Serendipitous conversation has taken a nosedive because everyone is constantly staring at their phone. All the normal feedback loops are out of whack. This also affected fashion and even interior design. People just wear sweatpants and athletic wear everywhere and almost all coffee shops and stores have the same design aesthetic. Regression to the mean and mass addiction is wrecking the world. “Bicycle for the mind”. Yea right, more like a ball and chain for the masses.
I mean, if we're talking about sex, I'll say that I love athletic wear on athletic-looking women. I guess the scarcity of athletic-looking people might be part of the problem.
I saw one of those random askreddit threads the other day asking women what sort of clothes they find unattractive on men, and I was mildly surprised to see gym/basketball shorts come up a lot. Can’t have anything comfortable smh.
I believe it going in that direction (what women find attractive or not on men). I suspect that it's a product of women generally caring more about socioeconomic status (signaled by being well dressed), while men generally care more about the purely physical aspect of sex. After 15 years of being together, my wife knows that I find her most attractive in t-shirts, tank tops, running shorts, and sleepwear but it's still counterintuitive to her and she instinctively dresses up when she wants to impress me.
Is it possible she's doing it for her own sake? It might be that dressing up like that makes her feel better about herself. She might feel more confident and sexy when dressed up. I know I feel good with a shave, haircut, and a sharp outfit.
Basketball shorts _these_ days tend to be huge tent-like things that come all the way down to the knee and hide any hint of the actual shape of the hips/thighs/bottom of the man wearing them. Which is not exactly sexy.
All of this seems to be downstream effects from wages not keeping pace with inflation and productivity since the 1970s. People are poorer than previous generations so they have less time to cook healthy meals or exercise regularly. Then they raise fat kids who don't know how to cook and don't exercise and the cycle becomes ingrained.
In times of yore when salaries were uncertain and low people had far more sex than they have now. Things they did not have back then which may be part of the reason why they went at it:
- an abundance of electric lighting
- media to distract them and personal portable screens with access to such. Personal is important since even a television screen watched by 2 people offers more of a social experience than those same 2 people each bent over their personal screens.
- contraceptives
- state pensions
- education, for good and for bad
- a relentless drive to consume, consume and consume for the sake of it
- life success measured by the number of ephemeral gadgets you collect - your great-grandfather's golden pocket watch was a status symbol for life while your Apple watch is outdated in one or two years.
To be sure, there were some things which people had back then which they do not have now for the most:
- religion - many people met their partner while going to church
- marriage was far more common
- contact with their neighbourhood - people knew their street/hamlet/village, they met them on the street, in shops, pubs, church, at work, etc.
- public social gatherings of sufficiently large size to meet that girl from the next town and of sufficiently small size to meet her at the next event.
It's tempting to agree with you, but the truth is we just don't know what the impact of these changes have been on sexual activity. Likely it's a combination and includes and excludes some surprises.
Yet I see people staring at their smartphones even in settings that would be perfect for some real social interaction. These things are just way too addicting for our primitive brains.
I've seen couples sitting together on a data at a restaurant, each glued to their own phones, not even saying a word to each other. I know I'm being judgmental here, but that's ridiculous and these people actually need help. The world has a mental health crisis going on, and smartphone addiction is only a tiny tip of the iceberg.
Maybe, but iPods and Walkmen predate smartphones by a few decades. I recall posts from a decade or so ago from men bemoaning headphones as a blocker from interacting with strangers.
If it wasn’t phones, it’d be newspapers. People will find devices to keep to themselves in public.
Newspapers, iPods, blackberries, the modern smartphone. The effect on the mind gets progressively worse from these things. I'll often go out somewhere without my phone, but I'll bring a book or newspaper and I easily get more distracted by what's happening around me and can't focus on reading. A smartphone? The apocalypse could be happening and my mind unchecked wouldn't pull its attention away the screen.
They repainted my gym to all gray. Every car on the road is white black or gray. All homes are adopting the white black gray interior color scheme. Its very depressing
I was a little surprised the article didn't mention declining sperm counts and testosterone as a possible factor.
My impression was that increased exposure to toxic compounds (microplastics, estrogen mimicking compounds, etc) has been contributing to declining sperm counts / motility, and things like earlier onset of puberty in women.
