Sex is going out of fashion?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20470085

""" The Screen and the Job have displaced almost everything else is our lives. Loneliness is just a primary symptom.

The Screen, whether it’s TV, computer, or phone, has supplanted almost all social interactions. This manifests itself in things like SitComs on TV (just a bunch of friends or family hanging out) or Social Media on phones. It’s very easy to fill the social needs of right now with a Screen. But under even a minuscule amount of self reflection these are revealed as hollow substitutes for real human interaction.

The Job has completely taken over as a driving force in evaluating choices. The average person has to consider all options in the light of both the current employer and the specter of tomorrow’s. Moving across the country for a high paying job? Great! Moving to be closer to friends? That’s a career killer.

No wonder we are lonely. We make choices in the short term that optimize happiness, often at the expense of our relationships. Ghosting is not just for dates now. Then turn around and make choices in the long term that optimize employability at the expense of all else. """

I'm the last person to denigrate the importance of online communities, most of my closest friends don't live in my city. There is, however, a very real and important role for communities tied to your geography.

For one, the "self-sorting" effect is less exaggerated in IRL communities. Sharing a space with people, not because you are similar, but because you live near by and perhaps share the same interests, anchors you to your physical reality. Now, that comes with hardy cons as well as pros (especially if you are like to be discriminated against), but the cons of aggressively self-sorting online are pernicious as well.

If this resonates with you, I have a humble suggestion. If you can mentally/physically afford it, join _any_ IRL community. Volunteering is a good way to do this, organised sports, join a amateur radio club, go to a hackerspace meet-up. If you're in NA and most places in the EU, COVID restrictions might make this more possible than you think.

Are you sure this is entirely the modern lifestyle's fault? When I look deeply into my past I realize I messed up high school and college a bit socially (for various reasons) and that's the time most people acquire their best friends. I have 1-2 good friends but I'm pretty sure it's on me its not more than that.

Perhaps you went through something similar?

The real annoying thing is making friends after mid 30s is very difficult. I am very choosy about who I want to meet because I'm a parent and my time is valuable and I put up with less bullshit than when I was young. Alas, all "older" folk are like me - so we barely try to create friendships.

Singapore and Japan have been unsuccessful at getting people to voluntarily engage in producing larger families.

Social media circa 2003 began as a codification of existing human relationships. One's first digital friends records generally were a product of social relations, but as the marginal cost of digital reproduction tends toward zero, so did the cost of digital records of friendship untethered from the supervenience of social reality.

The digitization of friendship as a signifier of the friendship replaced the latter forming a simulacrum - the signifier replaced the signified. “the simulacrum is never that which conceals truth – it is the truth which conceals that there is none. The simulacrum is true.”[1] It's this very digital simulacrum completely detatched from social reality that leads to "Would things get strange if I hit it off with someone and she asked to meet my friends and I said I have none?"

While a reflexive, "log off. go outside. touch grass. meet people," is easy to respond with, it ignores the real problem with the magnitude of the problem: there are few people doing the same - the world's social energy is hoovered up and mediated by the systems of digital social capitalization. There isn't a surplus left to interact with.

What's even worse is that offline interactions themselves are mediated by the online. The process of initiating friendships itself has been digitally systematized either implicitly by digital chance encounters or explicitly in the form of friend finding apps. The online world gatekeeps the offline world. The world has undergone a psychic migration and the former world is in ruins. Truly "we have abandoned living."

1. Baudrillard 1981

I've found that I prefer this life - where I choose my friends rather than having acquaintances thrust upon me by my occupation, as they were in school.

I'm hoping that with a shift to significantly more remote work, the options open up for more ways to meet people outside of work - which is seriously one of the _worst_ ways to meet people; Especially in a romantic sense.

It's become more of our own responsibility to meet people. That can be hard. But it also means that we can be more selective about the kind of people we meet. Don't like talking about work? Don't meet people who do what you do. Don't like to drink? Find meet-ups where alcohol isn't the main event. Love [whatever]? Find [whatever]. Cities tend to be great for this.

It's crazy how hard it is to not only make friends, but keep them. My wife and I meet another couple that even have kids the same age as ours. We get along very well, they like us and we like them. We managed to have dinner once and we see each other occasionally at outings or birthdays. We have fun each time, but then we go months in-between without any communication. It's like there's some kind of threshold or tolerance preventing us from making it a more permanent bond.

