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Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

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Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#82
In a cruel paradox, I find talking to women who are already in a relationship much more enjoyable. They are more humble, open-minded and treat me as a real person, not means to an end or some necessary evil. Which boosts confidence a lot.

Maybe 30 y.o. single women are so for a reason.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#83
post #25

I am a regular reader of Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" and the sheer number of terrible boyfriends/husbands is jaw-dropping. And that's probably always been true, but what has changed is the extent to which women now have agency through having decent jobs and not being social pariahs if they're not married and pregnant by 22. The stuff my grandmother put up with just doesn't fly today. So if the content of AITA is any…

> training the bottom quartile of men in the basics ....

I always thought schools should teach children "how to date". I went through sex-ed in Delaware public schools in the mid 1990s, and it was all the clinical physical aspects of sex, and the dangers of HIV. There was nothing about intimacy or consent.

I did have a separate class in 7th grade called Conflict Resolution. It felt like a low effort attempt to teach basic social skills that should have been a regular part of schooling since kindergarten.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#84
post #28

> One possible aid for sexual loneliness might come from online dating apps such as Tinder. In theory, online dating could provide an efficient way to find a partner. However, online dating divides people heavily into winners and losers – perhaps even more so than traditional dating. While women can get attention from thousands of men online in just a few hours, men are lucky if anyone is interested in them My wife d…

To be fair this is not entirely due to social dynamics but rather due to MatchGroup companies following identical monetization patterns. They’re just capitalizing on male desperation and artificially widening or narrowing the gap depending on how much you pay. If you observe the actual dating climate it’s nowhere near this bad and in larger cities like NYC it can even be closer to 1:1. Rather than a social problem th…

There was an article a few years ago saying that in Manhattan women outnumber men, and that led to men needing to compete less there, so yeah probably economics related.

But a gov-sponsored app? No way. It's bad enough they have your whole financial/employment history (IRS), but to add your health (medicare/aid) and now dating/sexual histories too? What's left that you can keep private? Sorry, bad idea there.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#85

You are not owed sex or intimacy. To men: want to be desired by other people? make yourself more desirable. As for women in this situation, that is largely self imposed because their sex drives are lower and they are often in denial about how their attractiveness declines with age, and are unable to adjust their expectations to match. In the modern dating / hookup culture young men and older women are the clear loser…

And I guess you could say that nobody deserves to live in an safe environment free of violence, black people don't serve to not get beaten up by the cops, poor people don't deserve health care, nobody is owed a job in a non-toxic environment that doesn't kill them because of stress, etc.

So often when people have problems that are hard to solve the answer is just "talk to the hand" at best.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#86

The article correctly identifies that lack of intimacy and relationships are serious problems, with sexual loneliness being a related comorbidity (if you will). The comments, so far, predictably drift toward "how do we get everyone laid?" Giving everyone access to sex will not solve sexual loneliness. And, solving (a lot of) sexual loneliness can be achieved without giving everyone access to sex. Anecdotally, I spent…

Yeah everyone seems to be very focused on sex whereas to me the problem is not fostering intimate connections in the first place. We don’t have an epidemic of relationships that aren’t having sex, we’re having an epidemic of people who aren’t fostering those relationships and as a downstream byproduct they aren’t having sex. Pay a prostitute is a bandaid patch on the downstream problem, but it will never makeup for the loneliness hole of the upstream problem

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#87
post #25

I am a regular reader of Reddit's "Am I the Asshole" and the sheer number of terrible boyfriends/husbands is jaw-dropping. And that's probably always been true, but what has changed is the extent to which women now have agency through having decent jobs and not being social pariahs if they're not married and pregnant by 22. The stuff my grandmother put up with just doesn't fly today. So if the content of AITA is any…

I'm sorry I have to be the one to tell you this but AITA is about as credible as newspaper advice columns and 4chan greentexts, that is to say not at all.

Rage bait, karma farming and creative writing exercises all rolled into one!

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#89

Legalize prostitution and regulate safety and perhaps incels would build confidence and learn to socialize a bit from paid sexual interactions? I'm kind of ignorant to the subject of what is the cause of 'sexual loneliness' but I believe the world's oldest profession shouldn't be pushed into the shadows as that causes more problems than it prevents.

If people consider marriage as a contract of exchange, then it is already a form of legalized prostitution. Monogamy might be a bigger underlying problem. Esther Perel's Mating in Captivity in a good read on this topic.

You can have a financially dependent relationship with actual love and affection, prostitution is purely transactional. I agree that monogamy as it is usually practiced has some drawbacks and is not well suited to many aspects of modern society, but it does work well for a large number of people, even if it is a minority.

Re: Sexual loneliness: A neglected public health problem?

#90
post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To be fair this is not entirely due to social dynamics but rather due to MatchGroup companies following identical monetization patterns. They’re just capitalizing on male desperation and artificially widening or narrowing the gap depending on how much you pay. If you observe the actual dating climate it’s nowhere near this bad and in larger cities like NYC it can even be closer to 1:1. Rather than a social problem th…

> in larger cities like NYC it can even be closer to 1:1 I don't know the stats but on places like Blind there's a lot of anecdotes about the dating scene favoring men in NYC and favoring women in SF, due to the gender balances.

Anecdotally agree, I tend to think of SF as a special case due to the extreme gender imbalance and the general sprawled out nature of the bay area
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