Wouldn't those at least have some effect on sex drive? I'm looking in particular at the decrease in adolescent masturbation, as it's hard for me to imagine that "increased video gaming" is a culprit for this.
Absolutely, testosterone is a major mediator of sex drive in both men and women. And testosterone is absolutely going down in men according to numerous studies.
I have low testosterone from a skiing accident when I was a teenager and I take testosterone weekly. It’s pretty obvious to my wife when I take it - and taking it weekly means I don’t have huge peaks or troughs in my testosterone level.
There’s also a community of women out there that have enlarged their clitorises by rubbing DHT (dihydrotestosterone) on them. Apparently sex is more enjoyable for them once it’s bigger, though it’s not like anybody can study that. I wonder if there’s any good data as far as what clitoris size was 40 years ago vs now, but I doubt it.
They say events in Japan often foretell the future of a highly developed and urbanized society, could be parallel to the old "Japanese people are not having much sex" news in the past, we're just catching up.
You just linked to an article that debunks the myth that Japanese are less sexually active than other people. TL;DR: the study that started it all, claiming that 40% of Japanese are virgins, was limited to people who have never married and this obviously skews the sample greatly.
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2022/sep/14/record-number-... (Record number of young people in Japan rejecting marriage, survey shows; Rise in people aged 18-34 who don’t intend to marry has consequences for Japan’s low birth rate and depopulation concerns)
Regarding economics, the economist Paul Krugman was the first to say it, in an essay in 1994, when he suggested that the slowdown in Japan might reveal what was going to happen to all other advanced nations. It was an idea he then developed over several years, in a series of essays, and then finally when his predictions came true, he came out with a book on the subject:
> last stop before the planet Mars: In Japan, the world’s most technologically sophisticated society, the future has already happened, says Peter Popham
With no data to back me up, I'm going to guess medications play a large part. Most people I know well enough to talk about the subject, and every potential partner I have dated in the last 20 years, are on prescription anti-depressants.
> Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women. [...] These respondents to the confidential survey ranged in age from 14 to 49 years.
"Young" extending to 49 aside ... almost half of American men and three quarters of women have no "partnered sex" and also don't masturbate at all? That sounds implausibly high, am I misunderstanding something?
That's what I came here to say as well, this simply can't be right.
Apparently these numbers come from a self-reported survey, so either the questioning was vague/confusing, people are not reporting the truth for whatever reason, OR... we're gonna see one hell of a drop in birthrates in the next couple of years.
The full article is linked [1] and I can view it. See Fig. 1 and quoting the actual article:
"Specifically, 28.8% of adolescent men ages 14–17 were categorized in Class 2 (no sexual behaviors) in 2009 compared to 44.2% in 2018. Among adolescent women, 49.5% were categorized in Class 2 in 2009 compared to 74.0% in 2018."
For adults the percentage was much lower -- 3.8% rising to 3.9%.
It doesn't. You are misreading the article, which is a bit ambiguously written. The results they are reporting for “young men” and “young women” are, as the first quoted sentence innyour excerpt suggests, gender breakouts of the adolescent (14-17) cohort in the study, not of the full population mentioned in the last sentence (14-49), as clicking through and reading the actual study will confirm.
Ah, thanks, I had clicked through, but stopped at "We used data from 14- to 49-year-old participants in the 2009 and 2018 waves of the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior" :'(
(Beware: HN has some auto-ban-words; words that, when used, will ban you. This includes at least one word pertaining to this topic, and you found one with your post.)
Are you predicting that luckylion will be automatically banned as a result of his post above? I don't think this will happen. I don't think are any "auto-ban-words" that will automatically cause a established poster to be banned without moderator review. What makes you believe this?
Do you doubt me? From your tone, and from the downvotes I have recieved, I guess so. However, I saw luckylion’s post in a state of being banned. I vouched for it, and I saw it be unbanned. Furthermore the moderators have described the mechanism, and listed the words as they were at one point:
Yes, I continue to doubt that a _user_ will be banned for using one of these words. I'm happy to believe that these words will cause that particular _comment_ to be killed, just that they won't cause a permanent ban for the user.
