The article mostly blames pornography and digital addiction, but I think those are symptoms of a larger problem, which is lack of belonging and community. If life sucks, you have few friends you can afford the time or money to see, and you work to make other people rich until you are exhausted, when do you have time and energy to maintain a relationship? If you feel like the world is on fire, it's hard to get in the mood.
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.
The decline of community is a very big deal. I think a lot of it has to do with the way we build our living spaces. Modern North American cities are rife with car-centric suburbs, huge driveways, front doors set back a mile from the sidewalk, long commutes to anywhere (not just work, even to get groceries). We're living in these metal-and-glass boxes and we only see other people as obstacles in the way of what we want, rather than fellow human beings.
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.
There's something about this I think is illuminating. I don't think the social issues fall into partisan politics. It's like we've abstracted away people into something like a corporate entity. Even in large residence buildings in cities, people don't know each other right next to them. That's in contrast with small villages where everyone knows each other for generations. Another example is roads and how road rage forms as a result of dehumanizing people into entities.
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.
I have lived in villages and cities in different continents. This abstraction you speak of isn’t limited to the US. Asian and European cities are the same. People don’t tend to socialize a lot with their neighbors in the cities as much as they did and still do in the villages.
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?
It couldn't be more obvious and intuitive that the people you're around for half your waking time would be one of the bigger sources of potential partners, and also just friends/acquaintances where a partner comes from the social networks thusly formed.
This paper suggests meeting people directly or indirectly via work was second to meeting through friends around the turn of the century, though there was a wide spread of how people met so it only amounted to a fifth of couples. Then online took over....
From the HR training i got from many places, harassment is what gets you in trouble with HR i.e. persisting after your advances have been rejected. Politely shooting your shot is fine, unless the target reports to you.
You're missing the distinction. I met my wife at work but any and all propositioning happened outside the office, and not at office social events either.
You can invite a group of coworkers to an event. You can attend events established by groups of coworkers. You can invite an individual to a party you're hosting that other people are attending, or sometime when she didn't pack lunch you can offer to go grab lunch with her. The important thing is to establish a social relationship before trying for a romantic or sexual one: Don't single her out, don't ask her to be in a situation where it's just you and her in something heavily date-coded (keeping her company when she grabs lunch? good! Asking her out solo for drinks/dinner? bad!) until you're a known quantity to her, until you could confidently say she considers you, if not a friend, someone she's friendly with. At that point, and AT THAT POINT ONLY, you can casually, in a low-key way, ask her on a date in a way that makes it abundantly clear it's not going to be a huge deal if she says no, and that that wasn't the whole entire point of getting to know her.
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.
Uh, only if invited? I mean do you not ever get lunch with coworkers or invite them to events you're hosting or ask if they want to see a movie or concert with you that you've been into? The important thing is to establish a positive social relationship before indicating any sort of sexual interest, so they know you as "My chill coworker John" rather than "John the guy at the office who's always staring at my tits and asked me out for 'drinks' before we ever had a single conversation." It's not impossible to establish sexual or romantic chemistry before establishing social chemistry, but it's sure harder.
I was wondering if someone would jump on that. Are you genuinely curious about or unclear on the difference? Do you legitimately not understand how those two statements can be true? I'm willing to try to explain, if you're seriously interested, but if you're motivated by trying to demonstrate that I'm incorrect I won't waste my time.
I think cars and urban design are too often used as a scapegoat.
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…
People want some external system to construct a social environment for them and often blame everything but themselves
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
"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...
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)
Hmm. Off topic, but I wonder if the reason for your second paragraph isn't your first paragraph. Sex and alcohol both are often escapes, and if you don't have time and energy for one, why would you have time and energy (and money) for the other?
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.
> 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"
Sex education lowers amount of sex among teenagers. Lack of it raises amount of sex among teenagers. Basically, when they know how body works, they have less sex, mostly dropping out of unsafe sex entirely. (Basically having less but safer sex).
Abstinence only education creates teenage pregnancies, basically.
You make some good points about attitude around sex in parts of the US today, and the erosion of community is a topic I was was more often discussed.
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.
This attitude is also being forced on people through media. Modern media seems almost allergic to the concept of even acknowledging that sex is a thing people do. Then, you look at the ways people self-censor on YouTube to avoid demonetization, where they won't even say the word sex. I see young people today who are shocked by movies and HBO TV shows from the 90s, 00s, and early 10s.
I watch mostly comedies a d crime stories on Netflix and there is no shortage of sex scenes. I am not deliberately searching them out, they just are there basically randomly.
I genuinely do not know what you are talking about heremaybe except "this person is consuming wastly different media".
I recently read (and enjoyed) Casey Tanner's _Feel it All_, which takes the stance that lack of sex ed is little-t traumatic, and backs up that argument convincingly.
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.
Even 30 years ago in East Texas we had sex ed in junior high. Abortions were legal and common. Boys had it shoved down their throats not to harass girls. I learned the biology of sex in 4th or 5th grade. While there was a common public message of abstinence the reality is most of the parents had their girls on birth control. At least all my friends were anyways.
Everything you said was more popular when rates of sex were higher, so clearly your thoughts aren't correct. On top of that, red states that push abstinence only have always had higher rates of teen pregnancy, again suggesting your ideas are not correct. Abstinence only education never stopped anyone.
> 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 would expect it to reduce fertility because we know when you explain to girls how human reproduction actually works fewer of them are onboard because that sure looks like a traumatic experience. Oh so eventually after the other horrible side effects the parasite gets so large I have to push it out of my body through an orifice which is clearly not adequately sized for this purpose? Strong no.
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 think you are trying to come up with an individualistic argument for why sex ed should exist.
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?
Viewed through a certain lense, you could view abstinence-only sex education and denial of access to abortions is a psyop to get (young) women to become pregnant and attached and dependant on a man.
But are they being given fair sex Ed that includes same sex stuff too? Because that still seems incredibly lacking even amongst the "less prude" communities for it.
What about hookup culture and apps like Tinder, how do you factor that into your analysis? Also dating apps are connecting people which lead to intimacy. I wonder what the demographics reveal and if it’s only a subset of the population using these.
My opinion of those is what I think of as the seal out of water effect. You wouldn't think a seal as a powerful and graceful animal if you only saw them out of the water. Most people on dating apps are like seals out of water.
I've had several meaningful relationships that were the results of dating apps, including my current 8-year one. And that one was from one of the "modern" apps you speak of.
The inequality on dating apps is very high. Their Gini coefficients vary from 0.4 to 0.6 on most popular dating apps. Even if 100% of people were using dating apps, only the top percentiles of men would be satisfied because they can get way more short-term partners than they could without the apps.
To the extent hookups lead to relationships, it's coming from people that are willing to settle
Quite interesting because in my trans and poly community I have found belonging, friendship, cuddles, alcohol free spaces, and lots of very exciting and interesting consensual safer sex. I’m having (by far) the best sex of my life after being active for 20+ years. It turns out that dancing in the forest on LSD is way more fun and exciting than chugging another beer on my couch (which is exactly how I spent my 20’s).
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.
When you have an inexplicable and paranoid disdain for a group and blame said group for the ills of everything wrong in the world, it's because the mere existence of said group disproves your worldview.
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?
