> Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely daunting but possibly offensive. “Revealing that your intention in talking to someone is sexual? That’s hairy,” shuddered one man.
When I read things like this, I can't understand whether american culture has gotten weirdly puritan or this is a wild exaggeration. There's such a huge distance between politely and respectfully expressing sexual interest in someone, especially in a BAR, and being creepy and offensive.
Edit: just to clarify, I've never lived in US or in countries in the similar #metoo zeitgest, so this is an uneducated view from the outside.
This is unsubstantive. It's one thing to express concern over what you might perceive as encroaching Puritan morality. It's another to blast a movement focused on giving a voice to sexual abuse victims.
I think it'd be wrong to not think through this though. When we talk about #metoo, we don't talk about the movement itself. #metoo is a symptom, indicative of a broader social sea change.
I'm on the more progressive end in a coastal city, but have been in a uniquely diverse environment when it comes to political views, international views. People that are more socially liberal tend to have changed their stances because of a change in the general understanding of what is proper or acceptable. People who are more socially conservative have also changes their stances, but specifically blame the fear around #metoo. And I totally understand why they feel this way - it's difficult to place that shift on some nebulous generational change of social mores. It's much easier to place that shift on a specific, well-defined, well-publicized movement. That's not to say anyone is blasting that movement by saying this is how people feel. Neither is it blaming the movement for actually doing anything. However, it is likely what this change is mentally attributed to for many people.
There have been some very public cases of men being ostracized in the public eye through the #meetoo movement for behaviors that many would be considered acceptable, or at least bordering on it. Examples are Aziz Ansari and John Lasseter. Then you've got a constant barrage in newspapers, Twitter, and Facebook about consent, and what needs explicit consent encroaching ever closer to normal behaviors such as conversation. There is the concept of "enthusiastic consent". All of this is spearheaded by the #meetoo movement.
Obviously consent is a good thing. But to pretend that the boundaries of what are reasonable regarding consent aren't overstepped and people aren't attacked unfairly is to deny the evidence. This fuzzy and changing boundary creates an environment of fear among men, especially when considering the consequences. There are forums were people discuss these issues in depth. Are they all hallucinating?
I am not so sure. Read about the Aziz Anzari situation.
Everyone makes mistakes. But consent is not revokable the next day. To claim abuse later, and not take responsibility, is absurd and offensive to real victims.
But this is how it is until women can take responsibility and say clearly "no" or accept the consequences of saying "yes" and possibly regretting it later.
“I wasn’t really even thinking of that, I didn’t want to be engaged in that with him. But he kept asking, so I said, ‘Next time.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, you mean second date?’ and I go, ‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ and he goes, ‘Well, if I poured you another glass of wine now, would it count as our second date?’”
What you have quoted is just talking. It isn't something that needs any strong worry about consent.
Read standalone, it could be anything from mutually flirtatious banter to the cringiest of escalation attempts.
Read in the context of the rest of the article, it's clearly the latter. But being bad at flirting, bad at trying to get to yes is in no way a violation of consent.
That said, other parts of the babe.net article do paint a much worse picture, of physically escalating both inappropriately (e.g. repeatedly putting her hand on his dick) and bizarrely (what's up with that fingers in mouth thing she described?)
Sure, but it's a very unambiguous example of her communicating lack of consent. One of many, yes. The Pixar debacle is even more clear cut IMO — don't insist on touching your subordinates.
More often than not, the 'difference' is whether or not the woman decided it's creepy or not, which is, more often than not, attached to the physical attractiveness of the man, or her mood at the time. Benefit of the doubt doesn't enter into it, especially after #MeToo
And you might have noticed that women aren't having much less sex. It's because women are all having sex with a small number of men. Attractive, successful men. This is, sadly, the result of female, and to a lesser extent male, freedom of choice. Most women would choose to only have sex with attractive, successful men. And unlike men, they have that option.
Couple puritanical norms with men who aren't that great at reading social norms and err on the side of caution and this is what happens. A significant minority is not able to make sense of it.
I’ve never been in a context where that’s even acceptable. None of my friends pick up women (or are successful) and the only person I know in a long term relationship met his fiancé in middle school.
I dont think it’s Puritanism but it is being risk averse. I know how hard it is for women and how many creeps they do have to deal with so I’d rather not even create the possibility of coming off as one. Add to this the tinderification of the hiring market (see Google’s top 1% of intelligence) and dating scene have put the bottom 80-90% in a bit of a bind because in many large metro areas there are more straight men than women and women are not culturally expected to make the first move. Couple that with increased expectations and lower social cohesion and it becomes...well, expected.
Source - non-homeschooled straight 23 year old, never once asked a girl out.
I suggest asking some girls out. I had social anxiety and the kind of social skills that lead to an Asperger’s diagnosis and I had more romantic experience than you by the time I was 18.
The chances of a girl being offended by being asked out are relatively low in any case; most people are nice. They’re really, really low if you’re attractive. When an ugly, charmless or poor man asks out a certain kind of girl they’re offended not just at having been asked out, but that the thought even occurred. Most girls aren’t like that. They’ll deflect the question or say that they’re busy and make no effort to reschedule.
My email is in my profile for anyone who has similar problems.
Well I’m not exactly attractive either :) Honestly, putting myself in the type of women I’m most intrigued by i wouldn’t put up with myself.
The closest I got was when I chatted up a girl on a train, but just couldn’t tell if she was just being super polite. Although I did end up getting her LinkedIn... I guess I’m not smooth either.
If you’re not attractive become attractive. If you’re not the kind of person you’d put up with change, become better. If you’re not smooth or confident work on them, they’re learnable skills. Don’t be yourself, that’s a crock of shit those born on third base say, work on becoming better, on becoming someone you respect and who you think is worth dating.
If that’s true I’m happy for you. I suggest observing the behaviour of other women to see how they react to similar behaviour from men of different levels of attractiveness. Whether it’s height, fat or just facial symmetry more attractive people, men and women, get away with more in life and go further, faster.
If I said the average man would sooner marry a penniless single mother of three who looked like a super model to an ugly woman with a nice personality would you find it similarly unbelievable?
There is much more to an interaction than someone's appearance. Perhaps “unattractive” men have worse social skills, or are are failing to signal they are not a threat.
There is definitely more to an interaction than someone’s appearance but the number of situations in which it’s irrelevant are quite small, much though we might pretend otherwise. Ugly people have worse lives than beautiful ones, even if we completely ignore romance because people treat them worse.
So one should work on being attractive. Some women put on makeup. Men do other things.
I know but they’re not going to hound you out of the bar, at worst they’ll say something mean and the interaction will be over. Also, become more attractive. Getting fit, dressing better and getting better posture or more confidence are available to most everyone healthy.
