People have been having less sex, whether they’re teenagers or 40-somethings
scientificamerican.com
scientificamerican.com
I mean, if we're talking about sex, I'll say that I love athletic wear on athletic-looking women. I guess the scarcity of athletic-looking people might be part of the problem.
- an abundance of electric lighting
- media to distract them and personal portable screens with access to such. Personal is important since even a television screen watched by 2 people offers more of a social experience than those same 2 people each bent over their personal screens.
- contraceptives
- state pensions
- education, for good and for bad
- a relentless drive to consume, consume and consume for the sake of it
- life success measured by the number of ephemeral gadgets you collect - your great-grandfather's golden pocket watch was a status symbol for life while your Apple watch is outdated in one or two years.
To be sure, there were some things which people had back then which they do not have now for the most:
- religion - many people met their partner while going to church
- marriage was far more common
- contact with their neighbourhood - people knew their street/hamlet/village, they met them on the street, in shops, pubs, church, at work, etc.
- public social gatherings of sufficiently large size to meet that girl from the next town and of sufficiently small size to meet her at the next event.
Read some Robert Putnam. This was happening well before screens could be blamed.
If it wasn’t phones, it’d be newspapers. People will find devices to keep to themselves in public.
My impression was that increased exposure to toxic compounds (microplastics, estrogen mimicking compounds, etc) has been contributing to declining sperm counts / motility, and things like earlier onset of puberty in women.
Wouldn't those at least have some effect on sex drive? I'm looking in particular at the decrease in adolescent masturbation, as it's hard for me to imagine that "increased video gaming" is a culprit for this.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32081788/
Somebody should look into this... If only there was an agency...
There’s also a community of women out there that have enlarged their clitorises by rubbing DHT (dihydrotestosterone) on them. Apparently sex is more enjoyable for them once it’s bigger, though it’s not like anybody can study that. I wonder if there’s any good data as far as what clitoris size was 40 years ago vs now, but I doubt it.
Maybe societal values have shifted such that less people lie about being a virgin.
https://thediplomat.com/2019/04/lets-talk-about-no-sex-a-clo...
> last stop before the planet Mars: In Japan, the world’s most technologically sophisticated society, the future has already happened, says Peter Popham
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2012/01/24/future-has-arrived/...
https://www.amazon.com/Return-Depression-Economics-Crisis-20...
"Young" extending to 49 aside ... almost half of American men and three quarters of women have no "partnered sex" and also don't masturbate at all? That sounds implausibly high, am I misunderstanding something?
Yes, I continue to doubt that a _user_ will be banned for using one of these words. I'm happy to believe that these words will cause that particular _comment_ to be killed, just that they won't cause a permanent ban for the user.
I think the issue is that we have a difference in terminology. I would never describe vouching as making a comment "unbanned". I think my terminology is correct, but I'll try to be sure before I continue to use it.
I appreciate the link to the list of words.
Apparently these numbers come from a self-reported survey, so either the questioning was vague/confusing, people are not reporting the truth for whatever reason, OR... we're gonna see one hell of a drop in birthrates in the next couple of years.
"Specifically, 28.8% of adolescent men ages 14–17 were categorized in Class 2 (no sexual behaviors) in 2009 compared to 44.2% in 2018. Among adolescent women, 49.5% were categorized in Class 2 in 2009 compared to 74.0% in 2018."
For adults the percentage was much lower -- 3.8% rising to 3.9%.
[1] https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10508-021-02125-2
It doesn't. You are misreading the article, which is a bit ambiguously written. The results they are reporting for “young men” and “young women” are, as the first quoted sentence innyour excerpt suggests, gender breakouts of the adolescent (14-17) cohort in the study, not of the full population mentioned in the last sentence (14-49), as clicking through and reading the actual study will confirm.
Sounds like old people policing sexual behavior once again.
That is a puzzling phrase - what do you mean by that?
Self-reported is generally unreliable. Whether its sex or food people are generally not accurate when asked how much X or Y.
So a better question is: Why would they under-report? Or are the current acceptable social norms such that it's okay to be honest, but in previous eras there was accepted (?) exaggeration?
<sidebar>
It would be interesting to know previously what typically "pairs" with sex. For example, alcohol. If alcohol consumption is down in certain tribes then it follows that sex might drop as well.
</sidebar>
The article even discusses the possibility of changes in self-reporting behavior, e.g. that young people today are more comfortable labelling themselves as asexual than they were 15 years ago.
As mentioned, before you do the comparison, you *must* make an effort to understand the changing social norms and how that might impact a *known* flawed data source (i.e., self reported).
Then once you come up with a theory about the impact of social norms, you can try to test your theory... Condom sales? Up or down? Other birth control prescriptions, up or down? STDs, up or down? Preg-test sales, up or down? What about associated / related Google search data*?
The bottom line...accepting self-reported data at face value is a true fool's errand. The Science is clear on this. Let's just leave it at that for today.