Well they will try to ban HRT, try to ban trans access to every space they can, and if things get really bad they will turn their ICE-based kidnapping machine on trans people.
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.
Alcohol, while for some part of the population disastrous, does have a strong socializing effect on people. Recent kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/aOwmt39L2IQ?t=567
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".
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.
> 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!
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.
Its actually quite a bit worse than you think, but to recognize what's happening you have to understand how torture and the developing mind work to some small degree.
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.
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.
How can this non sense still be this prevalent nowadays?
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.
Humans generally don't interact in person as much with other humans anymore and technology is I think one of the big drivers of this change.
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.
Smart phones and the ubiquity of internet and video games is really it I think. You never have to be bored anymore, and therefore don’t have to meetup in person to be entertained.
The timeline does not match. Both were widely available in oughts.
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.
The first smartphone — iphone — came out in 2007? Adoption definitely started ramping up in 2010.
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.
Video games weren't as widespread, personalized, or diverse than they are now. That people who played video games in 2010 said that those were better is immaterial. This graph goes up through 2022: https://i.redd.it/tnrs4wl1ibkb1.png
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 data shows the big drop in sex happened in the 2010's. Your graph shows the big spike in gaming happened 2021 & 2022. That's during the pandemic. Of course gaming rose during the pandemic when people were forced to stay home.
No one means a BlackBerry when they say smartphones. It implies a large screen that can consume content easily, and with a large data plan, neither of which existed until
The iPhone. I never saw someone watch 2 hours of YouTube on a blackberry.
In micro economics, when a substitute reduces in cost and increases in quality, we see a substitution effect [0] (amusingly, coined by economist Eugen Slutsky), i.e. people switch away from the relatively expensive good and into its lower cost substitute.
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.
Porn is a substitute for seeing strangers naked. It's not a substitute for relationships, or even for sexual release. Masturbating is no cheaper or easier now than it ever was; people have been pursuing romantic and sexual relationships despite having the option to masturbate forever.
This is very much upstream of sex. I just started a masters program this week, and on Friday night at 8 pm, zero out of 52 of my cohort members wanted to join me for a beer. It's anecdotal, but seemed really remarkable to me. So it's not just sex, young people don't socialize in-person nearly as much as they used to. I have no idea how this will be addressed, if it does ever get addressed.
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.
I think one of the mentally healthier decisions I ever made was to realize that many of the friends I have, if I stopped reaching out to them, the relationships may cease to exist. And then quietly reframe them in my mind as good acquaintances.
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."
I've experienced the same thing, I thought it was just people didn't like me but maybe there is something else here. If I see people regularly (e.g. at the office) I can make good friendships with them and we get along well, but other than that I am the one that needs to put in the effort to arrange something if I want to see someone. Maybe 1/20 times I am the one who is invited, otherwise it's me who needs to do it.
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.
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.
I wonder if it's because of social media creating deeper and deeper niche personality traits. Where it's simultaneously easy to find lots of people that share common likes/dislikes, but practically unobtainable to find that one human that shares all are likes/dislikes and be the that perfect friend. There's also so many things to like and dislike that maybe people don't even truly know what they like and dislike.
Too many social interactions (and the culture of labelling everything, increasingly dividing us) have us burned out on making the deep connections.
It's similar to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362
This is basically me except I'm not married. Not really much to say except your experience is super common and I often wonder if it's something specific to me (or us) or if it's just the way the world is now. I'd love closer connections with people but it just feels impossible.
Is it a lack of interest, or are they being priced out? When I was in university around 2010, you could do a very decent night out for 20€, and crash in your mate's student room, for which they paid 250€ per month. You'd meet friends, friends of friends, and your social circle would just expand.
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.
Money was never a problem, you could just go sit on a bench with your friends, drink a few beers before heading to the pub, then buy only one beer for the whole evening. You didn’t need to spend much, you could grab a cheap tea somewhere or just hang out walking around the city and so on.
I recently visited my alma mater. There is a restaurant/bar right in the middle of campus, which in my time was always an extremely crowded social spot. In addition to the convenient location, meals at the restaurant are covered by the university meal plan, so it's a great way to get some variety from cafeteria food at no added cost. Plenty of students in my time hung out there despite not drinking. When I visited, the place was dead - I and a fellow alumni I was meeting were the only two non-employees there. This was during typical dinner rush hours. There were quite a few door-dashers picking up food, but no one actually coming in to partake in either the bar or the food. During the same trip, I went to quite a few bars and restaurants in the area around the campus which were all packed, but I didn't see anyone college aged at any of them. None of these places were expensive, either when I was in undergrad or now.
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.
What are they going to get out of it? Everywhere you go on most campuses you're hammered with title IX messaging about how interacting with women in anything other than a cold professional way (which rarely results in sex, women don't want that) is harassment and can ruin your life. The only thing left then is getting drunk which is also a good way to ruin your life.
A brewpub steps from UC Berkeley just gave up half their building to a chain dumpling restaurant. When it is busy there, it's locals, not students. The youngs just aren't into beer.
This is all because of technology. Pre internet you could not just isolate yourself and medicate with content since there was only the television. In person communities formed organically as an effect. Those communities have now been eroded by technology. And no, technology cannot help make in person community, it's something organic that needs to happen with people.
Plenty of people isolated and medicated with TV alone. Couch potatoes were a thing.
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.
>Plenty of people isolated and medicated with TV alone. Couch potatoes were a thing.
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.
You have on demand options of anything you want now. You did not have that with TV. The pull to isolate and medicate is a million times stronger now than it was then
On the other hand an extremely shy introvert such as myself might experience things like social media and dating apps having a positive effect on their in-person social life.
This is when social media was actually used for more than keeping up with influencers.
Is this really all that surprising? We have a ton of things ongoing now that we either know or suspect are big contributors to this:
- 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.
On the other hand historically there's been circumstances far worse than we are having now in terms of war, famine, diseases, living standards and it didn't stop people from reproducing at all. I really doubt it's that. I think it's something else.
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.
Historically, people had less children during wars and famines. There were usually baby booms after. People always managed amount of kids to the extend technology allowed that.
Disease and famine does not "remove excess men". A war removes them when men go fight to other places. If the war is in your country, there are a lot more victims among non fighters - typically 3:1. In WWII it was a lot more. And there, the victims are whoever is physically weaker.
I am skeptical of the claim that more women die in war than men.
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.
- 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.
Doubt it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the erosion of woman’s rights is contributing. There are places in the US today where you will die by a pregnancy gone wrong because doctors are terrified of losing their licenses and livelihoods if a court rules (after the fact) that the procedure wasn’t necessary.
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.
I was on some forums back then and it literally took over the entire forum and installed itself into the moderation team. The entire social environment transformed as a result.
Say what you will about the positives or negatives of feminism, but that did literally occur.
It commandeered most of the culture in fact, and began policing everyone’s speech, actions, pastimes and fantasies. Then it seemed to eat itself and disappear.
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.
yeah, if you were going with the political cultural phenomena explanations rather than merely reduced socialization, the "incel" movements are a far more recent phenomenon than feminism...
Why Feminism? Isn't Feminism encouraging women to have more sex i.e sexual liberation, nudity is no longer a taboo, women are no longer constrained to a single man, all that jazz?
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.
