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Comment by rthomas6 | Hacker News Reader

Do you have a source for this claim? Specifically that women aren't having less sex too, and that the decline is almost entirely due to men. It's very possible for women to be more selective than in the past, and also everyone being less promiscuous overall.

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This WaPo article and specifically the chart entitled "Young men driving the decline in sex": https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

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.

So, to me, this implies women being more selective of partners than in the past accounts for some of the overall decrease, but not all.

Can you elaborate? This particular comment of yours reads to me as agreeing -- as in agreeing that selectivity accounts for some of the decrease in sex, but not all, which I think is what I stated.

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.

No, I agree. My other comment was limited the context of talking about that data only (that 80 percent of women fight over 20% of the men on data sites), not your data. You have promiscuity rates separated by sex, and changes of them over time. The other comment doesn't, and only taking the other comment's data by itself isn't enough, imo, to draw any meaningful conclusions.

Ah, makes sense -- thanks for clarifying.

Can't speak for the quantity, but didn't the big analysis from OKCupid determine that 80% of women are fighting over the top 20% of men? The data was published in a book called Dataclysm by Christian Rudder.

Right, this speaks to women being more selective than in the past, but says nothing in either direction about promiscuity levels overall. Women could be simultaneously more selective than in the past, and less promiscuous. Or more promiscuous. That data doesn't tell us.

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