I think the issue is that we have a difference in terminology. I would never describe vouching as making a comment "unbanned". I think my terminology is correct, but I'll try to be sure before I continue to use it.
The ones that do will have kids that'll have a much better planet in a couple generations and way less road traffic. Don't count on having a retirement though.
Letting in all willing immigrants doesn’t really make sense in context of a Western welfare state. Migrants simply need sufficient educational background to find a job, without one they are just more burden to the public sector. So it’s not always about racism or classism.
I've seen the decline in Italy of young people going out in the evening to meet new people. They are all buffed with splendid livers, but barely get laid, and spend most of their time playing monopoli and drinking tea.
> The researchers obtained the self-reported information from
Self-reported is generally unreliable. Whether its sex or food people are generally not accurate when asked how much X or Y.
So a better question is: Why would they under-report? Or are the current acceptable social norms such that it's okay to be honest, but in previous eras there was accepted (?) exaggeration?
<sidebar>
It would be interesting to know previously what typically "pairs" with sex. For example, alcohol. If alcohol consumption is down in certain tribes then it follows that sex might drop as well.
If you have 2 self-reported studies 5/10 years apart, it's still valid to compare them.
The article even discusses the possibility of changes in self-reporting behavior, e.g. that young people today are more comfortable labelling themselves as asexual than they were 15 years ago.
How so? Social norms change. White-lie X 10 years ago might be replaced with White-lie Y today. That doesn't make comparing X to Y valid.
As mentioned, before you do the comparison, you *must* make an effort to understand the changing social norms and how that might impact a *known* flawed data source (i.e., self reported).
Then once you come up with a theory about the impact of social norms, you can try to test your theory... Condom sales? Up or down? Other birth control prescriptions, up or down? STDs, up or down? Preg-test sales, up or down? What about associated / related Google search data*?
The bottom line...accepting self-reported data at face value is a true fool's errand. The Science is clear on this. Let's just leave it at that for today.
* "Everybody Lies: Big Data, New Data, and what the internet can tell us about who we really are" by Seth Stephens-Davidowitz (a Harvard-trained economist, former Google data scientist)
There is little to no leisure time left for most folks. There's no mandatory vacation time or even parental leave. Jobs are more demanding than ever, cost of living is higher than ever, and people are working more jobs than ever. People are more isolated and less social than in generations past. People move more frequently for their jobs and spend less energy getting to know their neighbors or making friends. There are fewer social groups like the VA, rotary club, Masons, bowling leagues, bingo, etc. So you come home from your job, you're burnt out, don't have excess cash to go spend socializing, and you don't have the time either. In contrast, you go to Europe and everyone has plenty on leisure time, plenty of vacation time, and are highly social (compared to Americans).
With unemployment at generational lows, I wish we'd shift to a 4-day work week or 32-35 hour work week. We also desperately need some baseline minimum for vacation time for full-time employees (3 weeks seems the bare minimum). And we should make parental leave mandatory on a Federal level--both parents should get to spend time with their child. I think it's cruel and inhumane that this isn't a human right. Corporations have gotten basically everything in their favor since the 1980s and the pendulum has swung too far in one direction--there needs to be a reversal.
While it's not perfect, Europe has better entitlements for the working class than in the US--guaranteed parental leave and vacation time are notable examples. I know many people in the US who have worked 'decent' jobs and not gotten any paid leave in years. That simply wouldn't happen in Europe. In Germany, you can't even text your employees after working hours... The US is on the complete opposite end of the spectrum. People in the US with kids who are working blue collars jobs are going to struggle their entire lives and barely have anything to show for it. Europe's not perfect, but it's not quite the meat grinder that we are.
> Between 2009 and 2018, the proportion of adolescents reporting no sexual activity, either alone or with partners, rose from 28.8 percent to 44.2 percent among young men and from 49.5 percent in 2009 to 74 percent among young women.
Middle class teen fun is a function of parental wealth, youth employment, and other things that were shaky in the 2010s. To put it plainly, it was a very unsexy decade for the average teenager. Nobody wants to date a bum or someone who identifies as a bum.