> Isn't Feminism encouraging women to have more sex i.e sexual liberation, nudity is no longer a taboo, women are no longer constrained to a single man, all that jazz
That was 50 years ago, they are probably talking about how feminism changed since then.
Another controversial point, but it is not a secret that sex is more a man's thing. Give women more "powers" and the outcome of less sex should not come as a surprise.
But reality is of course more complicated ... so don't blame it on one reason.
The Bowling Alone book captured this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone? Personally, I subscribe to the idea the underlying cause is the loss of trust in American institutions (government, church, corporations, sports, unions etc.)
- 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".
Aside from the other examples given I suppose (listed in no particular order, numbers not related to importance of reason)
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.
As others have pointed out, we need more space, and time, to socialise with each other in unstructured ways. This will inevitably lead to more sex (pure human nature). There are many very obvious reasons why this isn’t happening, like working longer hours to cope with cost of living, or high real estate prices that make it financially unsustainable to operate third places.
i wonder if the antisocial trend that has been discussed here have led to an unhealthy skepticism of others. tiktok videos that tell my late teen daughter that a boy who doesn’t check _all_ the boxes is unfit or unworthy of relationship and intimacy. there’s wisdom in looking for flags (red, green, or otherwise) if you’re seeking a committed relationship, but they honestly create so much fear and skepticism in her (and her peer group) and functionally objectify boys as emotional and practical vending machines that are held to a 100% standard. essentially they are a different form of pornography that sets up unrealistic expectations for potential partners.
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
I'm most surprised that people used to spend 12.3 hours/week with friends. With work, errands, laundry, relationships, family I find it hard to believe. Plus anyone that's a parent to a young kid in that age range. That's socialized 2-3 hours 5 nights a week, or a long hangout on the weekend. None of my friends have that kind of time.
People had kids earlier. A one week beach vacation with parents of other kids in a shared house over spring break would be 25% of that figure. Add some selection of little league/soccer/ballet/gymnastics/church/children's theater and kid stuff might be a majority. Dinner parties, their own adult sports, rotary club, charity ball, fishing, hunting. Church and breakfast or lunch before/after with church friends alone might be a consistent 4-5 hours with friends a week. A weekly game of golf could add 3-5 hours.
I didn’t see any mention in the article about the rise of obesity as a possible cause.
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. :)
I’m pretty sure it’s smartphones and aging society.
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.
> 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.
I do think the alcohol-fueled hookup culture that persisted in the US from the '70s to the '00s will be seen as a historical anomaly in the long run. The idea of empowerment has given way to the understanding that women have almost nothing to gain from the arrangement, and have bore the brunt of most of its' downsides.
As an Asian guy, I’d guess the statistics in Asia are even worse. There’s the combination of long working hours, academic pressure and a culture that tends to be less openly sexual. From my own experience dating both Asian and Western women, I’ve noticed a clear difference: Western women often bring up sexual topics casually, sometimes even asking for nude photos and wondering why you haven’t already suggested it. That’s something I’ve never encountered with Asian women. It makes me think that in long-term relationships too, Western women are more likely to be sexually expressive and expect frequent sex, whereas Asian women generally place less emphasis on it.
There's an interesting video I watched recently on how "manipulative reproductive suppression" may be an evolutionary tactic to ensure the success of one's own offspring at the expense of everyone else's. If true it's probably relevant to this question if not the only factor.
people always cheer up stats like that americans are drinking less, but I think what's overlooked is that young adults also socialising less. Turns out, they also have less sex, less relationships, are less extroverted and play more computer-games. I guess they also date less. I am not sure whether that's a win.
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 think it's cultural too. (But I'm Polish, not American)
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.
It's not really surprising. Hetero sexual desire has been framed negatively for well over a decade, as at best exploitative and at worst misogynistic and perverted. Men told that if you want sex you're part of society's biggest problem, and women told that if you give in to a man's sordid desires you are being taken advantage of and subjugated. All we ever talk about is the dreaded 'power imbalance'.
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.
That’s an exaggeration. As an Asian who has interacted with Americans, I still see the US as one of the most sexualized places in the world. The emphasis on physical attractiveness is extreme, and the hook-up culture, pick-up culture and PUA industry have influenced not just America but Asia as well. What you’re describing sounds more like a pushback against abuse and manipulative forms of hooking up, which is a natural reaction in a society shaped by individualism. People are simply becoming more cautious. This will likely drive an even greater focus on physical and sexual
appearance as consensual hookups continue.
It's crazy, the rural fundamentalist Christian community I was raised in was more sex positive than almost everyone in secular institutions despite all the "misogyny" and "homophobia."
It's a global phenomenon, I think it's just one of those inconvenient truths about women entering the workforce no longer seeing their central purpose in life being a mother and being pressured to find a desirable spouse to support her.
I would like to note that sex is just the proxy metric here as it is countable. Neither the article nor the relevant questions are about frequency of sexual activity.
Article is written by a conservative think tank pushing traditional family values. The statistics might or might not be valid but I wouldn't take their word for it.
The underlying study is the General Social Survey (GSS) out of NORC/University of Chicago, a dependable source for these types of data since the 1970’s. I can’t speak for the IFS, but yours seems to be a classic case of discounting the message because you don’t like the messenger.
Social science studies are notoriously difficult and often contradictory even when the authors are honest and doing their best.
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 is why I immediately brush off articles from liberal think tanks pushing novel anti-family values. The statistics might or might not be valid but I wouldn’t take their word for it
One thing I’ve noticed in London, being recently single after a 7 year relationship is that people’s behaviour on dating apps has changed pretty considerably.
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.
I used them a lot from 2014-2017 and met a lot of people, both in London and in my brief stay in the States so I’m mostly comparing my experience now vs then.
You gotta love a society which persistently makes the world a worse and worse place and then complains when people don't want to have sex or have kids.
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.
I think it's more than just "you aren't adequate". I think it's that the material prosperity isn't feeding our souls, or our hearts, or whatever word you want to use. We're better off, but less connected, and we need personal connection, not just internet connection. We're dying inside, even in the midst of all the stuff. We're poor in a way that material prosperity can't fix.
I think its actually counterproductive to use words like soul or heart or whatever, since these things aren't real. We need to figure out how to articulate what counts as healthy for humans without reference to bullshit.
Even the purely materialistic improvements have negative externalities which the rich western countries could mostly ignore but cannot anymore. I'm obviously talking the climate catastrophe plus the huge bunch of political problems.
This trend is probably the best example possible of "correlation does not imply causation".
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.
Nearly all in person interaction is a meaningless waste of time now. The only thing really left is sex and work. You're not supposed to have sex with your coworkers (if you even have a job where you work in person) and everyone is shamed for going to places specifically for sex so there's literally no way too initiate that kind of relationship anymore.
To quote a relative of mine, when asked if he and his wife were going to have a third child: “No, no. We found out what causes that. We don’t do that anymore.”
My vasectomy was 15 min in and out at no cost to me (ten US states require insurance cover with no cost sharing as of this comment), and I have all the sex I can get (respectfully asking anyone who might be interested) with no offspring risk. Perhaps this is not a well known option?
It was definitely said tongue-in-cheek. At the time I interpreted it as “we’re done having kids, and also we’re running around after two little kids and too tired for that.”
