I don't think tech or porn is the main culprit. It's that people now have way more entertainment options other than sex. Of course, a lot for those entertainment options are being driven by tech.
Back in my dad's days, they were poor so the only entertainment options in their free time was drinking cheap home made alcohol, dancing and sex, while now we have gaming, Netflix, tic-tok, porn, traveling to the infinite Instagramable places around the world, plus the grind of keeping up with spiraling living and real estate costs, which IMHO, is the real bummer here.
Also, adult dating and meeting people for the post-college working professionals, has largely moved from clubs/bars/the office to online dating apps, or lonely depression in your apartment, eating or drinking your feelings away, for those without success in the WFH, remote-everything, online dating world. Especially with the lockdowns.
That, and most are still holding people in their 20s to the same standards as generations able to start a family with the credentials of Homer Simpson.
"People" meaning banks really. The games with credit are effectively driving the housing shortage by making buying the small number of already built homes effectively more affordable than building new ones in the massive amount of permissibly zoned empty space we have. We're only exacerbating it by bringing in tons of legal and illegal immigrants and having the government pay for their housing. It's not surprising there's a conspiracy theory about intentional replacement of the native population with that going on.
Combine that with the value extraction from rent/debt (everyone has to own a car and since they probably can't afford to just buy one most are in debt over it) and no one can afford sex.
The awful part of all this is that young people blame women. Women are just the messengers.
> already built homes effectively more affordable than building new ones
The reason people buy instead of build is that the house is already there, whereas building anew takes a lot of time.
As interest rates grow, it becomes more expensive to do so, and waiting starts paying off.
But inflation is still high in spite of the high interest rates. And then, maybe the central banks will overshoot the interest rate, which will lead to another crash...
Other than that, living in a walkable area has its advantages, and codes are much stricter in high densities, so you can't build.
I actually meant the people, not banks. Banks exacerbate the problem, but you don't need to hold everyone to the same standards as 30 years ago. People in family homes in Southern Europe date, too. Many Japanese people get married before they leave the parental home. This was pretty standard in most of Europe and America a little less than a century ago.
>The awful part of all this is that young people blame women.
I don't want to blame women in particular, but from personal anecdotes, women in particular place huge importance on a guy having his own car and place, despite both being massive wastes of money here and actively hurting one's ability to get housing later. The opposite, not so much. This in a country where even rent is now mostly a dual-income market.
The Japanese buy and large aren't having sex, so I'd disagree with you that they're a good example of women having lower standards. Their desire for men to have things and a stable life is probably biological and immutable.
You can see their role as messengers of the truth pretty often. I saw this one video that I thought was pretty great where a group of three women were out. The videographer/interviewer had the two friends call up the first's boyfriend and ask to "hang out" behind her back as a sort of joke. The first woman then freaked out, not at her boyfriend for wanting to cheat but at her friends for showing it. If you watch carefully this sort of thing happens pretty often.
>The Japanese buy and large aren't having sex, so I'd disagree with you that they're a good example of women having lower standards.
This is a phenomenon in most of young generation US and EU too. Both housing and the ability to get on with someone are far cheaper and easier in Tokyo in particular, than most metropolises in the developed world. If that doesn't tell you there's more going on than "just your own place bro", I don't know what will. If women are continuously taught and telling each other that a guy must have their own place or they are bad / deadbeat, the entire thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given our species as a whole has been procreating with less for most of our existence, I'm more eager to place my bets it's a cultural phenomenon rather than "biologically hardwired".
>You can see their role as messengers of the truth pretty often.
You can just as well say men are "messengers of truth" because they don't want to marry single moms. The only thing you're showing is that their words mean jack compared to their actions, as is the case with every human being under the sun.
>You can just as well say men are "messengers of truth" because they don't want to marry single moms. The only thing you're showing is that their words mean jack compared to their actions, as is the case with every human being under the sun.
People in their 20s having their own digs is, I think, a decidedly American phenomenon. In most of the poorer parts of the world (including, for example, Central and Eastern Europe), 30+ years ago younger crowd managed to have sex just fine, using dorm rooms, snatching time while parents were away, etc. My 2c.
Aren't we talking about people in their 20s? You seem to be describing teenagers. For people in their 20s, it's always been quite normal to have a job, a home, and, at some point during their 20s, to get married.
I strongly doubt that. It was quite common in western Europe too. My parents got married in 1970 and did briefly live with my grandparents (who had a gigantic house that was still dirt cheap when they got married directly after WW2), but moved out soon after that.
As far as I know, people moved out either when they married, or when they went to a university in a different city. Around 1990 I knew one guy who had a job and still lived with his parents, and I thought that was odd (he spent all his money on fancy audiophile equipment).
A job -- sure. But a common situation in cities would be for a 20-something to live with their parents until (and sometimes after) they got married due to the very limited housing. When I came to the US in my mid-20s I was absolutely stunned that it was possible for someone working an unskilled job (which is what I did for my first year) to rent a small apartment of one's own (in a sketchy part of the town, sure) and invite whoever I please whenever I want.
There was socialism in CEE back then. So nobody and much less people in their 20s could afford their own home. After my parents got married, they lived in a 3-room apartment (+ kitchen, 65m2 in total) together with both parents of my mother, her grandmother, and her sister (who had a child) also sometimes showed up.
By CEE do you mean the European Economic Community? Or are you referring to eastern European communism? I don't know how the situation was there, but in western Europe, people could absolutely afford to at least rent in their 20s. My grandparents, who weren't rich at all (my granddad was a nurse) could afford a very large house, and my parents could afford to buy a fairly large house when they were 34. And I know that in Germany (central Europe), houses tend to be cheaper (at least today; not sure if it was the same back then).
Fair enough. But communist countries, especially towards the 1980s when they were basically bankrupt, is rather a special case. In western, northern and much of central Europe, the situation was quite different.
> People in their 20s having their own digs is, I think, a decidedly American phenomenon. In most of the poorer parts of the world (including, for example, Central and Eastern Europe), 30+ years ago younger crowd managed to have sex just fine, using dorm rooms, snatching time while parents were away, etc. My 2c.
is true then. It's only talking about the situation in the poorer parts of the world and not elsewhere, and gives CEE in 1980s as an example.
Only partially. It's not decidedly American, because it's also true in western, central and northern Europe. And probably many parts of the world. Most of the world is not communist.
Again in the United States and to a lesser extent in the rest of the developed world. It's very common in many parts of the world for kids to live at home until they get married, unless they have to move for work.
I am 29 and was finally able to purchase my first home. I am one of if not the only person in my large friend group to purchase a home without assistance from parents
If you think people in their 20s are buying homes and starting families en-masse well I've got bad news for you
But that is now. I'm talking about how it used to be. Look at the GP. Here's what I'm responding to:
> People in their 20s having their own digs is, I think, a decidedly American phenomenon. In most of the poorer parts of the world (including, for example, Central and Eastern Europe), 30+ years ago younger crowd managed to have sex just fine, using dorm rooms, snatching time while parents were away, etc.
I think them not having their own digs is much more an American phenomenon, at least recently. Though houses have gotten ridiculously expensive in a lot of countries. Still, back when I was in my 20s, it was quite common in Europe for people to at least rent their own place, and possibly even buy a small apartment. I've got an entire branch of my family where everybody married at 21 and moved out at that age. In my parents' time, it was not much different, though they did live in my grandparents' massive house briefly after their marriage, and bought their first home when they were 34. But it was definitely common for people to move out of their parents' home when they got married. Once going to university got more common, that became the time they moved out.
Apologies - you're absolutely correct. I think it was standard practice prior to everything going down-hill. The only reason I even have this ability is through my career. I think most people are not so fortunate and are fed up so the cycle of not trying starts to kick in.
Because now you get a lifetime label as a registered sex offender if you get caught.
Additionally, those of us who grew up in the 80's had the absolute fear of AIDS drilled into us. IMO, the AIDS epidemic blunted the libido of at least one generation.
It's not a big deal, we know that now. In the 80's when I was a teenager, the fear-tactics and abstinence only education were strong - I'd even say at their peak. Those patterns get embedded in your brain.
I’ll never forget seeing Oprah on tv in 1987, "Hello, everybody. AIDS has both sexes running scared. Research studies now project that one in five--listen to me, hard to believe--one if five heterosexuals could be dead from AIDS at the end of the next three years. That's by 1990. One in five. It is no longer just a gay disease. Believe me."
By the time I was a teenager that fear had subsided, but that’s was a pretty dramatic thing to hear at a young age.
We know that now because it's true now. In the late 80s it was a very big deal and an almost certain death sentence. We had no treatment options for years.
The idea that HIV/AIDS is primarily of concern only to gay men is completely false. At the Whitman-Walker clinic in Washington, DC, which was for years primarily an HIV/AIDS clinic serving mostly gay men, the majority of new HIV/AIDS patients has for some time been straight African-American women. Every sexually active adult needs to be concerned about HIV and take appropriate precautions.
Maybe at one particular clinic? But that's not true in the general case. I remember when I first discovered that AIDS was both rare and overwhelmingly affecting the gay community (where I live). I was pretty upset because having grown up in the 80s and 90s I'd been left with the impression that HIV was everywhere and even just one heterosexual hookup was a gamble (condom or not). But that's not an accurate view given the tiny, tiny number of people who have HIV.
Looking back at the 80s/90s AIDS hysteria now, it was the same as COVID hysteria. Same people even, guys like Fauci. They were telling people you could get AIDS from drinking water fountains and similar crap. No wonder people were crazy about it.
Incidentally the whole concept of a virus that primarily targets gay people doesn't make much biological sense, does it? Nothing the size of a virus can detect your sexuality, nor is there any evolutionary reason to select for such a thing even if it could. That's why the 'experts' predicted it would quickly stop being primarily a gay disease. Nope. That rather makes the theory that a lot of AIDS cases were driven by drug abuse more plausible, doesn't it, especially because this preference for gay men mysteriously vanishes in Africa.
At any rate, the public health community has pretty consistently and for a long time misled heterosexual people about the risks of any disease that's known to primarily affect the gay community. They're doing it again now with monkeypox. It almost exclusively affects gay men which is why the official CDC guidance is to - no kidding - hold socially distanced gay sex parties. But to listen to the early announcements about this you'd not have suspected this reality. There is of course no question of the state enforcing any measures against the at-risk community to "crush the curve", like banning pride week sex parties: the LGBT community is special. For the rest of us, we get lockdowns. For them, nothing. It's this sort of thing that destroys the credibility of public health (not that they had any left after COVID). It's just one long string of ideological driven "science".
I do wonder if the act of dating has gotten substantially less fun than it was in the past. At least if you go to a bar/concert/activity you may have fun and make plutonic friends, messaging random people on a dating site seems much more depressing.
It is very un fun, one of the big things I've noticed is online dating is very different experience for men and women.
Both have their negatives and positives, but it create a weird dynamic of how people date.
You seriously can't imagine being bombarded with messages from horny and desperate women is a great time? That having hundreds if not thousands to choose from is a grea time?
It's better than nothing? And from what I can tell there is usually a handful of good dates in the massive pile, and it's not too hard to find them. But then (as a woman) you could just not bother and go to a bar.
I'm not straight or a man, or a woman, and I was basing that on actual, real women I've talked to about their experiences with dating apps. It's a miserable experience.
possibly related. When you are forced to look at someones data sheet to decide on them rather than see them in public being themselves - it seems natural to get sucked into coming up with check-lists on a bunch of qualities you otherwise would not have actually cared about as a means of simplifying your choosing process
Entertainment has entered a tyranny of choice. I see it personally. I can watch nearly every show and movie that was ever created but I still flip through Netflix and RT endlessly, often times choosing not to watch anything. When I was younger I would just watch Seinfeld re-runs, with commercials and all. Am I more "entertained" today than I was when I was growing up? I'm not convinced.
The weirdest thing is I don't remember what I used to talk to my friends about when I was in high school. We didn't have much shared media to talk about (e.g. periodic TV shows people obsess about today). None of us so much picked up a newspaper at the time so current events were out. None of us had that many specific interests and the interests we had weren't shared. But somehow we spent hours talking about something. I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my prom table to just take in what was discussed.
Podcasts changed the game for me on this. Now there are entire days where I never turn the TV on. A bonus is that I can get basic chores done while listening or workout. It really freed me from the couch potato routine. A bonus is that many of them are educational and released weekly, so "binge" isn't really an option. There are certainly "junk food" podcasts that I listen to but the ratio of informative to junk compared to video content(movies, tv shows, etc) is way better. Though I will say YouTube has some excellent channels for learning.
Podcasts are similar to books though, you have to dig through a bit of garbage to find one that works for you. Here's my list:
- crime in sports
- Linux unplugged
- software engineering radio
- the knowledge project
- coinsec
- persona
- ten percent happier
- quanta podcast
- physics world weekly
- ologies
- darknet diaries
- stuff you should know
- the joy of why
- fall of civilizations
- smartless
- money talks
- planet money
- small town murder
- offensive security
- the journal
- programming throwdown
- timesuck
- Conan O'Brien needs a friend
- philosophize this
- against the odds
- levar Burton reads (no longer running)
- curiosity daily
- science weekly
- future of journalism
- wtf
- broken record
- idea cast
- swindled
- malicious life
- views room
- behind the bastards
- the exchange
- stuff to blow your mind
And for the "junk" I listen to just about every comedian podcast that exists: Bill Burr, Bobby Lee, Chris destefano, Stavros!, Tom Segura, (this list goes on a while...)
On a serious note they helped me learn to be content with being alone or at least not worry about "looking" for it via dating apps, and I would say not playing that game (dating apps) is what is "ruining" my sex life (or lack of).
Savage Love really improved my wife's and my relationship (physical and otherwise). I highly recommend it, but if you're not familiar with Dan Savage, be prepared for some varsity-level discussions.
I too love podcasts but I don't think the educational ones necessarily teach me much. Listening is too passive, especially if you're doing other things. If I'm not following a book or paying close attention, I'll put the book down. But its easy with well produced podcasts and audio to just continue listening while zoning out. I've listened to hours on a subject but if you were to quiz me on that subject I would be clueless. I don't think the same would be true if I had spent hours reading a book on a topic.
For sure my retention is better with text on a page. I kept a journal for a while about what I learned that day and that worked somewhat well. For the computer ones it's really just a starting point to find things I wasn't even aware of and dive deeper.
For the same reason I don't do audio books. I tried listening in the car during low overhead highway driving and quickly realized my attention faded in and out too much.
Along the same lines, I also came to theorize that books that were written to be read don't make good audio candidates. Yes, doable. But I found lectures and speeches to be better suited for listening (as it was their original and intended medium).
I disagree to the degree that a whole lot of people in the world are walking around without a lot of knowledge about their own sexuality. They often don’t even understand what their gas and brakes really are - which is often not even directly connected to sexual function (but that’s a topic for sex therapy).
That said, my gut impression is that people are less sociable and less socialized than we used to be. I believe we simply spend less time around other people, and we are less adept at building relationships. It’s easier to remain sexually, socially, financially, and resource independent from other people - so we do and sexual relationships become less frequent.
You are discussing others as generalizations, and my argument is that our tendency to attach ourselves to discussions of generalizations itself is the thing that intrudes as it is the absolute opposite of having sex. Fucking is an act that takes place entirely in the concrete present. Our ability to continuously dissociate into intangible abstractions has made us lose touch with our bodies. The discussion of podcasts and identities and all these other archetypes and mediums that divorce us from our physicality are ground zero of this loss.