EDIT: after thinking on it a little bit, I can't remember my parents nor friend's parents having friendships either. That makes me second-guess the technological influences on loneliness. I'm sure technology is making it worse, but I don't think we can point at it and say "this is the cause" because the loneliness epidemic seems to have started even before my generation.

When I was younger I wanted it badly enough that I did stupid things like that but I can understand why people like me are in a tiny minority.

The weirdest thing is I don't remember what I used to talk to my friends about when I was in high school. We didn't have much shared media to talk about (e.g. periodic TV shows people obsess about today). None of us so much picked up a newspaper at the time so current events were out. None of us had that many specific interests and the interests we had weren't shared. But somehow we spent hours talking about something. I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my prom table to just take in what was discussed.

You'd be suprised at the amount of males that want to have sex but just can't get any.

There is a serious case of looks inflation nowadays with Tinder etc.

Anecdotally, I myself and many otherwise healthy, sociable young men I know have pretty serious porn addictions. I really wish there would be more research done on the negative impacts of pornography, especially on young men and teens/pre-teens.

I know typically any anti-porn sentiment is met with "Oh you're just being a puritan", but the reality couldn't be further from the truth.

On social issues, I'm very liberal. Yet so much porn during my developmental years has done so much damage that as an adult I'm just now really understanding the full extent of it, and breaking that addiction is incredibly difficult

And those "dating" apps can hardly be called dating apps in most cases. They're designed to mess with the underlying sexual dynamic of men and women. If they were meant for romance, they'd have more mechanisms in place to help strangers actually date and get to know each other. Instead, they're a meat market, and the sad thing is more and more people are growing up in a world where they know no different. If you think about it, dating apps have no incentive to try and get people to actually meet in real life. Not only does that raise the potential for liability, but that means fewer eyeballs on their product at any given time.

Tinder knows very well that their product is selling attention to women and the promise of sex to countless men they know have next to zero chance based on their looks alone. As OK Cupid was losing its position as a dating app, I remember them putting out an advertising campaign featuring the initialism "DTF", which tells you all you need to know. They might even still be doing it, for all I know. I remember it from billboards and posters in Santa Monica.

> I don't think tech or porn is the main culprit. It's that people now have way more entertainment options other than sex. Of course, a lot for those entertainment options are being driven by tech.

I don't buy this one bit. The number of entertainment options is correlative, but who has demonstrated that it's causative? Yes, there is a chance that the proliferation of entertainment options is the primary cause, but unless a double-blind study has or will be done to test whether the sex drive is actually in competition with entertainment, I have very sincere doubts.

Furthermore, the porn industry is in no way declining. If people were losing an instinctive interest in sex, why would they be watching porn? What if people actually want sex, but they are too ill equipped to obtain it IRL?

And we haven't even brought up declining androgen levels in males.

Sex isn't going out of fashion. If anything, we are hypersexualized. The goal of sex isn't merely to propagate genes, but to propagate selected genes. Our current environment allows us to select our mates to such an extent that even more people are seleced out of the gene pool for a variety of reasons. Either we're perpetually thinking we can do better, or that we're never good enough or are too ugly, or are totally clueless because Boomer and Gen X parenting have been a disaster.

Online dating apps which have a huge incentive to keep people on their site as long as possible too...

Obesity was much lower and bodies were much healthier and more vigorous. Erectile dysfunction was much less common, and average serum testosterone levels were higher.

I guess it's uncouth to suggest that physical acts are more enjoyable with more physically attractive and capable populations, but I don't think it's something that should be discounted.

I wonder if younger people know what it's like to go a week or two without orgasm. I don't know many teens/young adults, much less well enough to ask about sex culture. I came of age in the 2000s, when online porn was a thing, but not ubiquitous, not HD, and still taboo. I do know that deprivation of orgasm makes it that much better when it does happen, and it changes your mind in both increase of sexual drive, and for me, increase in the desire for true intimacy, rather than just an anxious need to get off. When I kick the habit, my interest in talking to women goes higher than normal, and not "simply" because I'd like sex - it's because my entire mind is changed to wanting intimacy and to meet people.

So ubiquity of porn and its normalization is a big factor in people not seeking true human contact.