You should address some deep seated insecurity there. I’m currently in a country in Central Europe and have been to a traditional festival and the traditional garments are REALLY not modest lol
I have not noticed women dressing more sexually in the last 30 years or so. I've seen a lot of articles suggesting that women's fashion has remained largely stagnant since the 90s.
> Sure, at first everyone wants her, but many men don't want to marry and raise a family if mom publicly dresses/acts to attract other men's attention.
I think you’re projecting some pretty heavy misogyny here.
It turns out egalitarianism is antinatilist. Antinatilist ideologies cannot persist long term so continuing that isn't an option. The two available options are:
a) double down, die out, and get replaced by actual misogynists (ie Muslims, cartels etc)
b) find a nice compromise that actually works and minimizes people who get abused (like US culture 100 years ago or maybe something else.)
You're welcome to participate in the discussion those of us chosing b have but if you chose a listening to you is a waste of time at best.
I specifically said things are going to have to be less fair than they are now if we want them to work. So there's no contradiction there and what you wrote is not a counter argument.
I also didn't bring race into it but if you'd like to continue making the argument that black people are an existential problem for everyone else: Seig hiel I guess.
Holy hell, you start with misogyny, enter into gender essentialism, veer straight back into misogyny tinged with incel, and end with a screed on racism.
Maybe these are some thoughts you should go to therapy for.
lol, expected response. I'm not laughing at you though. The difference in branches of liberal vs "conservative" psychology schools is being highlighted in your comment. I know many licensed and experienced therapists who would agree with me, albeit with different wording. Likewise, there are many therapists who would agree with you.
Then i’d like to inform you that I know the same number that you know plus one that think otherwise. You use these professionals in your comment to highlight how mainstreams your views are but will not provide any information. I stated I was open to researching this train of thought more, but you are not interested in helping people understand your point of view. Surely there is a site on the internet that shares your worldview. Please share a name of a community that you feel consists of users that are aligned with your believe structure.
This can be summed up as a time and money problem.
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.
I haven't seen anyone talking about low T. My doctor has found that many millennials and z have T under 300. One of his patients was about to divorce because he didn't want sex. A San ball change in diet and exercise saved that marriage.
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.
I’m not sure why this is fading, but I think it’s a big part of it. Testosterone levels have been decreasing for many years, and we don’t know why. It seems to be environmental.
The article mostly blames pornography and digital addiction, but I think those are symptoms of a larger problem, which is lack of belonging and community. If life sucks, you have few friends you can afford the time or money to see, and you work to make other people rich until you are exhausted, when do you have time and energy to maintain a relationship? If you feel like the world is on fire, it's hard to get in the mood.
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 :)
The decline of community is a very big deal. I think a lot of it has to do with the way we build our living spaces. Modern North American cities are rife with car-centric suburbs, huge driveways, front doors set back a mile from the sidewalk, long commutes to anywhere (not just work, even to get groceries). We're living in these metal-and-glass boxes and we only see other people as obstacles in the way of what we want, rather than fellow human beings.
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.
There's something about this I think is illuminating. I don't think the social issues fall into partisan politics. It's like we've abstracted away people into something like a corporate entity. Even in large residence buildings in cities, people don't know each other right next to them. That's in contrast with small villages where everyone knows each other for generations. Another example is roads and how road rage forms as a result of dehumanizing people into entities.
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.
I have lived in villages and cities in different continents. This abstraction you speak of isn’t limited to the US. Asian and European cities are the same. People don’t tend to socialize a lot with their neighbors in the cities as much as they did and still do in the villages.
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?
All good points. Work from home isn’t helping us any either. People typically meet their partners at work.
What 1970s office have you been working at where this is true?
It couldn't be more obvious and intuitive that the people you're around for half your waking time would be one of the bigger sources of potential partners, and also just friends/acquaintances where a partner comes from the social networks thusly formed.
The one that exists in reality
Most of my working life I've worked with grizzled old dudes. I think thats the case for a lot of other men too.
Not everyone is straight either
You’re kidding, really?
"Grizzled old dudes" often make good husbands and they have sufficient income and lifestyle to support a family.
> People typically meet their partners at work.
That seems unlikely. Genuinely curious if there’s something I’m missing here.
This paper suggests meeting people directly or indirectly via work was second to meeting through friends around the turn of the century, though there was a wide spread of how people met so it only amounted to a fifth of couples. Then online took over....
https://web.stanford.edu/~mrosenfe/Rosenfeld_et_al_Disinterm...
it's for attractive people. for the rest of us it's a quick trip to HR.
You meet people at work, you don't proposition them at work.
I don't think your distinction matters at all.
If you're attractive and your advances are well recieved, you will not get reported to HR. Vice versa.
From the HR training i got from many places, harassment is what gets you in trouble with HR i.e. persisting after your advances have been rejected. Politely shooting your shot is fine, unless the target reports to you.
The distinction is creating a hostile work environment due to unwanted sexual attention.
which can happen after the first "advance".
You're missing the distinction. I met my wife at work but any and all propositioning happened outside the office, and not at office social events either.
and how did you get access to her outside the office for this propositioning?
You can invite a group of coworkers to an event. You can attend events established by groups of coworkers. You can invite an individual to a party you're hosting that other people are attending, or sometime when she didn't pack lunch you can offer to go grab lunch with her. The important thing is to establish a social relationship before trying for a romantic or sexual one: Don't single her out, don't ask her to be in a situation where it's just you and her in something heavily date-coded (keeping her company when she grabs lunch? good! Asking her out solo for drinks/dinner? bad!) until you're a known quantity to her, until you could confidently say she considers you, if not a friend, someone she's friendly with. At that point, and AT THAT POINT ONLY, you can casually, in a low-key way, ask her on a date in a way that makes it abundantly clear it's not going to be a huge deal if she says no, and that that wasn't the whole entire point of getting to know her.
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.
Social event.
You follow them to the gym, do you?
Uh, only if invited? I mean do you not ever get lunch with coworkers or invite them to events you're hosting or ask if they want to see a movie or concert with you that you've been into? The important thing is to establish a positive social relationship before indicating any sort of sexual interest, so they know you as "My chill coworker John" rather than "John the guy at the office who's always staring at my tits and asked me out for 'drinks' before we ever had a single conversation." It's not impossible to establish sexual or romantic chemistry before establishing social chemistry, but it's sure harder.
> The important thing is to establish a positive social relationship before indicating any sort of sexual interest
> asked me out for 'drinks' before we ever had a single conversation."
can you see the problem?
I was wondering if someone would jump on that. Are you genuinely curious about or unclear on the difference? Do you legitimately not understand how those two statements can be true? I'm willing to try to explain, if you're seriously interested, but if you're motivated by trying to demonstrate that I'm incorrect I won't waste my time.
Ah, I found the cheat code... My now-wife was in HR.
Dating at work has almost become an incest level taboo.
I think cars and urban design are too often used as a scapegoat.
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…
People want some external system to construct a social environment for them and often blame everything but themselves
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.
Mouse utopia comes to mind
I've been reading this same exact comment since 2012, and it has not described any city I've lived in since the bad old Tallahassee days.
Come to Denver. We have suburbs that are walkable. Or rather don't, we don't need more people ;-)
> 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.
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.
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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.
