The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping
ifstudies.org
ifstudies.org
It would help if we built third spaces that weren't centered around alcohol, which is also declining in popularity, especially with young adults.
Americans: why isn't anyone having sex anymore??
Also Americans: Abstinence only! You'll get pregnant! No abortions! STDs will kill you! Men deserve sex! We're not going to teach you how your body works!
Of course we end up with declining sex, in a country so obsessed with individualism and sex-adverse.
I do see hope though. The kids in my community are being taught age-appropriate, consent-based sex ed, and the availability of free, high-quality sex ed is improving.
I would be really interested to see if sex frequency is declining for everyone, or just for people who aren't putting in any emotional labor to learning and growing as a person when it comes to sexuality.
Just some off-the-cuff thoughts :)
Sex ed is also something I was more universally supported. Regardless of your views on when someone should have sex, I doubt it serves anyone’s goals to have young adults getting hurt, sick, or traumatized by a natural part of growing up.
It's a surprisingly positive read, given that thesis. The idea that we should be tought (in an age approptiate way) how our bodies work and how to respect others shouldn't be controversial, and yet, here we are.
Poland in particular is the outlier here, both in fall of birth rates and lack of sex ed...
Yet it got here even angrier at about the same time.
I genuinely do not know what you are talking about heremaybe except "this person is consuming wastly different media".
Unlike facebook which recommends pornographic content and AI generated attention bait.
None of that is new in America. If anything, I'd expect that these forces were stronger 20-30 years ago, when sexual activity rates were higher.
It’s not like there are 1.5 billion Indians because no one has sex there.
Both are true in large part there, at least in the cities.
Except Indian politics are at least 10x as crazy as current US politics on the ground, and probably 10x as potentially (violently) serious if someone ‘steps out of line’, so people are better at hiding what is going on.
The amount of sex though definitely includes hookups and a lot of sex outside of the acknowledged marital structure. A large number of those kids may well be illegitimate, I suspect no one wants to look too hard.
I also suspect what is happening in the US is a combination of defacto ‘strikes’ from both sides of the equation, combined with general confusion as to what to do or why. Essentially a ‘why would I want to engage with this mess? What’s even in it for me?’.
(Not sure if there are directly comparable surveys, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that unmarried Americans were rather more sexually active than unmarried Indians, even with the downward trend)
Good luck doing that in India without being murdered by your parents (not joking!).
Happy to be shown otherwise if there's data?
Knowing about your body and having access to contraceptives should in my opinion promote the frequency of sex.
But the other part sounds fun, so, why wouldn't learning about that encourage you? If you've done a decent sex ed course then a whole lot of fun possibilities are showcased, even if you think some of them are gross the others seem intriguing enough that I'd expect more rather than less will be interested in trying.
I'm just saying that observationally, traditional societies and sub-societies with worse sex ed that are less "sexually enlightened" tend to have more sex and fertility. Maybe it has something to do with breaking taboo?
In a place where abortion was legal, I expect having sex ed would not significantly affect fertility rate but would decrease abortion rate.
Abstinence only education creates teenage pregnancies, basically.
Back on topic: You mention "people who aren't putting in any emotional labor to learning and growing as a person". But, from your first paragraph, who's got time and energy for that?
My own guess at an additional factor: Women's equality has made women who didn't need to depend on a man. As a result, they got a lot choosier about what downsides, flaws, and baggage they were willing to put up with.
This would track with how a lot of dating apps, etc are described as "the top 70% of women competing for the top 30% of men"
Time and energy don't exist for _that_ level of casual activity, let alone overpriced and time-expensive in person activities.
It seems to me that we've built this horrible, alienating environment not by deliberate choice but through a larger collective and political process none of us could individually control. We've created rules (building codes and zoning laws) that entrench this dystopia in countless small ways which will take a concerted effort to undo.
That seems unlikely. Genuinely curious if there’s something I’m missing here.
https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disinterm...
If you're attractive and your advances are well recieved, you will not get reported to HR. Vice versa.
And one way to make it clear (to her and to yourself) is to have (social) relationships with other coworkers, with other women, and to have other women in your life. That way she knows (and you know) that she's not your sole focus, your only real chance, and she knows that you're able to maintain healthy, safe relationships with women that you aren't trying to date.