I don't think you understand. The problem isn't being hounded out of the bar, the problem starts with not being in the bar in the first place. Why go there if all you're going to face is rejection or worse? It's not exactly an exciting place to be and it saps your money. It's easier and safer to stay home, watch porn, and play video games.
Seemingly unending streams of rejection is what dating looks like for everyone. Bars are as boring as cafés. The people you’re with are what they’re for. They make it exciting. If someone prefers to stay home, watch porn and play video games that’s a choice, not a problem.
Dating apps are soul crushing seas of rejection, like dating in general, but worse because you feel like you’re trying when you’re playing with your phone. Given the choice between a mixed sex social activity once a month and dating apps you’re probably better off with the first.
In my opinion, yes and no. With dating apps it's only as soul crushing as you let it be. If the person online is not interested, s/he just ignores your message. A rejection in real life, on the other hand, can really sting. Multiple rejections can turn you off trying for good. And they are likely to happen, before you meet someone with whom you hit it off.
I highly recommend trying dating apps, especially if you're not a social butterfly. Just don't take it personally when you get no reply. And be patient, it'll probably take a while to find a good match (just like it would IRL).
> With dating apps it's only as soul crushing as you let it be.
This is how people who go on lots of dates treat dating in general. If you don’t treat a momentary social action as a big deal most people won’t either. Propose a date or make romantic interest clear. Be declined. Move on.
It's pretty discussing to look at dating app data about how women rate 80% of men as below average in attractiveness.[0] Men also get far fewer responses on dating apps.
Have you bothered to look at the access privileges any given dating app must be granted? Precise location, all contacts, calendar, etc. etc. Use websites, not apps.
> I know how hard it is for women and how many creeps they do have to deal with so I’d rather not even create the possibility of coming off as one.
I wouldn't worry too much about that, women are no different when it comes to creep distribution. We're all the same species after all. Granted, men don't normally get hit upon by women, so female creepiness manifests differently, and at later stages of a relationship. But it doesn't mean it's nonexistent.
> None of my friends pick up women (or are successful) and the only person I know in a long term relationship met his fiancé in middle school.
That sounds like something from another planet. I don't mean to say that I disbelieve you; it's just that it's so different from my personal experience and my social circle that I have a hard time even imagining this. There's just always something happening, meeting someone from Tinder, chatting each other on Twitter (which, I must say, seems to be more hookup-friendly than Tinder even), bumping into people at parties... I mean, sometimes I catch the lonely vibe and don't go out for weeks, but I've never lost this feeling that there's always this life out there, and it happens to everyone who's not in something serious.
Tinder and other hook up apps are the solution. No more approaching strangers in a bar who are either there to hang out with friends or just want to be left alone.
They are the solution because the intentions are clearer but then... you don’t get matches, because in straight pairings more women get orders of magnitude more attention than most men.
Source - I don’t get matches. And if I do, I’m boring.
Tinder is garbage. They have intentionally created a horribly imbalanced market to hook women with unrealistic prospects while extracting as much money as possible from the bottom 80% of men.
Singles meetups organized around a shared hobby or activity are a million times better.
I dont think it has anything to do with puritan, as its not related to religion at all.
well for one, sex in college is extremely dangerous. the Obama administration basically threatened Universities to treat male students as guilty (not even guilty until proven innocent).
I've never met any male college student where that was why they aren't having sex. I highly doubt this is a major factor for any but a very small number of people (and those people are unlikely to have sex for other reasons anyway).
American culture has deep roots, just like everywhere else. Just because the ideology of human rights or progressivism doesn’t identify itself as a post-Christian movement that doesn’t really make sense except on light of Christianity doesn’t make it untrue. The line from the Quakers with God’s inner light in each person to the inherent dignity of man is not exactly subtle. Likewise sex worker hostile feminism in Sweden or Norway uses similar rhetoric of concern for sex workers while doing everything in their power to make their lives hell. Just because the feminists in question don’t talk about Christ that doesn’t mean they’re not the same kind of judgmental bourgeois Lutherans their grandmothers were.
This is a wild exaggeration. Men used to be able to basically hit on women in all contexts with zero consequence (e.g. hitting on women at work was ok, let alone butting into a group at a bar). More recently, people have been pushing back on men who are inappropriate.
This leads to some men who don't understand the new boundaries having a very large overreaction and essentially saying that it's impossible or scary to 'chat someone up'. See also the men who won't work/game in mixed gender groups because it's "too difficult".
The new rules are essentially 'be respectful' and "there's a time a place" and 'politely accept no as an answer' and 'no one owes you shit'.
And there is no way to tell which people are okay with this and which aren't without taking risks that can have severe consequences. Some men are just going to say "no thanks" to this, and on the scale of society that some men is a large number.
Navigating consent is a skill. Skills take practice. Can you intend to be respectful and still fail? Yes, absolutely. Just like any social skill, if you've not practiced it you run the risk of making yourself an outsider.
My general thesis is that we're expecting men to be more practiced at this skill these days. Some men balk at this, some men were poorly prepared for this and struggle with a lack of proficiency in navigating consent. (To be clear, I believe there are women and gender minorities who fail to learn this skill as well, but the context of this conversation is about men this far.)
The problem arises, I think, because most of us are taught a set of social skills pretty early - sharing, listening, etc. But we didn't start teaching the skill of consent very well until recently, and it's folks like us who were kids awhile ago who are left trying to pick up a new skill that people expect us to have.
It's bloody difficult to learn a new skill when the consequence for failure is risking becoming a pariah.
>It's bloody difficult to learn a new skill when the consequence for failure is risking becoming a pariah.
And some will simply choose not to take that risk. On a societal level that some suddenly turns into millions of people who don't have a vested interest in the long-term future of that society.
PS I don't think that people lack skills around consent because they weren't taught it. I think people lack skills around it, because there is no clear expectation of what requires and doesn't require consent depending on the person.
Pacific northwest, and I'm gonna guess you're a man? Cause these may have been the rules as written, but these were not the rules 'on the field.' How many jokes do you remember in the 90s about "buying her dinner first"? And the pressure to put out after a nice meal even if you sorta didn't want to?
Even after you found a partner, it was legal to rape your spouse until what, 93? That doesn't seem like "politely accept no" was the rule to me...
I didn't hear these sorts of jokes in my circles. I certainly never heard them at work. And I suspect the people that told these jokes then are still telling them now.
I don't even know what you are talking about re: raping spouses, and is frankly a non sequitur.
Buying dinner jokes were totally in the zeitgeist from that era. See all the jokes in media about who should pick up the tab.