Perhaps, but we are not operating in a pure vacuum of naturalism and some amount of relationship building typically precedes sex. We are not merely coupling on a grassy plain by natural raw instinct. That might be a loss - but culture, sexual identity, religion have commandeered the natural sexual energies of mankind since… just about as long as we can tell.
If you are fully immersed in your raw, human sexuality - that’s great. For many, sex and sexuality is more nuanced than mere fucking.
Not sure how this plays into the back and forth, but my reasons are pretty simple. People use apps to find partners now, and I don't want to be on the apps. Of course I still meet people, and of course I'll find a partner. It just won't be through the primary mediums used by most. To me a dating app profile feels like looking for a partner by standing naked in the middle of a stadium and having everyone in the audience hold up a sign to rate you. I'll persue the people I like that I meet, and it will take longer. And I'm okay with that. Podcasts have helped me rekindle a life of my own. I believe too much TV and too much movie can give people the same feelings as too much Facebook or TikTok. You see all these sitcoms and reality shows and people's highlights and these relationships and feel like you're lacking. But TV and movies are fake, and so is most of social media. Stepping into the world of podcasts let me keep the entertainment without the depression of "why not me!?". That's my 2 cents anyway.
[META] List posts this long shouldn't be allowed, or at the very least be for exceptional circumstances only. Gratuitous use of screen space that could have been served perfectly fine with commas.
Thanks for the list of podcasts. I will check these out. And yeah, I've generally steered away from podcasts because of all the garbage. Also, I tried listening to podcasts while I run on the weekends, thinking it would be a good use of time for about 2 hours. Not so. My brain completely shuts down when I run; it's difficult to stay engaged in anything, so listening to a podcast felt like extra effort.
I love my list of podcasts, but I can't help but worry that I use it as a crutch for not having a ton of friends in my life. I remember being devastated when one of my favorites kind of abruptly ended (luckily they were just leaving the company they were at to start their own thing). I'm not saying all podcasts cause the listeners to form parasocial relationships, but I've found that ends up being the appeal for a lot of shows. Maybe it's just me, but the substitution for real relationships seems to be a huge part of why podcasts have become so popular.
Not only entertainment suffers from a tyranny of choice, but also sex and relationships.
I heard in an interview that 50 years ago, people used to basically used to fall in love with heir neighbours and coworkers. Modern dating means browsing hundreds of other people in your city like they're products on a store shelf, always with the feeling there might be someone better just a couple swipes away.
And that lack of initial investment also makes it harder to bridge gaps, as would normally happen. In the context of OLD, it also puts emphasis on very specific strengths whereas others are not visible until meeting up or spending more time.
I see this explanation of the grind of online dating a lot, and I think it misses a more fundamental point: people fundamentally are pretty terrible at talking to strangers. Without conversational skills, a vast majority of online dating conversations simply fizzle out; often times simply due to disinterest, but I think almost always due to a lack of ability to hold a conversation and be both interesting and interested.
I find there's actually a lot of success to be had online dating, if you just know how to talk to people and learn about them! It seems like such a tautology but I think it really is that simple.
If it were just a matter of people being terrible at talking to strangers, you'd see the same issues that affect straight dating apps affect gay dating ones. They don't. (That also applies to the comment you're replying to).
Any explanation of the shittiness of straight dating apps has to center gender norms and roles.
I won't claim to speak for an entire community, but among my many queer friends this seems to be a common thru line! Of course like anything social there's never one clear explanation to any phenomenon.
Dating apps don't want you to have a successful relationship because then they lose you as a customer. They want you to at most have a short fling and come back. But having no success and scrolling endlessly is also fine by them.
I’m good at conversation and getting to know people and I had no success with online dating (as opposed to acceptable success with serendipitous dating). I always thought it was because it’s hard to integrate them into your life. They’ve come from out of nowhere, your friend circles don’t overlap, and your daily paths don’t cross. It’s extra effort to make that stuff happen after the fact, and even then it doesn’t feel real somehow. I suppose it depends on certain aspects of your personality, and what makes you feel close to people.
For every relationship I ever had, I had the opportunity to observe them, get to know them in person, maybe flirt, sometimes be friends. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes for years, without any express intent. With online dating you’re both saying upfront that you’re evaluating each other as dating material, knowing only the fluff they wrote about themselves, or I take it with this generation only what they look like. All that will probably always feel too weird for me.
That's definitely true! It's so much easier to date in person from a logistical standpoint, and I think your comment also hints at what I think is kind of a paradox: in today's social spaces, being a kind and conscientious individual often means giving strangers their space, especially in places that used to be centers of socialization; gyms, coffee shops, parks etc. But by doing this, your opportunities for organic relationships dry up significantly, especially if you're not consistent about being in those spaces. So often times people feel forced into online dating as one of the few "sanctioned" spaces where it's still considered okay to flirt with strangers.
> So often times people feel forced into online dating as one of the few "sanctioned" spaces where it's still considered okay to flirt with strangers.
This has been the story of my life. I think there is a certain type of person - physical attractiveness is part of it, but charisma is even bigger – who can "get away with" flirting in unsanctioned spaces. It's a combination of being confident enough to break taboo, perceptive enough to read subtle interest cues, and being attractive enough for those interest cues to be non-zero.
I've tried to be that person from time to time, but it almost always breaks down on one of those axes, thus consigning most of my dating efforts to the soul-crushing grind of dating sites/apps.
See I think there are no "unsanctioned places" except for maybe a mosque or a funeral.
I think the real unwritten rule is, don't flirt with someone unless you're reasonably confident that they'd like to be flirted with. Some people might be able to figure that out in a matter of minutes, and others might need to get to know someone over the course of weeks or months in a casual group setting to figure it out.
I am sorry to say, but I think people who believe flirting is not allowed probably have not put in the effort to be able to read social cues, don't have an aptitude for it, or never learned to flirt in a non-offputting way.
This is because learning comes from failing and getting better. And young people can not do this easily because there is a lot of stigma associated with being the "creep" who flirts badly or when not wanted.
How much of that is real and how much of it is in young people's heads?
I think people have been dealing with rejection forever. Everyone has to start out awkward, and most people get over it.
Maybe that is one place where technology hurts us. Maybe 30 years ago, a young person would have tried and struck out, and then they would have gotten over it and tried again. Whereas maybe today people try and fail, and then they can retreat into video games and online communities, which offer a superficial sense of success or belonging without the same risk of direct rejection.
I think the important bit here that maybe I didn't make clear is that, at least in the context of men flirting with women, sometimes women are kind and polite without actually being comfortable (social conditioning), which many men incorrectly take as a sign of interest.
I agree that if you're charming and fun, flirting with strangers is pretty straightforward, and I especially agree with the point about getting to know people over a longer period of time before trying to gauge potential interest. Worst case, you get a cute friend!
> the context of men flirting with women, sometimes women are kind and polite without actually being comfortable (social conditioning), which many men incorrectly take as a sign of interest.
That's totally true! But that's one thing about flirting, it can be very light and non-committal.
If she is being extra friendly, smiling a lot, and giving you a little extra eye contact, you can do the same and see how she responds. If she gives you a positive feedback, take it one step farther. If she gives you negative feedback, just forget about it no harm done.
Maybe she was smiling at you in the first place because she also doesn't know if she wants to flirt with you and she's testing the waters.
I think where people get into trouble is they see someone go from 0 to 1, and they jump straight to step 7 which comes off as aggressive and off-putting.
> if you just know how to talk to people and learn about them!
dating is a two way street. If the other party just gives one line answers and does nothing to try to move a conversation forward, then it just becomes a job interview. You can't just magically get someone to open up when they refuse.
It doesn't help that, at least from a guy's perspective, it seems about 80% of women are really just trying to get instagram followers.
Dating also becomes a problem once you finally meet. You will never be more interesting than the smartphone in front of the other person. That person has the entire world in their hand. You can't possibly compete with TikTok or Tinder. You go to the restroom and the other person will go swiping on Tinder.
I really do believe humanity is doomed. Like really, actually, doomed. The internet is too much for our monkey brain.
> 80% of women are really just trying to get instagram followers.
These days they aren't even trying for of subscribers or ig followers, they just straight up put their cashapp in their bio. I have friends who have done that and made 100s of $ before their accounts got banned. And some didn't even get banned.
It's also true that a lot of people are on there but not realy to date. Like just to get compliments/validation. Not all girls either, just guys it doesn't work as well. Instead, a lot of us are on there just to look at/rate girls. At parties these days you will sometimes see a group of guys looking around somebody's phone "rating" girls on tinder.
> I heard in an interview that 50 years ago, people used to basically used to fall in love with heir neighbours and coworkers.
Dating coworkers is now forbidden in many companies, especially if there are differences in hierarchy. In some countries it becomes a possible legal liability for the one in the higher position.
Some large organizations that require traveling even forbid dating the “local population” when deployed abroad.
I've noticed the same thing. Honestly, as much as I hate ads, I've recently discovered Pluto TV on Google TV. It feels a lot like cable used to! You can pick from "channels" and you get what you get. There's no pausing, no rewinding, and your choices are limited to what's on.
I would have laughed if someone had told me that I'd be turning it on, but I frequently do. Basically whenever I'm not sure what to watch, I flip to that and throw on one of the channels.
I watch Pluto-TV for the exact same reason: it reminds me of old school cable-TV. I turn it on and "veg out", just like when I was a teenager. I tend to watch it before I go to sleep when I'm trying to shut down anyway.
The movie, The Big Short, was on heavy rotation about a year ago. Good movie. They have an entire channel dedicated to Narcos, so I'm basically fluent in Spanish now - well, "drug dealer Spanish", at least.
I had to stay once in an old hotel in a small town. It had an old CRT analog tv with analog cable. It brought back memories. Like the TV tuner changing channels really fast.
Fast channel surfing is something I hadn’t been able to do since switching to a digital tvs and digital cable about a decade ago.
> I don't remember what I used to talk to my friends about when I was in high school.
Gossip, mostly. Talking about your peers, who said what, how terrible teachers are for making us actually do work, commenting on style or the lack thereof, etc. Also, while there were fewer TV series, they still existed. Star Trek, B5, Knight Rider, Airwolf, etc.
> I can watch nearly every show and movie that was ever created
I think this is an illusion. When I check some films with awards (let's say "do the right thing", not a blockbuster but a well-known film) I cannot find them in any streaming service (maybe criterion collection). I can definitely think of tons of tv shows I cannot find on dvd, let alone on streaming platforms. Not even on torrent networks.
This idea that the internet has everything is fine for some topics (like programming), but I believe it does not apply to some contents, and films are one of them.
My HS era was pre-Internet as well. My circle of friends talked about sports, and girls. And Star Wars every now and then, and then back to sports and girls. Every once in a while nuclear annihilation would come up (Reagan 80's baby!), but eventually existential dread would dissipate until it was time to talk about college.
there is inflation with everything since we are connected to everyone in the world. All programmers work at FAANG, all artists are superhumanly taleneted, all business owners make million dollar unicorns and look like actors, etc. Average is slowly being filtered out
Well you can't really get laid if you spend day and night playing video games and binge watching series.
Every time I broke up I was mildly welcoming some time for myself but never managed to be single more than a handful of weeks. And I don't consider myself particularly more attractive/interesting than everybody out there.
I don't play video games, and I don't binge watch series, but why would this exlude women/gender-non-binary? They can and do enjoy both. And they could enjoy both with someone else. After all, what is the meaning of "Netflix and Chill"? I know many women who wish to do the same with another person, and that person need not look like Brad Pitt, et al.
Perhaps I am reading too deep, but you make it sound like someone needs to make some great effort to meet someone else. No, just a slight hiccup in their daily routine can introduce them to another person whom has very similar, low energy interests. Think: Buzzfeed dating videos from 5 years ago.
Low energy people are inherently boring. The vast majority of people would rather have a SO with some sort of interest than someone who just sits around passing time while the world moves on without them. Most folks require the freedom to be alone at times for their own sanity's sake. Being a complete homebody who does nothing but sit at home all the time deprives both parties independence of action and thought. It's not healthy.
>The vast majority of people would rather have a SO with some sort of interest than someone who just sits around passing time while the world moves on without them
Really? Tell me where these people are! The vast, vast majority of couples I know just coast through life and sometimes they "hang out" and sometimes they take some photo and sometimes they partecipate in some friend's celebrations and so on and on. If they asked each other about their interest they would not have any.
I'm not surprised when you look at the quality of 20ish year old males. They expect sex to just fall in their laps without doing anything like learning to socialize or being interesting.
Speaking about sex to fall in their laps. I remember 2009 or so even sort of cute guys were having girls approach them.
Now the looks required for that have basically skyrocketed. Being kinda cute doesn't cut it nowadays. You have to be tall broad shouldered and have a decent career.
This is why it pays to socialize. Live your entire life behind a keyboard or phone screen and you are giving people objective reasons to dismiss you out of hand. Most people do not want to live with shut-ins. Tinder is a dating tool, not a replacement for socialization.
Have you ever questioned if 20 years old females are as desirable as they think they are? Because they are not.
Pretty handy to make all the fault of "males" while never ask them what desires they have, what they want in the other person while constantly emphasize females' desires. Have we ever question women about their own standard? Are they too high? Are they what men want? Do they bring something on the table or it's the usual "I'm a passive princess: entertain me, jester!", because if it is I prefer porn, it usually doesn't ask to pay for a date.
Let's not insult the intelligence of literally anyone by suggesting that most women have high standards. Some do. Most just want a warm, presentable body with a steady job and decent hygiene... and most still end up married by age 35. Not dating. Married. And the focus is on men because it's men who are complaining about not being able to find a date while sequestered behind their phone screen.
I think that all the things you listed are definitely culprits, but I wouldn't be so quick to discount porn.
Anecdotally, I myself and many otherwise healthy, sociable young men I know have pretty serious porn addictions. I really wish there would be more research done on the negative impacts of pornography, especially on young men and teens/pre-teens.
I know typically any anti-porn sentiment is met with "Oh you're just being a puritan", but the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
On social issues, I'm very liberal. Yet so much porn during my developmental years has done so much damage that as an adult I'm just now really understanding the full extent of it, and breaking that addiction is incredibly difficult
Yeah, but porn addiction is a consequence I think. If all men could get laid whenever they'd feel like it with a willing partner, then porn use would plummet.
I haven't met many women into porn, probably because a one night stand is just a zero effort tinder swipe away, from the comfort of your pijamas in your living room.
As a man, you end up turning to porn or paying for sex, or drinking or doing drugs, to compensate the lack of intimacy in your personal life, as that just leads to depression and lack of any self worth.
I do not think an “addiction” is the problem. Obviously, everyone prefers the real thing to porn.
What has changed is the availability of porn introducing an extremely low cost alternative to sex, reducing the impetus for making the effort to find a partner (relative to previous times). Maybe even reducing the impetus to putting in the effort to seduce an existing partner!
Of course, it is not uniform across all men of course. I suspect those who are able to attract/interact with partners more easily will opt to do that, and those that are not will opt for the easier, lower cost option (even though there may be other long term costs).
> Obviously, everyone prefers the real thing to porn.
