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Comment by ancillary | Hacker News Reader

> 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!

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.

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Social media and phones with cameras has made a lot of people risk adverse. When a video can hit Twitter or TikTok or Reddit about something that can ruin your life why risk it?

I'm not sure that's it. It's a contradiction that we have social media where people share their lives and that people are risk averse to having videos made of themselves.

It's not a contradiction: people don't share their real lives, they share a curated and often dishonest version of their lives. Obviously people don't want negative videos shared publicly.

And seeing some content commented online. Even that curated part might not sell the personality. I might even say that decent chunk of people who put their lives online are less than stable or good partner material.

There are people running around poisoning produce and posting it online—I don't think camera shyness is an element of it.

Those people are psychopaths and the exception to the rule

just don't go to Coldplay concerts!

If both you and your date are marred to other people.

Roe V Wade reversal and the extent they rolled back women’s rights has certainly changed the atmosphere.

Roe v Wade reversal happened well past the observed decline in sex occurrence.

The reversal of Roe v Wade has changed people's sex drives?

I would imagine it has for a certain portion of the population with a certain organ that is the subject of legislation.

Yes? There’s now additional risk of dying

True. The decline has been in effect for a while, but as for recent chages losing reproductive freedom can't be helping, nor AI and legal weed as two new ways for people to opiate themselves.

I don't think any meaningful segment of the population is using AI to "opiate" themselves. AI is a useful tool but I haven't heard of it having parasocial effects on any meaningful scale.

Happy to be shown otherwise if there's data?

"Meaningful" is quite the qualifier. It's possible http://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is entirely one person's work of fiction but also maybe not. From there you have to guess at how many people are doing that and just not telling anybody or posting about it online. So there's no data that proves it one way or the other, and all we've got to go on is anecdotes.

Eh, having lived in many other countries - lack of reproductive freedom definitely doesn’t cut back on sex. Same with public shaming, or other coercive control.

It’s not like there are 1.5 billion Indians because no one has sex there.

I don't think the overturning of Roe vs Wade was the key driver in trends which started long before that decision, but there's a big difference between a society where girls marry who they're expected to marry and have sex with him when he expects it and a society where girls get to choose whether to hookup or not and if and when to marry but don't get to choose how they deal with the results...

I take it you’ve never lived in India?

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.

Spent enough months in India to be aware that hookups happen, including ones parents would be very disapproving of and ones which were illegal at the time. Pretty much everything happens in India to some degree, but we're talking about the effect at the margin here, and I don't think India has a 1.5bn population because hookups are more of a thing there than the West.

Fair point - the population numbers are largely due to the (most common) marital structure, and societal expectations around having kids.

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?’.

I suspect that for all the attention certain politics and niche subcultures promoting disengagement get, it mostly comes down to spending less time in mingly social environments with the opposite sex, something young unmarried Indian men frequently expressed disappointment with and is also increasingly the case in the West for a different balance of reasons. The average reason may be different, but of course the US has its small towns full of conservative parents and India has its internet addicts and workaholics.

(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)

Eh, the situation in the USA is a lot more like Japan - apparent voluntary self isolation. NEET’s, etc.

Good luck doing that in India without being murdered by your parents (not joking!).

Well they do also have 6-10 kids per family there so...

That's very recent while this started quite a while ago.

It takes about that long for the message to embed itself into the generational psyche.

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