For the second part, I'm talking about consent in all parts of a relationship. Politely accepting no is a part of finding a consenting partner. Up until very recently, men didn't have to accept no. They were legally protected in not accepting no. I said the new rule is "politely accepting no as an answer" was a new rule, you said it was always the rule. I provided a counter example saying it was clearly not always the rule.
Some states had the age of consent at 14 until as recently at 2001. It doesn't mean that the old rules were that pedophilia was accepted before the change.
You may think simple rules like "be respectful" are easy to follow, but for many people a such vague rules are harder than formal and strict rules "First you look at her. If she smiles you are allowed to say hi. After 10 minutes of smalltalk you " may be an improvement over "be respectful".
Sure. Believe me, I understand how difficult it can be if you haven't practiced this skill or are not neurotypical. But unfortunately, constructing an exhaustive decision tree is impossible. But yeah, be respectful is obviously a little glib for the purpose of brevity on this forum.
> Men used to be able to basically hit on women in all contexts with zero consequence
Zero legal consequence -- social consequence or vigilante consequence was always a possibility.
> More recently, people have been pushing back on men who are inappropriate
What's considered inappropriate is precisely what's changing.
> The new rules are essentially 'be respectful' and "there's a time a place" and 'politely accept no as an answer' and 'no one owes you shit'.
Those have always been the rules.
What has changed is what counts as respectful, and exactly when and where are the allowed times and places.
There really are those pushing a message that any (non-reciprocated) sexual interest is disrespectful. Excluding work from allowed time-and-place and then "there's a time and place" excludes the places where one spends a great deal of one's time out of the house, with people one knows and can judge, and are likely to be prefiltered to have similar interests and socio-economic background. Work romances are still a huge proportion of how marriages start.
> They aren't complicated rules.
They are when the underlying terms are in the process of being redefined.
You can disagree, but we know that young men are having less sex than ever before. We also know that young men are having significantly less sex than young women. Something is broken in the system and I'm afraid that something this fundamental to humans can result in bad consequences.
Ok, I'm willing to believe the less sex claim for the sake of argument. But "something is broken" doesn't follow from those data. Maybe things were broken before, and they are normal now? I'd certainly believe things are different, sure.
I don't think that it's normal that 28% of men between the ages of 18 and 30 haven't had sex in the last year, while the same percentage is 18% for women? Especially since the rates were very similar between men and women in the past. These men are likely to be less invested in society than previous generations. The effects of this are unknown, but it's considered that surplus men cause society to become less stable.
Um sure, I guess. I really would like to understand how and why you disagree though, but I think if I said anymore, it would just be reiterating my points in a not terribly useful way.
Even easier, just be nice, friendly and maybe even charming. You shouldn't even start to flirt until all that is going well, and by then the flirting is probably fine.
I just mean in the same way that they are (or should be) nice, friendly and charming with their friends and family.
If you meet new people and you find them attractive, treat them like they are already a friend that you've known for years. Don't be weird, just tell them a funny story, embarrass yourself, show them that you're fun and human. Those are my rules, and I've dated way out of my league my entire life. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is simple (not to be confused).
You make it sound like all boundaries are set in stone and everyone can perfectly tell where they are for every single person. This is clearly untrue. Life and social interactions aren't as easily navigable for everyone as they are for you.
Men are expected to take the risk of approaching women. When they do that they have to know what the woman's boundaries are, because if they don't then they're labeled a creep or a sexual harasser (even though it could be a one time event). The consequences of this kind of failure can result in being ostracized or even a loss of your livelihood. Just a misunderstanding is enough in some cases and there are plenty of cases of false accusations too. Some men aren't going to take these kinds of risks, because instead they can just go home, watch porn, and play video games. We have evidence of this too - young men are having far less sex than young women.[0]
I think this might be a big problem going forward, because these young men are going to be less invested in society than previous generations. This could have all kinds of implications on the economy, but also the future path of society. We've read articles [1] about how surplus young men can cause society to become less stable. One of the important pieces is that the men that don't get married are less invested in society. Those articles were in reference to Asia, but I don't see how that couldn't also apply to the young men in the western world if they don't have any relationships.
The worst part is that I don't think this is something that can be changed.
"Men are expected to take the risk for approaching women..."
Thank you for clearly articulating this sentiment. I've found it hard to empathize with this point of view but your description helped. I would argue that building a robust social life rather than approaching random women is a better approach to finding a partner for people who can't imagine taking this kind of risk.
The point about less investment in society is also interesting, and potentially scary. I agree there's no easy solution to that one.
There is a sort of sexual paranoia in the US, but it isn't religious and puritan....it shows up in corporations and academic institutions.
Laura Kipnis had a wonderful essay about it, and as if to drive the point home it resulted in a series of absurd investigations by the University she works at.
Sure. But the lead in to that makes it pretty clear:
> But that still does not seem to explain the persistence of America’s sex recession, or its most extreme feature: how concentrated it is among men. Since 2008 there has been almost a threefold rise in the share of men under the age of 30 who claim to be having no sex. At the same time, the portion of sexless women increased by only 8%. A range of possible explanations for the disparity has been suggested, and the students seemed to corroborate several of them. Many felt men’s social skills had been especially eroded by over-reliance on technology. Overindulgence in porn meanwhile offered them an escape route from reality. Yet the most compelling answer, because it contains elements of all that and more, may be signalled by young people’s increasing reluctance to date.
> This is often blamed on the “hook-up culture” of college campuses. Yet casual sex and dating coexisted in the 1990s. It is also easy to exaggerate—now as then—how many people are hooking up. Half the Northwestern students said they rarely or never did. Yet they also rattled off reasons not to date which, among the men, who would traditionally take the lead in such encounters, included uncertainty about how they were even managed. Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely daunting but possibly offensive. “Revealing that your intention in talking to someone is sexual? That’s hairy,” shuddered one man.
I didn't get comfortable "chatting someone up in a bar" until my mid 30s. After a few ~long-term relationships, and a failed marriage. And this was during the 60s-80s.
Its not rocket science. All but the ugliest women can get sex/relationships more easily than all but perhaps the most attractive men. You have the top 90% of women competing for the top 10% (guessimate but its around there) of men while the other men are left completely in the dust.
That doesn't seem plausible. How can the "top 10%" of men be having sex with anywhere near the " top 90% of women"? That'd be a lot of sex for those men. And wouldn't they be kept busy enough by the top 20%-40% of women?
I do suspect that social media is a huge part of it. With such a focus on superficial attractiveness. And the potential for mobbing. There was lots more slack, back in the day.
I said competing not necessarily having sex. Also the numbers are for illustrative purposes, its impossible to know the precise figure but the paradigm itself is very real. Women have a far easier time having relationships with men and women. Men tend to form the bulk of the outcasts of society mostly because of generally higher social intelligence in women but recent economic and ideological trends definitely have worsened things.