I think that people are also becoming more and more shy/anxious in general, at least by my flawed observations. Between rapidly changing social cues/acceptable behavior, being constantly connected, etc., it is difficult for people to connect and disconnect appropriately.

I think about the pre-Internet era when people could maybe date or hook up, and if it didn't work, it was out of sight, out of mind. Now with social media, I see people staying connected despite falling out. Maybe out of curiosity, maybe thinking they can still be friends, but I think that the inability to have a clear head/fresh start makes things difficult.

At least in my area/life, there isn't a huge sense of community. It takes a lot of effort to find non-bar oriented things to do that has a decently high number of people attending, who are all interested in the same things, and where it's likely to find a person to date. Say what you want about religion, but church really does serve a valuable purpose when not used to direct people toward bigotry.

Gotta run to a meeting, this was a bit of a braindump, but the topic of human interaction and macro loneliness is an interesting topic, and a serious one that truly scares the shit out of me for my society and myself.

Watching most people continue to be addicted to systems that take more than they give (social media) is difficult. And it affects the people around them deeply, too. It doesn't happen in a vacuum; the emotional un-presence is palpable. It is so common it feels very difficult to bring up.

Sex is beautiful, but I would always prefer a meaningful human relationship with common interests and good communications without sex over an sex-filled relationship without the rest. Or to put it simply: Love without sex is greater than sex without love. Prefarably both, but it is a thing two people need to want : )

Another way to consider this is that people find it easier to divert themselves than to exert themselves only to be disappointed. (Think of the universal pain of the characters in "Marty". [1])

Even though the cost to "view" people has been cheapened by technology, what we find is that disappointment remains the likeliest outcome.

The article is written for humour, but it is worth noting that although "sex" cannot go out of fashion, the illusions of Bernaysian manipulation [2] certainly can. And, as a society with a changing set of prevailing group behaviours, the delights of companionship can certainly be lost.

An enjoyable sexual relationship isn't just a matter of presenting (or hunting for) some pastiche of beauty: people must want to charm and please one another. This cultural trait definitely has gone "out of fashion" in Western society.

Add to these discouraging considerations the fact that the financial calculation of a relationship (even if children are not planned) has much more risk today than even just 10 years ago.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_(film)

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays

Since the actual text is nonsense, I think it is reasonable to substitute it with the subtext, "Men aren't men and haven't been since 1950, and it's because of the democrats". He's free to write an article about this, I suppose, but its definitely not "signal", as the mission statement of HN demands.

"These threads are always fun, because they often say more about us commenters than the subject matter."

I will not quote anything else from you and leave it at that.

I don't think I've ever heard sex described as "boring"?!

Maybe you just need to change things up a bit?

Can you put a number on what you mean by "a lot of time"?

Why?

This just all reads from a somewhat monogamous point of view when that’s not the point of the research. Quality is important but their is a significant amount of people in most western countries that wouldn’t define quality sex how you just did.

Outside of online dating where are you even supposed to meet women now? I see women saying all the time they don't want to be approached in public. COVID decimated my already fairly meager pool of friends that I see regularly so opportunities to meet people through friends are few and far between. On top of that most women near my age (mid 30s) are already in long term relationships. At this point I've mostly given up, now I'm trying to accept that I'll likely spend the rest of my life alone. It sucks.

I promise you it’s just as easy if you live near each other and much of Europe isn’t get married in their early 20s but are still having sex.

I’m introverted and well-suited to long stints of being alone, but ultimately that is nothing compared to a lifetime of being alone.

When I meet people who can’t articulate why they don’t want kids or a community or whatever, I worry they’re just as clueless as I was.

As with anything, I try to remind myself that I’m not an exception. The standard American diet tends to cause illness and disease faster than a whole food, plant based diet for example. I am not an exception to that rule; if I eat that way, I will suffer too. I’m not special. When humans are alone, they tend to die earlier and lead a lower quality of life (particularly later in life though, with evidence of higher quality earlier in life). I’m not an exception, in any case. We all want to believe we’re exceptions.

Note: Just skimming through the research and living a socially isolated life has mortality outcomes comparable to being obese. That’s incredible.

We're still at the feudalism stage sprinkled with iPhones/Technology.