The really important thing is to make sure she understands that there's no pressure on her to say yes, and that saying no will not lead to an uncomfortable workplace dynamic. A lot of this is good advice for connecting with women you'd potentially like to date in other circumstances too - the reason there's a lot of generic, overly broad 'advice' floating around about "don't hit on women at the gym" "don't flirt with women at their place of work" "don't ask women out at school" "don't ask your friends out" "don't hit on women in hobby groups" is that a lot of men are terrible at not making women feel singled out and socially coerced. If you can convince yourself that you're in that situation for more reasons than looking for a date, and if you're able to create a broader social context, you're very unlikely to fall into that trap, and vastly less likely to get accused of behaving inappropriately; and if you somehow do anyway, it'll be much easier to defend yourself as having engaged in good faith. Since you obviously did.
> asked me out for 'drinks' before we ever had a single conversation."
can you see the problem?
Come to Denver. We have suburbs that are walkable. Or rather don't, we don't need more people ;-)
So it's like the US is primarily for corporate entities to interact in predefined contractual settings that have abstracted away anything human about them. Even families are kind of like corporate entities interacting with each other. I am not sure how it got to this point but maybe something like pursuit of income at the expense of social ties and over-litigation caused it. I'm not sure.
Is this capitalism? Is it technology (I’m not talking about computers) induced narcissism? Is it because we reduce ourselves and others to metrics and then use yardsticks to incessantly measure ourselves on a broken scale?
Whether living in an apartment building in a city or a house in the suburbs, I’m frequently surprised how many people never introduce themselves to their neighbors. And that has nothing to do with cars.
People want some external system to construct a social environment for them and often blame everything but themselves when they could easily arrange a neighborhood get together by passing out some flyers…
I think this dependence on external systems, on governments, is another symptom of the problem. When people belong to a community they don't have that expectation, they are participants. Look to the Amish, for example, and their famous barn-raisings. They don't depend on government relief or insurance policies. Everyone contributes to building a new barn when someone in the community needs one.
cut - 10 minutes about alcohol being the most deadly drug on earth - "People who drink moderately have more friendships, closer friendships and higher levels of trust in others".
Now _moderately_ is the key word here.
We need an approved better alternative. Seriously chemistry exists, we actually have pharmaceuticals that literally are the alcohol with vastly reduced side effects. Still addictive, of course.
> The kids in my community are being taught age-appropriate, consent-based sex ed, and the availability of free, high-quality sex ed is improving.
This has been the case in blue states for decades. I had proper sex-ed in the 90s.
I think one reason the trans community is so threatening to a certain ideology is that we found happiness by intentionally and deliberately discarding core components of that ideology and having done so we found something better.
I truly never imagined I could have what I have today. In finding my way through poly, transition, and finding community, I changed my life. I don’t think for everyone gender transition is the answer, but going through a serious process of contemplative evaluation and change, however difficult it may be, did so much for me.
It's like a scientific discovery, a mathematical proof or evidence of a crime. The go to strategy is to get rid of that evidence, but how do you get rid of evidence if the evidence is a person?
There are some very vocal right wing politicians in the US who say openly that trans people should be eliminated from society. Much like calls 20-30-40 years ago to eliminate gays from society, such an effort is impossible, but they could do great harm if they try.
Thought reform, which is sophisticated science based techniques that impose stress and increase suggestability, almost to the point of mindlessness,are torture that have been imposed in varying ways to kids and teens. The entire process of centralized education embraces this through Paulo Freire's pedagogy which is most National Teachers Union members; like "Lying to Children", or by-rote teaching (two faces same coin).
When you succumb to torture, you adopt characteristics of the torturer that are reflected. The torturer can distort that reflection for purpose, and in general its a state of involuntary hypnosis. This same state can be induced through distorting reflected appraisal through media. Its not the type of torture you see caracicaturized in media. It leverages perceptual blindspots to induce psychological instability.
When the girls are taught that attractive qualities in men are unattractive or crazy, and the guys are taught the same thing; there is an age range where those core identity beliefs are adopted and crystallized to carry forward the rest of their lives. It takes great personal suffering to overcome any of these, let alone recognize them.
The behavior promoted is almost and mimics similar behaviors or mannerisms that occur in schizophrenics, and is one sign that a person may have been tortured. In addition to what you mention, this has been occuring for decades, and the economic consequences have only gotten worse, and the environment has only ever marched toward disadvantaged.
The world created by the aggregate of older adults today is a hellscape for their children, but most of these slothful (complacent) people have willfully blinded themselves to the reality of their actions.