That makes intuitive sense, but is far from the reality. Many men, even in otherwise healthy relationships, prefer porn.
Again I really wish more data was collected on this but anecdotally I've seen hundreds on online discussions from both women who are concerned about their partner and declining sex life and from men who want to quit using porn to better service the needs of their partner.
Porn addiction is real, serious, and more common than you may think.
I think what I am trying to convey is that it is not an addiction like nicotine, caffeine, alcohol, heroine, where the brain wants the substance itself.
With porn, it is the brain making a cost benefit calculation that putting in the effort for the real thing is not worth the cost relative to cost/benefit ratio of porn.
As in do I make all the effort to get my wife in the mood, or do I open a website and be done with it. Or do I control my diet and exercise, or do I open a website and be done with it.
I understand what you're trying to convey and I'm sorry but it's just not true.
Brain scans show the pathways for porn addiction are very similar to those found in cocain and amphetamine addicts. Perhaps this is true for you, but don't discredit porn addiction as not a "real addiction" when it's an established fact that it is one on par with substance abuse.
Almost every single drug addict and alcoholic has an emotional basis for their addiction. Be it childhood trauma, a predisposition to anxiety/depression, etc.
The fact that these reasons exist doesn't make the addiction any less of an addiction. It's often a reason why rehab centers try to take a holistic approach and not only tackle the addiction, but the surrounding lifestyle choices that further enable the addiction.
It's not "addiction is a masked emotional needs problem" it's, "addiction is often accompanied by emotional needs problems". Subtly different, but different nonetheless.
Established fact? You are trying to make a porn addiction appear as bad as a meth addiction and that is just not based in reality. The outcomes and damage of substance abuse are more severe and should not be conflated.
The established fact is that porn addiction utilizes the same nuerological pathways as substance addiction.
I said nothing of the outcomes, though I wouldn't be so sure. We don't have any data on the outcomes of porn addiction. I wonder how many young men have committed suicide in large part due to their porn addiction, or how many have lost their jobs. It's certainly a non-zero number.
>Again I really wish more data was collected on this but anecdotally I've seen hundreds on online discussions from both women who are concerned about their partner and declining sex life and from men who want to quit using porn to better service the needs of their partner.
> Again I really wish more data was collected on this
You obviously know the answer to your question since I repeatedly stressed my lack of data and how it was anecdotal.
We don't have any data either supporting or debunking that claim, I only am repeating what I've seen play out hundreds of time in various digital spaces. Some phenomena just haven't been studied in good enough detail to have hard data in either direction. A lack of data for an assertion doesn't disprove that assertion, it just makes it temporarily unprovable.
I'm sure the majority of men in healthy relationship prefer sex with their partner to porn. I'm also sure there are a non-trivial amount who do prefer porn.
Saying you wish there was more data doesn't imply that there is no data, so I figured I'd ask if there was something.
I think anecdotally you may be right. But preference is a very hard thing to determine. It's unfair to compare porn to sex the same way it is unfair to compare watching a sport to playing it. One requires very little effort, the other monumental effort comparatively.
Ive experienced the effects of porn addiction, and/or viewing from a young age, from both sides.
I have pretty niche tastes since i started watching in my very early teens, and though i find men very attractive its harder to finish with them.
Ive been with several partners who preferred porn to me. The latest had very, very unrealistic standards. They objectified my body, hard, and I swear their porn use affected their capacity for empathy. They said and did things that made me feel like a replaceable thing, they compared my to porn stars (and found me lacking).
They would collect massive amounts of porn and run off to use it multiple times a day… which wouldve honestly been fine, except for the fact that it did really affect their ability to connect with me. After theyd use porn their mood and empathy / behavior towards me would markedly change for the worse.
I am a fairly attractive, _very_ willing and attentive partner.
These experiences have honestly really damaged my self esteem and willingness to date.
I have also since stopped using porn a) to fix the first line and b) i cannot watch it without being reminded of my experiences with these men and their criticisms of my body.
I think that "probably" could make due with some nuance. A Tinder swipe away is a very high-risk way of having sex. There's so many men out there that truly do not treat women well, and that one wouldn't want to have sex with. Yet, nothing inhibits them from having very well-curated Tinder profiles.
But there's so many men out there that woman can probably find someone, at least in a normal-ish city. Most men get zilch. I think we're seeing some of the less obvious effects of that now. Men don't get to have a sexual exploration or slut phase and this is... who knows, stunting their emotional growth? Among other things. As each sex gets older, women tend to accumulate more experience, and mock men who may be lacking it.
The statistics disagree. Men on average have sex earlier[1] and with more people during their lifetime[2][3] and a higher percentage of people find theres negative stigma surrounding women having a high number of partners than men having a low number[4].
I've found either matching numbers, small difference (as you seem to be citing?), or skew in favor of women having more partners for 90s-00s cohorts. The stigma surrounding people with a high number of partners is something I've seen applied to both, and statistically, it does seem to invert marriage length.
I don't believe that's it. Plenty of men in relationships with a "willing partner" use heaps of porn, and in many circumstances prefer using porn to sex.
And yes, having _sex_ is only a swipe away for women. But having decent sex that you enjoy and is another matter altogether. And that's before thinking about safety.
If I was looking for reasons why fewer women seem to be into porn, I'd say it's because the vast majority of porn is explicitly made to cater to male desires.
You need to put more nuance on what a "willing partner" means, as it's incredibly important. Many stories I hear regarding "willing partner left aside for porn" boil down to a passive person expecting their partner to just pick up on clues while having a history of being denied and making zero effort to overcome it. Or worse, a passive, submissive person expecting men to just push their way through any resistance and keep trying, when men are actively taught to respect a woman's boundaries.
For many of these "porn addiction" cases, there's more going on than just "he is addicted to porn and now he won't have sex with me". Communication is a two-way street and women are a little eager to play the 'passive princess who can do no wrong' without realizing most of society is training men to avoid making assumptions.
> Or worse, a passive, submissive person expecting men to just push their way through any resistance and keep trying, when men are actively taught to respect a woman's boundaries.
Not to go into too much detail, but I've had to seriously recalibrate my "respect women" upbringing to make my wife happy. And I'm not even talking sub/dom stuff or outright rape-fantasy things like I've heard tell of from my (somewhat shell-shocked) unattached and actively-dating friends.
You are unfortunately a victim of propaganda; many men today are. Women did not magically in the last 50 years override all biological instinct and traditional desires that they have had for millennia, even though media would like you to believe otherwise
whenever someone says "the media" has a single monolithic view, it seems to be that person demonstrating a persecution complex
I've seen tons of "the media" contradicting your point, but I guess if you said "some people say this, others don't", your point wouldn't be as compelling
I said media, not "the media". And like my post would indicate by saying media, the large majority of popular media does just what I've said. Can you point out any popular media outlet that advocates for traditional gender roles? How about any targeted toward under 30s? Because I can point out literally dozens of unique, popular publications such as HP, WP, Vox which have published articles of the reverse viewpoint.
Whenever someone pretends that modern mass media is not overwhelmingly in favor of the current zeitgeist, it seems to me that person is either arguing in bad faith, or is startlingly naive. Finding one minute counterexample of a publication that no one has ever heard of does not imply an overall balanced media landscape. It would be as strange as arguing that western 'the media' doesn't support Ukraine over Russia; just absurdly incorrect to a cursory inspection.
> Can you point out any popular media outlet that advocates for traditional gender roles? How about any targeted toward under 30s?
yes, literally dozens, like fox, OANN, breitbart (I will happily continue to follow suit if you want to as well)
> Whenever someone pretends that modern mass media is not overwhelmingly in favor of the current zeitgeist
modern mass media is a product of the people, who determine the zeitgeist, so it is pretty unsurprising that the attitudes of media overall reflect the attitudes of people overall
similarly, we would obviously expect to see less content advocating extreme views that society largely rejects like "all abortion should be illegal", compared to content conforming with social norms
but let's get off this tangent and back on topic: whether you say "the media" or "media", my original response remains true: "media" says plenty to the opposite of what you claim it says, and you're simply cherry picking observations that fit your own narrative around "media" itself
but I guess "media says this sometimes, and sometimes the opposite" doesn't make for as compelling of a narrative
This is very common, which is why I called out the other commenter. Sex is complicated, fantasies even more so. Men are pushed to be less proactive and more reactive, but women are still primarily passive when it comes to working these things out. It certainly is 'safer' for society to not have every guy be proactive, but it creates a lot of mismatches in sexual expectations partners have of one another.
That's not to mention the onus of taking charge is still put onto men, while men are actively punished for making a mistake, and women tend to get off without social repercussions despite continuing to play passive. We're already seeing the cracks forming.
It’s worth pointing out that women may have higher rates of their testosterone levels being lower compared to men because of birth control, stress, or sleep.
Women are into different porn. Textual erotic works, spanning the gamut from romance novels to fanfiction, have been incredibly popular with women since the Victorian era. I'm not convinced at all that women are less interested in porn, simply because ao3 exists! It's that their usage isn't captured in a survey of video porn sites.
Women consume shitloads of porn—they just prefer to read it, rather than watch. It goes by the euphemism "romance novel". (yes, some don't have explicit sex, but... lots do, and they're quite popular)
Women have different sexual desires that aren't met by the simple act of fucking, so just watching two people fucking is far less gratifying. For them, sexual desire is much more bound up with psychology and the unfolding of a relationship -- especially with a handsome, powerful, dangerous person. Power and danger are to women what big tits are to men, hence the thriving market in vampire/werewolf/billionaire/pirate/surgeon erotica which does play into women's desires in ways most visual porn does not.
I wish there’s some discovery on another planet that makes people venture out like in the old days.
Fuck it I’ll lead or be part of a crew to get on a space ship and maybe never come back. Being stuck at a laptop all day is so fucking boring now because work from home means I’d rather not.
I want to be out and about. Not stuck inside ALL day (along with everyone else).
People do venture out like the old days, there's never any shortage, of, say, people wanting to establish a new home across the Atlantic because they are fleeing religious or ethnic persecution, or just trying to migrate for better economic opportunities.
We don't want them here, though, which is why they can't do it. If pre-contact America/Australia had strong passport controls, Europeans wouldn't have been 'venturing out to it', either.
I meant facing the unknown. I can find all the information about moving across the Atlantic because it’s not anything new or novel at this point. But five hundred years ago that was a journey of a lifetime and at the end were either riches or death.
Worst case scenario if I move across the Atlantic is that I don’t go bankrupt because I had a medical emergency. You know what? That doesn’t sound so bad.
Whenever I see these "women don't need porn cause they can just go on tinder and get laid" arguments I always find they are kind of unempathetic and do a bad job recognizing the reality of sex and pornography for both genders.
A one night stand is way way more risky for women in most ways whether with regard to the risk of being assaulted or catching STIs or unplanned pregnancy. On top of that, society heavily views sexually promiscuous women more negatively than the same behaviour in men. All of this means women can't treat no-strings sex as flippantly as men can and you shouldn't discount those risks and costs by saying sex is a swipe away for them. It is very much like if I were to say any man could get laid whenever they want by hiring a sex worker while ignoring the risks and costs involved.
These arguments also seem to ignore that the vast majority of women are not so universally attractive that getting on a dating site immediately results in a plethora of matches that they would want to have sex with (even ignoring my first point). If they lacked any standards and were willing to have sex with anyone yes it would be very easy to find a partner, but thats true for the vast majority of men as well.
The fact is most people, quite reasonably, only want to have sex with people they find attractive in situations where they feel safe, even when its only meant for physical pleasure, and this limiting factor greatly reduces the number of opportunities that are available regardless of the person's gender.
These arguments also don't fit with the real world statistics. In the US men on average have sex sooner than women[1] and have sex with more partners during their lifetime[2][3]. It differs by country and its possible to find studies and demographics where the more promiscuous gender switches, but the numbers never align with an assertion like "women don't like porn cause they can just go have real sex instead".
While its true a larger percentage of men consume porn, its very clear a large number of women do as well. You likely think you haven't met women that enjoy it because of stigma making them unwilling to discuss it openly. The biggest pornographic video site finds more than 1/3rd of their visitors are female[4].
Its also possibly because most discussions you see use a too narrow definition of "pornography". For instance, academic analyses often do not include types of pornography heavily preferred by women. When they do include things such as written erotica and not just images or video they find a majority (60%) of women enjoy porn[5].
And hopefully its clear I'm not trying to attack you personally. One study I came across while digging up the numbers found American men think women on average have 27 and men 21 sexual partners in their lifetime while the real numbers they found were 12 for women and 20 for men[3]. The perception that women have more sex is quite common and shared by a large number of men despite not being true. I simply hope my wasting an hour of my life writing all this up with citations will do a bit to change that.
You list men as the reason why people have less sex, but unless women is having a lot of more sex with other women to compensate the numbers, it is both women and men that is having less sex and it could be either gender or both that is causing the trend. It is jumping to conclusions to assume that only men determine if the world population is going to have sex or not.
Personally I would blame social media much more than porn, especially on young women and teens/pre-teens. Porn addictions, if such things exists (WHO is currently undecided on that fact), seems a minor issue compared to addictions caused by social media. Remove access to internet for a large group of teens and lets observe which kind of withdraws will firsts pop up.
The source for the article cites both women and men. That said, if it is also true that fewer men are sleeping with more women then the cause of this can also be attributed to the choice of the women than the choice of men.
If we look at Japan as an example, the observation I would make is how much people interacts with computer that simulates or replaces physical social interactions with a computer facilitated one. Be that a social networks, traditional media, movies, tvs, but also practical every day activities like work, shopping and entertainment. This interferes on a psychological level how people form emotional bonds, which changes behavior in both men and women.
If we observe that women are choosing from a smaller pool of men, one way to describe that would be that women turning into more tournament-like in their strategy for reproduction and away from pair bonding. Tournament and pair bonding strategies have both benefits and drawbacks, and both are related and possible influenced by perceived social status of potential mates.
I’m not against porn, but believe for some (many?) people it can develop into an addiction, and/or warp their view of normal bodies, and reduce their capacity to relate / be intimate / empathetic.
For some people, I think viewing porn is mostly harmless; for others, they are not able to consume it without negative effects on themselves and their potential partners…
I’m also very progressive, sex positive; i find its hard to discuss this with friends or strangers because theres such a stigma against decrying porn. It’s difficult to discuss with nuance.
> Also, adult dating and meeting people for the post-college working professionals, has largely moved from clubs/bars/the office to online dating apps, or lonely depression in your apartment, eating or drinking your feelings away, for those without success in the WFH, remote-everything, online dating world. Especially with the lockdowns.
And those "dating" apps can hardly be called dating apps in most cases. They're designed to mess with the underlying sexual dynamic of men and women. If they were meant for romance, they'd have more mechanisms in place to help strangers actually date and get to know each other. Instead, they're a meat market, and the sad thing is more and more people are growing up in a world where they know no different. If you think about it, dating apps have no incentive to try and get people to actually meet in real life. Not only does that raise the potential for liability, but that means fewer eyeballs on their product at any given time.
Tinder knows very well that their product is selling attention to women and the promise of sex to countless men they know have next to zero chance based on their looks alone. As OK Cupid was losing its position as a dating app, I remember them putting out an advertising campaign featuring the initialism "DTF", which tells you all you need to know. They might even still be doing it, for all I know. I remember it from billboards and posters in Santa Monica.