When 50% of the population smoked, smoking in bars was accepted. Non-smokers who didn't want to spend an evening wreathed in smoke didn't go to bars. Those who did knew what they were in for.
I think approaching people to try to get them into bed is a lot like smoking. At one time, 50% of people in a bar were engaged in that activity. If you went to a bar in the evening, you knew that would be a part of the environment. That doesn't mean it wasn't annoying or awkward for the people being hit on who just wanted to enjoy an evening with friends. It's understandable too that as it becomes rarer, it also is more likely to be seen as creepy, just as smoking has become more offensive as it becomes more rare.
Counterpoint: showing up at a bar that encourages smoking is a much stronger signal when there are less people that do it.
A human voluntarily showing up at a bar in the age of Tinder is a strong signal, too. So in theory the "creepiness" of assuming their intention to meet others as potential dating material should reduce as well.
And just like it would be gauche to go as a nonsmoker to a smoking bar and complain about the smoke in your face, it would be the same to go to a singles bar and complain about the unwanted attention of other patrons.
Mostly we see humans goalkeepers in football Match but now see the video of this dog goalkeeper
And this dog is doing good as compare to some humans
http://bit.ly/2IyYCmz
I wish they'd include the idea of "competition in the marketplace for orgasms" alongside these social and economic ideas.
People have limited time & energy, so some percent are conceivably putting less effort into the difficult ways of relieving sexual tension (relationships) while favoring the easier ways to do so (pornography).
Porn has been one of the first industries to take advantage of technology, and the change in accessibility of porn is unparalleled. It went from something one was forced to sneakily travel to shady locations and physically purchase to something that we are accidentally exposed to or even advertised to on omnipresent screens everywhere in our lives.
And that isn't even going into the way the market has selected for 'more potent' forms of pornography- like the way that just about every fetish can be explored to depths that would shock/offend someone who doesn't share it. (something that probably has an isolating effect on relationships)
And it also isn't accounting for the new-ish industry of 'relationship replacement' style streamers- another economic activity that I believe must be competing with traditional 1 on 1 relationships.
There has always been porn. IME, it served several roles, but generally did not replace the desire to be in a relationship or at least physically intimate with another person. Sure, porn is more available and more potent in a sense now, and it may be a factor, but I think at most it is a minor one. Something else is making kids introverted and isolated.
40 years ago, when I started my interest in porn, it was... different. Both in availability and in "potentness".
Skip forward 40 years, I have a bunch of millennial kids. Their (for me discoverable) sexual encounters are extremely limited in comparison to mine and that of my wife, at that age.
Personally I do not think that the one (porn) has much to do with the other (limited). What I suspect is far more the lack of privacy and anonymity. Everyone in their age group seems afraid of the potential flack they will receive “when people find out I did X with Y”. And with the current over connectivity that seems a real possibility.
Whereas we, between 15 and 25, could disappear for a couple of hours / days, and the lamest excuse would enable you to get away with anything.
I truly do not envy this generation. It seems growing up, as in establishing your own personality and experiences, is so much harder.
I'd say there's more to explore with the societal effects of parasocial internet relationships than porn.
Less a "competitive market of pleasure" and more a market for attention. Even a casual relationship is fairly high cost interms of time (and potentially money) something millennials (and gen Z) aren't known for having in abundance.
I really liked this book! I don't think I want to post spoilers (like really buy and read the book), but I think he established an inverse relationship between how free a society is towards sex and how much actual sex people have.
You don't really need real physical sex with all the associated risks and overheads when quality porn has become so abundant and readily accessible.
A half hour spent on pornhub vs. dealing with other people while making a diceroll on your health and safety? One is clearly more convenient and costs less by a very wide margin.
There are a lot of people (such as myself) that grew up poor, so we invest most of our energy into our careers to avoid falling back into poverty. Unfortunately, families are expensive and a great way to ensure you raise another generation in poverty.
It's no surprise that people are putting off marriage and starting a family if you don't want to raise children in the same situation you were raised in. It's a similar problem across the pond in Japan where people grew up in practically single-parent households due to the rigors of work potentially leading to Karoshi. So you have people either completely checking out of society, or focusing entirely inwards to avoid a repeat of history.
points that they bring up but wedge into one paragraph in the dead center surrounded by various hand-waving and alarmism... I think some one had a quota to fill.
In the past the ruling class could always count on the proletariat (literally "offspring producing") to reproduce itself no matter how abysmal its conditions. Yet today we find ourselves in a situation Malthus could not have expected: the proletariat is on reproductive strike! The ruling class response is to push an ideology of mass migration that no one dares question. Who will stand up and say they don't welcome immigrants? Not I. This solution seems to be working in the short term, but if birth rates decline in the developing world, there won't be anyone to mass migrate. Then what? Share the wealth?
I think plenty of people fulfill their sexual needs through online means these days, which is a shame because real life experiences are much more emotionally enriching, with the added benefit that if you repeatedly engage sexually with a person you really like, it could form the basis of a relationship. Whereas in the digital space, one gets no long term return on the time invested/wasted.
> Most interactions with the opposite sex are emotionally draining ...
Indeed, but this can be successfully counteracted to some degree by proper socialization, and by participating in social activities alongside a group of friends, which by virtue of creating social contexts, will lower the barriers to social interactions.
People spend too much time indoors in the company of their screens, and without adequate social training, anxiety will surely present itself when one is placed in the company of real people, especially of the opposite sex.
> The problem is that you have to wade through a ton of mud to get to the gold nugget that is someone you genuinely like to interact with.
Anything meaningful in life requires some level of effort. There's no way around it.
Previously a person's mate selection was very geographically constrained. Everyone wanted to date the most attractive person in (school, town, neighborhood).
The internet has broadened the pool of potential mates beyond mere geography. Which makes finding a match easier, but makes all the matches nearby seem less desirable, and makes all the long-distance matches difficult. Particularly on a constrained budget.
I always cringe when I see people describe human relationships in biological terms, it hints at a feeling of reductiveness, or the applicability of all biological models to human behavior without taking into consideration massive societal differences and the change in attitudes and the emergence of new sexuality (see Japan's hikkikomori) even of the past few hundred years. It's the same sort of "analysis" that uses "breeding" to refer to when people have children. To top it off, the people using these terms to describe human phenomena are likely not even qualified in biological sciences, never mind anthropology, sociology or psychology.
I think it’s a number of things. For one, we have less free time to be social, we’re under more stress, social media is warping expectations and self-esteem, dating costs more than for prior generations, STDs and awareness of them, partisanship and people actually not wanting to date people with differing political opinions, and on and on.
