Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

441–450 of 740 posts

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#441

Post by roosterdawn »

Nav_Panel wrote: post #398
abeppu wrote: post #187

People in this thread are talking a lot about the availability of non-sex ways to spend attention (porn, social media, netflix), and of loosely power-law effects where a small number of men can have a lot of sex because of good looks and money. What about the other economic factors? - aren't more young people in living situations with greater sharing and less privacy than 20 years ago? - given the relative stagnation…

Yes. I think many people are missing the point, which is that all these failures of intimacy are downstream from failures of community, of sociality in general (cf. "Bowling Alone"). Our culture has shifted further toward valuing the individual over the group, which means that many individuals no longer have recourse to a group in order to find partners, friends, etc. Men are not just "not having sex", they are lonel…

> Our culture has shifted further toward valuing the individual over the group

Further from where? For better or worse, America has always been a deeply individualist country. Is it maybe the case that now the less savory consequences of that are more visible than ever before?

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#442

Post by thewarrior »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #211
thewarrior wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But the data also shows that for women the figure is unchanged.

Precisely illustrates my point: most men are still operating under an outdated expectation of sex and romance. That merely existing suffices for being a good partner. When in reality, standards have been vastly increased any only a few men have gotten with the times.

And what are the standards exactly ? Plenty of people who have good jobs, average bodies and decent personalities absolutely struggle. If that’s not enough ...

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#443

Post by whytaka »

watwut wrote: post #400
whytaka wrote: post #358

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think people become more human the more you treat them as humans that can grow. If you see others through the lens of risk assessment, you'll surely see lots of risk.

Yeah, but I can treat people as human without putting myself in danger. I can treat a guy as human without entering romantic relationship. Romantic relationships don't cure anger nor violence. But, women who believe so are the typical domestic abuse victim. They date guys thinking they will change them and blaming themselves for abuse. I mean, abuse is a real thing (and both genders do abuse). But someone who can get…

> Romantic relationships don't cure anger nor violence.

I can honestly pinpoint you the day my life changed forever for the better. It's the day I lost my virginity. That one moment where I felt myself being accepted made me realize I was good enough.

Ever since then, I'd become less angry, more confident, more loving of myself, more charitable towards other people's insecurities instead of positioning myself higher in some imaginary pecking order.

I am far from being truly non-judgmental. I am also still very competitive with others, not un-occasionally in some mean, vicious way. But I no longer feel completely rejected by women, which, for some reason, mattered so much before that very moment.

Obviously, I am just one person and my anecdote may mean nothing to the breadth of your experiences. But I can't agree with this one sentence.

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#444

Post by kylebyproxy »

malcolmgreaves wrote: post #193
Vysero wrote: post #47

It's become harder to approach women. Based on my experience, they are far more likely this day in age to reject you than ever before. That coupled with the constant barrage men receive on the sexual misconduct front coupled with the notion that women only want exceedingly wealthy, attractive, muscular men makes it very easy for men to slink away into their rooms after work, and play video games all night rather than…

Men don't receive a constant barrage of sexual misconduct. Where did you get this idea? There's countless data and evidence showing instutionalozed sexual discrimination from men against women. If you want an enlighting read as it pertains to tech, read Brotopia. Or read about how Uber only bought leather jackets for it's men SREs and explicitly chose to not buy the same jacket for their women SREs. Or simply ask any…

> Or simply ask any woman about an instance where a man pressured her for some sexual act. Or made them feel unsafe or uncomfortable. Or where a male boss of theirs made sexually discriminatory or otherwise hostile remarks against them in a workplace (dismissing a woman's perspective on a topic definitely counts here).

As a male who has been subjected to all of these and more (from both male and female perpetrators), I'll attest that sexual misconduct against towards men really does happen.

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#445

Post by Nav_Panel »

roosterdawn wrote: post #427
Nav_Panel wrote: post #300

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IQ Shredder is a dangerous concept, because it displaces "human worth" onto _individual_ fertility and offspring. If we follow that ethics a little further, we might find ourselves fully devaluating any religious practice which has an element of chastity (because it's dysgenic, obviously!), as well as condemning homosexuality along similar lines. The fact of the matter is that, psychologically speaking on the level o…

> it displaces "human worth" onto _individual_ fertility and offspring I think the word "worth" could be an anthropomorphization. I read the concept through the lens of survivability. Hypothetically, a societal identity which does not ensure biological reproduction could be evolutionarily outcompeted by one that does. Even, or especially by a fertility cult. I remember this being one of the central, disturbingly dyst…

> Hypothetically, a societal identity which does not ensure biological reproduction could be evolutionarily outcompeted by one that does

Ah, this is pretty close to the same claim that "JayMan" made once when explaining to me how "gay people shouldn't exist, evolutionarily speaking" (because, of course, the gays would be outcompeted genetically by non-gays, and the identity wouldn't persist, right?)