> I don't think tech or porn is the main culprit. It's that people now have way more entertainment options other than sex. Of course, a lot for those entertainment options are being driven by tech.
I don't buy this one bit. The number of entertainment options is correlative, but who has demonstrated that it's causative? Yes, there is a chance that the proliferation of entertainment options is the primary cause, but unless a double-blind study has or will be done to test whether the sex drive is actually in competition with entertainment, I have very sincere doubts.
Furthermore, the porn industry is in no way declining. If people were losing an instinctive interest in sex, why would they be watching porn? What if people actually want sex, but they are too ill equipped to obtain it IRL?
And we haven't even brought up declining androgen levels in males.
Sex isn't going out of fashion. If anything, we are hypersexualized. The goal of sex isn't merely to propagate genes, but to propagate selected genes. Our current environment allows us to select our mates to such an extent that even more people are seleced out of the gene pool for a variety of reasons. Either we're perpetually thinking we can do better, or that we're never good enough or are too ugly, or are totally clueless because Boomer and Gen X parenting have been a disaster.
Dating apps have no incentive to encourage long term relationships, because if you are in a long term relationship you are far less likely to use a dating app. Given the prevalence of dark pattern research to maximize "engagement" in the social media space, I would not be surprised if the most successful dating apps are actively optimized to encourage a meat market dynamic because it maximizes engagement with the app.
This is analogous to how regular social networks actively encourage unreasonable maximally-controversial discourse because it maximizes engagement, to the detriment of rational discussion of social and political issues. If people can reach a solution to issues like tradition vs. personal freedom, abortion, guns, etc., then they might spend less time on social media debating them and trolling and fighting about them and social media engagement might decline.
As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort.
Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.
> Dating apps have no incentive to encourage long term relationships
Yes. This is absolutely a fundamental problem not just with dating apps but with any business whose employees and/or customers have surpassed Dunbar's number. It's not so much a problem of money or capitalism as it is with the dehumanization of financial transaction.
> As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort.
It is a substitute as far as it can surpass the cost/benefit of meatspace. If too many people are ill prepared to be self-reliant adults and attract the other sex, and thereby unable to be sufficiently attracted or aroused by their peers, then porn completely makes sense. The proliferation of isolation only further encourages porn use, as it does with any form of escapism.
But this is coming from the standpoint that I have which is that far too many adults from my generation onward are objectively less self-reliant and have more pathologies than their proximal ancestors. Not everyone agrees with this, but I know enough Millennials and have enough Gen Z and Alpha family members that my experience is informing me that said generations aren't destined for greater success than the previous.
My point being that I think if more people were socially functional and able to make themselves attracted to whichever sex(es) they are attracted to, porn might not be quite as normalized as it currently is. (it would still be normalized by virtue of the internet)
> Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.
I generally agree... it can set people up to have expectations that lead to disappointment and even personal failure that leads to poor self esteem, animosity, and lack of fulfillment.
I almost want sex-ed classes to find a way to teach about this, but that's a whole can of worms that I ultimately think would backfire and be a bad idea. My intentions are good, though. :)
However, I don't entirely agree with the use of the word "unrealistic." Putting aside the theatrics in porn, telling people that porn is unrealistic can give them the impression that their particular sexual interests are abnormal and can't be lived out in real life with consensual partners, which is by no means true. I'm not sure I know what the best alternative is, but there's got to be some way to communicate that. It's actually a very nuanced point of discussion, I think.
> If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.
Yes. I think this is where parents (and unfortunately probably teachers of some kind) are going to have to grow the cajones to actually talk about these issues with their kids at an appropriate age. We can't pretend like we live in a world where young people can't watch explicit material online instantly and for free. The "birds and the bees" doesn't cut it anymore.
On a related note, I've found it interesting that apparently girls get way more sexual education from their mothers than boys do from their dads. My dad tried... not well, but he tried. And it was way too late. I already knew what he was trying to say by tip-toeing around the words. Most of the men I know have told me the...
This is a bit too conspiratorial: I've spoken to people who work at these companies, and there's not a team of analysts trying to figure out how to minimize the number of successful relationships that come from using the app. An app that has a reputation for "I met my last partner on X, and we're getting married next week!" will get far more users and recurring revenue through word of mouth.
The bigger issue is that figuring out good matchings is a crapshoot and users' self-described desires and priorities aren't actually in-line with what will make them happy. Everyone wants someone hot (almost by definition), and so the hot people get a lot of interest: the ones actually interested in relationships quickly end up off the market, and those remaining are more than capable of soaking up all the available interest.
Really? I worked on the biggest dating app in the world and there are so many dark patterns at play to keep people paying while in reality the way those features work is correct only from a vague reading of the perks. They not only have analysts but legal involved. End of the day they want money like any other business, their goal is to maximize users and revenue, and keep more and more people engaged. The goal of finding love is something crafted by marketing. It may have been the founders vision, but then they got millions in funding lol.
> This is a bit too conspiratorial: I've spoken to people who work at these companies, and there's not a team of analysts trying to figure out how to minimize the number of successful relationships that come from using the app.
I think the effect can be true without anyone having ill intent. The dating app companies are generally trying to make as much money as they can, which will indrectly lead to decisions that optimize for serial dating.
As a parallel I don't think Facebook is full of evil people who want to increase the amount of hate and anger in the world, but it does have a lot of people who just want to make money and encouraging negative reactions happens to be an effective way of doing that, so that's what we get.
Obesity was much lower and bodies were much healthier and more vigorous. Erectile dysfunction was much less common, and average serum testosterone levels were higher.
I guess it's uncouth to suggest that physical acts are more enjoyable with more physically attractive and capable populations, but I don't think it's something that should be discounted.
I have no doubt that self-reports of erectile dysfunction were probably less common at that time.
I will say that information about it was certainly less common, and the stigma associated to it was stronger and more prevalent.
> I guess it's uncouth to suggest that physical acts are more enjoyable with more physically attractive and capable populations
On "capable": Erectile dysfunction can be caused by low levels of testosterone, as well as sexual desire. However, sexual prowess doesn't orbit around the male penis as much as our fathers thought. That is but one dimension.
On the subject of attractiveness: I question that men with high levels of testosterone are actually more attractive to women. High testosterone has some obvious advantages (higher strength, bigger muscles, stronger sexual desire) but it also bring some things that are not so universally appraised (more body hair, less head hair, stronger body smell, mode violent behavior, less empathy). That group of traits, and the fact that we live in a more informed society, might be making high-testosterone males less attractive to women, overall.
Perhaps that is what is making the testosterone levels go down - the same thing that is making us taller: artificial selection. My (totally unverified) impression is that this is what happens in Japan. Most famous male Japanese actors tend to look "effeminate" to me, as an European. There seems to be very little "strong jaw, big muscles" amongst that group, compared to Europeans or Americans.
> That group of traits, and the fact that we live in a more informed society, might be making high-testosterone males less attractive to women, overall.
I believe Cicero, in one of his speeches, complained about women being into young clean-shaven men, and not the robust full-bearded patrician look.
Tech, porn, and social media/lack of community are what I think the issues are. And your comment which I mostly agree with seems to contradict your first sentence. Everything you said (Gaming, endless video-on-demand, porn, social media, online dating, remote work) is enabled by technology. Ergo, tech /is/ the main culprit. Now, onto the post I originally typed:
I wonder if younger people know what it's like to go a week or two without orgasm. I don't know many teens/young adults, much less well enough to ask about sex culture. I came of age in the 2000s, when online porn was a thing, but not ubiquitous, not HD, and still taboo. I do know that deprivation of orgasm makes it that much better when it does happen, and it changes your mind in both increase of sexual drive, and for me, increase in the desire for true intimacy, rather than just an anxious need to get off. When I kick the habit, my interest in talking to women goes higher than normal, and not "simply" because I'd like sex - it's because my entire mind is changed to wanting intimacy and to meet people.
So ubiquity of porn and its normalization is a big factor in people not seeking true human contact.
I think that people are also becoming more and more shy/anxious in general, at least by my flawed observations. Between rapidly changing social cues/acceptable behavior, being constantly connected, etc., it is difficult for people to connect and disconnect appropriately.
I think about the pre-Internet era when people could maybe date or hook up, and if it didn't work, it was out of sight, out of mind. Now with social media, I see people staying connected despite falling out. Maybe out of curiosity, maybe thinking they can still be friends, but I think that the inability to have a clear head/fresh start makes things difficult.
At least in my area/life, there isn't a huge sense of community. It takes a lot of effort to find non-bar oriented things to do that has a decently high number of people attending, who are all interested in the same things, and where it's likely to find a person to date. Say what you want about religion, but church really does serve a valuable purpose when not used to direct people toward bigotry.
Gotta run to a meeting, this was a bit of a braindump, but the topic of human interaction and macro loneliness is an interesting topic, and a serious one that truly scares the shit out of me for my society and myself.
We've also forgotten what sex is for in a relationship, doubtless because it is inconvenient when stacked against all of our favorite soma.
Watching most people continue to be addicted to systems that take more than they give (social media) is difficult. And it affects the people around them deeply, too. It doesn't happen in a vacuum; the emotional un-presence is palpable. It is so common it feels very difficult to bring up.
Another thing to consider: It might just be, that sex being more of an taboo (without the internet being there to inform yourself!) made it more interesting.
Sex is beautiful, but I would always prefer a meaningful human relationship with common interests and good communications without sex over an sex-filled relationship without the rest. Or to put it simply: Love without sex is greater than sex without love. Prefarably both, but it is a thing two people need to want : )
This understates the proliferation and impact of porn, but as with most things, there's usually more than one factor. What you mentioned as novel activities today share one thing in common: they're sedentary. A sedentary lifestyle leads to lower sex drive.
> people now have way more entertainment options other than sex
Another way to consider this is that people find it easier to divert themselves than to exert themselves only to be disappointed. (Think of the universal pain of the characters in "Marty". [1])
Even though the cost to "view" people has been cheapened by technology, what we find is that disappointment remains the likeliest outcome.
The article is written for humour, but it is worth noting that although "sex" cannot go out of fashion, the illusions of Bernaysian manipulation [2] certainly can. And, as a society with a changing set of prevailing group behaviours, the delights of companionship can certainly be lost.
An enjoyable sexual relationship isn't just a matter of presenting (or hunting for) some pastiche of beauty: people must want to charm and please one another. This cultural trait definitely has gone "out of fashion" in Western society.
Add to these discouraging considerations the fact that the financial calculation of a relationship (even if children are not planned) has much more risk today than even just 10 years ago.
> Another way to consider this is that people find it easier to divert themselves than to exert themselves only to be dissappointed.
This is an exceptionally succinct description of the problem, thank you. A societal shift from exertion to diversion. Creation to consumption. Scary stuff.
> the illusions of Bernaysian manipulation [2] certainly can
What do you mean here, in reference to Bernays? For context, I’m familiar with his work and legacy — the documentary ‘The Century of the Self’[1] is still perhaps the most important piece of media I’ve ever consumed.
By "Bernaysian" I mean much of what is discussed in that documentary by Adam Curtis. The out-sized notion of self in pursuit of the baubles, bangles, and beads of a glorified pageant of passion and love.
When two such highly-conditioned specimens meet, they probably will reject each other. Or if not, they will test each other's endurance in the illusion.
The subtlety is that the hyper stimuli of modern porn streaming, while lascivious on the inside, is leading to something that looks like puritanism on the outside, hence the drop in actual sex.
No. What is ironic is thinking being against porn is puritanical. It's not all black and white.
Like many people outside of the US, I am as far from puritanism as possible, yet I maintain that porn is a cancer. We should have more sex instead. The hippies were onto something.
It is in fact possible to be further from puritanism, because you could not be against porn. There's nothing wrong with sex and there's nothing wrong with filming it or otherwise making money off of it.
If you think the opposite of puritanism is PornHub, you have a pretty distorted view of sexuality. Both are degenerate, but they're not on the same axis at all. The fact that both replies to my comment share this view shows how unhealthy is our society's approach to sexuality.
Free, healthy, frequent consensual sex with real people for fun or otherwise, is miles better than either, and doesn't fit in any of the two black and white categories you have identified.
I thought it was a decent book, seemed to cite a good number of sources, but I'm no scientician. But Gary makes a pretty rational argument -- If you're finding yourself in a certain situation[1], without a known underlying medical cause (as ruled out by a doctor), then cutting out porn never killed anyone, and anecdotally has cured many. So why not just give it a try?
[1]: I'll keep it PG here, but the book is clear what this situation is
I am yet to read a convincing study about these supposed detrimental effects of porn. All these texts start from the assumption that it is bad without anything like a root cause analysis.
For example, yes, single people tend to watch more porn. But are they single because they watch porn (demonstrating that porn is a social inhibitor)? Or do they watch more porn because they are single (in which case porn is just a way to get some of the pleasure they would otherwise have with a partner)?
Same for depression, which does not help going out and meet people. Should we then deduct that porn causes depression? Of course not, and yet this is the starting point of a lot of anti-porn rants.
These arguments also fit too well with puritanical and repressive world views, which makes me very suspicious as motivated reasoning is pervasive in these discussions.
> anecdotally has cured many
That’s the thing, anecdotes are not data. I also have anecdotes of people who have a healthy life and watch porn regularly. Without an epidemiological study it does not mean much. From my experience, “watching porn never killed anyway, and anecdotally has cured many” is just as true as your assertion.
Actually anecdotes are data and they're one manner in which we find, for example, unexpected side effects of treatments https://vaers.hhs.gov/ . I say this not to specifically boost Gary's claims, but to encourage us to not wholesale discount anecdotes. They're too often clues to the right path to be ignored.
I found the book to be pretty clear in it's wording saying essentially (to paraphrase) If you're not having any problems, then you don'd need a cure. But if you're experiencing these symptoms then here's what has worked for 100s, and by simple rationale there's no cost or danger to trying it (eliminating porn for a time). That's the part I found particularly compelling the simple deduction of "It might work, costs nothing, has no risk, so why not try it?"
> I say this not to specifically boost Gary's claims, but to encourage us to not wholesale discount anecdotes. They're too often clues to the right path to be ignored.
Right, but there are plenty of plainly stupid ones (“my kid is autistic and, surprise, surprise, had a vaccine weeks before being diagnosed”), and there are plenty of conflicting ones (like on the current subject, but also on things like CBD, though the picture is getting clearer on that front).
They are also unverifiable most of the time, and are commonly just made up.
The only way of knowing whether the anecdotes are significant is to verify them and do some statistical analysis, at which point they are data that we can analyse quantitatively or qualitatively, and not anecdotes anymore.
“Trust my anecdotes” is an argument one makes when reality is inconsistent with one’s position.
> I found the book to be pretty clear in it's wording saying essentially (to paraphrase) If you're not having any problems, then you don'd need a cure.
Which does sound reasonable. But that was not the OP’s message, which was based on the same book. There is no reason to assume that stoping watching porn will help with anything. It’s like homeopathy: sure, trying costs nothing, but it’s still stupid and can occasionally backfire.
Again, watching porn also never killed anyone, costs nothing and has no risk. So why not simply say “do whatever you want to do” and consider those anti-porn arguments for what they are: pseudo-science?