Hmm. Off topic, but I wonder if the reason for your second paragraph isn't your first paragraph. Sex and alcohol both are often escapes, and if you don't have time and energy for one, why would you have time and energy (and money) for the other?
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.
> 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"
I can't even manage to get people I chat with online to get together to play any videogames I like the idea of on a recurring basis.
Time and energy don't exist for _that_ level of casual activity, let alone overpriced and time-expensive in person activities.
And I can speak with confidence that we men as whole, are not doing too hot.
Sex education lowers amount of sex among teenagers. Lack of it raises amount of sex among teenagers. Basically, when they know how body works, they have less sex, mostly dropping out of unsafe sex entirely. (Basically having less but safer sex).
Abstinence only education creates teenage pregnancies, basically.
You make some good points about attitude around sex in parts of the US today, and the erosion of community is a topic I was was more often discussed.
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.
This attitude is also being forced on people through media. Modern media seems almost allergic to the concept of even acknowledging that sex is a thing people do. Then, you look at the ways people self-censor on YouTube to avoid demonetization, where they won't even say the word sex. I see young people today who are shocked by movies and HBO TV shows from the 90s, 00s, and early 10s.
I watch mostly comedies a d crime stories on Netflix and there is no shortage of sex scenes. I am not deliberately searching them out, they just are there basically randomly.
I genuinely do not know what you are talking about heremaybe except "this person is consuming wastly different media".
Right, I’m glad there’s some platforms that still ensure standards for content.
Unlike facebook which recommends pornographic content and AI generated attention bait.
I recently read (and enjoyed) Casey Tanner's _Feel it All_, which takes the stance that lack of sex ed is little-t traumatic, and backs up that argument convincingly.
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.
That would be true if the change was not worldwide, but most countries did not introduce serious sex ed.
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.
Even 30 years ago in East Texas we had sex ed in junior high. Abortions were legal and common. Boys had it shoved down their throats not to harass girls. I learned the biology of sex in 4th or 5th grade. While there was a common public message of abstinence the reality is most of the parents had their girls on birth control. At least all my friends were anyways.
Everything you said was more popular when rates of sex were higher, so clearly your thoughts aren't correct. On top of that, red states that push abstinence only have always had higher rates of teen pregnancy, again suggesting your ideas are not correct. Abstinence only education never stopped anyone.
> 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.
Is sex ed positively correlated with greater fertility and frequency of sex? I expect the opposite is true.
I would expect the effect of sex ed (real sex ed, not "abstinence and jesus") would be to decouple fertility and sex frequency.
In a place where abortion was legal, I expect having sex ed would not significantly affect fertility rate but would decrease abortion rate.
I expect fertility would drop, but frequency of sex would rise.
Knowing about your body and having access to contraceptives should in my opinion promote the frequency of sex.
I would expect it to reduce fertility because we know when you explain to girls how human reproduction actually works fewer of them are onboard because that sure looks like a traumatic experience. Oh so eventually after the other horrible side effects the parasite gets so large I have to push it out of my body through an orifice which is clearly not adequately sized for this purpose? Strong no.
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 think you are trying to come up with an individualistic argument for why sex ed should exist.
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?
Viewed through a certain lense, you could view abstinence-only sex education and denial of access to abortions is a psyop to get (young) women to become pregnant and attached and dependant on a man.
But are they being given fair sex Ed that includes same sex stuff too? Because that still seems incredibly lacking even amongst the "less prude" communities for it.
What about hookup culture and apps like Tinder, how do you factor that into your analysis? Also dating apps are connecting people which lead to intimacy. I wonder what the demographics reveal and if it’s only a subset of the population using these.
My opinion of those is what I think of as the seal out of water effect. You wouldn't think a seal as a powerful and graceful animal if you only saw them out of the water. Most people on dating apps are like seals out of water.
What's the app for dating seals in water?
Slowly building up context with people like coworkers and classmates over years.
No I meant actual seals.
Sex doesn't equal intimacy, at least in the way people really want. Modern dating apps turn sex into a transaction, a one night stand on tap.
I've had several meaningful relationships that were the results of dating apps, including my current 8-year one. And that one was from one of the "modern" apps you speak of.
The inequality on dating apps is very high. Their Gini coefficients vary from 0.4 to 0.6 on most popular dating apps. Even if 100% of people were using dating apps, only the top percentiles of men would be satisfied because they can get way more short-term partners than they could without the apps.
To the extent hookups lead to relationships, it's coming from people that are willing to settle
Quite interesting because in my trans and poly community I have found belonging, friendship, cuddles, alcohol free spaces, and lots of very exciting and interesting consensual safer sex. I’m having (by far) the best sex of my life after being active for 20+ years. It turns out that dancing in the forest on LSD is way more fun and exciting than chugging another beer on my couch (which is exactly how I spent my 20’s).
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.
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When you have an inexplicable and paranoid disdain for a group and blame said group for the ills of everything wrong in the world, it's because the mere existence of said group disproves your worldview.
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?
Well they will try to ban HRT, try to ban trans access to every space they can, and if things get really bad they will turn their ICE-based kidnapping machine on trans people.
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.
Alcohol, while for some part of the population disastrous, does have a strong socializing effect on people. Recent kurzgesagt: https://youtu.be/aOwmt39L2IQ?t=567
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.
The trade is living on average a fifth shorter.
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.
tell me you know nothing about america without telling me you know nothing about america... jeez
> 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!
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.
> You can't watch a movie for 5 minutes without having your face rubbed in a sex scene
The frequency of sex scenes in movies has been dropping for a while.
I've never thought about this but I think you're right. I always hated these. I like having it, I don't like watching people pretend to have it.
Its actually quite a bit worse than you think, but to recognize what's happening you have to understand how torture and the developing mind work to some small degree.
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.
>Men deserve sex!
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.
How can this non sense still be this prevalent nowadays?
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.
Humans generally don't interact in person as much with other humans anymore and technology is I think one of the big drivers of this change.
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.
They should call it "the social recession".
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.
Smart phones and the ubiquity of internet and video games is really it I think. You never have to be bored anymore, and therefore don’t have to meetup in person to be entertained.
The timeline does not match. Both were widely available in oughts.
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.
The first smartphone — iphone — came out in 2007? Adoption definitely started ramping up in 2010.
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.
Video games have been responsible since their inception for everything the bigots don't like. That doesn’t make it true.
Video games have been present for a shit ton of time in the form on game consoles. Social media, on the other hand, is a recent phenomena
Most people say video games were better pre 2010 and we already had smartphones at that point, just not iPhones. So it's not either of those.
Video games weren't as widespread, personalized, or diverse than they are now. That people who played video games in 2010 said that those were better is immaterial. This graph goes up through 2022: https://i.redd.it/tnrs4wl1ibkb1.png
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 data shows the big drop in sex happened in the 2010's. Your graph shows the big spike in gaming happened 2021 & 2022. That's during the pandemic. Of course gaming rose during the pandemic when people were forced to stay home.
Find the graph for "hours spent on social media" and I bet you will have found your culprit.
No one means a BlackBerry when they say smartphones. It implies a large screen that can consume content easily, and with a large data plan, neither of which existed until The iPhone. I never saw someone watch 2 hours of YouTube on a blackberry.
Please, this is HN. Don't make moot points. Smartphones existed before 2010, but few people had them.