I am just not understanding how that choice means I am dooming myself with less.. intimacy? I don't follow. Explain please - (Genuinely curious not trying to argue)

Glad you pointed this out. As a bisexual guy, I'd like to give some input. Sex between homosexual men is definitely not getting out of fashion. As a lot of these dating apps encourage short-lived relationships, it incentivizes a lot of these men to not commit in relationships and just have "fun." On the other hand (note that this is only based on my experience), a lot of women seem to have set higher and higher expectations within these dating apps similar to how it is in a typical social media platform like Instagram. I can't blame them though, it's part of human nature to aspire for more.

No. Many men are turning to gay sex because they can’t get any women. Lots of guys are “bi” but it’s like 10% gay 90% straight attraction. Getting a guy is 100x easier than a woman so even though they’re mostly straight, they become gay in practice. I expect that 50% of all sex will be between men within the next few decades.

Women get graduated thinking that investing your time in your own family and kids is slavery, but living paycheck-to-paycheck in a rented condo, ready to be laid off on a whim is true freedom.

Not more, but less.

It should be fair to say that careerism has resulted in less free time for family and less time for chores which also puts a damper on the bedroom when everyone argues over all the work that has to get done.

We can afford a contraction.

In the past, some people argued for a much smaller world population (however they imagine we could possibly get there), but now that it might happen, we realise our economies run on young people.

And yet we don't pay young people enough and we don't give them the opportunity to start families. Much of this is definitely also a policy problem: make sure young people can buy a house and start a family, can afford to raise kids, have time off with their family, etc.

So in a sense, that's inevitable, isn't it?

The alternative would be to ensure that birth rates are such that the population distribution across ages is always vaguely balanced, but due to the changing socioeconomic conditions, I doubt that's viable. So all that can be done for the most part is just to have social safety nets and support for the older people in the forms of affordable housing, discounts, pensions and other such systems.

Here in Latvia a certain part of each salary is put towards our retirement funds, be it through a privately managed set of funds (typically through one of the banks) or otherwise. The sizes of pensions and living expenses are still a hotly debated topic, given that those still aren't always sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, but the idea of accumulating enough money for when you age seems like a sane approach to the problem at hand.

There’s simply fewer high school graduates available, so enrollment counts will go down and universities will have to fight harder or lower admission requirements to keep the same number of students year over year.

It could also be that young people today simply don’t want to pay the high cost of college, and honestly I get that. But even cheaper or budget colleges are seeing enrollment dips.

The Amish.

I'm not quite joking. They're some of the best farmers on the planet and they have huge families. I suspect, if you do the math, they smoothly replace the rest of us as we "grey out" so to speak. ;)

While some current projections do predict a steep decline in population growth - it's still gonna take roughly a hundred years, just to reach zero growth. Which means we are looking at another 100 years of population actually still growing.

If the trend continues unchanged, and population growth goes negative, it would take another 100 years just to return to exactly the same population numbers that we do have today.

If the growth then grew even more negative for another 100 years, that's when you'd be able to talk about an population implosion - 300 years down the line. So no, I don't think there will be any implosion within our lives.

The problems you describe though - that's not implosion, but population aging and the economic problems that causes down the line. Those issues have been around in some countries for multiple decades already - and yes they are going to get worse. Still, growing population numbers to levels beyond what this planet can sustain just to keep the economy afloat does not seem like a well thought-through plan to me.

We will have to achieve zero population growth - and if the world economy can't take that... we really need to radically change the economy, not increase population growth again.

I’ve never used a dating app, but I’m curious about this. My assumption has been that people filter pretty heavily on politics and religion, which are less advertised in person. Meeting people at a party or through social activities seemed to moderate people’s views long term because an initial attraction could lead to encounters with really different sorts of personalities and backgrounds and counter reinforcement of naive views of the world.

For instance, more couples used to realize their votes cancelled out, so they would make a deal to just stay home and have sex instead of heading the the polls.

On one hand, this is great! Unfortunately, text conversations between strangers who's only cues are a handful of photos and snippet of text are miserable.

Im almost sure if I had met someone I've met in dating apps in more traditional environments, I'd at least have more friends.

I appreciate my experiences are wildly different from a straight person's, but I would be very careful in advertising 'real world dating' as just easier. Often I've seen guys (straight and gay) who struggle with dating do so because their mental health is not in the right state (desperation is not sexy gents). People should focus on sorting that first (exercise, sleep, eating properly etc) before going out on the dating scene.