The real culprit isn’t porn, it is mainly the change in societal expectations and the ease of changing your baseline expectations. Our relationships have become extremely disposable. You are one Instagram DM away from moving onto the next one. Dating websites and apps largely have the same problems.
I'd bet that how much money you have (beyond a low bar of "enough") matters a lot less for the American dating pool than being able to make somebody laugh.
One hypothesis of a contributor to falling marriage rates is that as women's income potential has risen there's still a standard (whether cultural or innate) for them to marry "up" economically. Therefore, there's a growing demographic shortage of economically attractive male partners in the U.S. marriage market.
To me a rather more reasonable take than "women are coached or born to flock to money" is "the world is going to hell, economic precarity is making it scarier to tie two people to a particular geography for work, and the future looks grim enough that having kids is probably a bad idea, so why get married?".
The HN age demographic seems older than most online communities.
If they aren't using apps for quick thrills, they are moving to the Villages and using an upside-down pineapple as an ironic bat signal for some fruitless copulation.
Even as a mid-30s male HN reader I've been able to get another relationship months after my previous one failed. I'm sick of it, though. I don't want to lose this one. I didn't want to lose the last one either.
IMO this is a different issue. If you change your partner say every week it doesnt mean that you have less sex. Also in my (limited) experience the "swinger" type people who constantly cheat (=more sex) or just have one night relationships (=more sex) are a small subset of the population.
I mean, I have sex with my wife on average 3-5 times a week. It's not daily but it comes close. It only changes when she's recovering from giving birth or one of us is sick.
They just say that until they realize that when you don't have sex for a week, you want it every day, but after you have sex, the need fades for a while. And of course sex drive decreases with age, from an extremely horny peak around ~20.
At least for me it was very different. I never had a problem with women attention and two of them were frank enough to spell it out for me (this was very unexpected). Still in both cases I just refused the opportunity.
There are three things that are lacking from the article completely as a reason for lower sexual activity: a lack of time, a place and money:
- With people working ridiculous overtimes, "double shifts" or working two jobs just to make ends meet, there is simply no time to maintain a relationship. That one is offset a bit by Tinder and other "casual sex" opportunities, but nevertheless it's going to impact people.
- With rents being ridiculously high, a majority of young adults are forced to live at their parents', a record number not seen in many decades. And without one's own place, it's hard to even enter a relationship, much less have sex.
- to expand on that point, maintaining a relationship or having casual sex requires money, which a lot of people simply don't have available. Cinema tickets, going eating out to a restaurant, other joint activities... you get the drift, no money means no dates means no sex.
- Especially for the US: as sex can result in children, even when using condoms, the pill or IUDs, many women elect to abstain from sexual activity entirely since the access to abortion is under ever more and more attacks.
- Additionally, the cost of giving birth [2] and raising a child [3] is prohibitively expensive for many people, further reducing the amount of people willing to search for a partner in the first place.
Articles like this are often mostly focused on the male side of cisgendered male-female relationships. Have things not changed for women? Or how about among other types of people? Is gay sex going out of fashion too?
Young people in general are having less sex but young men are having a noteworthy amount less than young women. And the delta between the two groups is a new thing within the last 10 years or so.
I doubt the ratio is that extreme, but if the delta exists isn't the logical conclusion that a smaller subset of the men are having sex with a larger percentage of the women?
A quick stab in the dark is a sugar daddy, older man, more established with more free disposable income. My only evidence to back this up is anecdotal, I have young parents. I am 28 and my dad is 46. Parents divorced a few years ago. My Dad works sales and makes a good chunk of money. He recently stopped going to bars because all the 20-some year old girls would hit on him and get a little too close for his comfort, which grosses him out because my sister is 26.
Edit: I found it funny when he was complaining to me about it because all I could thing of is that these girls probably don't know they are hitting on a guy with grandkids.
Glad you pointed this out. As a bisexual guy, I'd like to give some input. Sex between homosexual men is definitely not getting out of fashion. As a lot of these dating apps encourage short-lived relationships, it incentivizes a lot of these men to not commit in relationships and just have "fun." On the other hand (note that this is only based on my experience), a lot of women seem to have set higher and higher expectations within these dating apps similar to how it is in a typical social media platform like Instagram. I can't blame them though, it's part of human nature to aspire for more.
>I can't blame them though, it's part of human nature to aspire for more.
I don’t even think it’s any kind of aspiration, it’s just that women are completely overloaded with matches. All the claims of “women pass 99% of the time” really don’t paint the whole picture, because in my experience men swipe right 99% of the time. Wouldn’t you also only pick the best of the best if you had hundreds of options?
As another bi guy, dating apps have been a godsend for the LGBT community (though they've cannibalized other valuable parts of the culture, like gay and lesbian bars). It's exactly what I think most straight men imagine dating apps to be before their naivette is crushed: you hop on, exchange a couple messages with someone, and then meet up. It's pretty pleasant, and there's no sense that you have to hold onto someone forever on the basis that if you don't, it'll be months or years before you meet another person even vaguely interested. Different people have more or less success, but very few people have no success, and it's never a painful experience requiring dozens of hours of emotional labor to even meet with someone.
The contrast in experience on them versus heterosexual apps is shocking. Apps are kind of ideally suited for a relatively homogeneous population of gay men, but the bifurcated population that uses heterosexual dating apps leads to pretty bad outcomes. Particularly for men, but for women as well.
No. Many men are turning to gay sex because they can’t get any women. Lots of guys are “bi” but it’s like 10% gay 90% straight attraction. Getting a guy is 100x easier than a woman so even though they’re mostly straight, they become gay in practice. I expect that 50% of all sex will be between men within the next few decades.
Yeah, I guess the bigger point being missed (by the article and most of the comments) is that there is a whole generation of people having sex but not having kids due to concerns for the future. (Myself included)
The future is still looking pretty bright relative to the rest of human history, unless the subset of people who are very concerned about the future choose not to have kids, in which case not so much.
Yeah it's even weirder when you realize that a teenage boy really just wants a baby. Deep down his sex drive is leading him to having a baby and reproducing.
Population implosion is going to be the biggest problem of our lives. It is one of those issues that creeps up progressively (like Global Warming), but will have cataclysmic impacts. Sex is a precursor to relationships and kids, if people don't have sex...
Imagine 80% of the population is elderly and retired (or want to be retired) - that is where the world is heading by the end of the century.
Depends on the scale you look at it. It's going to be a shit show for a few generations. Especially in all the countries relying on the working force to pay for the elderly through tax &co
> Especially in all the countries relying on the working force to pay for the elderly through tax &co
I don't think it makes much of a difference in practice for this scenario if retirement is funded by savings/investments of the elderly or through taxes and other transfers from the working population. As much of the population is retired the value of the investments will go down as now now people are selling than buying new investment. It would become a indirect transfer.
The problem (mostly) isn't fewer people, it's an ever-increasing proportion of elderly. As long as total fertility is below replacement the proportion of elderly to working-age people increases /forever/.
I think the point isn't that a contraction is bad in general, it's that too fast of a contraction leaves an inverted demographic pyramid, which has all kinds of very bad implications.
You need a certain tax base to keep services funded. Then at some point on the curve, you start running out of service workers for the care industry.
I think automation will help to a degree but healthcare services is right at that sweet spot of both physically intricate and nonroutine that is so hard to automate.
That argument is in line with the "Thank God for the pandemic! all people are locked at home and pollution is decreasing! also less people in the planet!"
I don't know who are "we" and if they can afford it. I suspect most don't know either and think they "afford" part is not their part or imagine it's having one less latte/month in exchange for less traffic.
And yet people used to worry about overpopulation. Several countries already depend on immigrants to fill vital jobs, despite there sometimes being quite a bit of xenophobia towards those immigrants.
In the past, some people argued for a much smaller world population (however they imagine we could possibly get there), but now that it might happen, we realise our economies run on young people.
And yet we don't pay young people enough and we don't give them the opportunity to start families. Much of this is definitely also a policy problem: make sure young people can buy a house and start a family, can afford to raise kids, have time off with their family, etc.
But surely as societies enter the later parts of the demographic transition phases (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition) something like that is bound to happen - you cannot have infinitely growing populations and eventually mortality will decrease (due to healthcare improvements and increased living standards) to a point where a non-insignificant part of your population will be of an advanced age.
So in a sense, that's inevitable, isn't it?
The alternative would be to ensure that birth rates are such that the population distribution across ages is always vaguely balanced, but due to the changing socioeconomic conditions, I doubt that's viable. So all that can be done for the most part is just to have social safety nets and support for the older people in the forms of affordable housing, discounts, pensions and other such systems.
Here in Latvia a certain part of each salary is put towards our retirement funds, be it through a privately managed set of funds (typically through one of the banks) or otherwise. The sizes of pensions and living expenses are still a hotly debated topic, given that those still aren't always sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, but the idea of accumulating enough money for when you age seems like a sane approach to the problem at hand.
It's inevitable, but it's also not really something society has dealt with or addressed.
Money in a retirement fund is just an IOU. The actual labour of your retirement - the bartender serving you drinks, the doctor performing surgery, the carer taking you to the toilet - is done by young people. If there's not enough of them around, the money will very quickly inflate towards worthlessness.
I am very, very excited about this. We are absolutely culpable for the absolute havoc we have wrought on the environment. Mindless consumption and endless growth cannot continue forever.
An early litmus test for this is to look at college admission counts. Universities are very concerned right now over projected admissions from now through 2025.
There’s simply fewer high school graduates available, so enrollment counts will go down and universities will have to fight harder or lower admission requirements to keep the same number of students year over year.
It could also be that young people today simply don’t want to pay the high cost of college, and honestly I get that. But even cheaper or budget colleges are seeing enrollment dips.
I'm not quite joking. They're some of the best farmers on the planet and they have huge families. I suspect, if you do the math, they smoothly replace the rest of us as we "grey out" so to speak. ;)
> Population implosion is going to be the biggest problem of our lives.
While some current projections do predict a steep decline in population growth - it's still gonna take roughly a hundred years, just to reach zero growth. Which means we are looking at another 100 years of population actually still growing.
If the trend continues unchanged, and population growth goes negative, it would take another 100 years just to return to exactly the same population numbers that we do have today.
If the growth then grew even more negative for another 100 years, that's when you'd be able to talk about an population implosion - 300 years down the line. So no, I don't think there will be any implosion within our lives.
The problems you describe though - that's not implosion, but population aging and the economic problems that causes down the line. Those issues have been around in some countries for multiple decades already - and yes they are going to get worse. Still, growing population numbers to levels beyond what this planet can sustain just to keep the economy afloat does not seem like a well thought-through plan to me.
We will have to achieve zero population growth - and if the world economy can't take that... we really need to radically change the economy, not increase population growth again.
It's not a long term problem. To be utterly dispassionate about it, people who don't reproduce are voluntarily selecting themselves out of the gene pool, leaving behind those who genetically have a stronger drive to reproduce even under adverse circumstances. There's no moral or philosophical dimension to it; it's simply how the unfeeling mechanics of how nature works.
The issue is that most of the countries from which the US draws immigrants are going through the demographic transition themselves. The US will remain a relatively desired destination for immigration, but there will be many fewer migrants. And as the demographic transition happens in those countries, the demand for would-be migrants' labor will be higher, resulting in improved compensation and less reason to emigrate.
“It's a fact...that in societies like ours sex truly represents a second system of differentiation, completely independent of money; and as a system of differentiation it functions just as mercilessly. The effects of these two systems are, furthermore, strictly equivalent. Just like unrestrained economic liberalism, and for similar reasons, sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization . Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never. Some make love with dozens of women; others with none. It's what's known as 'the law of the market'...Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society.”
― Michel Houellebecq, Whatever
Have you heard about contraception and abortion? Amount of sex had does not correlate with birth rates, with the exception of literally 0 sex. You can have sex daily all your life and not have any kids, and have sex just one time and get pregnant.
first sentence:
"With every fetish having a dedicated subreddit and every vagina a Gwyneth Paltrow candle scent, it's hard to believe sex isn't the most popular of all the cardinal sins..."
Or every good Christian having children is commiting sin when procreating? How do Christians procreate without sex, through the prayer and then some holy mother come to their house and bring child?
You can have lust without sex, though it's quite unplesant to have sex without lust.
The reversion to the mean here just reminds me of stuff I would read on 4chan back in the day as a high school student.
Many of my friends in those environments grew up, figured out how to navigate society a bit better, and stopped saying this kind of stuff. But these threads are a reminder that loads of people didn’t.
I dunno, don't discount that maybe there's a number of high schoolers on here. I forget sometimes that anyone can be on the other side of these posts.
That very few people are mentioning things like the AIDS epidemic (and the abstinence only education that came from it), plus the conservative effort to censor sex positive media from organizations in the 80s-90s like moral majority, PTC (probably in response to the free love of the 70s), etc., is telling that they didn't live through it.
Or maybe they're just intentionally ignoring it, I dunno, but young adults today are a product of this.
Reading HN almost always makes me want to read HN less, but you’re right. I have no idea what most of this thread is on about. I’m hoping it’s just my age (40s). Almost nothing in this thread resembles any subset of my total sex life.
I don't know why but there seems to be some outsized group of people that thrives on reducing social interactions to numbers. I remember seeing a lot of this in self-destructive subreddits (eg MGTOW). Maybe it's so they can write off self-improvement (you can't argue with math!)?
MGTOW's major proponents will go out of their way to demonize women whenever they can. It's common for these people to turn towards things like RealDolls (the supposedly lifelike sex dolls) and anime starring under-aged girls. Raging Golden Eagle on YouTube is the poster boy of this kind of MGTOW advocate.
Self-improvement isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
I've noticed most of those types of groups essentially use self-improvement as the vector to ship the hate message. Which is pretty classic cult behaviour in the end: build a support network, isolate people from other networks (by making them evangelists for you) and then threaten to cut them off if they don't go long with the rest of the message.
This is also how non-hate groups rope people in -- Scientology, for example, literally starts with the premise that they can help you improve yourself from t=0.
Self-improvement definitely isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex. But from what I gathered MGTOW is(was?) simply a movement that wanted to improve their lives by being comfortable without being in a relationship for various reasons.
I never got a misogynistic vibe from them. But it's literally years ago I had read about them. They could very well have gone the Incel route over time. Which was a non-toxic movement in the beginning as well.
That's never what the MGTOW people asserted in any serious way. From the jump it was "the world is 'sexually prejudiced' against us men [or capital-M Men when they were being extra weird] and so we should separate from it entirely." It immediately leapt right into what would today be called "cope" how even if you do get married she'll just divorce you for a studly chad and take all your stuff, the fear of feminists (hiss! never mind that mainstream feminist study is pretty in on the assertion "this is bad for dudes too"! hiss!), all that. As a side effect of this insularity, for some people trapped in it there were definitely some self-improvement vibes. But that was never the goal of the people developing its, for lack of a better term, theory.
I used to study online right-wing and fascist movements as they evolved. The incel and MGTOW crowds absolutely went towards a fearful, hard-right-wing view of the world as fast as they could be led towards it. It is difficult to gin up another reading of the core stuff that doesn't depend on being super, super credulous.
ETA: 'XorNot, in a sibling reply to yours, raises a really good and thoughtful point about the self-improvement gimmick being a good way to rope suckers into your movement, and it's worth thinking about.