Let me tie it into this:

> if the environment that enables the financial prosperity of these model citizens also disables their ability to reproduce their way of life, how does it successfully compete in "the marketplace of ideology" against opponents who out-produce them by default?

Because ideologies don't exist in a market, they exist within an ecosystem. To put it plainly: it doesn't matter if the finance guys don't have kids, because the finance guys aren't themselves breeding more finance guys. The fact that the role of "finance guy" exists at all is a product of the broader cultural ecosystem, which wont disappear even if all the extant finance guys do.

But all this is beside the point. Land's post lays out a sociological model (viewing the world as a detached observer) and then, through sleight-of-hand and careful selection of metrics, converts it into a measure of value (how one views one's life as an individual).

If your sociological frame makes the world look like a dys/utopia, consider that it might be a flawed frame, at least if your goal is to see clearly.

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#446

Post by [deleted] »

smichel17 wrote: post #48
codezero wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I can't tell from the article, but it sounds like they did not take into account wealth in their study, but are inferring a pattern based on other studies on wealth/sexuality, or am I missing something here? One can't simply say "women prefer men with higher socioeconomic status" because it sounds right, and I'm not saying that this isn't studied somewhere, just that when making conclusions about a study, if that fac…

I don't think the patent was saying the two are related, just that they follow the same pattern.

[deleted]

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#447

Post by CameronNemo »

michaelmrose wrote: post #304
toomuchtodo wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some citations for your thesis below. To your last point, IMHO, you're going to continue to see a decline in the total fertility rate (US is roughly ~1.77 this year, lowest on record) as women shift from casual seeking in their 20s to relationship/nesting in their 30s and find the market for partners to be much smaller than they would've anticipated, while also nearing the end of natural fertility (fertility rates st…

Maybe tinder isn't reality and many in fact most people meet each other outside of tinder. 78% of women aren't actually chasing the top 20% of men and are in fact available to meet outside of hook ups on tinder. Reducing women to vaginas on legs that can't be obtained outside of tinder is a big part of why 1/3 not 80% of men aren't getting much play. For other contributing factors I would look at generational differe…

>maybe ... many in fact most people meet each other outside of tinder

Evidence shows that online dating is immensely dominant.

https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#448

Post by fdsgnr0g90n0fw »

enriquto wrote: post #356
vsareto wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So, "give us families, or we'll do crime and destabilize society"? Sounds like mental health problems are even more rampant than we guessed. We should probably handle that.

> Sounds like mental health problems are even more rampant than we guessed. We should probably handle that. Other than generalized chemical castration I don't see how you could eliminate the "problem" of most of the male population unfulfilled sex drive. For all its problems and unfairness, patriarchal society provides an answer to that problem, if an ugly one.

At the risk of sounding cold... anything that causes the mortality rate of men in this high risk category to rise significantly would likely reduce the overall problem. For example, making the choice of suicide readily available for young men that face poo life prospects, and the choice of ending your own life for the better of society a virtue, perhaps even heroic.

Whether enough people would see such a thing as acceptable for it to become policy is an entirely different issue.

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#449

Post by geodel »

tarsinge wrote: post #437
eigenvalue wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is exactly right. Apps like Tinder that normalized online "dating" (before the apps it was much less common among younger people) have allowed the "apex predator" men with good jobs/looks/personalities to have sex on demand with virtually unlimited numbers of women. This has also been made possible because a lot more women are now willing to be in non-exclusive sexual relationships at the beginning when…

It’s only my anecdotal experience but part of the reason for me is that a lot of men are not even trying (edit: anymore) and simply more or less consciously gave up. In my days even as a nerd I tried to fit in, go to parties, bars, tried to hang with popular guys, or just do interesting thing (my hack was playing in a band, but doing art or skateboard, was ok too, you see the point). Nowadays I feel like you either h…

I think it is quite reasonable approach that these men are taking. I'd think of myself in that category. With society going in direction where social norms are evolving faster than many have mental bandwidth to deal with, it would be wise to just save time, money and energy to acquire that fake attractiveness. May be men have also taken cue from pop song 'You are beautiful just the way you are...'

Re: Young U.S. men having a lot less sex in the 21st century, study shows

#450

Post by verst »

Here is the primary data source used by this study.

GSS General Social Survey https://gss.norc.org/

Specifically of interest as it related to this article:

Number of sex partners in last year (by year): https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5049/vshow

Frequency of sex in last year (by year): https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5057/vshow

Post reply on HN