The Sex Recession

[Cristiano]

Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?

 

[Free]

Young people, huh?

 

[Casey Pelous]

Young people, huh?

I took it as a compliment.

 

[Kalel]

that was a long article but i like how well she broke it down the different sources and acknowledged its been in decline for over a decade now..

i feel its fairly well researched and i can relate to allot of it.


some quotes from the article:

The conversation proceeded to why soup-bringing relationships weren’t more common. “You’re supposed to have so much before you can get into a relationship,” one woman offered. Another said that when she was in high school, her parents, who are both professionals with advanced degrees, had discouraged relationships on the grounds that they might diminish her focus. Even today, in graduate school, she was finding the attitude hard to shake. “Now I need to finish school, I need to get a practice going, I need to do this and this, and then I’ll think about love. But by 30, you’re like, What is love? What’s it like to be in love?”

“In my own conversations, men and women alike spoke of a new tentativeness and hesitancy. One woman who described herself as a passionate feminist said she felt empathy for the pressure that heterosexual dating puts on men. “I think I owe it to them, in this current cultural moment particularly, to try to treat them like they’re human beings taking a risk talking to a stranger,” she wrote me. “There are a lot of lonely, confused people out there, who have no idea what to do or how to date.””

Sex seems more fraught now. This problem has no single source; the world has changed in so many ways, so quickly. In time, maybe, we will rethink some things: The abysmal state of sex education, which was once a joke but is now, in the age of porn, a disgrace. The dysfunctional relationships so many of us have with our phones and social media, to the detriment of our relationships with humans. Efforts to “protect” teenagers from most everything, including romance, leaving them ill-equipped for both the miseries and the joys of adulthood.

 

[danielravennest]

Why Are Young People Having So Little Sex?

Removal of lead from gasoline, improving people's self-control and intelligence, and the rise of the internet, making porn trivially available.

 

[Cristiano]

I found this statistic interesting:

From 1991 to 2017, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey finds, the percentage of high-school students who’d had intercourse dropped from 54 to 40 percent. In other words, in the space of a generation, sex has gone from something most high-school students have experienced to something most haven’t.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

Well, some more stuff on Sex in general:

Have Smartphones Destroyed a Generation?

More comfortable online than out partying, post-Millennials are safer, physically, than adolescents have ever been. But they’re on the brink of a mental-health crisis.

 

[Argent Stonecutter]

As predicted by Bruce Sterling in "A Good Old-Fashioned Future" (1999).

 

[EmpressOfCommunism]

The economy and environment are murdering people's mental and physical health. I bet that sex is down across the board for all living generations. I bet that the chronic depression, chronic pain, and impotence causing opioids crisis are all factors.

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

"One especially springlike morning in May, as Debby Herbenick and I walked her baby through a park in Bloomington, Indiana, she shared a bit of advice she sometimes offers students at Indiana University, where she is a leading sex researcher. “If you’re with somebody for the first time,” she said evenly, “don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.”

I find the thought that young men have to be told that to be incredibly depressing.

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Outside of porn actors, do people really have all that much nookie?

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

I've been following this research for a while and think it's fascinating and horrifying all at the same time.

I'm cautiously optimistic that this is going to turn out to be a good thing. Traditionally, people were just shoved into relationships that they were stuck in because "that's what you do." I think that was the case with my grandparents. The joke that "a man who loves his own wife is probably too boring to be loved by another woman" is hundreds of years old.

Asexuals and people who lack the physical ability to enjoy physical love have always been around. Plenty of sexual people were still stuck in very poorly matched marriages.

I don't mean to say that romance should go away for good, I mean to say that I think humanity needs to relearn how to do it right. The traditional way was a horror show for a lot of people. Giving people choices resulted in a lot more people choosing to be single. I don't think modern dating apps is the right answer, but it might be a step in the right direction in some respects.

 

[Vaelissa Cortes]

Outside of porn actors, do people really have all that much nookie?

Huh? Yes, yes they do.

 

[Bartholomew Gallacher]

By the way, there was some kind of column in the New York Times some weeks ago, where a 30 year old woman - employee of the NYT - described what should be her first romantic encounter with a 24 year old man. Well, at least this was her plan.

In reality 6 years meant that those two individuals were light years apart: the woman would have really much enjoyed, if the man would have taken the initiative. But in reality he always asked first "is it ok, when I touch you?", "is it ok when I pull down your trousers?", "is it ok when I look at your breasts?" and so on, and even though she encouraged him to just go on, she'll tell him for sure when he's doing something bad, he just went on with this approach, which just for her killed the whole mood and encounter.

Later she was torn apart: on the one hand she appreciated his concerns, because the average male is far more powerful than the average female, on the other hand it was exactly this what for her killed the whole kaboom. So in the end they just cuddled - somewhat.

Maybe I am going to be able to locate this text someday again - it was an interesting read, though, which explains many of the problems.