For example dating websites where you are never matched up to someone that is long-term compatible, effectively being pigeonholed into a eugenics experiment since the strategy the company uses to guarantee profit is the same strategy the USDA uses to eradicate parasites through sterility.
Whenever these type of dynamics occur, chaos sustainably grows until the systems involved can no longer correct, as a positive feedback system. All the way to catastrophe.
Aside from food security, when you make social life unlivable and intolerable. When you deprive children who become adults, of lifes joy through conditioned indoctrination and torture. You have as a group stolen their future. The ones that did nothing are equally responsible as the ones that moved it towards that state.
There is a critical point where they will realize what has been done to them, because you can't fool everyone always. When that occurs, the law won't save the old. Absent a functioning rule of law (which we don't have), violence will be the only option to these people, and they will have nothing to lose.
Chickens come home to roost eventually. Evil doesn't need to know its evil to be evil. All it needs to do is be willfully blind. Thomas Paine said it best when he referred to "Dead Men Ruling."
Books:
Robert Cialdini (1990s) - Influence - Covers perceptual blindspots
Robert Lifton (1950s) - Thought Reform & Totalism - Detailed Case Studies of Torture
Joost Meerloo (1950s) - Rape of the Mind - Covers the broad topic of torture and thought reform; has some dating.
Chase Hughes - Ellipsis - The material in this domain is highly fragmented across many subfields, he aggregates most of the important parts of modern thought reform (1970s+) into NCI, including Cults, Cointelpro, Kubark, and others. Author was a professional military interrogator/behavioral modification expert (iirc).
Torture/Modern Thought Reform is recognized by its Elements, Structuring, and Clustering, and the last group is often addiction linked following lines of Narco-synthesis/analysis through dopamine triggering/conditioning.
Unfortunately, you probably won't see this post long. HN has a lot of bots, automatons, or despicable people that don't want harsh truths to see the light of day. Almost without fail within 30 minutes of linking to the reference material included, the posts get downvoted to invisibility despite being science backed and true.
Mind you nothing said here changes the reality of the dynamics. It will all happen the same regardless. The hiding is only an action that prevents a general forewarning to others as preparable time ahead of the associated collapse occurring.
There are a lot of people alive today that want to destroy everyone and everything they can.
Ivan Illyin seems to have been right with regards to his refutation of Tolstoy, and outcomes of evil.
I don't know what time machine you arrive on, but no one has been seriously promoting abstinence for decades, except in certain religious circles, and that's where people are having the most sex and the best sex. That's not a coincidence. They more like to be engaging in it the only healthy way it can be: an expression of mutual self-giving and love, and an act of bonding that reinforces the relationship that's already there. Intrinsically entailed is its openness to new life, as that is its ultimate consummation and raison d'etre. Block that and you corrupt the act. Reap the consequences.
> Of course we end up with declining sex, in a country so obsessed with individualism and sex-adverse.
Sex averse? You must be joking. We're sex-obsessed! Creepiness has been normalized. You can't watch a movie for 5 minutes without having your face rubbed in a sex scene, or a newspaper with the latest sexual fetish looking to receive society's blessing instead of its condemnation and scorn. Advertising is heavily sexualized, contributing to the commercializing of sex. Dating culture, rather that being about courtship and getting to know someone to find a spouse, is and has been for some time some kind of dystopian and aimless sex ritual. What a mind job!
And porn use? Yeah, it is a problem and a major contributor to various disorders and insecurities. The vast majority of males (especially Gen Z) are regular consumers of pornography, which has never been so ubiquitous and easily available - you're just a typo away from accidentally tripping over a porn site. Record numbers of women are dabbling in OF-style sex work. In the case of Gen Z and Gen Alpha, they practically grew up on the stuff. Pornography is also shaping sexual norms that are disturbing. For instance, there has been a rise in the frequency at which women are choked during sex. That comes from pornography, which has been only deepening mistrust, misunderstanding, disrespect, and animosity between the sexes. The crippling effect pornography has on the ability to form and have a healthy relationship cannot be understated.
The very fact that we're even talking about people not having sex as the problem is already a sign that we have a deranged relationship with sex. It's not about sex as if it were some decontextualized recreational activity that is failing to hit quotas. It has a place, and outside of its legitimate narrow confines, it becomes an act of violence, an instrument of power, and an act of exploitation and abuse. The social fallout is incalculable. Consent doesn't wave that away.