The cost of going to bars, coffee shops, and other common spaces was much cheaper in prior decades. If it costs you $10 to have a beer while waiting around at a bar to see who comes in, how often are you heading out? As for coffee shops, the phone/laptop situation persists. There's also something to be said for how many people are more likely to leave the town they grew up in these days, as opposed to in prior decades. When you're in a town you grew up in, there's a social network that allows for a lot more intermingling of individuals, whereas in a city, interaction tends to be more sought out, or not.
When I was a before-driving-age suburban teenager, I rode my bike into the city to horse around all day, or if they were feeling generous, my parents could drive me to the mall and drop me off, relying on me to get a ride home before dark. These days, 1. there's no mall or fun places for teens to horse around, and 2. helicopter parents won't let their kids out of their sight for more than five minutes at a time, let alone the entire day.
It's not just helicopter parents. I'd love to let my kids have more freedom. But there are roadblocks at every turn:
- There aren't as many kids, and other parents don't let their kids out these days, so your kids are often the only ones out there.
- Without other kids being out there, it's much harder to estimate what is safe. There is just no data.
- Because there are no other kids out there, things that used to be safe no longer are. Our roads don't have sidewalks. Because there are very rarely any kids, people fly down the curvy residential roads at 40+ mph. Even I feel uncomfortable walking carefully on our local roads because people they are so curvy and low-visibility and our neighbors drive so insanely fast.
- Because there are no other kids out there, people who see kids by themselves treat it like it's an emergency. I literally had someone run out of a restaurant and grab one of our kids and ask if they are OK, because I wasn't walking close enough to them. Then she treated me like I was the crazy one.
- Their teachers tell them its not safe to be out without parents.
- Their public school doesn't allow them to be by themselves at the bus stop and won't drop them off without an adult present.
- If you send them into a store by themselves, people treat them like aliens or like something is wrong.
- Even just leaving your kids by themselves in a temperate car for a reasonable time to go into a store has resulted in a child protective services action in our area.
There aren't as many kids any more so people just can't tell what is safe and what is not, and so they assume everything is unsafe.
When I was a kid I rode my bike all over town and had free reign, and there were kids everywhere. Now as an adult I have to work hard just to find things that my kids can do without us that won't get the police or child protective services called on us. What is going to happen to the people who grow up this way?
Tinder and other dating apps are making it even harder...
People will say that it's because of the creeps etc, but as long as men have almost no matches if they don't pay, it's not going to lead to a good experience, which leads to even worse experience for women who won't use it.
Online dating deserves it's awful reputation.
It's time that a good documentary highlights how those platforms work.
Top 80% of women compete for the top 20% of men on dating apps. And then, there is a funnel where unpartnered women race to find a partner in their 30s for those who race to have kids before fertility rates decline.
No one likes online dating, but everyone still defaults to it because third spaces where pairings traditionally occurred are evaporating.
For me: the scare of "I have changed my mind and the sex we had 3 months ago was not consensual."
In the olden days, we'd meet, have fun, kiss, have sex and... whatever happened, happened.
Now, there is this realistic probability that what you thought was a fun evening, turns into a drama even a long time after it happened. There is no recourse, no evidence, no change of a fare trail: when s/he "does not feel it" afterwards, you're guilty.
Me personally will not flirt / hit on / touch anyone anymore.
I spent my teens/early 20s with the messages about "enthusiastic consent" overinternalized, to such a degree that I would ask permission for every little thing (even holding hands or a kiss). I now understand that, like many things, this can't be measured without changing it, so now I focus more on body language and other cues, and my partners and me both seem much happier.
I also have strong social anxiety, so that plays into it.
My guess would be the decay of the "traditional values" life path for a number of reasons. There's just much less of an assumption that you'll be married in your 20s and have kids before 30 than there was 50 years ago. There was so much more social pressure around the assumption that everyone's life would go that way, so even if it wasn't what you wanted for whatever reason, it was what you did because you wanted to conform to your family/friends/community's expectations.
Obviously that worked for some people, but there were also probably plenty of people having sex, or reporting they were having sex, just because it was expected of them.
