> Also, adult dating and meeting people for the post-college working professionals, has largely moved from clubs/bars/the office to online dating apps, or lonely depression in your apartment, eating or drinking your feelings away, for those without success in the WFH, remote-everything, online dating world. Especially with the lockdowns.
And those "dating" apps can hardly be called dating apps in most cases. They're designed to mess with the underlying sexual dynamic of men and women. If they were meant for romance, they'd have more mechanisms in place to help strangers actually date and get to know each other. Instead, they're a meat market, and the sad thing is more and more people are growing up in a world where they know no different. If you think about it, dating apps have no incentive to try and get people to actually meet in real life. Not only does that raise the potential for liability, but that means fewer eyeballs on their product at any given time.
Tinder knows very well that their product is selling attention to women and the promise of sex to countless men they know have next to zero chance based on their looks alone. As OK Cupid was losing its position as a dating app, I remember them putting out an advertising campaign featuring the initialism "DTF", which tells you all you need to know. They might even still be doing it, for all I know. I remember it from billboards and posters in Santa Monica.
> I don't think tech or porn is the main culprit. It's that people now have way more entertainment options other than sex. Of course, a lot for those entertainment options are being driven by tech.
I don't buy this one bit. The number of entertainment options is correlative, but who has demonstrated that it's causative? Yes, there is a chance that the proliferation of entertainment options is the primary cause, but unless a double-blind study has or will be done to test whether the sex drive is actually in competition with entertainment, I have very sincere doubts.
Furthermore, the porn industry is in no way declining. If people were losing an instinctive interest in sex, why would they be watching porn? What if people actually want sex, but they are too ill equipped to obtain it IRL?
And we haven't even brought up declining androgen levels in males.
Sex isn't going out of fashion. If anything, we are hypersexualized. The goal of sex isn't merely to propagate genes, but to propagate selected genes. Our current environment allows us to select our mates to such an extent that even more people are seleced out of the gene pool for a variety of reasons. Either we're perpetually thinking we can do better, or that we're never good enough or are too ugly, or are totally clueless because Boomer and Gen X parenting have been a disaster.