What I would say people should be careful about with apps is to always consider that the motivations of the business do not necessarily align with yours. Tinder wants you to engage with the app as much as possible to drive revenue, they don't want you find the love of your life because then the revenue stream stops. I see it like alcohol though, a little bit of alcohol is a great social lubricant, too much ends in misery.

When your parents had you, the world was decisively a worse place. Especially if you were born prior to 1989. Why wouldn't you want to bring a child into the objectively best times of human existence to date?

My thinking is there will always be something. Our parents could have said the same thing about Vietnam and the Cold War. My litmus test is: "is this issue affecting you". Global warming and wars may make you anxious when reading the news, but does it _actually_ affect your life.

Now, obesity might possible lower sex drive, but that would be a completely different mechanism.

Sex, even soft and slowly sex, is a bit like sport. It is body work, you have to train it a bit, you have get the other persons feeling.

Finally you need time, even for a quicky somewhere.

Men at the bottom get absolutely nothing, while women at the bottom mostly end up going on bad dates or getting used for sex.

Now, those odds are apparently not good enough for the men of the 2020s. It's insane - these men just don't want sex enough if they're not willing to spend 15 mindless minutes a night swiping and messaging.

Not sure if you know this but almost all the apps you've ever heard of are owned by precisely one company: the Match Group.

I think for the majority of guys, the rigmarole around getting hookups was always a delicate calculus involving tradeoffs in money and time, for an uncertain payoff: a good lay if you’re lucky and bragging rights.

Now the economy is tighter and society has made bragging about conquests a bit less acceptable, so I think our pattern of just having deep (and free) sex with a loving partner is much more appealing.

Pull the foil off your windows, go outside, and make a connection with another human. It's good for you.

And it's sad, because sex is very fun and porn is a very poor approximation of the real thing.

At least for me it was very different. I never had a problem with women attention and two of them were frank enough to spell it out for me (this was very unexpected). Still in both cases I just refused the opportunity.

I'm still kind of bitter about it, lol.

14 hours a week a lot of time

I think you missed most comments under this article...

Many of my friends in those environments grew up, figured out how to navigate society a bit better, and stopped saying this kind of stuff. But these threads are a reminder that loads of people didn’t.

Yes the comments in this thread is surprisingly bad and I got flagged on my comment.

HN seems to have had their eternal september event.

The solutions may be seen as bad or the takes as not good, but the problem still is very real, and for many people bad solutions are better than no solutions or the advice people give that doesn't work at all. Things like this should alert you to the fact something is wrong, not make you recoil from all the bad people.

But don't go out of your way to tell us how much you dislike reading it. That's virtue signaling and it's silly in this context.

"I dislike you so much I'm going to post comments talking about how much I dislike you"

Turns out that despite all my achievements and failures, despite all my joys and pains, despite all my loves and losses, despite everything in my mind and body that makes me 'me', I've ever only truly been motivated by the desire to find a strong provider and reproduce before my eggs expire.

"Oh, but not you, you're different" - hears every women in a male-dominated field at some point or another. Nope, I'm not. No different brain-chemicals, no differently testosterone. Not in denial of my gender identity nor my sexuality. Just a plain old human slob like the rest of you.

There's one claim about the amount of sex people may or may not be having, GRANDPAS HAD MORE ACTION IN THEIR TIME, but it is totally unqualified in any real way. Today's Grandpas could have been born in the 80s-90s... What time are we actually talking about?

The next sentence talks about boomers having more kids, and the next sentence assumes they only had marital sex. If that's the only evidence given for having sex, then this is nothing more than a thinly veiled think piece from the religious right (and the subsequent casual racism doesn't help), and I fail to see how that meets any of HN's standards, either.

Studies show most people meet online. Studies show most people struggle in dating markets. These are not mutually exclusive. But unlike jobs, one doesn't need to date to live, even if having a partner is a major point of fulfillment to most.

There's lots of nice people out there trying to meet. You just need to know what you want, be actually ready to take the leap, and are realistic about your value (sorry to phrase it like that but it IS a market)

Everyone you meet is the child of people who have sex. Even if they had the child via in vitro or adopted or whatever. Your parents fuck.