When I say “smarphone” I mean iphone and later.
In micro economics, when a substitute reduces in cost and increases in quality, we see a substitution effect [0] (amusingly, coined by economist Eugen Slutsky), i.e. people switch away from the relatively expensive good and into its lower cost substitute.
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.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Substitution_effect
Porn is a substitute for seeing strangers naked. It's not a substitute for relationships, or even for sexual release. Masturbating is no cheaper or easier now than it ever was; people have been pursuing romantic and sexual relationships despite having the option to masturbate forever.
> Masturbating is no cheaper or easier now than it ever was
Given the amount of men who can't masturbate using their imaginations, masturbation has absolutely become cheaper and easier.
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This is very much upstream of sex. I just started a masters program this week, and on Friday night at 8 pm, zero out of 52 of my cohort members wanted to join me for a beer. It's anecdotal, but seemed really remarkable to me. So it's not just sex, young people don't socialize in-person nearly as much as they used to. I have no idea how this will be addressed, if it does ever get addressed.
I notice this too.
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.
I think one of the mentally healthier decisions I ever made was to realize that many of the friends I have, if I stopped reaching out to them, the relationships may cease to exist. And then quietly reframe them in my mind as good acquaintances.
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."
I've experienced the same thing, I thought it was just people didn't like me but maybe there is something else here. If I see people regularly (e.g. at the office) I can make good friendships with them and we get along well, but other than that I am the one that needs to put in the effort to arrange something if I want to see someone. Maybe 1/20 times I am the one who is invited, otherwise it's me who needs to do it.
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.
> People are complicated
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.
I wonder if it's because of social media creating deeper and deeper niche personality traits. Where it's simultaneously easy to find lots of people that share common likes/dislikes, but practically unobtainable to find that one human that shares all are likes/dislikes and be the that perfect friend. There's also so many things to like and dislike that maybe people don't even truly know what they like and dislike. Too many social interactions (and the culture of labelling everything, increasingly dividing us) have us burned out on making the deep connections. It's similar to this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25667362
This is basically me except I'm not married. Not really much to say except your experience is super common and I often wonder if it's something specific to me (or us) or if it's just the way the world is now. I'd love closer connections with people but it just feels impossible.
Is it a lack of interest, or are they being priced out? When I was in university around 2010, you could do a very decent night out for 20€, and crash in your mate's student room, for which they paid 250€ per month. You'd meet friends, friends of friends, and your social circle would just expand.
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.
Money was never a problem, you could just go sit on a bench with your friends, drink a few beers before heading to the pub, then buy only one beer for the whole evening. You didn’t need to spend much, you could grab a cheap tea somewhere or just hang out walking around the city and so on.
I recently visited my alma mater. There is a restaurant/bar right in the middle of campus, which in my time was always an extremely crowded social spot. In addition to the convenient location, meals at the restaurant are covered by the university meal plan, so it's a great way to get some variety from cafeteria food at no added cost. Plenty of students in my time hung out there despite not drinking. When I visited, the place was dead - I and a fellow alumni I was meeting were the only two non-employees there. This was during typical dinner rush hours. There were quite a few door-dashers picking up food, but no one actually coming in to partake in either the bar or the food. During the same trip, I went to quite a few bars and restaurants in the area around the campus which were all packed, but I didn't see anyone college aged at any of them. None of these places were expensive, either when I was in undergrad or now.
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.
What are they going to get out of it? Everywhere you go on most campuses you're hammered with title IX messaging about how interacting with women in anything other than a cold professional way (which rarely results in sex, women don't want that) is harassment and can ruin your life. The only thing left then is getting drunk which is also a good way to ruin your life.
Why would they go?
Haven’t seen this on campuses myself
I suppose you haven't spent much time on one on the past ten years then. I graduated around five years ago and it was everywhere.
Maybe you just went to a different place, cause I left less than a year ago.
A brewpub steps from UC Berkeley just gave up half their building to a chain dumpling restaurant. When it is busy there, it's locals, not students. The youngs just aren't into beer.
I feel like beer and alcohol is on a decline. People don't like expensive cocktails.
Maybe ask to share a joint? Lol
> upstream of sex
A metaphor worth stealing.
This is all because of technology. Pre internet you could not just isolate yourself and medicate with content since there was only the television. In person communities formed organically as an effect. Those communities have now been eroded by technology. And no, technology cannot help make in person community, it's something organic that needs to happen with people.
Plenty of people isolated and medicated with TV alone. Couch potatoes were a thing.
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.
>Plenty of people isolated and medicated with TV alone. Couch potatoes were a thing.
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.
You have on demand options of anything you want now. You did not have that with TV. The pull to isolate and medicate is a million times stronger now than it was then
On the other hand an extremely shy introvert such as myself might experience things like social media and dating apps having a positive effect on their in-person social life.
This is when social media was actually used for more than keeping up with influencers.
you can be shy and still find community with like minded people
Exactly. The internet helped me do that.
Is this really all that surprising? We have a ton of things ongoing now that we either know or suspect are big contributors to this:
- 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.
On the other hand historically there's been circumstances far worse than we are having now in terms of war, famine, diseases, living standards and it didn't stop people from reproducing at all. I really doubt it's that. I think it's something else.
> war, famine, diseases, living standards
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.
Historically, people had less children during wars and famines. There were usually baby booms after. People always managed amount of kids to the extend technology allowed that.
war, disease and famine remove the excess men and makes society less interconnected.
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.
Disease and famine does not "remove excess men". A war removes them when men go fight to other places. If the war is in your country, there are a lot more victims among non fighters - typically 3:1. In WWII it was a lot more. And there, the victims are whoever is physically weaker.
I am skeptical of the claim that more women die in war than men.
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.
I thought this was an interesting statement:
> 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.
Historically there's been a whole lot of rape, coercion, and unwanted babies.
Feminism maybe? (yes controversial, more science needed)
Doubt it, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the erosion of woman’s rights is contributing. There are places in the US today where you will die by a pregnancy gone wrong because doctors are terrified of losing their licenses and livelihoods if a court rules (after the fact) that the procedure wasn’t necessary.
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.
Feminism started in 2010?
I was on some forums back then and it literally took over the entire forum and installed itself into the moderation team. The entire social environment transformed as a result.
Say what you will about the positives or negatives of feminism, but that did literally occur.
It commandeered most of the culture in fact, and began policing everyone’s speech, actions, pastimes and fantasies. Then it seemed to eat itself and disappear.
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.
Any logistic/exponential curve starts slowly.
The feminism movement started seeing successes only recently.
Women got the right to vote in 2015.
yeah, if you were going with the political cultural phenomena explanations rather than merely reduced socialization, the "incel" movements are a far more recent phenomenon than feminism...
Social media feminism started
So did social media white nationalism. So did social media basket weaving enthusiasm. Social media happened.
I don't think this should be a controversial point at all. I'm also pro-feminism. If certain men want to have sex, be better men.
Yes, in the sense that educated and working women have started to prefer a partner at the same or higher levels of education and income.
But most people don't have college degrees, so this doesn't explain everything.
College educated women are marrying at about same rate as they used to. They marry men with similar income even if they are not College educated.
Uneducated women marry significantly less.
