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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?

#21

Post by lotsofpulp »

souprock wrote: post #15
ok_coo wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They balance their budget by skipping the expensive day care. There just isn't any way for a normal person to get day care for a family. It isn't even legal for a day care to have the same adult-to-kid ratio as a family can have, so you'd be paying multiple adults to do the job of one parent. If they get normal pay, then the parent must earn much more than normal pay.

The most strict ratio requirements I've seen for daycares is 4 kids to 1 adult (7 kids to 2 adults in Massachusetts) for toddlers and younger.

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#22

Post by lotsofpulp »

theodric wrote: post #14
do_not_cancel32 wrote: post #8

I 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…

I'm curious why a relationship with another person isn't something you'd want to prioritize. What fills your hours, and moreover, what fills your mental needs to such an extent that it can override biological imperatives?

Is there a biological imperative for a male other than orgasming, which ostensibly, content from a website can accomplish?

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#23

Post by lotsofpulp »

theodric wrote: post #9

I 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…

>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.

It seems reasonable to me to not have children if you do not feel secure about your housing prospects and overall cash flow projections.

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#24

Post by staticman2 »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #22
theodric wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm curious why a relationship with another person isn't something you'd want to prioritize. What fills your hours, and moreover, what fills your mental needs to such an extent that it can override biological imperatives?

Is there a biological imperative for a male other than orgasming, which ostensibly, content from a website can accomplish?

My understanding is some asexual people can experience romance but not obtain any pleasure from sex.

This suggests there are parts of the brains of (some, perhaps most men) looking for something which you can't get from orgasming.

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#25

Post by souprock »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #21
souprock wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They balance their budget by skipping the expensive day care. There just isn't any way for a normal person to get day care for a family. It isn't even legal for a day care to have the same adult-to-kid ratio as a family can have, so you'd be paying multiple adults to do the job of one parent. If they get normal pay, then the parent must earn much more than normal pay.

The most strict ratio requirements I've seen for daycares is 4 kids to 1 adult (7 kids to 2 adults in Massachusetts) for toddlers and younger.

3.5 kids per adult then.

So for just 3.5 kids, you'd need to pay 100% of a salary plus all the extras of running a business. (insurance, legal, finance, advertising, sewage, electricity, food, toys, etc.)

Given the overhead, you'd expect daycare for 2 kids to consume the working parent's entire pay. For a low-paid parent, just 1 kid might consume the entire pay.

Obviously that isn't viable. I know a handyman in Massachusetts who had at least 11 kids. It's perfectly legal for his wife to care for 11 kids.

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#26

Post by temp-dude-87844 »

jimmaswell wrote: post #5
PebblesHD wrote: post #2

While 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.

The paper "Declines in Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, 2008-2011" [1] by Lawrence B Finer and Mia R Zolna is linked by the CDC on their page about Unintended Pregnancy, and is a notable source of data on unintended pregnancies. This paper clearly states how they determined whether a pregnancy was intended:

"Pregnancy intention was defined according to a respondent's answers to a series of retrospective survey questions about her desire to become pregnant right before each pregnancy occurred. If she reported that she did not want to become pregnant at the time the pregnancy occurred, but wanted to become pregnant in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as mistimed. If a respondent reported that she did not want to become pregnant then or at any time in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as unwanted. We classified a pregnancy as unintended if it was either mistimed or unwanted; an intended pregnancy was one that was desired at the time it occurred or sooner."

When others cite statistics from this paper, this definition of "unintended" is nearly impossible to de-tangle from poverty: a reasonable respondent may very well indicate that their pregnancy was mistimed because of well-founded concerns, such as that they were not in a financially secure environment at the time. The paper treats such a response as an "unintended" pregnancy.

Careful reading of the paper reveals that there is evidence that poverty (at the time of surveying and/or at the time of pregnancy) causes respondents to retroactively rate their pregnancies as "unintended". This is a far less radical result than one may glean from casual discussion of such statistics.

[1] https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsa1506575

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#27

Post by lotsofpulp »

souprock wrote: post #25
lotsofpulp wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The most strict ratio requirements I've seen for daycares is 4 kids to 1 adult (7 kids to 2 adults in Massachusetts) for toddlers and younger.

3.5 kids per adult then. So for just 3.5 kids, you'd need to pay 100% of a salary plus all the extras of running a business. (insurance, legal, finance, advertising, sewage, electricity, food, toys, etc.) Given the overhead, you'd expect daycare for 2 kids to consume the working parent's entire pay. For a low-paid parent, just 1 kid might consume the entire pay. Obviously that isn't viable. I know a handyman in Massa…

Were all 11 kids under the age of 3?

FYI, it takes differing amounts of attention and work to care for children at different ages.

I don’t know if you have ever cared for a baby, but I have with a ratio of 2 kids under 3 years old and 1 adult (myself), and I don’t even know how people at daycare do it with a 4 to 1 ratio.

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#29

Post by staticman2 »

adflux wrote: post #6

Fewer 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 poi…

But women generally don't want to be part of harems. If they want something besides sex, they pretty much need to stop sharing a small group of attractive guys and start settling down with the less attractive guys.

Perhaps tinder is not the place to find a guy for settling down.

Re: Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

#30

Post by JeremyBanks »

adflux wrote: post #6

Fewer 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 poi…

That graph seems like an accurate reflection of how much effort people of each gender put into their appearance.
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