> The kids in my community are being taught age-appropriate, consent-based sex ed, and the availability of free, high-quality sex ed is improving.
Sex ed has been around for a long time, and one of its common faults is that it decontextualizes sex, and second, doesn't and can't give you "just the facts", but actively promotes and shapes unhealthy attitudes toward what is acceptable sexual behavior. Sexual ethics is reduced to mere consent, at best. To say the problem is that we don't have enough sex ed is like saying communism failed because it didn't communism hard enough.
Sex is not a toy. It's a powerful and sacred act. FAFO. That we are not horrified by the state of sexual relations and sexual disorder is a testament to the numbing effect our disorder has. For centuries, it was known to great moral teachers that one of the "daughters of lust" (where lust is not healthy sexual desire, but one not proportioned by reason) is a darkening of the mind.
So, yes, community is important, but it needs a basis, and a deep one, but the point of a community is not to supply you with sexual experiences. If your community begins operating like some kind of sex market, it will dissolve and right so, because it will have become a seedy hive of sexual perversion, coercion, and unhealthy relations.
The sexual relationship is the glue of family and through that of society. Mess with it, and prepare for hell.
The frequency of sex scenes in movies has been dropping for a while.
To the extent hookups lead to relationships, it's coming from people that are willing to settle
I think you got this one backwards.
The messaging I've seen is the opposite "Men don't deserve sex!".
The dead bedroom is particularly popular when the boyfriend in question is, in the words of the girlfriend in question, "gentle and treating his girlfriend better than any of her previous boyfriends".
Okay, but don't get surprised if men listen to you and avoid having sex.
Dead bedroom happens because people don’t solve their marital problems, generally have poor sex but are too afraid to talk about it, or to summarise communicate extremely poorly. It’s entirely unrelated to men being "too nice" whatever that’s supposed to mean.
If you are unhappy in your relationship, have some courage, talk about it, fix it or end it if it will never satisfy you. Stop playing the victim.
And to be fair, I think communication issue might be the crux of the modern lack of socialisation.
From the article:
"When it comes to sexlessness (“no sex in the last year”) among young adults, the biggest change comes post-2010."
"Between 2010 and 2019, the average time young adults spent with friends in a given week fell by nearly 50%, from 12.8 hours to just 6.5 hours."
No doubt there are other factors too, and all of the factors are entangled together as in any complex system, but I think internet and smartphones is one of the biggest aspects to point to.
Just in the past couple of weeks we've met some neighbors with toddlers that enjoy our toddler. It's been SUPER nice being able to hanf out with the adults while the kids entertain each other.
So there was something smooth that hit a phase transition. Likely enployment or housing prices, forcing people to engage survival mode. People in this mode do not feel secure enough to have sex or especially start families.
Video games were available pre-2010, but they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous, and honestly the people playing lots of video games pre-2010 weren’t having lots of sex either.
Same with smartphones. Smartphone apps existed but weren't as personalized and didn't serve nearly as diverse of content as they do now. It's night and day. Surely I don't need to pull up a graph of smartphone usage per day.
The primary substitute for physical sex is DIY with porn. Over the past 30 years porn has become orders of magnitudes cheaper (pre internet, it was ~$9 to see ~5 humans nude a la playboy magazine, and involved a trip to the shops; now it's approximately free and instant). Porn simultaneously increased orders of magnitude in quality and variety.
If you apply the same thinking to any other two substitute products (i.e. one gets 1000x cheaper whilst improving in quality and variety, whilst the original stays approximately the same), we could expect the exact same results, i.e. switching from one to the other.
Given the amount of men who can't masturbate using their imaginations, masturbation has absolutely become cheaper and easier.
Maybe ask to share a joint? Lol
A metaphor worth stealing.
Now the rent tripled, 20€ gets you a beer and a bus ride, and people stay home with the same few friends, if they're bothered to do anything at all.
Obviously this is one anecdote, but it seems the kids these days just don't like going out to bars and restaurants. I can't imagine 20 somethings have stopped liking food, so it seems the atmosphere is more likely the issue.
Why would they go?
I've made a new year resolution in 2024 to be much more outgoing with my friends and coworkers, and to go to more concerts. My wife isn't a concert person, and I don't have many local friends. But still, I always buy two tickets and, to the friends and colleagues I will offer the other ticket, usually in conversation or at random, usually months in advance, and usually at no cost just because I just really like having friends -- who doesn't?
