Why are young people having so little sex? (2018)

>> It's not for bad reasons that "trying to kiss a girl" has become so cringe.

Oh cringe, is it? I'd say your generation cringing at the thought gets directly to the reason it has no sex.

>> Why are you trying to do something that intimate when you have no clue how the other person will react?

Possibly precisely because you don't know how they'll react. Whoa, crazy right? You might initiate something without prior consent and see what happens? Holy fuck!

You aren't trying to do anything against someone's will. You aren't going to kiss the girl unless she wants to kiss you. But when you're 15 years old and you go on a first date, you do already know you'd like to kiss that girl. And you also know she isn't going to kiss you first.

It takes risk. No you don't take that risk if you think the girl doesn't like you, but it's still scary and risky all the same if you think she does. Having no clue how she's gonna react and taking a leap -- that's what you need to do to learn, both ways, to grow up. A lot of the problem with men not respecting women is down to men not learning when they aren't invited for a kiss.

But ya can't learn until you've tried. And when you're 15, trying to kiss a girl you like is pretty much the most important thing on earth. And if you don't know that, never experienced it or don't remember it, all I can say is I feel sorry for you. If you ever go on a date and carry through for a couple hours - and you're still interested, without thinking "how should I kiss that girl"? Then you're missing one of the better parts of life.

In any case, intellectualizing it to the point of obliterating all unplanned activity in the name of policing everyone's behavior and telling them they're dirty or wrong for kissing strangers is a victorian, petit bourgeois fascist little conceit which like most of your generation's ill-formed ideas will be trodden over by your children who are gonna go hog-wild fuckin' every cock in sight in return for your closed-minded, terrified little incel ideas about life.

> She really needs to find you intuitively compelling in a general sense, and this will be practically interchangeable with physical attractiveness in her mind. One reason I know this is that it works just fine the other way around.

That of course assumes that men and women work the same in this respect. There are so many differences between the sexes, both biological / hormonal and social / expectations, that this is not a given. (Though yes, personally I'd guess we're rather similar. Just pointing out that it's not a given, at least not just because it works that way for men.)

From TFA:

> Take for example the online hate and real-life violence waged by the so-called incels—men who claim to be “involuntarily celibate.” Their grievances, which are illegitimate and vile, offer a timely reminder that isolated young people are vulnerable to extremism of every sort.

Sure, the "remedies" some incels resort to are illegitimate and vile, but to dismiss their actual grievances as such feels a bit weird after having spent most of a long, long article describing exactly how the incels' grievances arose. Especially apparent in the section on dating apps: The overwhelming majority of guys get absolutely no responses. Sure seems to point towards women being much more choosy than men, which is what I've understood, in a nutshell, the incels' main grievance to be.

> Oh, young people have less sex? This is definitely a problem, and...

Well, judging from many of the quotes in the article, it seems to be a problem for many of these young people, according to these young people themselves. Just because you can do without doesn't mean everyone should have to.

> This is just a laundry list of everything older generations hate about the youth

Funny, to me it looked like a list of problems young(ish) people themselves were having, plus some possible explanations from more or less popular science. Or are you claiming the authors just plain made up all those quotes from interviewees?

> I also can't even begin to express how frustrating paragraphs like this are:

> > Humans’ sexual behavior is one of the things that distinguish us from other species: Unlike most apes, and...

WTF is wrong with that paragraph? It's just (a pop-sci resume of) simple fact. Your frustration at it indicates a fault in your frustrativity [You read it here first! (?)] more than in the article.

> There's this tone running through the article of "we're not saying you have to have sex to be emotionally fulfilled as a human being,

That's because the overwhelming majority of people do have to have sex to be emotionally fulfilled as a human being. And, you know, the overwhelming majority is "the norm", so defines what's "norm-al".

> but we are going to constantly look at you weird and act like you might be emotionally stunted because of it."

Just because you don't want to be called "emotionally stunted" doesn't necessarily mean that you aren't: I don't know what range of emotions you're capable of, and you don't know mine. But as I understand the concept of "emotions", they're fairly intimately connected to hormones and sex drives and stuff. So unless and until we can look around inside each other's heads and examine each other's emotions first-hand, it seems fairly plausible that a-sexual people as a group might have a more limited -- colloquially, "stunted" -- range of emotions than people who aren't have as a group. If you inist on taking that as a slur, that's your choice. If you don't, then it isn't.

> I'm aroace, so I may be over-sensitive

Yup.

And, hey, "aro-" means "a-romantic", right? But "romantic feelings" are emotions; so how the fuck could you think you're not "emotionally stunted" if you don't have those? Compared to people who are otherwise similar to you, but in addition are ro- without the a-, you obviously, logically, have a narrower set of feelings.

> but holy crud, could older generations stop... [yadda, yadda.]

Sounds like wild projection caused by over-sensitivity. (Then again, this free on-line psychiatric diagnosis is worth every penny you paid for it. My degree in psychiatry is from Has Watched Frasier On TV University.)

> As the article hints at, our view of pre-marital sex has never been more positive.

Depends how you define "positive": Sure, it's not so much condemned on puritanical grounds any more (at least not openly). But if many of the kinds of (i.e. young, single) people who used to have lots of it are now all "meh" about it, then that's not much of a "positive view", now is it?