There doesn't seem to be any weird stuff there but I'm not a social scientist so I will have to take your word for it. I'm not so invested to start a heated discussion about this anyway.
If you go forward a few days or months you will start to see rabid hatred of women pop up from time to time. Frequently enough for the sub to earn its reputation.
From time to time is very different from being a hate movement. In any large group of people weird stuff pops up from time to time. I think you can only classify something as a hate movement if the hate is inherent to the large majority that make up the group, which didn't used to be the case for MGTOW.
Given you say you didn't see the misogynistic content I'm not sure you spent much time looking in to what was going on in the subreddit -- you may have missed how hateful its members were, especially in the latter years.
Like I said I didn't check the site for years so I didn't know it evolved into a hate group. The only thing I'm saying that at the very least they didn't used to be like that.
It was that from day one. These groups notoriously prey on those with low social and rhetorical literacy by pretending to be anodyne until they are not. That you did not see the okeydoke does not mean it was not there.
Most right-wing movements of which I am aware would definitely like to be seen as apolitical (and thus reduce the critical eye aimed at them). But the line you can draw from there (and similarly from "apolitical" rage-movements like GamerGate) to the current state of things is a straight one.
This seems at odds with Stephen Colbert's famous quote "Reality has a well known liberal bias". Regardless, there isn't anything in MGTOW that indicates either left or right wing views as far as I can tell
It didn't. In this pipeline, the incels are an earlier stage; MGTOW is for the incels that (ostensibly) are giving up on women entirely. Of course in practice they do no such thing - instead they focus even harder on blaming women for their problems.
No not really. As a person that nominally fits the label as stated, those MGTOW dudes are just toxic women haters. They have some kind of fucked up unresolved issues with women but it's all couched in some self-justifying logic.
Personally I'm just a lazy, irresponsible, and selfish person, so I think a life of relationships and children is not appropriate for me, so I don't pursue those things. That does not appear to be the case for most of the men who adopt the label. There seems to be genuine hate there.
While I agree MGTOW is cringe, dating is initially a numbers game. I have way more matches in a densely populated area such as SF Bay area. Timing and luck play in to it as well, multiple people in my social circle would have dated me if they weren't LTR'd prior.
The thing is, you may dislike the takes but they are in response to a real problem normies don't think about or would have any advice to give.
The solutions may be seen as bad or the takes as not good, but the problem still is very real, and for many people bad solutions are better than no solutions or the advice people give that doesn't work at all. Things like this should alert you to the fact something is wrong, not make you recoil from all the bad people.
I totally acknowledge and sympathize with people (nerds) who strugge with finding love and sex. I don't recoil, I was a similar situation as a teenager. My point is mostly that it's far from a global population wide phenomenon. Plenty of people are having sex - it's alive and well - and it's not really going out of fashion would be my clarified expanded argument.
My feminine instincts should have kept me out of here.
Turns out that despite all my achievements and failures, despite all my joys and pains, despite all my loves and losses, despite everything in my mind and body that makes me 'me', I've ever only truly been motivated by the desire to find a strong provider and reproduce before my eggs expire.
"Oh, but not you, you're different" - hears every women in a male-dominated field at some point or another. Nope, I'm not. No different brain-chemicals, no differently testosterone. Not in denial of my gender identity nor my sexuality. Just a plain old human slob like the rest of you.
The fact that commenters are just taking the author at their word is something else that makes me want to read HN less.
There's one claim about the amount of sex people may or may not be having, GRANDPAS HAD MORE ACTION IN THEIR TIME, but it is totally unqualified in any real way. Today's Grandpas could have been born in the 80s-90s... What time are we actually talking about?
The next sentence talks about boomers having more kids, and the next sentence assumes they only had marital sex. If that's the only evidence given for having sex, then this is nothing more than a thinly veiled think piece from the religious right (and the subsequent casual racism doesn't help), and I fail to see how that meets any of HN's standards, either.
Obesity epidemic. I mean, when so many people are that unattractive, it's not exactly rocket science why we're having less sex.
EDIT -
The number of replies by people in denial that being horribly out of shape and having excessive body fat isn't related to attractiveness and sexual enjoyment is... well not surprising. Though it is indicative of how in denial our infantilizing culture is and how effectively it enables people to live out slothful, narcissistic, and self-destructive lifestyles, while blaming others for not accepting them.
Attractiveness is relative, we adjust our standards all the time. Also, history has shown that we, collectively as a species, will have sex with everything we can.
Now, obesity might possible lower sex drive, but that would be a completely different mechanism.
The obesity epidemic is also a significant contributing factor. Fat reduces testosterone levels, endurance levels, makes it harder to maintain an erection, and directly steals length off the base of the penis. Combine fat men with fat women and a lot of positions are effectively untenable due to length, flexibility, and obstruction issues. Fat sex is just worth way less effort than fit sex. I know this first-hand.
Specifically the avoirdupois pound is used in the United States, which is 0.45359237 kg, except if you weighting precious metals, then sometimes the troy pound is used, which is 0.3732417216 kg.
These threads are always fun, because they often say more about us commenters than the subject matter.
Personally, I find the article's supernatural stimulus theory compelling.
Sex takes a lot of time if you aren't being selfish about it. It's also boring, compared with other forms of entertainment and creative pursuits, pornographic or not.
I'm not sure this is all that new, either. Jokes about the declining frequency of sex after marriage have been around for longer than I have. Maybe we're just hitting that wall sooner as the entertainment that we fall asleep to becomes more compelling.
If you do find sex to be the most fulfilling part of your life, it might be worth asking where that sense of fulfillment comes from. It's probably a "who", not a "what".
Right. If its the only entertainment one ever has it could get boring. But its far more entertaining that... Most other forms of entertainment. That being said it shouldnt be the most fulfilling part of ones life.
There's a whole lot of real estate between "most fulfilling part of your life" and "boring".
If you find sex boring, you probably need to take a look at yourself or maybe find a different partner. Sex is rarely mind-blowingly great after your first few times but I can't say I've ever been bored by it.
Could be a way of coping with the fact that they never had good sex. Sex can be pretty terrible, awkward and not fun at all if you happen to be with the wrong partner that night.
95% of Tinder swipes by women are passes compared to 47% for men. Women tend to date up. Online dating apps are rigged for men. These apps are search engines optimized to match women with the top 5% of men. These apps are designed for women. Being average or even above average will almost never result in a date. Tinder was designed like a slot machine which will ruin your self-esteem from constant rejection but your hope of a large reward will keep you going for ages. You will have a much higher success rate as an average guy simply with a completely cold approach. That is how bad online dating is for men.
As an example, a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate. Out of 290 matches he will send 87 messages and receive 12. 191 matches will never result in a message. Of the 99 messages 31 will be left on read or never even opened the initial message, resulting in 68 conversations. 40 of these women ghosted him, and our subject gave up on 17 of them. Ultimately this resulted in getting 11 phone numbers. These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates and 8 gave up on texting, declined the dating offer, or our subject simply gave up on them. All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term. It was a complete waste of time. Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are less than very appealing if they use these online platforms.
The sad thing about this particular disenfranchised social group is the disenfranchisement is re-enforced by the group. Contrast with other support groups that help their members learn how to live a healthy and fulfilling life while coping with or managing whatever disenfranchised them.
I would not sooner hook up with a gang of Christians than incels. Some of us are just better off with smaller groups aligned by positive interests rather than a sense of collective victimhood.
@shadowgovt I agree that many communities labled as such engage in self-destructive behavior. It may even be psychologically similar to the mentality of a suicide bomber.
i'm not sure i would compare a person coached to despair so hard that they would sacrifice their life to a person seduced by their cope club into staying in the cope club.
I don't know. I will speculate that they will go on dates with attractive men but because the top tier of men by appearance attract so many women there is little incentive to stay in a long term relationship for the man. If this is true then there is a very narrow middle ground between the extremes which could explain why fewer meaningful relationships are formed via online dating relative to a cold approach.
My understanding is that average women get a lot more matches and messages, but start about the same number of conversations. The filtering step just happens later
80% are not struggling with women. Most dating frustration is due to unrealistic expectations and a lack of effort. Some of the ugliest men I know have gotten married and have maintained relationships because they put in the effort to be interesting, listened to their SOs, found common interests, kept up with personal hygiene, and maintained the relationship long-term... which includes both sharing time together and giving each other space.
Are their SOs conventionally attractive? Not really, but I think their intimacy with their best friend makes up for it.
Speaking as not the most attractive guy in the world, and also a prior user of dating apps.
I don't think it's as one sided as you make out. Yes women probably want to trade up, but so do men but then if you actually want a relationship those things aren't really important so it's more a case of filtering the dross to find someone who actually wants a relationship. I'm not sure that would be easier as an 'attractive' male or female, your still going to get all the dross.
To add to your 1 data point, I'm currently in a long term relationship with someone I met online.
I'll second this comment- I'm definitely not in the top quartile of men in terms of attractiveness but on Hinge I regularly get dates, in no small part to being able to write messages when liking. Tinder and Bumble are meat markets, definitely, but Hinge (and probably others, I haven't tried that many more) do work with some effort put into crafting a thoughtful introduction message.
Jumping on here too.
It's a lot of work, and can feel demoralizing.. but at the end of the day I go on way more dates than I ever did without apps.
I attribute it to being able to display more about myself in a quick snapshot for women to peruse. Rather than just see my average face, they get the sense from my profile that I am interesting.
Plus one to this. I think it's both true that the app-based dating world is demoralising and heavily biased towards a privileged minority of users and that the pre-app world was even worse.
Apps that introduce scarcity are the best at matching. Bumble and Hinge only let you "heart" three people a day(unless you pay). Certainly as a woman there is a sense of scarcity in cold approaching. An attractive woman may have one man flirt with her and ask her on a date once per day.
I had to delete Bumble as the app repeatedly told me a photo of myself wasn't me, meanwhile I could upload a black square and it would take it days to flag it.
Get of these apps.
I think many men who use apps, do so because they are too afraid to approach a woman they find attractive if the situation is appropriate.
They don't bite, if you make a move with enough respect and confidence.
In my opinion while convenient, they should be last resort.
They are only worth using as a man if you are ranked in the top 10% of superficial appearances. Those guys are going on dates with different women daily with these apps. If you don't believe me look up any YouTube video going undercover on Tinder masquerading as an attractive man.
The thing is Tinder has 75 million active users. If we assume 75% of these active users are men, and only the top 10% of men will reliably match, approximately 51 million men are gambling their time away (75×.75×0.9=50.625)
While I don’t disagree that it’s probably hard for your average straight guy to get a date on Tinder, I encourage you to stop thinking about attractiveness as something objective that everyone agrees on.
There’s no such thing as a 1-10 scale everyone falls on. We all have types, and sometimes those types run counter to the mainstream definition of “attractive”.
The trick is to figure out what type you are, and try to become the best version of that.
There were some really interesting analyses presented by a dating app several years ago (I don't remember which; they had a blog and I'm worried it's now buried outside of Google's apparent time window). One of the most interesting things was that there was a mismatch between men and women in interest versus openness and confidence. I don't remember the details, but I think the problem was something like women were more interested in a wider range than you'd think, because they were more afraid to approach/make contact with men they were attracted to, and men were more picky about attractiveness but also more assertive about contacting women. The net result of it all was that there were these attractiveness ranges that were being neglected not because of attractiveness per se but because of complicated dynamics in confidence of approaching at different levels and how different genders on average acted on perceived attractiveness.
The analyses were like gender x attractiveness x willingness to approach x receptiveness to being approached. It looked like all four variables interacted at some level.
Maybe it wouldn't generalize and maybe I'm remembering it incorrectly but it was something like that.
I am willing to approach a woman I find attractive if the situation is appropriate. Unfortunately, most situations you come across attractive women are rarely appropriate. You end up having to go to events and things you don’t normally do just to gain exposure to women. It is a miserable reason to participate in these things when your only interest is in the women, not the event or hobby. And often the things you really want to do are of little interest to attractive women.
Back in the day, we used to call participating in new things you might not enjoy on the off chance that you would either learn something or meet somebody interesting "living."
I'm not sure when that changed, but the comments in the thread don't suggest to me it changed for the better.
> You end up having to go to events and things you don’t normally do just to gain exposure to women.
That's how it was for a long time. And, IMHO, it was not a bad setup.
I certainly would not call it a miserable reason to participate in those events. For example as a youth I went to dances (which, not knowing how to dance felt very uncomfortable), "intellectual" movies and classical concerts (which, for a small-city oaf who only thought about science, were way out of depth), but looking back I think I got a very good return on the time I spent on those.
Maybe it’s good if you’re just looking to rail some ass but what if you do find someone you like but now they will only be with you if you keep doing those things you don’t care about? Are you supposed to just live your whole life that way. No way. Not sustainable.
> Get of these apps. I think many men who use apps, do so because they are too afraid to approach a woman they find attractive if the situation is appropriate.
Yes. I couldn't agree more. Spent 2-3 frustrating years on Tinder without much success. At the start of the pandemic, I was done with being alone in my apartment and decided to try to approach women on the street. My takeaways:
1. Heart rate goes over 130 (according to the Garmin smartwatch)
2. It's **much** more fun to be rejected. Instead of being ignored, you get cool stories like me asking "Hey, you look nice. Would you like to chat?" and getting as response "Uhm... No, I'll continue walking".
3. Get inspiration/courage from watching lots and lots of YouTube videos from people who do nice approaches. I personally liked ThatWasEpic a lot. See for example https://youtu.be/cj9tvIFcUeU.
4. It's much more effective in my case. I'm with my girlfriend for 2 years now and she was the 6th person that I approached... I'm not kidding. After years of Tinder.
So, delete dating apps and go out and talk to people.
>Get inspiration/courage from watching lots and lots of YouTube videos from people who do nice approaches. I personally liked ThatWasEpic a lot. See for example https://youtu.be/cj9tvIFcUeU.
And if the cops show up then what? I couldn't get them to show up for a blatant hit and run in Texas or assault in Washington D.C. If you are lucky enough for a cop to show up do you think a man will stick around waiting for them to show up? Do you think cops will pursue in these instances? Have you ever called the police? Do you know what the response time is for the type of report you are filing? Even in the most wealthy countries in the world the police won't take you seriously if you tell them "this man is talking to me, creeping me out, and scaring me"
I don't know where you live but in my country it's not illegal to talk to strangers.
If you follow her around, especially after being asked to leave her alone, then we're getting into harassment territory. But if she calls the cops because you talked to her, she's 100x more crazy than you are creepy.
I've been using Hinge for the past year and half with a good bit of success, I can regularly go on 1-3 dates per week and have managed to keep that consistency pretty much all year.
IMO success comes down to 3 key things: profile, conversation and managing expectations.
First your profile, take high quality photos and weave in a story about your life in there. Guys think that it's the shirtless 6 pack that will get dates and while that's true, what I found is you have to build an "attractive lifestyle" through your profile. All my photos are of me doing things, on boats, outside, etc and all my prompts are things like "We should go kayaking together" and stories about travel. It's not one thing on my profile, it's the entire thing that builds a persona of a person that likes going outside alot and traveling, women find that very attractive in my experience.