 

[GoblinCampFollower]

By the way, there was some kind of column in the New York Times some weeks ago, where a 30 year old woman - employee of the NYT - described what should be her first romantic encounter with a 24 year old man. Well, at least this was her plan.

In reality 6 years meant that those two individuals were light years apart: the woman would have really much enjoyed, if the man would have taken the initiative. But in reality he always asked first "is it ok, when I touch you?", "is it ok when I pull down your trousers?", "is it ok when I look at your breasts?" and so on, and even though she encouraged him to just go on, she'll tell him for sure when he's doing something bad, he just went on with this approach, which just for her killed the whole mood and encounter.

Later she was torn apart: on the one hand she appreciated his concerns, because the average male is far more powerful than the average female, on the other hand it was exactly this what for her killed the whole kaboom. So in the end they just cuddled - somewhat.

Maybe I am going to be able to locate this text someday again - it was an interesting read, though, which explains many of the problems.

Yeah, this is kind of what I was alluding to in my above post. The old way to do things actually did result in a horrifying amount of non consensual sex. ...but I think many agree that scaring men into being so timid is having unintended side effects.

"The sex recession" talked about in OP is partly due to technology killing social skills, like the link talked about, but a lot of it is also because men became more aware of the damage they could do when doing it wrong.

We've given men so much information on what not to do, many are totally bamboozled on what to do. I've had to give men I know in SL A LOT of instruction on how to approach women and when it's okay to stop testing for how agreeable she is at EVERY step. I didn't do this to teach a class, I did it so I'd have people to RP with...

I think there is a desperate need for public education on how to approach people romantically the right way. There is just way too much bad information out there. If you try to find out how to pick up women you are likely to run into crap like:

1) Older relatives who got married when social pressure pushed people to settle down, and really have no idea how to woo people because they never had to. Note that I'm not saying no older people know how to do it right, just that a lot of young people got bad/over simplified information passed down to them.

2) PUA (Pick up artists). They are often full of horrible information. A lot of misogynistic and pseudo scientific explanations for why women like certain things. Still, I've at times referred guy friends to carefully selected pick up resources (usually after rewriting them) because there is some good advice. Sometimes having a system like this gives men the confidence to just do SOMETHING when they'd otherwise hide.

3) Abstinence only educators. I don't need to expand on this one.

4) I always insist to guy friends that most feminists aren't like this, but women like Andrea Dworkin are LOUD.

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Huh? Yes, yes they do.

Vague. More like, what about ugly people? I guess I can imagine beautiful people because their attractiveness can excite others. Maybe this decline is due to beautiful people adopting ugly people activities.

Maybe there's a correlation with the 'fake gamer faux nerd' scene?

The more time beautiful people spend doing ugly people activities, the less time they have for anything else?

...In reality 6 years meant that those two individuals were light years apart...

Meh. Get on my level. I was 21 when I married to 43. =^-^=

 

[Free]

Oh hey, did you hear? Ugly people don't have sex. @fakenews

 

[Vaelissa Cortes]

Vague. More like, what about ugly people? I guess I can imagine beautiful people because their attractiveness can excite others. Maybe this decline is due to beautiful people adopting ugly people activities.

Maybe there's a correlation with the 'fake gamer faux nerd' scene?

The more time beautiful people spend doing ugly people activities, the less time they have for anything else?

Once again, huh? What are "ugly people activities"? Not having as good of a skin care routine? Everybody does the same stuff these days more or less, both pretty and non pretty people bang, use social media, play video games, etc..

 

[Imnotgoing Sideways]

Once again, huh? What are "ugly people activities"? Not having as good of a skin care routine? Everybody does the same stuff these days more or less, both pretty and non pretty people bang, use social media, play video games, etc..

That's what I'm saying. Maybe there's a correlation between the popularization of nerdy things and the reduction of sex.

I just observe patterns. To somewhat over-simplify what I saw during high school:
-The most beautiful people could be the most social and active. They wouldn't have to settle for lesser things.
-As people with lesser attractiveness, fewer people would want to be around them, so it would be necessary to find activities which didn't require so many people. If they were smart enough, they could play D&D or something of the sort and at least sustain a small degree of social contact.
-But, once looks and intelligence goes down the drain, we would have to settle for very solo activities like tinkering with electronics or programming and such. When there's nobody around, it serves for something to do.

Now that these base activities are becoming popularized, it looks like people are wasting their opportunity to thrive in addition to pushing the bottom feeders out to deeper fringes. As people are getting pushed out, some push back, and that's how we also see a growth in MRAs and GamerGate-like situations. At the same time, people who could have been more social and sexually active have fetishized geek culture and adopted lesser social leanings.

 

[Zaida Gearbox]

Beauty is in the eyes of the beholder. I tend to be attracted to brains as much as physical beauty. A man could weigh 500 lbs and have the face of a burn victim, but if he's really smart - I'll be attracted.

Sex decreased for us right around when Hubman turned 50, and then obviously decreased again when he had the heart attack. But, we're still averaging at least once a week.