Wouldn’t knowing that you’ll marry later than the previous generations make you want to have sex sooner since “easily accessible sex” is now further away?
That wasn't exactly what I was implying - more that it's now more socially acceptable to spend your teens and twenties focusing on things other than finding a partner and getting ready to have kids. I know plenty of people who did get married in their 20s, or at least had a stable relationship, but also a good number of people who were focused on their career or hobbies instead and maybe dated occasionally.
I'd actually be curious what the median age people get married at is now vs. in the 80s, although I'd assume that's confounded by people who just don't get married but are functionally in a similar level of committed relationship.
My overall point is that if you're 35 and single now, you're less of a social pariah and automatically seen as a failure of a person. You're also probably experiencing less social or familial pressure to "just settle down with someone". People are having sex and in relationships more because they want to than because they're pressured to.
People have less free time. More people are in white collar job or higher education than ever before.
And people also have less opportunity. All this communication technology means, that instead of having to meet in person, you text. That means less time around people, less face to face time.
Another comment [1] observed that the survey claims that 44% of men and 74% of women have 0 sexual activity - including 'batin (some term in the referenced post resulted in an apparent auto-flag which I'm trying to avoid). That doesn't pass my sniff test, at all.
The most likely singular explanation seems to be a bias or sampling error.
I know it’s not the question you asked, but I don’t think there is likely to be 1 reason. Our society is so complex and diverse that this and every other socioeconomic indicator is the confluence of dozens of different factors and forces that interact in non-obvious and non-linear and mostly unobservable ways.
Look at all the explanations being suggested in this thread. Which one is right? Maybe all of them! Each on their own contributes a little piece of the puzzle, adding up to the effect we see.
This myth of monocausality leads to very bad policy decisions, where people jump on an explanation as the One True Cause of the Current Thing. It’s oversimplifying and polarizing and moves us further from truth and progress.
The myth of pluricausality is also a problem where people can handwave many random ideas. Not saying its either cases.. I was simply trying to have people commit to 1 idea they would be ready to defend and support.
A big part no pun intended. I'm an average looking man, but skinny, and I could go on a dating app and find a larger woman to have sex with in a couple weeks or a month tops. They aren't exactly uncommon on there. But finding a woman my weight or even a few bmi units above me is essentially impossible. They never match - too much demand for them.
A combination of
1. Cost of living forcing both partners to work and have less time and energy
2. Social media distraction
3. Pressure to meet the exceedingly high standards we constantly hear about
4. Women's roles changing and feminist values
> 1. Cost of living forcing both partners to work and have less time and energy
If both partners working = both partners employed, that seems to be the norm since the industrial revolution got underway (allowing for that post-WWII historical exception).
If both partners working = hours in labor, I can't recall a period with disproportional demands on time.
I think you're right about having less time and money; I think your #3 is closer to the cause. I'd phrase 3 to read:
Can you say more about 4? I don’t have data, but from chatting with friends it seems that feminist values are not a strong predictor of how much sex people have.
“Various studies around the world have proposed different explanations, such as economic status. Lower income is associated with greater declines. One study looked at use of computer games among young people [as a possible explanation]. Some folks have tracked declines in alcohol use, and we know that [alcohol use] can be associated with disinhibition. We have seen, somewhat, [an] increase in sex toy use—from what we looked at, not a massive increase. If there is a change, it’s probably just going to contribute to one of the blips. I don’t expect it to be the explanation.”
I also don’t think there is a single reason to bet on.
I totally agree. It’s just far easier to consume porn than it is to actually have sex. And for men, it’s much more transactional anyway, which is what we want.
If you mean incels. I'm not a psychologist but I think the incels do want transactional sex but hate the fact they can't get it.
Your comment isn't very clear to me
The core part of in Elgin is hating women because they can’t have sex with them.
The motivation is important.
It’s similar to the difference of someone being blowing up a building for political reasons and not. The former makes that person a Terrorist. The latter does not.
Have you been around the communities? It isn’t about trying to have sex with them or trying to settle down with a woman most of the time. It’s mostly self-pity and illogical hatred.
It’s regularly specifically about blaming women as a whole and having constant contradictions. IE, they put down women who they could date. They are too ugly. Too low in socio-class structure. They don’t want women to be superficial with them, but then they want to be superficial with women.