It seems like millennials are avoiding partying in general. Alcohol is a factor in a lot of casual sex. Hell, my family got started because two otherwise unattractive people who previously hated each other realized they liked to get drunk on cheap wine and play with each others' naughty bits. A baby was conceived and a family was started out of guilt. Alcohol plays a big role in breaking down people's inhibitions and insecurities. Now that the combination of alcohol and sex are considered verboten, you lose one of the most effective aphrodisiacs and social lubricants.
I'm curious if whatever is behind our lowering sperm counts is also playing a role in this.
Given the experience of my fiancee, a millennial who gave up on guys her own age, it seems like the guys who are sexually active(i.e. the ones not stuck on video games and smoking weed), are creeps and philanderers. Hook-up apps and technologically fueled cheating have definitely reduced the mystique behind committed, monogamous relationships among kids these days.
Also, title is misspelled. Two n's in millennials.
Obviously there are many factors, those included but I wouldn't be as quick to discount ideological factors as many people are doing. The Metoo stuff...actually this has been bubbling long before as a general feature of puritanical 3rd wave feminism really has put a damper on things, not just through direct fear instilled into men but generally moving the overton window of sex in society's subconscious.
I'm not sure why the author ends on such an optimistic note. Economy isn't great especially for millennials. 80% of Americans as a whole live paycheck to paycheck. Furthermore there are some signs that there will be another recession coming up. If anything these statistics are going to get worse.
Living paycheck to paycheck doesn't mean one is poor. I've known many such who were quite well off. They simply couldn't resist spending everything they had.
Well, we had a huge recession 10 years ago, and we’ve only recently recovered fully from it. We’re at full employment now. There are more open jobs today than unemployed people in the US.
It’s true that the value of unskilled and low-skilled labor has dropped, but the value of skilled labor has substantially increased. Case in point: software developers are on average making $150k in salary alone in the Bay Area. Add bonuses, equity, and other cash and non-cash benefits: a good programmer can easily make over $200k. (I’m a millennial, and I find my own compensation incredible and unbelievable.)
Americans living paycheck to paycheck has more to do with spending habits than income. People in the United States continue to have the world’s highest purchasing power. On a large scale, living paycheck to paycheck has more to do with culture and discipline than level of income. (Exceptions exist: living in a high cost-of-living area with low/minimum-wage income, only having part-time temporary like PhD graduates who have to be adjuncts and TAs forever, etc.)
> There are more open jobs today than unemployed people
It also depends on your income source. People with low job quality end up with low living quality regardless how much they earn.
If it is coming from a busy job that for whatever reason feels pointless and or stressful, not having enough breaks, and long commute, etc..
That adds to all news about corruption, wars, conflicts, surveillance.. and people end up adopting pets more than willing to have children because they are seeking to have a free private time.
You're making an argument about "the economy" by focusing on a small part of it (highly skilled individuals). Sounds a bit like "housing was great in the middle ages, just look at the castles where the kings lived".
There seems to be a lot of different explanations given below, but I can't help but think of:
It's all of them, more or less.
They've pretty much all come up as a consequence to the internet, whether it be better organisation leading more effective communication of how (some) men make unwanted advances, dissemination of pornography or the paradox of choice in dating. You could probably throw on top of that pile greater entertainment choices that are not pornography, making the payoff for sex just too low when you can get instant gratification now.
First off, I'm not making any judgments here -- every generation has its problems.
If I had to guess, I would say that a significant part of this phenomenon is tied to status concerns. Compared to Gen X, more people from the millennial generation appear to be openly obsessed with status. (Gen X cared about status, too, but from what I have seen it was considered "uncool" to care about status as an Xer, so you had to have some subtlety about how you obtained it.) Obsession with status is tolerated and even encouraged by peers, and is further reinforced by social networks and group dynamics.
* Flirt with someone who rejects you? You lose status.
* Seen by peers with someone of potentially lower status? You lose status.
* Hook up with someone when there are negative rumors about them? You lose status.
* Make out with someone who rejected a friend? You damage that relationship and either gain or lose status based on mysterious dynamics.
Status is felt as an invisible currency that affects your prospects for friendships, relationships, and your career. As such, losing it is seen as worse than an equivalent monetary loss. It's almost equivalent to "losing face" in East Asian countries, although the consequences are not quite as severe.
I would argue that there is actually an ongoing "status bubble" and that people are overestimating the value of status -- surely it can't be worth all that. For single people, though, it can be hard to drop out of the status game. Who wants to be seen as a "loser"?
Edit: I didn't really account for the gender disparity here, I've got some vague ideas but this was already treading too deep into speculation. Anyway, I don't think this can be fully explained by #MeToo concerns.
It could also be due to the millennial generation being pickier about who we have sex with. Consider this graph [1] from Datacalysm. It displays the number of messages received by attractiveness. The more attractive an individual, the more messages they receive. There's also another graph [2] that splits this data by gender.
There is a pretty significant drop around the 85% mark for women. Which means that the bottom 80% of men are competing for the top 10% of women when meeting through online dating apps.
In a world where a more attractive individual is only a swipe away, it's much more likely that the less attractive individuals are getting far less sex.
This is just attractiveness. Consider other elements, like family pressures, possibilities of lawsuits / accusations (#MeToo), and other modern issues around sex. No wonder folks are spending less time hooking up.
How about too many people think that they deserve somebody too much more attractive than they are?
Things like Facebook/Instagram/Tinder give the illusion that there are lots of attractive people out there when, in reality, those attractive people are unavailable to YOU because YOU aren't attractive enough. If you hold out for someone too far above your level, you're going to be waiting a while.
This has been documented in college professors. Divorce rates are quite a bit higher among college professors because the abundance of attractive members of the opposite sex makes them less satisfied with their partners even though those youngsters really aren't available to them.
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[ 4.6 ms ] story [ 153 ms ] threadWhen I read things like this, I can't understand whether american culture has gotten weirdly puritan or this is a wild exaggeration. There's such a huge distance between politely and respectfully expressing sexual interest in someone, especially in a BAR, and being creepy and offensive.
Edit: just to clarify, I've never lived in US or in countries in the similar #metoo zeitgest, so this is an uneducated view from the outside.
I'm on the more progressive end in a coastal city, but have been in a uniquely diverse environment when it comes to political views, international views. People that are more socially liberal tend to have changed their stances because of a change in the general understanding of what is proper or acceptable. People who are more socially conservative have also changes their stances, but specifically blame the fear around #metoo. And I totally understand why they feel this way - it's difficult to place that shift on some nebulous generational change of social mores. It's much easier to place that shift on a specific, well-defined, well-publicized movement. That's not to say anyone is blasting that movement by saying this is how people feel. Neither is it blaming the movement for actually doing anything. However, it is likely what this change is mentally attributed to for many people.