* "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and what the internet can tell us about who we really are" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (a Harvard-trained economist, former Google data scientist)
With unemployment at generational lows, I wish we'd shift to a 4-day work week or 32-35 hour work week. We also desperately need some baseline minimum for vacation time for full-time employees (3 weeks seems the bare minimum). And we should make parental leave mandatory on a Federal level--both parents should get to spend time with their child. I think it's cruel and inhumane that this isn't a human right. Corporations have gotten basically everything in their favor since the 1980s and the pendulum has swung too far in one direction--there needs to be a reversal.
Middle class teen fun is a function of parental wealth, youth employment, and other things that were shaky in the 2010s. To put it plainly, it was a very unsexy decade for the average teenager. Nobody wants to date a bum or someone who identifies as a bum.
- There aren't as many kids, and other parents don't let their kids out these days, so your kids are often the only ones out there.
- Without other kids being out there, it's much harder to estimate what is safe. There is just no data.
- Because there are no other kids out there, things that used to be safe no longer are. Our roads don't have sidewalks. Because there are very rarely any kids, people fly down the curvy residential roads at 40+ mph. Even I feel uncomfortable walking carefully on our local roads because people they are so curvy and low-visibility and our neighbors drive so insanely fast.
- Because there are no other kids out there, people who see kids by themselves treat it like it's an emergency. I literally had someone run out of a restaurant and grab one of our kids and ask if they are OK, because I wasn't walking close enough to them. Then she treated me like I was the crazy one.
- Their teachers tell them its not safe to be out without parents.
- Their public school doesn't allow them to be by themselves at the bus stop and won't drop them off without an adult present.
- If you send them into a store by themselves, people treat them like aliens or like something is wrong.
- Even just leaving your kids by themselves in a temperate car for a reasonable time to go into a store has resulted in a child protective services action in our area.
There aren't as many kids any more so people just can't tell what is safe and what is not, and so they assume everything is unsafe.
When I was a kid I rode my bike all over town and had free reign, and there were kids everywhere. Now as an adult I have to work hard just to find things that my kids can do without us that won't get the police or child protective services called on us. What is going to happen to the people who grow up this way?
Wait, is this saying that 44% of adolescent boys and 74% of adolescent girls aren’t even masturbating? If so, I simply don’t believe it.
People will say that it's because of the creeps etc, but as long as men have almost no matches if they don't pay, it's not going to lead to a good experience, which leads to even worse experience for women who won't use it.
Online dating deserves it's awful reputation.
It's time that a good documentary highlights how those platforms work.
No one likes online dating, but everyone still defaults to it because third spaces where pairings traditionally occurred are evaporating.
https://web.archive.org/web/20091121080804/http://blog.okcup...
https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...
https://www.profgalloway.com/a-fewer-good-men/
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2008/03/marry-h...
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6692099-marry-him
We have an entire subpopulation of primarily men associated with a certain slur which suggests the opposite.
The motivation is important.
It’s similar to the difference of someone being blowing up a building for political reasons and not. The former makes that person a Terrorist. The latter does not.
It’s regularly specifically about blaming women as a whole and having constant contradictions. IE, they put down women who they could date. They are too ugly. Too low in socio-class structure. They don’t want women to be superficial with them, but then they want to be superficial with women.
Another example is the regular shitting on women for sleeping around too much. Insulting women. Casually dropping words like slut or in-group terminology without issue. A woman is bad for sleeping around too much and it’s not good for women to be with many different penises. It messed them up. Yet somehow this logic doesn’t follow when a woman is with the same man having sex daily. They are fine with the latter saying that’s fine. Not the former specifically angry that women are ruining themselves with getting with so much penis.
The number of contradictions are numerous. To simplify it down to they only hate women for not being able to have sex is incorrect. Many in the community hate women because they can’t have have the women they deem they are entitled to. No one is entitled to someone else.
Note: I tried hedging most of the time but to be clear I’m always talking about a majority of the community when looking through the conversations. I never mean every single incel. Just the ones actively engaging in the toxic parts of the community.
Obviously that worked for some people, but there were also probably plenty of people having sex, or reporting they were having sex, just because it was expected of them.
I'd actually be curious what the median age people get married at is now vs. in the 80s, although I'd assume that's confounded by people who just don't get married but are functionally in a similar level of committed relationship.
My overall point is that if you're 35 and single now, you're less of a social pariah and automatically seen as a failure of a person. You're also probably experiencing less social or familial pressure to "just settle down with someone". People are having sex and in relationships more because they want to than because they're pressured to.
https://www.apa.org/news/press/releases/stress/2022/concerne...
https://www.self.com/story/how-stress-affects-sex-life
Mechanism: stress->higher cortisol levels->lower libido
“Various studies around the world have proposed different explanations, such as economic status. Lower income is associated with greater declines. One study looked at use of computer games among young people [as a possible explanation]. Some folks have tracked declines in alcohol use, and we know that [alcohol use] can be associated with disinhibition. We have seen, somewhat, [an] increase in sex toy use—from what we looked at, not a massive increase. If there is a change, it’s probably just going to contribute to one of the blips. I don’t expect it to be the explanation.”