Another example is the regular shitting on women for sleeping around too much. Insulting women. Casually dropping words like slut or in-group terminology without issue. A woman is bad for sleeping around too much and it’s not good for women to be with many different penises. It messed them up. Yet somehow this logic doesn’t follow when a woman is with the same man having sex daily. They are fine with the latter saying that’s fine. Not the former specifically angry that women are ruining themselves with getting with so much penis.
The number of contradictions are numerous. To simplify it down to they only hate women for not being able to have sex is incorrect. Many in the community hate women because they can’t have have the women they deem they are entitled to. No one is entitled to someone else.
Note: I tried hedging most of the time but to be clear I’m always talking about a majority of the community when looking through the conversations. I never mean every single incel. Just the ones actively engaging in the toxic parts of the community.
Screen time. The more we spend looking at screens the less we care about "real life". In the past the unfortunate individuals were hardcore gammers. Now most of the people are hardcore mobile users(be it social media, news or whatever). At least the poor gammers are not looked upon like some kind of different creatures.
I'm really not sure of this. I know plenty of very sexually active people who are much more active on social media and the like than I'd say is average. If anything, the more lonely/single people I know are the ones who spend less time at their computer or on their phones.
Sex is pretty motivating in-and-of-itself. I have a feeling most people don’t need that much of nudge - provided they’ve already gotten to the point of finding a willing partner. That seems to be the bigger issue.
May be due to the same reason people lose interest in other pleasures of life. Having anything available freely and in abundance leads to losing interest in that thing (be it food/sex/movies). With most people becoming Liberal in their views on sex, its no more interesting than having a shoulder massage.
I can assure you that in fifty years of abundant access to aged cheddar cheese, eating it several times a day as my go-to snack food, that I have yet to lose interest in the pleasure.
yeah, I'm not going to take seriously any study saying 44% men under 49 don't jack off, now if you said 4.4% I could believe it, but half of the men not jacking is complete BS
I'm curious what you think the relation is to the topic here? I don't disagree, but there's a lot of potential options for how social media could relate to people's sexual activity, so I'm curious which one you feel is damaging here.
Not OP, but one reason I feel that social media is so damaging is that it's the human interaction equivalent of sugar-filled, highly processed foods. These foods can give you enough calories (and then some) and a sugar rush, but they're lacking in things like fiber and other vital nutrients to the point that you still feel hungry a short while after eating.
With social media, online interaction can feel like it "fulfills" the benefits and responsibilities of human interaction and friendship, but it is a poor, poor substitute. That is, sitting at home, starting to feel a little bored, you may pull out your phone, scroll your favorite social media app, like some of your friends' posts, maybe add a witty comment or two, and this can stave off the boredom. But in the pre-social media era you would have been more inclined to call up your friends, maybe invite them out for a bite to eat, or go to a movie. Social media can give a quick "social fix", but in the long term it doesn't really make you feel more connected to your friends, and given the "performative" nature of much social media, it can in fact do the opposite.
Sure - I understand that case for general social loneliness, but I have a hard time believing that replaces any form of sexual contact, even solo. I can also see a reasonable case for social media leading to less lasting relationships, but an overall decrease in sexual contact of any kind because of it feels odd.
We're not talking directly about people having less friends or social interaction. We're essentially talking about a mass of people essentially losing/ignoring their libido for years at a time. Looking at tweets, let alone scrolling Instagram doesn't feel like it should replace a physical desire for sexual pleasure to me. It may replace me deciding to call up a friend and go have dinner or such, but it feels like a stretch to say people are having a night where they would otherwise go out to find someone to have sex with, or just deal with it themselves at home, and instead they go read their Facebook page?
I think the effects would be different for people in different stages of life and relationship statuses. As a married guy in my 30s, the effect that I see is compulsive checking and scrolling social media feeding anxiety and depression. By the time my wife and I get our kids settled into bed and have a chance for one-on-one time, Facebook etc. often gets in the way and kills the mood, or it already did so earlier in the day.