So your parents fuck. Your friends' parents fuck. That asshole who bullies you in high school. Their parents fuck. It really does seem like everyone is fucking all the time. You live in a neighborhood where most people will also have kids. All those people? Fucking.

You know what happens to people who don't fuck? They don't have families. You never get to really interact with them until you or your friends become those people later in life. And it makes you wonder why you aren't fucking because when you were growing up, it seemed like everyone was. But it was only a very specific subset of people that made up your circle.

I was a home-owner at 26, make an outsized income compared to both the national average and my local average, am well-traveled, educated, and by conventional standards am at average or slightly above average attractiveness. Despite all of this, I had an absolutely horrible time with dating until I was in my 30s. I am now married to a wonderful woman I met 5 years ago through a dating app, after years of frustration.

The main thing I discovered in this journey is:

1. Older men (but not too old, 30s/40s) get better traction than younger men (teens, 20s), even if you are an outlier in success as a younger man

2. Women have a vastly different assessment of attractiveness than men do. There is TONS of data to support this, and it's basically incontrovertible at this point. I don't know if dating apps caused it, or it just revealed it, but women basically have a Pareto distribution of how they judge attractiveness. Only 20% of men pass the filter, the remaining 80% are never going to get a response. Men have a much more normal distribution (follows a bell curve) in how they view attractiveness.

3. The two things above mean that a (relatively) small number of men have success, and don't see the problem, while a (relatively) large amount of men are left out in the cold.

You might think my 3 points above sound "incel type", yet I'm a married guy who absolutely supports the rights of women and their equality in society. This is not about politics, this is not about misogyny, this is not about frustration turning to anger. This is about the facts and the lived experience of millions of people, especially younger people, and how it drives societal trends. I watch many of friends who also work in tech struggling still even in their 30s because they are conventionally less attractive than I am, despite being better than me in other ways (smarter, more financially successful), and these are by the general standards of the day successful and stable people who cannot find a relationship. People who are farther down the income and intelligence curve struggle even further. This article didn't come out of nowhere, and this issue isn't only in the US. All over the OECD we are seeing falling birth rates, falling marriage rates, and self-reported reductions in sexual activity and relationships.

What this means for society and our future, I don't know, but it will certainly mean a change of some kind. Sticking your head in the sand and deriding the people stating these things clearly does not do anything to understand or address this situation. If you personally faced no challenges in using online dating, then I would put forward that you are probably privileged in some way you don't realize and that your experience is unusual, rather than being the norm.

One challenge many people haven't even mentioned yet in these comment threads is that online dating is fundamentally not a very good way to approach finding a relationship, and there is a different between "dating" for hookups and dating for finding a relationship. Most people are not satisfied with hookups, even when they can get them, and would prefer the more meaningful relationship. There are thankfully a few better apps in that direction, but as a general case an app is not a good basis for selecting someone to know on a deeper level, as apps emphasize the most shallow and curated view of people rather than the process of meeting people organically through shared activities. When I was dating, I found far more success organically meeting people vs using apps, despite the fact that I ended up meeting my wife through an app.

This doesn't just affect dating, it effects all sorts of relationships. We've decided somehow as a society to intermediate a screen between us and other people in nearly every single situation, and this form of communication is inherently lossy and biased towards appearances over realities, and it has caused a structural loss of community and the actual social skills in people necessary to meet and create connections. To look at our society as it currently sits, see the trend line of where it's going, and then to deride the people pointing it out as "incel type" seems deeply naive if not pernicious.

I am convinced the actual negative attitude that you can't get any interest is the major reason guys don't- this victim/complaining/entitled attitude is the most unattractive thing to women.

Here are some of the things I did that worked for me:

* Heavy strength/weight training 3-4x/week

* Take the time to carefully build a Tinder profile that shows me having fun doing things I like (outdoor activities) but dressed well, with great lighting, etc.

