Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
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Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
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Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#2While I don’t specifically fall into this category, I’d like to broaden it to younger men starting families. The reason my partner and I haven’t moved toward doing so is primarily economic, we still can’t afford a house and rental laws here mean we could be kicked out at quite short notice. We don’t want to bring a child into an environment that we aren’t even able to keep stable for ourselves.
Others we know are in even more limited circumstances, who put off even dating due to how tight their finances are. Money just isn’t making it to the lower and middle classes any more in any real capacity.
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#3I'm betting on dating sites and the internet in general. Our evolutionary biology is for the women to only get pregnant by the fittest available male in the "tribe" because it's such an investment in time and resources (also why men are inclined to go around with whoever they can, it's all benefit and no cost to "dine and dash"), and now the "tribe" we percieve is artifically extended with the fittest possible specimens constantly on display. Where a woman of the species might have been content settling for someone in their small town 100 years ago, the part of their brain that evolved to discern mates screams at them that they can do better because of the men on dating sites with perfect bodies these days, and the rest of the men are just left to simmer in discontent, probably a reason for a lot of social unrest.
I don't know what we could do to fix this but completely ban dating apps, which is impractical. Optimally in the far future we'd be able to rewrite the human genome to update our standards of attraction from the stone age - beefy muscles, tall height, other such signals are generally irrelevant to life today yet they're still such strong factors for men to be able to break into dating.
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#4While I don’t specifically fall into this category, I’d like to broaden it to younger men starting families. The reason my partner and I haven’t moved toward doing so is primarily economic, we still can’t afford a house and rental laws here mean we could be kicked out at quite short notice. We don’t want to bring a child into an environment that we aren’t even able to keep stable for ourselves. Others we know are in…
To echo this statement, I wasn't financially stable until ~35. We still do not own a home/condo and I'm not sure it's going to happen at this point. My spouse and I may just move in with family to split costs and live cheap.
To be fair, I also didn't have any social pressure from my family to have children and since my gf, now wife, doesn't want to have any children either, it just worked out this way.
TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#5While I don’t specifically fall into this category, I’d like to broaden it to younger men starting families. The reason my partner and I haven’t moved toward doing so is primarily economic, we still can’t afford a house and rental laws here mean we could be kicked out at quite short notice. We don’t want to bring a child into an environment that we aren’t even able to keep stable for ourselves. Others we know are in…
Poverty is usually associated with increased unwanted pregnancy (which must have come from sex) though.
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#6Fewer men are having sex with about an equal amount of women. So there are a few men who statistically have the most sex and then the rest barely gets any. Tinder and the like very heavily favor attractive men. Then there's a whole bunch (like in my compsci major) who don't even talk to women on a daily basis...
https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo graphs like this dont inspire hope either and serve to support my previous points
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#7The data in that article only goes up to 2018. It will be interesting to see if that 27% figure is now higher.
It's pretty clear what is happening: Online dating has become the main way romantic partners meet online [1] and the average man finds it far more difficult to find a partner than, say, in a bar or the workplace [2]
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...
[2] https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#8I am in my late 20s and a senior engineer at FAANG. I am conventionally attractive and have been asked out by numerous women over the years, even when I did not have my FAANG salary. However, I have had very few sexual partners.
The article has four ideas on why men like me have fewer partners. That men lack the money for partners, that the top 10% of men outcompete the bottom 90% on social media apps, that at least some of these men are homosexuals, that men prefer pornography over the actual act.
The answer for me (maybe not you) is the fourth one, "Rise of the tube sites." It is easy to fit a tube site into my schedule. It is hard to fit another human in to my schedule. After going on a tube site, I have no incentive to go to parties, go on tinder or to otherwise meet women. If I did not have tube sites, I likely would have gotten married in college when my future earnings potential became obvious.
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#9I was in my 20s 8-18 years ago and despite any sort of stability or decent employment I was still sexually active with female partners. I had a smartphone before most people knew that was a possibility, and essentially unlimited porn. I don't get it. Birth control and condoms have been widely available for one billion years at this point. Doesn't anybody want personal contact, a relationship, etc.? Are people really just holding out on experiencing life in the hope that either someone richer or richer times might suddenly appear? Because that would be monumentally stupid.
Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
#10Because we have cheap entertainment that is a lot less annoying than dealing with the opposite sex?
I can't speak to the unrealistic demands from men, but, if you aren't from an area with a surplus of women, the dating demands of women who are effectively average are absurd. I seem to remember that there was some dating site analysis that basically backed that up--men mis-estimate average-ness some but most women are just way off.
Ding: Thanks to adflux for finding the OKCupid data: https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo
You clearly don't know what the inside of a gym even looks like, but you want me to have six pack abs? Your degree barely qualifies you for Amazon warehouse worker, but you want me to be pulling six figures? Oh, and I also have to be over 6 foot tall.
Uh, yeah, I think I've got lots to do until someone a little more grounded in reality comes along.