Second is the conversation. You have to get good at actually "closing" a girl on a first date. There's a ton of "science" that guys will spew but it comes down to practice. The first couple of girls you talk to you will probably fuck it up, keep going and you will get better. My strategy here is to talk "lifestyle", where are you traveling, what shows have you seen, and NEVER EVER EVER BRING UP SEX.
Finally it's managing expectations. Most of these girls "fall through" not at the matching/conversation stage, but after the first couple of dates. Most of the time it's not something either person did, rather us realizing that we are just not right for each other. At this stage it's very easy to get bitter, the key is to keep going and not get bitter, and understand that if you're going to be playing the "online dating game", you're going to get a shit load of rejections.
At this point I do not even consider the "1st date" to be a real "1st date", rather I consider it to be a magic "0 date" that only applies to online dating. Usually on a first day you've already had one interaction with that person to figure out that they are worth going out with; however, with online dating you don't have that. So I consider the first time we meet to be more of a screener date, don't expect to go home with the girl, don't even expect a kiss, just make sure you like them and think if you would like to see them again. For these dates I usually go to a coffee shop mid-day, if it goes well we can schedule a longer dinner/activity date, but if it goes off the rails you can cordially end the date in about 15 minutes.
> I can regularly go on 1-3 dates per week and have managed to keep that consistency pretty much all year.
The difficulty for most men is getting those 1-3 dates per week, not the follow-through. As much as you might want to attribute your success to your charm and conversation, even getting a match per week, let alone enough to turn into 1-3 dates, is the barrier. And anyone who's getting 1-3 dates per week is likely going to be able to find a relationship if they're looking for one after a couple months.
Quality of pictures and persona certainly plays a role, but there are immutable traits that apps prioritize that radically reduce the amount of inbound interest. Getting off the apps as suggested in the parent comment is the only real way to deal with that.
In fact, it gets repeated so frequently in threads/topics like this one, that I wonder if the true origin of this "statistic" is in fact some of the... more interesting corners of Reddit/4chan.
Reading stuff like this makes me really glad that I married my first girlfriend.
We've been married for over 10 years now. She was really out of my league.
I did compromise on many things including age gap (she is older), past baggage and the fact that I have to let her win every argument and do everything she says but I'm glad because she was the opportunity of my life and I took it and I've never been so lucky since about anything since.
If you don't mind me asking, what are some things you like that you feel make it worth being with this person? (since you mentioned past baggage and having to 'let her win every argument' - that doesn't sound too nice)
Good looks and strong character. Also, we are comfortable to tell each other everything.
Also, it helps that she has a very unusual taste in men and I happen to meet her requirements.
It used to be difficult when we started dating but now not so much. She keeps getting better over time. She just can't control her emotions when things get heated. I'm basically the opposite; it's easy for me to detach from my emotions and take a step back.
With such a dismal acceptance rate there is no point in swiping left as a man yet men will still on average swipe left about 50% of the time.
To throw another wrench in the process, swiping excessively to the right may further derank your profile, causing a positive feedback loop. It's an insane system.
Because it hardly takes more than 2-3 seconds to swipe, and there were so few matches you couldn't probably waste too much time on handling them, it looks like about 5 hours of work gets you 1 date. I think it's more than OK. A date itself takes more time and more money. This is efficient.
Went nowhere in the sense: did not result in sex? Then it's certainly something the guy was doing wrong, the girls are going for Tinder dates specifically with that goal. The OP said they they "did not result in anything serious", so i assumed it meant "no relationship", but this is simply not what Tinder is for. Yes i know a lady who built relationship from Tinder, but she had to do about 500 dates over 3 years go be able to pick the right guy, it was exhausting and not an efficient way to do it for sure.
Spending 15 hours to get 3 hookups is good. One could do more swipes to get more, spending proportionally more time, if the city they live in is good enough (and yes Tinder is a numbers game so it works for guys only in big cities)
While I agree that the matching experience is completely different for men and women, I think (many) women find them just as disappointing (and abusive) as men. Tinder pressures women to expose themselves to strangers who primarily are looking for sex and will just swipe if they aren't satisfied.
Is there even anybody who wouldn't be positively affected by some limitation on sexualised content and online dating?
I completely agree with you. It can be difficult to find meaningful long term relationships on Tinder for women as well. There is no denying that. I think the chances are best with a cold approach or a warm introduction.
But many women on Tinder and Bumble aren’t looking for a relationship. When I fill in the “Looking For” parameter with “Relationship” instead of leaving it blank on Bumble, my incoming like count would drop by 40% percent. When I’d remove that parameter, my likes would go back up.
Well not completely wrong, this is a very pessimistic take.
> You will have a much higher success rate as an average guy simply with a completely cold approach
This is where I think you're wrong.
First, I'm probably never going to cold approach in public and neither are most men I know. It's not a matter of "growing a pair", it would require a personality change or being disingenuous.
Second, cold approach is a terrible way to meet someone. It's like a tinder swipe where both parties have only 1-2 photos and no profile. Dating like this is a strict needle and haystack approach to finding a compatible partner.
> These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates
Before apps I was at 1-2/year. Now 1-2/week is possible, though time and energy keeps me at 1-3/month.
I liked OkCupid a lot more than Tinder. You could write more about yourself and personality played more of a role in matching. I had an ex out of OkCupid. Tinder on the other hand values looks over everything and Bumble feels like LinkedIn dating. A pessimistic part of me feels like people are optimizing their personalities and lives to be Tinder or Bumble successful. Focusing on cool photos, looks and having a nice job title over having a personality or unique values.
As a guy, OkCupid was pretty much a complete waste of time for me. The only date I readily remember going on, the woman showed up 1.5 hours late for lunch, absolutely reeked of flower perfume, and brought up astrology as a topic in a non-flirty way. Oh, there was also a woman with a toddler that was ready for me to be her baby's daddy by the 3rd date.
I dug up some SLR photos of me with buzz cut hair and a nice shirt, and tried out Tinder. I actually went out on some quality dates once in a while. It was even then still a time sink, and after thinking through the algorithm a bit, I started just blindly swiping right. A month or so later I was in a relationship with my eventual wife.
I wonder what number of suicides each year can be attributed to disenfranchisement on dating apps. They can rob an above average man of his self esteem, self worth, and self value from past accomplishments and cause depression.
75.8% of Android Tinder app users are male and 24.2% are female. (Tankovska, 2021)
By 2023, the number of dating app users in the US is forecast to reach 25.7 million. (Tankovska, 2021; Kats, 2020)
Just imagine the scale of the psychopathology if 17 million of these men are essentially living in a casino in just one country.
If these dating apps are used by a large group of women to date a comparatively tinier group of men, then it makes no sense for men to even bother unless they're part of that small group of men that gets all the attention.
Likewise, unless these women plan to date for the rest of their lives and never settle down, they can't all end up marrying that small group of men, so they will end up marrying "down".
Then the strategy becomes clear: ditch the dating apps and look to meet women who are ready to settle. Easier said than done, sure, but it sure looks like dating apps are useless to all but the top percentile of men, so why bother?
I'm not saying that in the sense of "10% of some gender has sex with 90% the other gender due to [tinder/bumble/hinge]", but rather that in my countries - dating apps have become the de-facto way to hook up with others. And these apps have sort of redefined that scene - mainly because women have pretty much endless choices, but also because the opposite is absolutely not true for most guys on these apps.
With that said, the old ways are still working. People do go out and meet people, but I think most of my peers (late 20-somethings to early 30-somethings) mostly use a bunch of different dating apps for that initial screening. You are exposed to people that you'd NEVER meet in the more traditional sense.
Also, as other people have mentioned - there are more options for entertainment today - even for poor people / those in the lower classes.
Sex toys are also becoming way better and more advanced for all sexes. If your _only_ goal is to chase an orgasm, lots of modern toys will give you a better shot at that than some random hookup.
> You are exposed to people that you'd NEVER meet in the more traditional sense.
I’ve never used a dating app, but I’m curious about this. My assumption has been that people filter pretty heavily on politics and religion, which are less advertised in person. Meeting people at a party or through social activities seemed to moderate people’s views long term because an initial attraction could lead to encounters with really different sorts of personalities and backgrounds and counter reinforcement of naive views of the world.
For instance, more couples used to realize their votes cancelled out, so they would make a deal to just stay home and have sex instead of heading the the polls.
I'm not sure what your age/location is, but as a young American, young people filter for politics and religion in person just as fast as they do on a dating app. It is considered that compatible political and religious views are table stakes for a serious (non-hookup) relationship.
For example, in my extended friend-aquaintance group, there's not a single young woman who would consider dating a conservative. Obviously conservative women exist, I have seen many on dating apps, the point is that the natural social circles have already formed strong bubbles such that hanging out let alone dating outside the tribe is unheard of.
I'm not really complaining about this either, I'm not going to get along with a conservative in a normal sort of idle chatter situation. We could work or play a sport or videogame together but beers aren't going to be enjoyable once they start talking about wokeness poisoning the country.
> For example, in my extended friend-aquaintance group, there's not a single young woman who would consider dating a conservative. Obviously conservative women exist, I have seen many on dating apps, the point is that the natural social circles have already formed strong bubbles such that hanging out let alone dating outside the tribe is unheard of.
This is also a recent "feature", at least in the USA. My older extended family (parents, aunts, uncles) have political views all over the map, including between married couples, and it's no big deal. Back when they all got together, people weren't so much wrapping their entire identities into their political views. It was more taboo for a Protestant to marry a Catholic than for a Democrat to marry a Republican. Today, it seems people have replaced their religion with their political party, to the point where they consider "the other side" to be totally off-limits for dating or even friendship.
I've got friends on both sides and it just seems so ridiculous to me, but I guess tribes gotta tribe.
it seems the country has grown less tolerant of intolerant political philosophies (ones which directly attack people, like saying they should have fewer rights, or die, etc.)
IMHO, that has been a result of said philosophies pushing harder than ever on said viewpoints, angry that yelling them louder is failing to convince most people they don't suck
> You are exposed to people that you'd NEVER meet in the more traditional sense.
On one hand, this is great! Unfortunately, text conversations between strangers who's only cues are a handful of photos and snippet of text are miserable.
Im almost sure if I had met someone I've met in dating apps in more traditional environments, I'd at least have more friends.
Can this be quantified somehow? Show some evidence people in some place that has been studied are having sex less often now or in the recent past compared to some more distant past?
I spent about 20 minutes trying to find some series of historical surveys somewhere, and meanwhile 65 comments popped up with their own personal beliefs on why people are having less sex, but none of those comments and the article itself don't present any actual evidence that people are having less sex. What they do show is people, at least in the US and most OECD nations, are having fewer lifetime children. But that is clearly explainable by widespread availability and use of contraceptives and protected sex or even by the increasing popularity of anal sex. It doesn't require that people not have sex at all.
I'm not saying this claim is wrong necessarily, but if this is going to be discussed, shouldn't we have some evidence allowing us to quantify to what extent there has actually been a decrease, where this has happened, and over what span of time it has happened?
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[ 3.7 ms ] story [ 369 ms ] threadBack in my dad's days, they were poor so the only entertainment options in their free time was drinking cheap home made alcohol, dancing and sex, while now we have gaming, Netflix, tic-tok, porn, traveling to the infinite Instagramable places around the world, plus the grind of keeping up with spiraling living and real estate costs, which IMHO, is the real bummer here.
Also, adult dating and meeting people for the post-college working professionals, has largely moved from clubs/bars/the office to online dating apps, or lonely depression in your apartment, eating or drinking your feelings away, for those without success in the WFH, remote-everything, online dating world. Especially with the lockdowns.
When I was younger I wanted it badly enough that I did stupid things like that but I can understand why people like me are in a tiny minority.
Combine that with the value extraction from rent/debt (everyone has to own a car and since they probably can't afford to just buy one most are in debt over it) and no one can afford sex.
The awful part of all this is that young people blame women. Women are just the messengers.
The reason people buy instead of build is that the house is already there, whereas building anew takes a lot of time.
As interest rates grow, it becomes more expensive to do so, and waiting starts paying off.
But inflation is still high in spite of the high interest rates. And then, maybe the central banks will overshoot the interest rate, which will lead to another crash...
Other than that, living in a walkable area has its advantages, and codes are much stricter in high densities, so you can't build.
>The awful part of all this is that young people blame women.
I don't want to blame women in particular, but from personal anecdotes, women in particular place huge importance on a guy having his own car and place, despite both being massive wastes of money here and actively hurting one's ability to get housing later. The opposite, not so much. This in a country where even rent is now mostly a dual-income market.
You can see their role as messengers of the truth pretty often. I saw this one video that I thought was pretty great where a group of three women were out. The videographer/interviewer had the two friends call up the first's boyfriend and ask to "hang out" behind her back as a sort of joke. The first woman then freaked out, not at her boyfriend for wanting to cheat but at her friends for showing it. If you watch carefully this sort of thing happens pretty often.
This is a phenomenon in most of young generation US and EU too. Both housing and the ability to get on with someone are far cheaper and easier in Tokyo in particular, than most metropolises in the developed world. If that doesn't tell you there's more going on than "just your own place bro", I don't know what will. If women are continuously taught and telling each other that a guy must have their own place or they are bad / deadbeat, the entire thing becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. Given our species as a whole has been procreating with less for most of our existence, I'm more eager to place my bets it's a cultural phenomenon rather than "biologically hardwired".
>You can see their role as messengers of the truth pretty often.
You can just as well say men are "messengers of truth" because they don't want to marry single moms. The only thing you're showing is that their words mean jack compared to their actions, as is the case with every human being under the sun.
Yup. It flips when everyone gets older.
As far as I know, people moved out either when they married, or when they went to a university in a different city. Around 1990 I knew one guy who had a job and still lived with his parents, and I thought that was odd (he spent all his money on fancy audiophile equipment).
The situation was bad. It wasn't legal to rent.
> People in their 20s having their own digs is, I think, a decidedly American phenomenon. In most of the poorer parts of the world (including, for example, Central and Eastern Europe), 30+ years ago younger crowd managed to have sex just fine, using dorm rooms, snatching time while parents were away, etc. My 2c.
is true then. It's only talking about the situation in the poorer parts of the world and not elsewhere, and gives CEE in 1980s as an example.
I am 29 and was finally able to purchase my first home. I am one of if not the only person in my large friend group to purchase a home without assistance from parents
If you think people in their 20s are buying homes and starting families en-masse well I've got bad news for you
> People in their 20s having their own digs is, I think, a decidedly American phenomenon. In most of the poorer parts of the world (including, for example, Central and Eastern Europe), 30+ years ago younger crowd managed to have sex just fine, using dorm rooms, snatching time while parents were away, etc.
I think them not having their own digs is much more an American phenomenon, at least recently. Though houses have gotten ridiculously expensive in a lot of countries. Still, back when I was in my 20s, it was quite common in Europe for people to at least rent their own place, and possibly even buy a small apartment. I've got an entire branch of my family where everybody married at 21 and moved out at that age. In my parents' time, it was not much different, though they did live in my grandparents' massive house briefly after their marriage, and bought their first home when they were 34. But it was definitely common for people to move out of their parents' home when they got married. Once going to university got more common, that became the time they moved out.
Additionally, those of us who grew up in the 80's had the absolute fear of AIDS drilled into us. IMO, the AIDS epidemic blunted the libido of at least one generation.
By the time I was a teenager that fear had subsided, but that’s was a pretty dramatic thing to hear at a young age.