I could certainly see that on the margins, but not to the level of "we haven't had any sexual contact in a year". If the survey was "have you had sex in the last week" then I'd totally accept that social media was driving that number down, but a full year is a really long time. If you're ruining your day/libido that consistently by doomscrolling then that feels like less of a social media problem and more of a personal/relationship problem. I'm sure it's happening to some people, but not this many, right?
Agreed, it exacerbates underlying problems (e.g. the depression and anxiety disorders) that were already present. I note that the 2009 rate for adults who hadn't had sex in the past year was already at 24%, and now (2018) it's 28%. So yeah, social media and smartphones clearly aren't responsible for the whole 28%.
In a way, the prevalence of social media is truly a case of “the market has spoken”…and we picked convenience and quick hits of dopamine over long drawn out back and forths about what to do next.
Heck, I like playing badminton in my apartment complex but I’ll never pick up the building intercom to call individual players to ask if they want to play. I’d rather post in our WhatsApp group and hope that someone bites.
In this case, social media is reading interaction and in my view is a net positive.
I don’t really think you can compare instant messaging and social media. They serve different purposes and have different impacts. It still gets in the way of physical conversations - for example picking up the phone) but doesn’t come with a dopamine hit.
Commenter actually read the article before commenting, like a n00b. It brings up social media and income:
"Various studies around the world have proposed different explanations, such as economic status. Lower income is associated with greater declines. One study looked at use of computer games among young people [as a possible explanation]. Some folks have tracked declines in alcohol use, and we know that [alcohol use] can be associated with disinhibition. We have seen, somewhat, [an] increase in sex toy use—from what we looked at, not a massive increase. If there is a change, it’s probably just going to contribute to one of the blips. I don’t expect it to be the explanation."
That quote doesn't mention social media? It mentions computer games as a possible explanation, and then explicitly says none of the things listed is a complete explanation. The article speculates that social media may be related, but what I'm asking is what the commenter thinks is the specific connection between social media and a decrease in sexual activity.
The OP comment essentially said that Social Media was causing massive catastrophic social change. I'm not seeing that backed up in the article, even if I think I may agree.
I'd say getting sex by dating is more expensive than paying for it directly in most if not all developed countries. This topic needs a study of its own though.
While dating may be more expensive, paying for it almost certainly exposes you to health risks. Even in dating, you should avoid persons who are, so to speak, "too easy" or say, "have 5 partners", as one thread here mentions.
In comparison, having sex with a prostitute almost guarantees consequent health problems. Better and far cheaper to stay true to "Five Finger Mary".
ciswomen tend to date up. That leaves them with less options in a society that pays equal salary among sex/genders (or even trending in that direction).
Salaries haven’t kept up with productivity since 1965. In fact 1965 was an inflection point for a number of important social well-being metrics like health, education, and housing affordability. So what happened around 1965? Of course the Vietnam war is the pat answer. However of far more social import is the sexual revolution and the accompanying marketing of female hormonal birth control. As Dijkstra, of all people, observed, the pill was a true radical novelty and as such society wasn’t equipped to cope with it. It is to prior forms of contraception as the digital computer is to the slide rule or abacus: a paradigm shifting invention.
Western societies have been living in a state of sexual bulimia for the last four generations and we wonder why it’s become dysfunctional?
Social media addiction and its consequences belong largely in the effects category and not the causes one. But hey we now have millions of things to choose to stream and back in the early ‘60s there were only three channels so really we’re better off.
Looking between 1960 to 2020, the birth rate are declining everywhere except Muslim world, not just "western societies". Russia, China, Japan, etc, you name it. Even India is slowing down on the population growth a bit recently.
Yeah, improvements to quality of life and socioeconomic development lead to lower fertility. Pretty sure this is an Industrial Revolution phenomenon that predates chemical contraception.
The researchers [...] used responses from 4,155 people in 2009 and 4,547 people in 2018.
Just two sample years or a regular sample within those dates?
Discussed here before has been the significant drop in male heterosexual activity due to the growth of hookup apps post-Tinder around 2012 allegedly focusing a majority of the female partnering among a minority of men.
It would be interesting to know if the survey here is merely reproducing some of that or if the decline has been reasonably linear between the two quoted sample years.