I also don’t think there is a single reason to bet on.
If both partners working = both partners employed, that seems to be the norm since the industrial revolution got underway (allowing for that post-WWII historical exception).
If both partners working = hours in labor, I can't recall a period with disproportional demands on time.
I think you're right about having less time and money; I think your #3 is closer to the cause. I'd phrase 3 to read:
3. The stresses of increasingly complex living.
And people also have less opportunity. All this communication technology means, that instead of having to meet in person, you text. That means less time around people, less face to face time.
Another comment [1] observed that the survey claims that 44% of men and 74% of women have 0 sexual activity - including 'batin (some term in the referenced post resulted in an apparent auto-flag which I'm trying to avoid). That doesn't pass my sniff test, at all.
The most likely singular explanation seems to be a bias or sampling error.
Look at all the explanations being suggested in this thread. Which one is right? Maybe all of them! Each on their own contributes a little piece of the puzzle, adding up to the effect we see.
This myth of monocausality leads to very bad policy decisions, where people jump on an explanation as the One True Cause of the Current Thing. It’s oversimplifying and polarizing and moves us further from truth and progress.
In the olden days, we'd meet, have fun, kiss, have sex and... whatever happened, happened.
Now, there is this realistic probability that what you thought was a fun evening, turns into a drama even a long time after it happened. There is no recourse, no evidence, no change of a fare trail: when s/he "does not feel it" afterwards, you're guilty.
Me personally will not flirt / hit on / touch anyone anymore.
I spent my teens/early 20s with the messages about "enthusiastic consent" overinternalized, to such a degree that I would ask permission for every little thing (even holding hands or a kiss). I now understand that, like many things, this can't be measured without changing it, so now I focus more on body language and other cues, and my partners and me both seem much happier.
I also have strong social anxiety, so that plays into it.
{"data":{"error":"Imgur is temporarily over capacity. Please try again later."},"success":false,"status":403}truly devious
Combine that with salaries not keeping up with productivity levels and you basically have an unhealthy populace.
With social media, online interaction can feel like it "fulfills" the benefits and responsibilities of human interaction and friendship, but it is a poor, poor substitute. That is, sitting at home, starting to feel a little bored, you may pull out your phone, scroll your favorite social media app, like some of your friends' posts, maybe add a witty comment or two, and this can stave off the boredom. But in the pre-social media era you would have been more inclined to call up your friends, maybe invite them out for a bite to eat, or go to a movie. Social media can give a quick "social fix", but in the long term it doesn't really make you feel more connected to your friends, and given the "performative" nature of much social media, it can in fact do the opposite.
We're not talking directly about people having less friends or social interaction. We're essentially talking about a mass of people essentially losing/ignoring their libido for years at a time. Looking at tweets, let alone scrolling Instagram doesn't feel like it should replace a physical desire for sexual pleasure to me. It may replace me deciding to call up a friend and go have dinner or such, but it feels like a stretch to say people are having a night where they would otherwise go out to find someone to have sex with, or just deal with it themselves at home, and instead they go read their Facebook page?
Heck, I like playing badminton in my apartment complex but I’ll never pick up the building intercom to call individual players to ask if they want to play. I’d rather post in our WhatsApp group and hope that someone bites.
In this case, social media is reading interaction and in my view is a net positive.
"Various studies around the world have proposed different explanations, such as economic status. Lower income is associated with greater declines. One study looked at use of computer games among young people [as a possible explanation]. Some folks have tracked declines in alcohol use, and we know that [alcohol use] can be associated with disinhibition. We have seen, somewhat, [an] increase in sex toy use—from what we looked at, not a massive increase. If there is a change, it’s probably just going to contribute to one of the blips. I don’t expect it to be the explanation."
The OP comment essentially said that Social Media was causing massive catastrophic social change. I'm not seeing that backed up in the article, even if I think I may agree.
Another great parallel would be Guy Debord's La société du spectacle, published in 1967.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brave_New_World
Of course, Huxley predicted that we would have more sex, not less.
Western societies have been living in a state of sexual bulimia for the last four generations and we wonder why it’s become dysfunctional?
Social media addiction and its consequences belong largely in the effects category and not the causes one. But hey we now have millions of things to choose to stream and back in the early ‘60s there were only three channels so really we’re better off.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Immigration_and_Nationality_Ac...
[1] https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SP.DYN.TFRT.IN?location...
In comparison, having sex with a prostitute almost guarantees consequent health problems. Better and far cheaper to stay true to "Five Finger Mary".
Just two sample years or a regular sample within those dates?
Discussed here before has been the significant drop in male heterosexual activity due to the growth of hookup apps post-Tinder around 2012 allegedly focusing a majority of the female partnering among a minority of men.
It would be interesting to know if the survey here is merely reproducing some of that or if the decline has been reasonably linear between the two quoted sample years.