Obviously consent is a good thing. But to pretend that the boundaries of what are reasonable regarding consent aren't overstepped and people aren't attacked unfairly is to deny the evidence. This fuzzy and changing boundary creates an environment of fear among men, especially when considering the consequences. There are forums were people discuss these issues in depth. Are they all hallucinating?
Everyone makes mistakes. But consent is not revokable the next day. To claim abuse later, and not take responsibility, is absurd and offensive to real victims.
But this is how it is until women can take responsibility and say clearly "no" or accept the consequences of saying "yes" and possibly regretting it later.
You mean the part where consent wasn't given in the first place? Here's the original article:
https://babe.net/2018/01/13/aziz-ansari-28355
“I wasn’t really even thinking of that, I didn’t want to be engaged in that with him. But he kept asking, so I said, ‘Next time.’ And he goes, ‘Oh, you mean second date?’ and I go, ‘Oh, yeah, sure,’ and he goes, ‘Well, if I poured you another glass of wine now, would it count as our second date?’”
That said, other parts of the babe.net article do paint a much worse picture, of physically escalating both inappropriately (e.g. repeatedly putting her hand on his dick) and bizarrely (what's up with that fingers in mouth thing she described?)
Sure, but it's a very unambiguous example of her communicating lack of consent. One of many, yes. The Pixar debacle is even more clear cut IMO — don't insist on touching your subordinates.
Bullshit. Complete bullshit. Politely approaching someone in a bar is not something under attack, nor has it ever been.
And you might have noticed that women aren't having much less sex. It's because women are all having sex with a small number of men. Attractive, successful men. This is, sadly, the result of female, and to a lesser extent male, freedom of choice. Most women would choose to only have sex with attractive, successful men. And unlike men, they have that option.
I’ve never been in a context where that’s even acceptable. None of my friends pick up women (or are successful) and the only person I know in a long term relationship met his fiancé in middle school.
I dont think it’s Puritanism but it is being risk averse. I know how hard it is for women and how many creeps they do have to deal with so I’d rather not even create the possibility of coming off as one. Add to this the tinderification of the hiring market (see Google’s top 1% of intelligence) and dating scene have put the bottom 80-90% in a bit of a bind because in many large metro areas there are more straight men than women and women are not culturally expected to make the first move. Couple that with increased expectations and lower social cohesion and it becomes...well, expected.
Source - non-homeschooled straight 23 year old, never once asked a girl out.
The chances of a girl being offended by being asked out are relatively low in any case; most people are nice. They’re really, really low if you’re attractive. When an ugly, charmless or poor man asks out a certain kind of girl they’re offended not just at having been asked out, but that the thought even occurred. Most girls aren’t like that. They’ll deflect the question or say that they’re busy and make no effort to reschedule.
My email is in my profile for anyone who has similar problems.
The closest I got was when I chatted up a girl on a train, but just couldn’t tell if she was just being super polite. Although I did end up getting her LinkedIn... I guess I’m not smooth either.
This sounds like a scare-story men who feel inadequate like to tell themselves.
If I said the average man would sooner marry a penniless single mother of three who looked like a super model to an ugly woman with a nice personality would you find it similarly unbelievable?
So one should work on being attractive. Some women put on makeup. Men do other things.
In my opinion, yes and no. With dating apps it's only as soul crushing as you let it be. If the person online is not interested, s/he just ignores your message. A rejection in real life, on the other hand, can really sting. Multiple rejections can turn you off trying for good. And they are likely to happen, before you meet someone with whom you hit it off.
I highly recommend trying dating apps, especially if you're not a social butterfly. Just don't take it personally when you get no reply. And be patient, it'll probably take a while to find a good match (just like it would IRL).
This is how people who go on lots of dates treat dating in general. If you don’t treat a momentary social action as a big deal most people won’t either. Propose a date or make romantic interest clear. Be declined. Move on.
“He/She/It doesn’t like me? Oh well.”
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2009/11/18/okcupid-inbox-attractive/
I wouldn't worry too much about that, women are no different when it comes to creep distribution. We're all the same species after all. Granted, men don't normally get hit upon by women, so female creepiness manifests differently, and at later stages of a relationship. But it doesn't mean it's nonexistent.
That sounds like something from another planet. I don't mean to say that I disbelieve you; it's just that it's so different from my personal experience and my social circle that I have a hard time even imagining this. There's just always something happening, meeting someone from Tinder, chatting each other on Twitter (which, I must say, seems to be more hookup-friendly than Tinder even), bumping into people at parties... I mean, sometimes I catch the lonely vibe and don't go out for weeks, but I've never lost this feeling that there's always this life out there, and it happens to everyone who's not in something serious.
Source - I don’t get matches. And if I do, I’m boring.
Singles meetups organized around a shared hobby or activity are a million times better.
well for one, sex in college is extremely dangerous. the Obama administration basically threatened Universities to treat male students as guilty (not even guilty until proven innocent).
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2017/09/the-un...
This leads to some men who don't understand the new boundaries having a very large overreaction and essentially saying that it's impossible or scary to 'chat someone up'. See also the men who won't work/game in mixed gender groups because it's "too difficult".
The new rules are essentially 'be respectful' and "there's a time a place" and 'politely accept no as an answer' and 'no one owes you shit'.
They aren't complicated rules.
1. don't.
Ask?
My general thesis is that we're expecting men to be more practiced at this skill these days. Some men balk at this, some men were poorly prepared for this and struggle with a lack of proficiency in navigating consent. (To be clear, I believe there are women and gender minorities who fail to learn this skill as well, but the context of this conversation is about men this far.)
The problem arises, I think, because most of us are taught a set of social skills pretty early - sharing, listening, etc. But we didn't start teaching the skill of consent very well until recently, and it's folks like us who were kids awhile ago who are left trying to pick up a new skill that people expect us to have.
It's bloody difficult to learn a new skill when the consequence for failure is risking becoming a pariah.
And some will simply choose not to take that risk. On a societal level that some suddenly turns into millions of people who don't have a vested interest in the long-term future of that society.
PS I don't think that people lack skills around consent because they weren't taught it. I think people lack skills around it, because there is no clear expectation of what requires and doesn't require consent depending on the person.
They aren't complicated rules.
This should be a poster in every bar.
Even after you found a partner, it was legal to rape your spouse until what, 93? That doesn't seem like "politely accept no" was the rule to me...
I don't even know what you are talking about re: raping spouses, and is frankly a non sequitur.
For the second part, I'm talking about consent in all parts of a relationship. Politely accepting no is a part of finding a consenting partner. Up until very recently, men didn't have to accept no. They were legally protected in not accepting no. I said the new rule is "politely accepting no as an answer" was a new rule, you said it was always the rule. I provided a counter example saying it was clearly not always the rule.
https://thewaterpipe.files.wordpress.com/2013/12/capture.png...
https://www.nationalreview.com/2018/06/netflix-five-second-s...