Of the 6 shows since then, 4 people accepted to go with me, but all of them ended up cancelling. One friend tapped in at the last second just because he was a local student with nothing better to do on friday night. So I've been to a lot of concerts alone, which kinda sucks. Everyone else is there with some companion, but I'm kinda extraverted so made a few acquaintances.
I also planned a fishing trip with another -- free airfare (companion pass) and lodging (family condo) for them -- and cancelled about 2 weeks prior to it.
I also realized i'm the manufacturer of my friendships -- I am the one who asks friends out for lunch, brunch, hikes, beers, coffee, picnics, game night, etc. I'm the conversation starter. I send the plurality of reels. I'm reminded of my friends on a daily basis from random happenings, that spur me to get a gift, or send a news article, or just a pic or text, or to form a plan for a birthday party or fishing trip or cross-country flight or anything.
They'd often accept the small stuff, and things were good. But I backed away during my recent paternity leave, and they basically disappeared. I still send and receive some how are you's, but it made me realize how lopsided my relationships became.
I kinda burnt out manufacturing my relationships (also after learning about that term), so I stopped, and for the last 3 months I've been essentially devoid of friendship (except for one person who ).
Started to make me think I smell or something, but reading of the male loneliness epidemic and an overall dissolution of community is making me realize the only thing I'm doing wrong is not continuing to manufacture my friendships like I was before.
You may be quite the extrovert like myself. My partner is an introvert and deeply struggles to reach out to people that she really wants to reach out to and keep in touch with. I found it quite baffling at first, though it appears to come from a desire to avoid bothering people. People are complicated.
And ultimately, real friendship is quite rare. I think Muhammad Ali had the best definition
"Friendship is a priceless gift that cannot be bought nor sold, but its value is far greater than a mountain made of gold. For gold is cold and lifeless. It can neither see nor hear. In times of trouble, it's powerless cheer. It has no ears to listen, no heart to understand. It cannot bring you comfort or reach out a helping hand. So when you ask God for a gift, be thankful if sends not diamonds, pearls, or riches but the love of real, true friends."
Another thread said how things changed at lot in the 10s which echos my experience. When I first started working professionally I'd go out with my colleagues every week at least once after work. The rest of the 10s I was mostly working remotely, but recently I've been in the office more. Since COVID it seems that socialising has just gone down hill, even just getting people to go for lunch together is hard now... At work if a person leaves who I had a good friendship with, there's a good chance I'm never going to see them again.
Ain't that an understatement.
I don't know if I'd reframe them as acquaintances though. I could probably be better at reaching out to them as well, for all I know they feel the same way. And I'm absolutely close with a lot of my friends that I rarely see or talk to. There is the whole meme format about "the stuff you get up to with that one friend you see once a year" or something that seems to be a common sentiment.
Plenty of people also find community through technology, so I personally don’t believe technology is the only contributing factor here.
I do agree with in you general about many Americans not having enough social or communal interaction, though. I suspect this is more a symptom of a lot of other social issues than a purely technological problem though.
As with all addiction, the poison is not just in the dosage, but the intensity of the hit. Television was only so powerful. Shows ended, commercials ran, and channels were limited. Of course the rise of having absolutely anything imaginable available at all times in high definition in limitless amounts will make the effect far stronger.
This is when social media was actually used for more than keeping up with influencers.
- the whole male loneliness epidemic
- a longstanding loss of community and social organizations around the country
- a pretty terrible job market for many Americans
- plenty of things to be stressed or worried about. Geopolitical instability. Erosion of individual rights. The complete failure of political leadership across the US. Rising cancer rates. Take your pick.
But most people don't have college degrees, so this doesn't explain everything.
Uneducated women marry significantly less.
The feminism movement started seeing successes only recently.
Say what you will about the positives or negatives of feminism, but that did literally occur.
I put this disappearance down to two factors: “me too” alienated too many women, and also the millennials who drove the movement aged out and eased up on their online activities. Gen Z didn’t want any part in it so there were no successors.
Today is like life post covid: we all know it happened but somehow it’s unreal and unbelievable. Some refuse to believe it ever happened at all.
Where women are forced to carry to term after rape.
Where seeking medical care in another state for either scenario will result in prosecution.
These are real, serious concerns for many woman that will have a cooling effect on their willingness to have intimate relationships.