Why Feminism? Isn't Feminism encouraging women to have more sex i.e sexual liberation, nudity is no longer a taboo, women are no longer constrained to a single man, all that jazz?
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.
> Isn't Feminism encouraging women to have more sex i.e sexual liberation, nudity is no longer a taboo, women are no longer constrained to a single man, all that jazz
That was 50 years ago, they are probably talking about how feminism changed since then.
Sex-positivity is still the dominant belief system amongst modern feminists.
Another controversial point, but it is not a secret that sex is more a man's thing. Give women more "powers" and the outcome of less sex should not come as a surprise.
But reality is of course more complicated ... so don't blame it on one reason.
The Bowling Alone book captured this. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bowling_Alone? Personally, I subscribe to the idea the underlying cause is the loss of trust in American institutions (government, church, corporations, sports, unions etc.)
I have this book, and it's been on my nightstand for about 3 years, still haven't read it.
> the whole male loneliness epidemic
Probably better phrased as the 'immature men epidemic'. Put responsibility where it belongs.
Kick 'em while they're down
Aside from the other examples given I suppose (listed in no particular order, numbers not related to importance of reason)
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.
fertility decreased in the sexual revolution
As others have pointed out, we need more space, and time, to socialise with each other in unstructured ways. This will inevitably lead to more sex (pure human nature). There are many very obvious reasons why this isn’t happening, like working longer hours to cope with cost of living, or high real estate prices that make it financially unsustainable to operate third places.
i wonder if the antisocial trend that has been discussed here have led to an unhealthy skepticism of others. tiktok videos that tell my late teen daughter that a boy who doesn’t check _all_ the boxes is unfit or unworthy of relationship and intimacy. there’s wisdom in looking for flags (red, green, or otherwise) if you’re seeking a committed relationship, but they honestly create so much fear and skepticism in her (and her peer group) and functionally objectify boys as emotional and practical vending machines that are held to a 100% standard. essentially they are a different form of pornography that sets up unrealistic expectations for potential partners.
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
I'm most surprised that people used to spend 12.3 hours/week with friends. With work, errands, laundry, relationships, family I find it hard to believe. Plus anyone that's a parent to a young kid in that age range. That's socialized 2-3 hours 5 nights a week, or a long hangout on the weekend. None of my friends have that kind of time.
People had kids earlier. A one week beach vacation with parents of other kids in a shared house over spring break would be 25% of that figure. Add some selection of little league/soccer/ballet/gymnastics/church/children's theater and kid stuff might be a majority. Dinner parties, their own adult sports, rotary club, charity ball, fishing, hunting. Church and breakfast or lunch before/after with church friends alone might be a consistent 4-5 hours with friends a week. A weekly game of golf could add 3-5 hours.
I didn’t see any mention in the article about the rise of obesity as a possible cause.
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.
Counterpoint, courtesy of The New York Magazine deep in the throes of silly season: https://www.thecut.com/article/ghb-doxypep-sniffies-peak-gay...
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...
We're Flanderizing ourselves? That would explain kind of a lot.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Supernormal_stimulus
I’m pretty sure it’s smartphones and aging society.
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.
> 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.
I do think the alcohol-fueled hookup culture that persisted in the US from the '70s to the '00s will be seen as a historical anomaly in the long run. The idea of empowerment has given way to the understanding that women have almost nothing to gain from the arrangement, and have bore the brunt of most of its' downsides.
I think you've left AIDS out of your timeline. The period after the pill and before AIDS was the true anomaly.
TLDR people have better things to do now?
As an Asian guy, I’d guess the statistics in Asia are even worse. There’s the combination of long working hours, academic pressure and a culture that tends to be less openly sexual. From my own experience dating both Asian and Western women, I’ve noticed a clear difference: Western women often bring up sexual topics casually, sometimes even asking for nude photos and wondering why you haven’t already suggested it. That’s something I’ve never encountered with Asian women. It makes me think that in long-term relationships too, Western women are more likely to be sexually expressive and expect frequent sex, whereas Asian women generally place less emphasis on it.
There's an interesting video I watched recently on how "manipulative reproductive suppression" may be an evolutionary tactic to ensure the success of one's own offspring at the expense of everyone else's. If true it's probably relevant to this question if not the only factor.
https://youtu.be/dPyD53BTEUY?si=8RRJtA40dS8jpSsp
The people who are actually having the sex are probably those who don't project all the world's evils or goods (depending on ideology) into it.
people always cheer up stats like that americans are drinking less, but I think what's overlooked is that young adults also socialising less. Turns out, they also have less sex, less relationships, are less extroverted and play more computer-games. I guess they also date less. I am not sure whether that's a win.
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 think it's cultural too. (But I'm Polish, not American)
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.
I wonder how much this correlates with fewer one on one relationships versus more "broadcast" and parasocial relationships
Closely related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44348016
It's not really surprising. Hetero sexual desire has been framed negatively for well over a decade, as at best exploitative and at worst misogynistic and perverted. Men told that if you want sex you're part of society's biggest problem, and women told that if you give in to a man's sordid desires you are being taken advantage of and subjugated. All we ever talk about is the dreaded 'power imbalance'.
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.
That’s an exaggeration. As an Asian who has interacted with Americans, I still see the US as one of the most sexualized places in the world. The emphasis on physical attractiveness is extreme, and the hook-up culture, pick-up culture and PUA industry have influenced not just America but Asia as well. What you’re describing sounds more like a pushback against abuse and manipulative forms of hooking up, which is a natural reaction in a society shaped by individualism. People are simply becoming more cautious. This will likely drive an even greater focus on physical and sexual appearance as consensual hookups continue.
It's crazy, the rural fundamentalist Christian community I was raised in was more sex positive than almost everyone in secular institutions despite all the "misogyny" and "homophobia."
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It's a global phenomenon, I think it's just one of those inconvenient truths about women entering the workforce no longer seeing their central purpose in life being a mother and being pressured to find a desirable spouse to support her.
Does any of this reduce a woman's sex drive?
I would like to note that sex is just the proxy metric here as it is countable. Neither the article nor the relevant questions are about frequency of sexual activity.
"I know what my life needs -- chaos, demands, and risk!' Been there, done that.
This trend arises from a rational analysis of tradeoffs.
Article is written by a conservative think tank pushing traditional family values. The statistics might or might not be valid but I wouldn't take their word for it.
The underlying study is the General Social Survey (GSS) out of NORC/University of Chicago, a dependable source for these types of data since the 1970’s. I can’t speak for the IFS, but yours seems to be a classic case of discounting the message because you don’t like the messenger.
Social science studies are notoriously difficult and often contradictory even when the authors are honest and doing their best.
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.
Seriously. I don’t understand why nearly every other comment just assumes the headline is true without a second thought.
Banning pornography is high on the agenda for these folks. I’m sure they get paid to turn out think pieces on the subject.
So if even those curmudgeons say sex is declining, there must be something to it.
This is why I immediately brush off articles from liberal think tanks pushing novel anti-family values. The statistics might or might not be valid but I wouldn’t take their word for it
One thing I’ve noticed in London, being recently single after a 7 year relationship is that people’s behaviour on dating apps has changed pretty considerably.
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.
Honestly, I never had much success on dating apps. And I used them since the early 2000s.
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.
I used them a lot from 2014-2017 and met a lot of people, both in London and in my brief stay in the States so I’m mostly comparing my experience now vs then.