Zero legal consequence -- social consequence or vigilante consequence was always a possibility.
> More recently, people have been pushing back on men who are inappropriate
What's considered inappropriate is precisely what's changing.
> The new rules are essentially 'be respectful' and "there's a time a place" and 'politely accept no as an answer' and 'no one owes you shit'.
Those have always been the rules.
What has changed is what counts as respectful, and exactly when and where are the allowed times and places.
There really are those pushing a message that any (non-reciprocated) sexual interest is disrespectful. Excluding work from allowed time-and-place and then "there's a time and place" excludes the places where one spends a great deal of one's time out of the house, with people one knows and can judge, and are likely to be prefiltered to have similar interests and socio-economic background. Work romances are still a huge proportion of how marriages start.
> They aren't complicated rules.
They are when the underlying terms are in the process of being redefined.
I don't think that it's normal that 28% of men between the ages of 18 and 30 haven't had sex in the last year, while the same percentage is 18% for women? Especially since the rates were very similar between men and women in the past. These men are likely to be less invested in society than previous generations. The effects of this are unknown, but it's considered that surplus men cause society to become less stable.
If you meet new people and you find them attractive, treat them like they are already a friend that you've known for years. Don't be weird, just tell them a funny story, embarrass yourself, show them that you're fun and human. Those are my rules, and I've dated way out of my league my entire life. I'm not saying it's easy, but it is simple (not to be confused).
Men are expected to take the risk of approaching women. When they do that they have to know what the woman's boundaries are, because if they don't then they're labeled a creep or a sexual harasser (even though it could be a one time event). The consequences of this kind of failure can result in being ostracized or even a loss of your livelihood. Just a misunderstanding is enough in some cases and there are plenty of cases of false accusations too. Some men aren't going to take these kinds of risks, because instead they can just go home, watch porn, and play video games. We have evidence of this too - young men are having far less sex than young women.[0]
I think this might be a big problem going forward, because these young men are going to be less invested in society than previous generations. This could have all kinds of implications on the economy, but also the future path of society. We've read articles [1] about how surplus young men can cause society to become less stable. One of the important pieces is that the men that don't get married are less invested in society. Those articles were in reference to Asia, but I don't see how that couldn't also apply to the young men in the western world if they don't have any relationships.
The worst part is that I don't think this is something that can be changed.
[0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...
[1] https://qz.com/186066/this-lost-generation-of-young-men-is-t...
Thank you for clearly articulating this sentiment. I've found it hard to empathize with this point of view but your description helped. I would argue that building a robust social life rather than approaching random women is a better approach to finding a partner for people who can't imagine taking this kind of risk.
The point about less investment in society is also interesting, and potentially scary. I agree there's no easy solution to that one.
Laura Kipnis had a wonderful essay about it, and as if to drive the point home it resulted in a series of absurd investigations by the University she works at.
http://5d5.3dd.myftpupload.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/08/Se...
> But that still does not seem to explain the persistence of America’s sex recession, or its most extreme feature: how concentrated it is among men. Since 2008 there has been almost a threefold rise in the share of men under the age of 30 who claim to be having no sex. At the same time, the portion of sexless women increased by only 8%. A range of possible explanations for the disparity has been suggested, and the students seemed to corroborate several of them. Many felt men’s social skills had been especially eroded by over-reliance on technology. Overindulgence in porn meanwhile offered them an escape route from reality. Yet the most compelling answer, because it contains elements of all that and more, may be signalled by young people’s increasing reluctance to date.
> This is often blamed on the “hook-up culture” of college campuses. Yet casual sex and dating coexisted in the 1990s. It is also easy to exaggerate—now as then—how many people are hooking up. Half the Northwestern students said they rarely or never did. Yet they also rattled off reasons not to date which, among the men, who would traditionally take the lead in such encounters, included uncertainty about how they were even managed. Many considered the prospect of chatting someone up in a bar not merely daunting but possibly offensive. “Revealing that your intention in talking to someone is sexual? That’s hairy,” shuddered one man.
I didn't get comfortable "chatting someone up in a bar" until my mid 30s. After a few ~long-term relationships, and a failed marriage. And this was during the 60s-80s.
I can't imagine what it's like now.
I do suspect that social media is a huge part of it. With such a focus on superficial attractiveness. And the potential for mobbing. There was lots more slack, back in the day.
I think approaching people to try to get them into bed is a lot like smoking. At one time, 50% of people in a bar were engaged in that activity. If you went to a bar in the evening, you knew that would be a part of the environment. That doesn't mean it wasn't annoying or awkward for the people being hit on who just wanted to enjoy an evening with friends. It's understandable too that as it becomes rarer, it also is more likely to be seen as creepy, just as smoking has become more offensive as it becomes more rare.
A human voluntarily showing up at a bar in the age of Tinder is a strong signal, too. So in theory the "creepiness" of assuming their intention to meet others as potential dating material should reduce as well.
And just like it would be gauche to go as a nonsmoker to a smoking bar and complain about the smoke in your face, it would be the same to go to a singles bar and complain about the unwanted attention of other patrons.
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People have limited time & energy, so some percent are conceivably putting less effort into the difficult ways of relieving sexual tension (relationships) while favoring the easier ways to do so (pornography).
Porn has been one of the first industries to take advantage of technology, and the change in accessibility of porn is unparalleled. It went from something one was forced to sneakily travel to shady locations and physically purchase to something that we are accidentally exposed to or even advertised to on omnipresent screens everywhere in our lives.
And that isn't even going into the way the market has selected for 'more potent' forms of pornography- like the way that just about every fetish can be explored to depths that would shock/offend someone who doesn't share it. (something that probably has an isolating effect on relationships)
And it also isn't accounting for the new-ish industry of 'relationship replacement' style streamers- another economic activity that I believe must be competing with traditional 1 on 1 relationships.
Skip forward 40 years, I have a bunch of millennial kids. Their (for me discoverable) sexual encounters are extremely limited in comparison to mine and that of my wife, at that age.
Personally I do not think that the one (porn) has much to do with the other (limited). What I suspect is far more the lack of privacy and anonymity. Everyone in their age group seems afraid of the potential flack they will receive “when people find out I did X with Y”. And with the current over connectivity that seems a real possibility.
Whereas we, between 15 and 25, could disappear for a couple of hours / days, and the lamest excuse would enable you to get away with anything.
I truly do not envy this generation. It seems growing up, as in establishing your own personality and experiences, is so much harder.
Less a "competitive market of pleasure" and more a market for attention. Even a casual relationship is fairly high cost interms of time (and potentially money) something millennials (and gen Z) aren't known for having in abundance.