* Practice emotional vulnerability (read Mark Manson: Models), especially saying out loud to girls anything I was afraid to say, that I was worried would turn them off

* Make really solid eye contact with women when talking and listening to them, in an even borderline creepy way - make them look away first

* Stop trying to 'win approval' or entertain women but just try to have fun myself, and enjoy the conversations, and sex

* Drive a 20+ year old 'exotic' sports car that looks impressive but cost less than most people spend annually on a smartphone, maintain it myself

* Wear nice clothes, and develop my own unusual sense of style (shows confidence)

* Intermittent fasting to keep weight somewhat under control

* Have a lot of hobbies, friends, and activities that make it almost hard for interested women to schedule enough time with me- don't hang around them with nothing to do

* Be confident in sharing my desires and interests, especially sexually (see vulnerability above)

* Be willing to lower standards really low at first- have sex with whoever is interested, even if they are older or a bit overweight. As I built confidence and experience, I gradually was able to date more and more attractive women over time.

* Live in a major metropolitan area with a lot of dating options.

* Develop a mindset of abundance and self-esteem: realize the truth that I am the only guy these girls are likely to find that has my life together this well, and they are very lucky to get to go on a date with me despite my shortcomings

Ultimately, I didn't find casual sex very fulfilling but really enjoy sex itself, with someone I have feelings for. I ended up deciding to enter a long term relationship with a girl from Tinder, and we have sex at least once a day, and are always pushing the limits and trying new things sexually.

For example, yes, single people tend to watch more porn. But are they single because they watch porn (demonstrating that porn is a social inhibitor)? Or do they watch more porn because they are single (in which case porn is just a way to get some of the pleasure they would otherwise have with a partner)?

Same for depression, which does not help going out and meet people. Should we then deduct that porn causes depression? Of course not, and yet this is the starting point of a lot of anti-porn rants.

These arguments also fit too well with puritanical and repressive world views, which makes me very suspicious as motivated reasoning is pervasive in these discussions.

> anecdotally has cured many

That’s the thing, anecdotes are not data. I also have anecdotes of people who have a healthy life and watch porn regularly. Without an epidemiological study it does not mean much. From my experience, “watching porn never killed anyway, and anecdotally has cured many” is just as true as your assertion.

The second paragraph was eye-watering:

> Say what you want about old people but they've merited the historical "Baby Boom" through sheer sexual prowess

The "Baby Boomers" were the product of the baby boom, not the instigators of it. The ones having the baby boom sex were their parents, the "Greatest Generation", who are now almost all dead.

> Now generations have to be named after backside alphabet letters cause everyone is focusing on their careers.

I assume this is a reference to "Generation Alpha". In what sense is Greek a "backside alphabet"? More confusingly, are they claiming a lack of sex has something to do with running out of Roman alphabet characters? I'm pretty sure no amount of procreation will make more letters.

Is this reality for the HN audience?

And you wonder why there's a fairly large community that have the so-called 'incel' behaviour. It didn't used to exist back in the pre-net dating era!

In the Western world if you aren't a >= 7 in the looks department you will definitely struggle.

I don't think it's as one sided as you make out. Yes women probably want to trade up, but so do men but then if you actually want a relationship those things aren't really important so it's more a case of filtering the dross to find someone who actually wants a relationship. I'm not sure that would be easier as an 'attractive' male or female, your still going to get all the dross.

To add to your 1 data point, I'm currently in a long term relationship with someone I met online.

They don't bite, if you make a move with enough respect and confidence.

In my opinion while convenient, they should be last resort.

What if the 53% of men swiping right ("accept") are attempting to date "up"

I think there may be some hidden assumptions you should investigate, there.

Is there even anybody who wouldn't be positively affected by some limitation on sexualised content and online dating?

> You will have a much higher success rate as an average guy simply with a completely cold approach

This is where I think you're wrong.

First, I'm probably never going to cold approach in public and neither are most men I know. It's not a matter of "growing a pair", it would require a personality change or being disingenuous.

Second, cold approach is a terrible way to meet someone. It's like a tinder swipe where both parties have only 1-2 photos and no profile. Dating like this is a strict needle and haystack approach to finding a compatible partner.

> These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates

Before apps I was at 1-2/year. Now 1-2/week is possible, though time and energy keeps me at 1-3/month.

Likewise, unless these women plan to date for the rest of their lives and never settle down, they can't all end up marrying that small group of men, so they will end up marrying "down".

Then the strategy becomes clear: ditch the dating apps and look to meet women who are ready to settle. Easier said than done, sure, but it sure looks like dating apps are useless to all but the top percentile of men, so why bother?

Even in like 2000s when this trend started? I was a kid so maybe it was harder for women then but really?

There are lots of ugly women too, who are they going to date?