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Comment by devmunchies | Hacker News Reader

Those are scientific issues, but STD spread is also a by-product of social changes.

The median age of female's first marriage was less than 22 for 100 years and rose to 28 in the last few decades[1]. I would assume this results in a higher number of partners and more opportunities for an STD to spread.

[1]: https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...

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Everything I've read about the 19th and early 20th century has lead me to believe that practically everyone was a walking petri dish. Spreading STDs weren't well understood. Lot's of supposedly brilliant artists and writers usually met there end by going raving mad, usually from syphilis. But were just famous enough to have it documented by their friends.

We don't need to lay blame of STDs on the sexual revolution, we were already down bad as a species.

You say "lay blame" as if I'm being critical, when I'm just theorizing.

My non-scientific assumption is that there were less people who chose the lifestyle of "artists and writers". The sexual revolution took the lifestyle mainstream.

Another social change is increase in oral sex. Most people don't use protection while doing oral sex which is also the cause of widespread STDs. Eating ass is a good way to get a bunch of disease causing microbes into your body. I don't know why it's normalized these days, it wasn't the case in the past.

> The median age of female's first marriage was less than 22 for 100 years and rose to 28 in the last few decades[1]. I would assume this results in a higher number of partners and more opportunities for an STD to spread.

This is a common talking point among conservatives, but it's off-base. Not only has the median number of lifetime sexual partners not increased (in fact, it mostly flatlined from the 1960s, and even fell for many demographics after the 1980s), but it's irrelevant to the issue of gonorrhea, because single unmarried women in their 20s are not the main demographic affected by gonorrhea today.

Do you have some links? The surveys I found show the opposite for number of partners. I'm also curious about the demographics.

This article is a little dated but it shows the data very clearly. Subsequent surveys have shown similar results, with Boomers and X out-sexing Millennials (by # of partners) and with some signs indicating Z is on track for even fewer partners...

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/05/06/why-m...

I think it's a terrible trend and we should all start having sex with more people.

Pay walled, so I can't see your article. This article references a survey with a fairly small sample size. I found one other article that claimed what you are, but they were stupidly comparing millennials' lifetime average of 8 to boomers lifetime average of 10, even though boomers have been around almost twice as long (millennials would likely track to surpass boomers at the same age). That's why I was curious for more (open) data.

https://www.the-sun.com/lifestyle/4479617/average-number-sex...

This would be a great comment if you cited sources.

Condom use has also declined over the past decade or so.

This is primarily due to HIV (rightfully) no longer being seen as a death sentence, and PrEP being widely available.

I think most folks were actually being quite rational here. When the consequences of unprotected sex were so severe, most people used condoms. Right now, for someone on PrEP and/or the pill, the negative consequences of unprotected sex are primarily infections that can be cleared up with antibiotics or are generally not very serious.

A serious untreatable pathogen may well change people's behaviors again in the future.

It's kind of sad to think that people would rather help create the next catastrophe by relying on treatments that are known to become less effective with use than act responsibly for prevention.

Yes, new HIV infections have gone down since the 80s but have been relatively flat over the past decade or two, with the cumulative rate of infection continuing to rise. Of course IV drug use is another major source.

> It's kind of sad to think that people would rather help create the next catastrophe by relying on treatments that are known to become less effective with use than act responsibly for prevention.

Neither condoms nor PrEP "become less effective with use". Either one is a way of acting responsibly for prevention.

I was referencing the treatments for gonorrhea (antibiotics). Condoms would actually fall in the "act responsibly" category of my comment, as you pointed out.

Why is this women’s fault somehow?

Why do you assume OP was blaming women? Nothing they said implies blame.

Noone passed blame, simply noting the sexual revolution has made STD's more common-place.

How do you infer that op is blaming women? They merely stated a fact and didn't assign any blame.

>" median age of female's first marriage "

The mere mention of a statistic involving a gender does not blame that gender. The point of noting the increase in marriage age is to point out that presumably the number of sexual partners increase as well, which can lead to more spread. Presumably women having more sexual partners ALSO means men having more, it takes two to tango and all that.

That said I had initially assumed that the reason for using women specifically was probably that the male median age didn't increase in the same time-frame, but it looks like it's pretty much been in lockstep (https://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/visualizat...) so it's an odd choice to not just mention the median age of marriage instead of women specifically.

I think that phrasing can reasonably be interpreted as critical: it sounds like it’s saying it’s somehow women’s responsibility and that dovetails with the very common cultural trope of assuming that men are irresponsible horndogs who can’t be expected to control ourselves. I don’t know if OP comes from that background but it’s common, especially in strongly religious communities where you have the “Eve tempted Adam into sin” mythos.

That's a statement of fact that is either true or not. It is not a statement of culpability in anyway.

Men are pigs (see that's a fact and an example of a moral judgement), and are almost exclusively to blame for the spread of STDs. Doesn't change the fact changing female sexual norms change sexual network connectivness and therefore how STDs spread

I think the OP indirectly does that. They chose to say

“The median age of female's first marriage was less than 22 for 100 years and rose to 28 in the last few decades”

and not

“The median age of male's first marriage was less than 26 for 100 years and rose to 30 in the last few decades”

or the neutral

“The median age of first marriage was more or less stable for 100 years and rose by about 6 years in the last few decades”

How about we judge people for what they say and not what we fantasize they meant to say?

Judging others based on what we feel they really meant to say is a very dangerous course.

They’re being judged by what they actually said. They could have picked a neutral statement but choosing to focus on only half of the people involved was an editorial choice which is reasonable to question.

Well, even if "they both rose about 6 years", they aren't actually the same. I chose the lowest for a reason, since it shows a bigger shift in relative terms. Going from 22-28 is bigger percentage gain than 24-30.

It actually is the more impactful number which was relevant to my original point (people are staying in the dating pool for a longer % of their life)

> It actually is the more impactful number which was relevant to my original point (people are staying in the dating pool for a longer % of their life)

You may have had that point in your mind, but by choosing to only mention the numbers for women, the point you made was “women are staying in the dating pool for a longer % of their life”.

I chose women because it was the younger age and assumed it was more relevant to taking half the population out of the dating pool, which was my main point. All these comments assuming it was some crack at women are wound too tight.

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