The book by Aziz Anzari "Modern Dating" suggests this may be a factor.
A half hour spent on pornhub vs. dealing with other people while making a diceroll on your health and safety? One is clearly more convenient and costs less by a very wide margin.
Unless, of course, you want to make children.
It's no surprise that people are putting off marriage and starting a family if you don't want to raise children in the same situation you were raised in. It's a similar problem across the pond in Japan where people grew up in practically single-parent households due to the rigors of work potentially leading to Karoshi. So you have people either completely checking out of society, or focusing entirely inwards to avoid a repeat of history.
I think plenty of people fulfill their sexual needs through online means these days, which is a shame because real life experiences are much more emotionally enriching, with the added benefit that if you repeatedly engage sexually with a person you really like, it could form the basis of a relationship. Whereas in the digital space, one gets no long term return on the time invested/wasted.
I would challenge this and probably flag it as the core problem.
Most interactions with the opposite sex are emotionally draining and insipid and our digital interactions are almost always more rewarding.
The problem is that you have to wade through a ton of mud to get to the gold nugget that is someone you genuinely like to interact with.
Indeed, but this can be successfully counteracted to some degree by proper socialization, and by participating in social activities alongside a group of friends, which by virtue of creating social contexts, will lower the barriers to social interactions.
People spend too much time indoors in the company of their screens, and without adequate social training, anxiety will surely present itself when one is placed in the company of real people, especially of the opposite sex.
> The problem is that you have to wade through a ton of mud to get to the gold nugget that is someone you genuinely like to interact with.
Anything meaningful in life requires some level of effort. There's no way around it.
The internet has broadened the pool of potential mates beyond mere geography. Which makes finding a match easier, but makes all the matches nearby seem less desirable, and makes all the long-distance matches difficult. Particularly on a constrained budget.
I'm curious if whatever is behind our lowering sperm counts is also playing a role in this.
Given the experience of my fiancee, a millennial who gave up on guys her own age, it seems like the guys who are sexually active(i.e. the ones not stuck on video games and smoking weed), are creeps and philanderers. Hook-up apps and technologically fueled cheating have definitely reduced the mystique behind committed, monogamous relationships among kids these days.
Also, title is misspelled. Two n's in millennials.
Can also be read as "The portion of Americans aged 18 to 29 who have sex has slightly decreased, from 89% to 77%".
I'm not sure why the author ends on such an optimistic note. Economy isn't great especially for millennials. 80% of Americans as a whole live paycheck to paycheck. Furthermore there are some signs that there will be another recession coming up. If anything these statistics are going to get worse.
https://www.npr.org/2018/11/30/672103209/why-arent-millennia...
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/millennials-are-much-poorer-tha...
https://www.cnbc.com/2019/01/09/shutdown-highlights-that-4-i...
https://www.theguardian.com/business/2019/jan/05/global-econ...
It’s true that the value of unskilled and low-skilled labor has dropped, but the value of skilled labor has substantially increased. Case in point: software developers are on average making $150k in salary alone in the Bay Area. Add bonuses, equity, and other cash and non-cash benefits: a good programmer can easily make over $200k. (I’m a millennial, and I find my own compensation incredible and unbelievable.)
Americans living paycheck to paycheck has more to do with spending habits than income. People in the United States continue to have the world’s highest purchasing power. On a large scale, living paycheck to paycheck has more to do with culture and discipline than level of income. (Exceptions exist: living in a high cost-of-living area with low/minimum-wage income, only having part-time temporary like PhD graduates who have to be adjuncts and TAs forever, etc.)
It also depends on your income source. People with low job quality end up with low living quality regardless how much they earn.
If it is coming from a busy job that for whatever reason feels pointless and or stressful, not having enough breaks, and long commute, etc..
That adds to all news about corruption, wars, conflicts, surveillance.. and people end up adopting pets more than willing to have children because they are seeking to have a free private time.
You've finally made the Religious Right's centuries long dream of a sexless puritanical world a reality.
It's all of them, more or less.
They've pretty much all come up as a consequence to the internet, whether it be better organisation leading more effective communication of how (some) men make unwanted advances, dissemination of pornography or the paradox of choice in dating. You could probably throw on top of that pile greater entertainment choices that are not pornography, making the payoff for sex just too low when you can get instant gratification now.
If I had to guess, I would say that a significant part of this phenomenon is tied to status concerns. Compared to Gen X, more people from the millennial generation appear to be openly obsessed with status. (Gen X cared about status, too, but from what I have seen it was considered "uncool" to care about status as an Xer, so you had to have some subtlety about how you obtained it.) Obsession with status is tolerated and even encouraged by peers, and is further reinforced by social networks and group dynamics.
* Flirt with someone who rejects you? You lose status.
* Seen by peers with someone of potentially lower status? You lose status.
* Hook up with someone when there are negative rumors about them? You lose status.
* Make out with someone who rejected a friend? You damage that relationship and either gain or lose status based on mysterious dynamics.
Status is felt as an invisible currency that affects your prospects for friendships, relationships, and your career. As such, losing it is seen as worse than an equivalent monetary loss. It's almost equivalent to "losing face" in East Asian countries, although the consequences are not quite as severe.
I would argue that there is actually an ongoing "status bubble" and that people are overestimating the value of status -- surely it can't be worth all that. For single people, though, it can be hard to drop out of the status game. Who wants to be seen as a "loser"?
Edit: I didn't really account for the gender disparity here, I've got some vague ideas but this was already treading too deep into speculation. Anyway, I don't think this can be fully explained by #MeToo concerns.
There is a pretty significant drop around the 85% mark for women. Which means that the bottom 80% of men are competing for the top 10% of women when meeting through online dating apps.
In a world where a more attractive individual is only a swipe away, it's much more likely that the less attractive individuals are getting far less sex.
This is just attractiveness. Consider other elements, like family pressures, possibilities of lawsuits / accusations (#MeToo), and other modern issues around sex. No wonder folks are spending less time hooking up.
[1]: https://i1.wp.com/www.brainpickings.org/wp-content/uploads/2...
[2]: https://i.redd.it/09d1ndzeki221.jpg
How does this conclusion follow from the charts you’ve linked to?
Things like Facebook/Instagram/Tinder give the illusion that there are lots of attractive people out there when, in reality, those attractive people are unavailable to YOU because YOU aren't attractive enough. If you hold out for someone too far above your level, you're going to be waiting a while.
This has been documented in college professors. Divorce rates are quite a bit higher among college professors because the abundance of attractive members of the opposite sex makes them less satisfied with their partners even though those youngsters really aren't available to them.
>almost a threefold rise in the share of men under the age of 30 who claim to be having no sex
So are people actually having less sex, or are they just more willing to admit it?