens out by age 40. This is due to suicide rates among men being wildly higher.
Most men and women are monogamous - but many people date. A few men sleep with many women. Many men never see a date or any sex. 25% of men will be childless. 15% of women will be childless. It should get kinda obvious how this works even with a monogamous society. Women can get sex when they want and not commit to someone even in a monogamous society. The attractive men can choose to be non-committal and sleep with many women. Eventually - many women will commit to a man but it will be to a man who had very few partners whereas the woman might've slept with many of the men who get to sleep with many women.
Basically - the idea is that a small subset of men are sleeping with all the women. The women might settle down eventually but they will inevitably settle down with a man who did not have many sexual partners.
I've read 18 but I forget the source.
107:100 is either the high end of the range or outside of the range, depending on which estimate you look at. 105:100 seems to be closer to mid-range. [0]
> This only evens out by age 40.
Globally, it's actually closer to 50. [1] In particular countries this varies a lot from the global average, and, yes, the US is around 40. [2]
> This is due to suicide rates among men being wildly higher.
No, it's not. Boys have significantly higher infant mortality and males have higher rates of violent (even excluding suicide) and accidental death at all age ranges. Suicide isn't the main differentiating factor.
[0] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_sex_ratio
[1] https://statisticstimes.com/demographics/world-sex-ratio.php
[2] https://www.statista.com/statistics/241488/population-of-the...
Research into “accidental deaths” a bit more. You’ll find it’s not that “accidental.” A lot of things get ruled as an accidental deaths when they’re not. This is due to the US trying to save face. Work in the military enough and you’ll see what I mean.
And yes - seems closer to 105:100. Just ignore under age 5 age count if you’re bothered by increased infant mortality. You’ll find it’s still 105:100…
I don't think though it can be inferred from here that women hook up with the top 10/15% of men.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...