My understanding is that Conservatism encourages family values but at the cost of having less sexual partners (for example no sex before marriage) whereas Liberalism encourages the opposite.
That was 50 years ago, they are probably talking about how feminism changed since then.
But reality is of course more complicated ... so don't blame it on one reason.
Technology makes society more interconnected and puts men in competition with a greater number of their peers.
My observation from comparing different societies is that the amount of sex increases as men have greater leverage over women, and vice-versa.
Even so, any event that removes people from society largely indiscriminately of sex, removes excess men for the purpose of this argument. The pool of competition for men is greater than the pool of competition for women.
In other words, the difficulty of male competition increases with population density at a greater rate than the same of female competition. So you expect areas with high population density to have low fertility due to the male disadvantage. Calhoun's rat utopia is one such extreme example.
> the difficulty of male competition increases with population density at a greater rate than the same of female competition
I queried GPT and checked a few of the sources, it was an interesting diversion: https://chatgpt.com/share/68b3508b-cd98-8000-8021-811acd5908...
TLDR; seems to be that:
- There isn't any direct empirical research that supports the idea of male competition for a partner gets harder with population density. On the contrary, it seems competition for a guy finding a partner gets worse the lower the population density becomes. This would explain stories I've heard about dating in parts of Alaska.
- The sex ratio balance of a population seems to be the highest predictor of the level of competition for a partner. This makes intuitive sense to me: The less common gender will always have more options than the more common gender in an area.
What I don't know and would be interested to hear about: Is there a strong link between population density and gender ratio? In addition to this, I'm sure there's also all sorts of interesting facets you could examine like cohorts by age, sexuality, or partner preferences like height, build, appearance, etc. and how that factors into the perception vs reality of competition for a desirable cohort of partners vs total available partners.
Just because those are the most interesting events to study doesn't mean that in the past countries were constantly experiencing war, famine and epidemics. There were plenty of calm, relatively peaceful periods in between.
As far as living standard are concerned, while being a peasant was hard work during certain periods such as harvest and sowing, outside of those periods farmers actually worked less hours than we do today. That leaves lots of time to help out with chores in your village and maintain relationships with the people around you.
- Decline in trust undermines institutions, and the loss of institutions further reduces trust.
- Rising inequality, political polarization, and lack of fairness & opportunity further reduce trust.
- This results in withdrawal from in-person activities and the substitution of online "life".Probably better phrased as the 'immature men epidemic'. Put responsibility where it belongs.
1. Social movements promoting not having sex. Obviously not that big a thing but it does cut down the available sex partners.
2. reiterating the examples people give of animosity between male and female, straight sex still the bulk of sex and does seem to be a lot more reasons for avoiding each other nowadays.
3. neurodivergence becoming more acceptable, many neurodivergent people have lesser sex drives, in the past you might have just decided to go ahead and have sex because oh well it's what one does isn't it.
4. sex is going down in comparison to previous decades which might have been especially high sex decades. Perhaps the sexual revolution was revolutionary but now it is somewhat old hat and not as interesting.
instead of using it as a tool and saying “hey, let’s try this” (sexually, emotionally, practically), they’re conditioned to just pull the ripcord if you don’t meet expectations
Aside from the social aspects which could be debated, older obese adult men are more likely to have medical conditions that would decrease their ability to have sex.
I think the other reasons they posted are valid but was expecting a comment on that.
To indulge my inner freshman-dorm-philosopher: It feels like every social dynamic is becoming "more of itself" as the engines of standardization and commodification churn. With the social technologies bringing the same phenomena to interpersonal relationships as the forces of capital did to our material relationships: everything is relatively abundant but cheap and interchangeable and disposable; friction is sanded away; stimuli are hyper-optimized for salience; everything's about closing the next sale, and a long-term relationship is an obstacle to that end...
How can the real world compete? Why build when you can rent? Why turn from the endless variety and bright colors and ocean of perfect bodies or whatever, toward something that's "special because it's ours," and frankly, much more boring than in the movies (or The New York Magazine)? Plus, the risk! The vulnerability!
Was it John Mayer who got a bit of hot water over his relationship with pornography [1]?
More than enough is too much, what is essential is invisible to the eye, it is the time you have wasted for your rose that makes your rose so important, etc. :)
[1] https://www.playboy.com/read/playboy-interview-john-mayer/?s...
I’ve been gathering data on the natural experiment that occurred due to differences in proliferation of smartphones across countries. The sex surveys aren’t consistent but that is a very strong factor. Look at the hockey stick curve in the paper here.