> Speaking to female and male friends, both sides are seeing them as a complete shitshow
In what sense?
To simplify, women are completely inundated with poor quality matches, men get very few matches.
It's no surprise since irregular sex has gotten so popular.
Is the rising average age not enough to explain it ?
I mean, we all know the birth rate is dropping already?
To be fair, you don't need to have sex each week to make children.
And you absolutely don't need to make children to have sex each week!
You gotta love a society which persistently makes the world a worse and worse place and then complains when people don't want to have sex or have kids.
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.
I think it's more than just "you aren't adequate". I think it's that the material prosperity isn't feeding our souls, or our hearts, or whatever word you want to use. We're better off, but less connected, and we need personal connection, not just internet connection. We're dying inside, even in the midst of all the stuff. We're poor in a way that material prosperity can't fix.
I think its actually counterproductive to use words like soul or heart or whatever, since these things aren't real. We need to figure out how to articulate what counts as healthy for humans without reference to bullshit.
Even the purely materialistic improvements have negative externalities which the rich western countries could mostly ignore but cannot anymore. I'm obviously talking the climate catastrophe plus the huge bunch of political problems.
Negative externalities like having jobs and higher quality of life?
Like producing enough carbon dioxide to change the climate.
This trend is probably the best example possible of "correlation does not imply causation".
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.
Nearly all in person interaction is a meaningless waste of time now. The only thing really left is sex and work. You're not supposed to have sex with your coworkers (if you even have a job where you work in person) and everyone is shamed for going to places specifically for sex so there's literally no way too initiate that kind of relationship anymore.
> Nearly all in person interaction is a meaningless waste of time now.
Please get help. It doesn’t have to be this way, I promise.
> Nearly all in person interaction is a meaningless waste of time now.
This says more about you than it does society.
If everyone is experiencing it then it is, infact, a societal problem. That's what the whole thread is about.
This whole thread isn’t about nearly all in person interaction being a meaningless waste of time.
To quote a relative of mine, when asked if he and his wife were going to have a third child: “No, no. We found out what causes that. We don’t do that anymore.”
My vasectomy was 15 min in and out at no cost to me (ten US states require insurance cover with no cost sharing as of this comment), and I have all the sex I can get (respectfully asking anyone who might be interested) with no offspring risk. Perhaps this is not a well known option?
It's a joke about having children diminishes their father's sexual attraction to their mother.
Is it? I’m not sure how you interpreted it that way.
It was definitely said tongue-in-cheek. At the time I interpreted it as “we’re done having kids, and also we’re running around after two little kids and too tired for that.”
Hmm I don't think so...
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> Men want to marry a feminine woman, not a woman acting like a man.
Your understanding of feminism is not right. It isn’t about women behaving like men.
This sounds like an Andrew Tate analysis.
You should address some deep seated insecurity there. I’m currently in a country in Central Europe and have been to a traditional festival and the traditional garments are REALLY not modest lol
Traditional is not the same conservative or modesty.
> Where I might get the most pushback: marrying someone from a significantly different culture is difficult.
So are many other things that are worth doing.
I have not noticed women dressing more sexually in the last 30 years or so. I've seen a lot of articles suggesting that women's fashion has remained largely stagnant since the 90s.
Observe for yourself. Go to any gym or mall. Walk near a school or college. It's definitely not stagnant since the 90's.
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Don’t confuse security in oneself and confidence with “commanding”. They are not the same thing at all.
Women and men both want the former.
> women weaponizing sex against men by initially advertising their assets, then withholding them unless they can control their men
You need to spend more time with women who are emotionally mature. What you describe is childish behavior.
Keep in mind emotionally mature people will have less tolerance for bullshit or anti-social behavior.
feminism is just the act of valuing yourself as a feminine person. I can't see any reason why a man WOULDN'T want that.
> Sure, at first everyone wants her, but many men don't want to marry and raise a family if mom publicly dresses/acts to attract other men's attention.
I think you’re projecting some pretty heavy misogyny here.
It would seem that way, but I absolutely love women. Who wouldn't?
> but I absolutely love women. Who wouldn't?
Women, they tend to love men.
Some of them love some men, certainly.
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Sure, some guys are tired of their bad behaviour being called out, but that’s precisely why it needs to still be called out.
It turns out egalitarianism is antinatilist. Antinatilist ideologies cannot persist long term so continuing that isn't an option. The two available options are:
a) double down, die out, and get replaced by actual misogynists (ie Muslims, cartels etc)
b) find a nice compromise that actually works and minimizes people who get abused (like US culture 100 years ago or maybe something else.)
You're welcome to participate in the discussion those of us chosing b have but if you chose a listening to you is a waste of time at best.
> b) find a nice compromise that actually works and minimizes people who get abused (like US culture 100 years ago or maybe something else.
Ah yes, the US was famously good a century ago.
Remind me, when did Jim Crow get repealed?
Not a counter argument.
It directly shows your make believe past of fairness is a joke.
I specifically said things are going to have to be less fair than they are now if we want them to work. So there's no contradiction there and what you wrote is not a counter argument.
I also didn't bring race into it but if you'd like to continue making the argument that black people are an existential problem for everyone else: Seig hiel I guess.
You said
> find a nice compromise that actually works and minimizes people who get abused (like US culture 100 years ago or maybe something else.)
Which is directly countered by pointing out how explicitly abusive and unfair the US was.
You're either struggling to read or struggling to reason. I don't know how to help you.
> Testosterone creates tension and a commanding attitude. Men naturally don't want to marry a feminist.
Always the most pathetic and fragile men that say this shit.
If you're worried about the mom of your kids leaving for someone else, you have much larger issues than the clothes your wife is wearing.
Yes obviously the clothes are a surface level indication of a deeper problem.
So, err, what problem do you think this indicates? Heaven forbid folks should wear clothes that make them feel good.
Holy hell, you start with misogyny, enter into gender essentialism, veer straight back into misogyny tinged with incel, and end with a screed on racism.
Maybe these are some thoughts you should go to therapy for.
> This is why diversity is not always a strength.
Yikes
lol, expected response. I'm not laughing at you though. The difference in branches of liberal vs "conservative" psychology schools is being highlighted in your comment. I know many licensed and experienced therapists who would agree with me, albeit with different wording. Likewise, there are many therapists who would agree with you.
> I know many licensed and experienced therapists who would agree with me…
Name them please. I am unable to read up or understand this ideology from a professional otherwise.
I will not name them, to protect their careers from possible harassment. It's not a small number though.
Then i’d like to inform you that I know the same number that you know plus one that think otherwise. You use these professionals in your comment to highlight how mainstreams your views are but will not provide any information. I stated I was open to researching this train of thought more, but you are not interested in helping people understand your point of view. Surely there is a site on the internet that shares your worldview. Please share a name of a community that you feel consists of users that are aligned with your believe structure.
This can be summed up as a time and money problem.
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.
I haven't seen anyone talking about low T. My doctor has found that many millennials and z have T under 300. One of his patients was about to divorce because he didn't want sex. A San ball change in diet and exercise saved that marriage.
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.
I’m not sure why this is fading, but I think it’s a big part of it. Testosterone levels have been decreasing for many years, and we don’t know why. It seems to be environmental.