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The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

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Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#151

Post by lukevp »

mathiaspoint wrote: post #138
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart phones and the ubiquity of internet and video games is really it I think. You never have to be bored anymore, and therefore don’t have to meetup in person to be entertained.

Most people say video games were better pre 2010 and we already had smartphones at that point, just not iPhones. So it's not either of those.

No one means a BlackBerry when they say smartphones. It implies a large screen that can consume content easily, and with a large data plan, neither of which existed until The iPhone. I never saw someone watch 2 hours of YouTube on a blackberry.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#152

Post by dttze »

mathiaspoint wrote: post #148
dttze wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It directly shows your make believe past of fairness is a joke.

I specifically said things are going to have to be less fair than they are now if we want them to work. So there's no contradiction there and what you wrote is not a counter argument. I also didn't bring race into it but if you'd like to continue making the argument that black people are an existential problem for everyone else: Seig hiel I guess.

You said

> find a nice compromise that actually works and minimizes people who get abused (like US culture 100 years ago or maybe something else.)

Which is directly countered by pointing out how explicitly abusive and unfair the US was.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#153

Post by lbreakjai »

andrewrn wrote: post #63

This is very much upstream of sex. I just started a masters program this week, and on Friday night at 8 pm, zero out of 52 of my cohort members wanted to join me for a beer. It's anecdotal, but seemed really remarkable to me. So it's not just sex, young people don't socialize in-person nearly as much as they used to. I have no idea how this will be addressed, if it does ever get addressed.

Is it a lack of interest, or are they being priced out? When I was in university around 2010, you could do a very decent night out for 20€, and crash in your mate's student room, for which they paid 250€ per month. You'd meet friends, friends of friends, and your social circle would just expand.

Now the rent tripled, 20€ gets you a beer and a bus ride, and people stay home with the same few friends, if they're bothered to do anything at all.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#154

Post by mathiaspoint »

dttze wrote: post #152
mathiaspoint wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I specifically said things are going to have to be less fair than they are now if we want them to work. So there's no contradiction there and what you wrote is not a counter argument. I also didn't bring race into it but if you'd like to continue making the argument that black people are an existential problem for everyone else: Seig hiel I guess.

You said > find a nice compromise that actually works and minimizes people who get abused (like US culture 100 years ago or maybe something else.) Which is directly countered by pointing out how explicitly abusive and unfair the US was.

You're either struggling to read or struggling to reason. I don't know how to help you.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#155

Post by __turbobrew__ »

AstralStorm wrote: post #129
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart phones and the ubiquity of internet and video games is really it I think. You never have to be bored anymore, and therefore don’t have to meetup in person to be entertained.

The timeline does not match. Both were widely available in oughts. So there was something smooth that hit a phase transition. Likely enployment or housing prices, forcing people to engage survival mode. People in this mode do not feel secure enough to have sex or especially start families.

The first smartphone — iphone — came out in 2007? Adoption definitely started ramping up in 2010.

Video games were available pre-2010, but they weren’t nearly as ubiquitous, and honestly the people playing lots of video games pre-2010 weren’t having lots of sex either.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#156

Post by jjk166 »

sonictomb wrote: post #31

In micro economics, when a substitute reduces in cost and increases in quality, we see a substitution effect [0] (amusingly, coined by economist Eugen Slutsky), i.e. people switch away from the relatively expensive good and into its lower cost substitute. The primary substitute for physical sex is DIY with porn. Over the past 30 years porn has become orders of magnitudes cheaper (pre internet, it was ~$9 to see ~5 hu…

Porn is a substitute for seeing strangers naked. It's not a substitute for relationships, or even for sexual release. Masturbating is no cheaper or easier now than it ever was; people have been pursuing romantic and sexual relationships despite having the option to masturbate forever.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#157

Post by __turbobrew__ »

mathiaspoint wrote: post #138
__turbobrew__ wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Smart phones and the ubiquity of internet and video games is really it I think. You never have to be bored anymore, and therefore don’t have to meetup in person to be entertained.

Most people say video games were better pre 2010 and we already had smartphones at that point, just not iPhones. So it's not either of those.

When I say “smarphone” I mean iphone and later.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#158

Post by notahacker »

lazide wrote: post #135
notahacker wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Spent enough months in India to be aware that hookups happen, including ones parents would be very disapproving of and ones which were illegal at the time. Pretty much everything happens in India to some degree, but we're talking about the effect at the margin here, and I don't think India has a 1.5bn population because hookups are more of a thing there than the West.

Fair point - the population numbers are largely due to the (most common) marital structure, and societal expectations around having kids. The amount of sex though definitely includes hookups and a lot of sex outside of the acknowledged marital structure. A large number of those kids may well be illegitimate, I suspect no one wants to look too hard. I also suspect what is happening in the US is a combination of defact…

I suspect that for all the attention certain politics and niche subcultures promoting disengagement get, it mostly comes down to spending less time in mingly social environments with the opposite sex, something young unmarried Indian men frequently expressed disappointment with and is also increasingly the case in the West for a different balance of reasons. The average reason may be different, but of course the US has its small towns full of conservative parents and India has its internet addicts and workaholics.

(Not sure if there are directly comparable surveys, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that unmarried Americans were rather more sexually active than unmarried Indians, even with the downward trend)

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#159

Post by amelius »

swat535 wrote: post #104
amelius wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Feminism maybe? (yes controversial, more science needed)

Why Feminism? Isn't Feminism encouraging women to have more sex i.e sexual liberation, nudity is no longer a taboo, women are no longer constrained to a single man, all that jazz? My understanding is that Conservatism encourages family values but at the cost of having less sexual partners (for example no sex before marriage) whereas Liberalism encourages the opposite.

Another controversial point, but it is not a secret that sex is more a man's thing. Give women more "powers" and the outcome of less sex should not come as a surprise.

But reality is of course more complicated ... so don't blame it on one reason.

Re: The share of Americans having regular sex keeps dropping

#160

Post by BobaFloutist »

exe34 wrote: post #123
iamacyborg wrote: post #102

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> People typically meet their partners at work. That seems unlikely. Genuinely curious if there’s something I’m missing here.

it's for attractive people. for the rest of us it's a quick trip to HR.

You meet people at work, you don't proposition them at work.
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