The rest of the decline is (in my evaluation) best explained with the increase in average age of the 18-64 year old demographic.
I wondered about this before reading the article, but there's a chart in the article comparing narrow ~10 year age ranges to their past levels, and the decline is persistent in each group, so I don't think it can be explained by the overall population being older.
Btw, from my personal experience in europe, I actually don't see a significant rise in sober adults when going out. Combined with the rise of loneliness (from 12h per week of socialising in 2010 to just 5h!) I think its not because they found a fun sober alternative, I think its because they don't see anyone anymore. Or the other way around: Do the share of young adults, who socialize as much as previous generations, also drink significantly less, date less, have less sex? How do these stats behave when controlled for the amount of socialising one does?
I was raised by very anxious mother, until I was like 20-21, I never got out of the house unless it was for school. And nowadays I just... don't know how I would even meet people.
10-20 years ago, someone would tell her she's insane. Later, she'd be seen as a protecting parent.
We've removed sex from normal life as far as possible. Films can be full of violence but any hint of titillation is verboten now. Any reference to sex in normal walks of life is seen as harassment, chauvinistic or pandering to the male gaze. Our culture is influenced by global social and religious conservatism in the quest to sell media to as many markets as possible. Our own new conservatism (the so-called left wing) is just as bad.
On top of that we have the culmination of a few decades of obsessive education about STDs and sex as a dangerous act that can ruin lives. A far cry from 'The Joy of Sex' as a cultural phenomenon.
We're letting prudes and those with deep psychological issues around sex call the shots. Millennials and Gen Z may be a lost cause, but let's hope that Gen A can rewrite the rules.
What other studies have been done on this subject, and did they reach similar conclusions? What evidence out there contradicts this study, and why should we give more weight to this evidence? "Pick the study that reinforces the point you are trying to make" is a classic.
From years of reading Scott Alexander I've become attuned to the difference between 1) someone trying to convince me of something or 2) someone trying to discover the truth. The tone of this article fits clearly into category #1. That doesn't mean it isn't true, but it should not be accepted at face value.
This trend arises from a rational analysis of tradeoffs.
Speaking to female and male friends, both sides are seeing them as a complete shitshow that’s not helping either side meet the right people.
Meeting people IRL yielded much better results.
But I have to admit, I met my latest partner in 2019, so I don't know how the pandemic would my current dating success.
In what sense?
I'm not one of those weirdos who can't see that materially in some superficial ways, our lives are better than ever: medicine, toys, entertainment, and a lot of other stuff, better than ever. Not only that, I can even acknowledge that capitalism is what has provided this bounty to us.
But what it also does is underline all the time that you, personally are not "adequate" unless you want to be the kind of person who hustles all the time, who is seeking an angle or an alpha, who wants to be an entrepreneur of some kind. I think this just doesn't appeal to most people the message society is sending loud and clear is that if you just want to have a nice life and you don't want to constantly figure out new ways to improve your capital, you'll get left behind. I think for many people this doesn't seem like a cool world to have a baby in.
If there is any clear reason at all, it's simply that sex is a choice. It has been completely unrelated to survival for a long while now. Yes, it is technically required at scale that someone has babies, but if no particular individual feels that pressure you should expect it to fluctuate like any other choice.
Sex would have to mean something to the individual for the numbers to go back up.
This says more about you than it does society.
Please get help. It doesn’t have to be this way, I promise.
Time has disappeared as people attempt to do everything themselves (work, cooking, cleaning, managing finances, etc) that may have been shared or outsourced in the past. But time has also disappeared into intentionally addictive apps on our phones. Every commercial game and social media site is designed to maximize your eyes.
Money seems to be ignored by the article, but every generation is worse off than their parents, as wages stagnate, housing skyrockets, student loan and medical debt keep going up, leaving less and less disposable income. With finances so tight, people cut back on group gatherings that have an associated expense (bars, concerts, etc). And raising children becomes unaffordable.
Personally, I blame billionaires, including their influence on tax policies, suppression of wages, and the creation of monopolies that push up prices. The elimination of sex is just one of many side effects of a much bigger issue affecting the working population around the world.
Now look at the world of singles. T increase risk taking. What if we have several generations of low T and therefore loss desire for risk. Let's exclude the modern reality of women posting men who approach them to social media as if they are creeps. No T means no risk taking.