Looking back at the 80s/90s AIDS hysteria now, it was the same as COVID hysteria. Same people even, guys like Fauci. They were telling people you could get AIDS from drinking water fountains and similar crap. No wonder people were crazy about it.
Incidentally the whole concept of a virus that primarily targets gay people doesn't make much biological sense, does it? Nothing the size of a virus can detect your sexuality, nor is there any evolutionary reason to select for such a thing even if it could. That's why the 'experts' predicted it would quickly stop being primarily a gay disease. Nope. That rather makes the theory that a lot of AIDS cases were driven by drug abuse more plausible, doesn't it, especially because this preference for gay men mysteriously vanishes in Africa.
At any rate, the public health community has pretty consistently and for a long time misled heterosexual people about the risks of any disease that's known to primarily affect the gay community. They're doing it again now with monkeypox. It almost exclusively affects gay men which is why the official CDC guidance is to - no kidding - hold socially distanced gay sex parties. But to listen to the early announcements about this you'd not have suspected this reality. There is of course no question of the state enforcing any measures against the at-risk community to "crush the curve", like banning pride week sex parties: the LGBT community is special. For the rest of us, we get lockdowns. For them, nothing. It's this sort of thing that destroys the credibility of public health (not that they had any left after COVID). It's just one long string of ideological driven "science".
As one of those people, well, it didn't stop me. But the terror was real.
Did you mean "Platonic friends"?
Although it sounds kinda nice to have Plutonic friends as well, since they'd have yachts and what not.
I wonder if people are simply more selective about what they want in a partner.
Which sort of lines up with the polarisation we see in other aspects of society.
And so they go into dating with much higher expectations and less open-mindedness.
The weirdest thing is I don't remember what I used to talk to my friends about when I was in high school. We didn't have much shared media to talk about (e.g. periodic TV shows people obsess about today). None of us so much picked up a newspaper at the time so current events were out. None of us had that many specific interests and the interests we had weren't shared. But somehow we spent hours talking about something. I wish I could be a fly on the wall of my prom table to just take in what was discussed.
If you Google “rt <name of movie>” you will get the rating too.
It makes me think that the prom table would be full of nonsense, expletives, and talking about women, but isn't that what you'd normally expect?
Podcasts are similar to books though, you have to dig through a bit of garbage to find one that works for you. Here's my list:
- crime in sports
- Linux unplugged
- software engineering radio
- the knowledge project
- coinsec
- persona
- ten percent happier
- quanta podcast
- physics world weekly
- ologies
- darknet diaries
- stuff you should know
- the joy of why
- fall of civilizations
- smartless
- money talks
- planet money
- small town murder
- offensive security
- the journal
- programming throwdown
- timesuck
- Conan O'Brien needs a friend
- philosophize this
- against the odds
- levar Burton reads (no longer running)
- curiosity daily
- science weekly
- future of journalism
- wtf
- broken record
- idea cast
- swindled
- malicious life
- views room
- behind the bastards
- the exchange
- stuff to blow your mind
And for the "junk" I listen to just about every comedian podcast that exists: Bill Burr, Bobby Lee, Chris destefano, Stavros!, Tom Segura, (this list goes on a while...)
What is this "sex life" you speak of? (haha).
On a serious note they helped me learn to be content with being alone or at least not worry about "looking" for it via dating apps, and I would say not playing that game (dating apps) is what is "ruining" my sex life (or lack of).
Along the same lines, I also came to theorize that books that were written to be read don't make good audio candidates. Yes, doable. But I found lectures and speeches to be better suited for listening (as it was their original and intended medium).
That said, my gut impression is that people are less sociable and less socialized than we used to be. I believe we simply spend less time around other people, and we are less adept at building relationships. It’s easier to remain sexually, socially, financially, and resource independent from other people - so we do and sexual relationships become less frequent.
If you are fully immersed in your raw, human sexuality - that’s great. For many, sex and sexuality is more nuanced than mere fucking.
It's basically a few pixels on mobile.
You can just say Cum Town ;)
I heard in an interview that 50 years ago, people used to basically used to fall in love with heir neighbours and coworkers. Modern dating means browsing hundreds of other people in your city like they're products on a store shelf, always with the feeling there might be someone better just a couple swipes away.
I find there's actually a lot of success to be had online dating, if you just know how to talk to people and learn about them! It seems like such a tautology but I think it really is that simple.
Any explanation of the shittiness of straight dating apps has to center gender norms and roles.
For every relationship I ever had, I had the opportunity to observe them, get to know them in person, maybe flirt, sometimes be friends. Sometimes for weeks. Sometimes for years, without any express intent. With online dating you’re both saying upfront that you’re evaluating each other as dating material, knowing only the fluff they wrote about themselves, or I take it with this generation only what they look like. All that will probably always feel too weird for me.
This has been the story of my life. I think there is a certain type of person - physical attractiveness is part of it, but charisma is even bigger – who can "get away with" flirting in unsanctioned spaces. It's a combination of being confident enough to break taboo, perceptive enough to read subtle interest cues, and being attractive enough for those interest cues to be non-zero.
I've tried to be that person from time to time, but it almost always breaks down on one of those axes, thus consigning most of my dating efforts to the soul-crushing grind of dating sites/apps.
I think the real unwritten rule is, don't flirt with someone unless you're reasonably confident that they'd like to be flirted with. Some people might be able to figure that out in a matter of minutes, and others might need to get to know someone over the course of weeks or months in a casual group setting to figure it out.
I am sorry to say, but I think people who believe flirting is not allowed probably have not put in the effort to be able to read social cues, don't have an aptitude for it, or never learned to flirt in a non-offputting way.
I think people have been dealing with rejection forever. Everyone has to start out awkward, and most people get over it.
Maybe that is one place where technology hurts us. Maybe 30 years ago, a young person would have tried and struck out, and then they would have gotten over it and tried again. Whereas maybe today people try and fail, and then they can retreat into video games and online communities, which offer a superficial sense of success or belonging without the same risk of direct rejection.
I agree that if you're charming and fun, flirting with strangers is pretty straightforward, and I especially agree with the point about getting to know people over a longer period of time before trying to gauge potential interest. Worst case, you get a cute friend!
That's totally true! But that's one thing about flirting, it can be very light and non-committal.
If she is being extra friendly, smiling a lot, and giving you a little extra eye contact, you can do the same and see how she responds. If she gives you a positive feedback, take it one step farther. If she gives you negative feedback, just forget about it no harm done.
Maybe she was smiling at you in the first place because she also doesn't know if she wants to flirt with you and she's testing the waters.
I think where people get into trouble is they see someone go from 0 to 1, and they jump straight to step 7 which comes off as aggressive and off-putting.
"Dad, you're old (in his 60s), and short (5'5")"
You're going to be filtered out of everyone's automated search.
But my Dad is funny and can talk to anyone. I kept telling him, OkCupid isn't your scene! Meetup.com is!
Unfortunately, he didn't listen to me
dating is a two way street. If the other party just gives one line answers and does nothing to try to move a conversation forward, then it just becomes a job interview. You can't just magically get someone to open up when they refuse.
It doesn't help that, at least from a guy's perspective, it seems about 80% of women are really just trying to get instagram followers.
Dating also becomes a problem once you finally meet. You will never be more interesting than the smartphone in front of the other person. That person has the entire world in their hand. You can't possibly compete with TikTok or Tinder. You go to the restroom and the other person will go swiping on Tinder.
I really do believe humanity is doomed. Like really, actually, doomed. The internet is too much for our monkey brain.
These days they aren't even trying for of subscribers or ig followers, they just straight up put their cashapp in their bio. I have friends who have done that and made 100s of $ before their accounts got banned. And some didn't even get banned.
It's also true that a lot of people are on there but not realy to date. Like just to get compliments/validation. Not all girls either, just guys it doesn't work as well. Instead, a lot of us are on there just to look at/rate girls. At parties these days you will sometimes see a group of guys looking around somebody's phone "rating" girls on tinder.
Dating coworkers is now forbidden in many companies, especially if there are differences in hierarchy. In some countries it becomes a possible legal liability for the one in the higher position.
Some large organizations that require traveling even forbid dating the “local population” when deployed abroad.
I would have laughed if someone had told me that I'd be turning it on, but I frequently do. Basically whenever I'm not sure what to watch, I flip to that and throw on one of the channels.
The movie, The Big Short, was on heavy rotation about a year ago. Good movie. They have an entire channel dedicated to Narcos, so I'm basically fluent in Spanish now - well, "drug dealer Spanish", at least.
I had to stay once in an old hotel in a small town. It had an old CRT analog tv with analog cable. It brought back memories. Like the TV tuner changing channels really fast.
Fast channel surfing is something I hadn’t been able to do since switching to a digital tvs and digital cable about a decade ago.
Gossip, mostly. Talking about your peers, who said what, how terrible teachers are for making us actually do work, commenting on style or the lack thereof, etc. Also, while there were fewer TV series, they still existed. Star Trek, B5, Knight Rider, Airwolf, etc.
I think this is an illusion. When I check some films with awards (let's say "do the right thing", not a blockbuster but a well-known film) I cannot find them in any streaming service (maybe criterion collection). I can definitely think of tons of tv shows I cannot find on dvd, let alone on streaming platforms. Not even on torrent networks.
This idea that the internet has everything is fine for some topics (like programming), but I believe it does not apply to some contents, and films are one of them.
EDIT: grammar
You'd be suprised at the amount of males that want to have sex but just can't get any.
There is a serious case of looks inflation nowadays with Tinder etc.
Every time I broke up I was mildly welcoming some time for myself but never managed to be single more than a handful of weeks. And I don't consider myself particularly more attractive/interesting than everybody out there.
Perhaps I am reading too deep, but you make it sound like someone needs to make some great effort to meet someone else. No, just a slight hiccup in their daily routine can introduce them to another person whom has very similar, low energy interests. Think: Buzzfeed dating videos from 5 years ago.
See: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FzDFKJHczQ8
Really? Tell me where these people are! The vast, vast majority of couples I know just coast through life and sometimes they "hang out" and sometimes they take some photo and sometimes they partecipate in some friend's celebrations and so on and on. If they asked each other about their interest they would not have any.
Now the looks required for that have basically skyrocketed. Being kinda cute doesn't cut it nowadays. You have to be tall broad shouldered and have a decent career.
Pretty handy to make all the fault of "males" while never ask them what desires they have, what they want in the other person while constantly emphasize females' desires. Have we ever question women about their own standard? Are they too high? Are they what men want? Do they bring something on the table or it's the usual "I'm a passive princess: entertain me, jester!", because if it is I prefer porn, it usually doesn't ask to pay for a date.
Go on Tinder and see what you get.
Not just dating.
Not just sex.
Marriage.
Anecdotally, I myself and many otherwise healthy, sociable young men I know have pretty serious porn addictions. I really wish there would be more research done on the negative impacts of pornography, especially on young men and teens/pre-teens.
I know typically any anti-porn sentiment is met with "Oh you're just being a puritan", but the reality couldn't be further from the truth.
On social issues, I'm very liberal. Yet so much porn during my developmental years has done so much damage that as an adult I'm just now really understanding the full extent of it, and breaking that addiction is incredibly difficult
I haven't met many women into porn, probably because a one night stand is just a zero effort tinder swipe away, from the comfort of your pijamas in your living room.
As a man, you end up turning to porn or paying for sex, or drinking or doing drugs, to compensate the lack of intimacy in your personal life, as that just leads to depression and lack of any self worth.
When a porn addiction is developed before you hit your teens it's hard to blame a dysfunctional sex life on externalities.
What has changed is the availability of porn introducing an extremely low cost alternative to sex, reducing the impetus for making the effort to find a partner (relative to previous times). Maybe even reducing the impetus to putting in the effort to seduce an existing partner!
Of course, it is not uniform across all men of course. I suspect those who are able to attract/interact with partners more easily will opt to do that, and those that are not will opt for the easier, lower cost option (even though there may be other long term costs).
That makes intuitive sense, but is far from the reality. Many men, even in otherwise healthy relationships, prefer porn.
Again I really wish more data was collected on this but anecdotally I've seen hundreds on online discussions from both women who are concerned about their partner and declining sex life and from men who want to quit using porn to better service the needs of their partner.
Porn addiction is real, serious, and more common than you may think.
With porn, it is the brain making a cost benefit calculation that putting in the effort for the real thing is not worth the cost relative to cost/benefit ratio of porn.
As in do I make all the effort to get my wife in the mood, or do I open a website and be done with it. Or do I control my diet and exercise, or do I open a website and be done with it.
Brain scans show the pathways for porn addiction are very similar to those found in cocain and amphetamine addicts. Perhaps this is true for you, but don't discredit porn addiction as not a "real addiction" when it's an established fact that it is one on par with substance abuse.
-I want porn, because I carve intimacy
-I want to smoke, so I can relax or be seen as Y.
-I drink a lot of coffee because I dont have time for Quality Sleep.
The fact that these reasons exist doesn't make the addiction any less of an addiction. It's often a reason why rehab centers try to take a holistic approach and not only tackle the addiction, but the surrounding lifestyle choices that further enable the addiction.
It's not "addiction is a masked emotional needs problem" it's, "addiction is often accompanied by emotional needs problems". Subtly different, but different nonetheless.
I said nothing of the outcomes, though I wouldn't be so sure. We don't have any data on the outcomes of porn addiction. I wonder how many young men have committed suicide in large part due to their porn addiction, or how many have lost their jobs. It's certainly a non-zero number.
Not according to the American Psychological Association [1]
A brain scans showing a similar response to other pleasure stimula is far from "addiction".
GP has a valid point. Blaming porn for sex issues is an oversimplification of a very complex issue involving deep interpersonal dynamics.
[1] https://www.insider.com/guides/health/mental-health/porn-add...
I didn't blame porn alone, but I said I wouldn't discount it's contribution to the issue as GP did. I agree it's a complex issue.
Do you have data of this phenomenon?
>Again I really wish more data was collected on this but anecdotally I've seen hundreds on online discussions from both women who are concerned about their partner and declining sex life and from men who want to quit using porn to better service the needs of their partner.
You obviously know the answer to your question since I repeatedly stressed my lack of data and how it was anecdotal.
We don't have any data either supporting or debunking that claim, I only am repeating what I've seen play out hundreds of time in various digital spaces. Some phenomena just haven't been studied in good enough detail to have hard data in either direction. A lack of data for an assertion doesn't disprove that assertion, it just makes it temporarily unprovable.
I'm sure the majority of men in healthy relationship prefer sex with their partner to porn. I'm also sure there are a non-trivial amount who do prefer porn.
I think anecdotally you may be right. But preference is a very hard thing to determine. It's unfair to compare porn to sex the same way it is unfair to compare watching a sport to playing it. One requires very little effort, the other monumental effort comparatively.
Ah yeah, fair enough. My mistake.
Ive experienced the effects of porn addiction, and/or viewing from a young age, from both sides.
I have pretty niche tastes since i started watching in my very early teens, and though i find men very attractive its harder to finish with them.
Ive been with several partners who preferred porn to me. The latest had very, very unrealistic standards. They objectified my body, hard, and I swear their porn use affected their capacity for empathy. They said and did things that made me feel like a replaceable thing, they compared my to porn stars (and found me lacking).
They would collect massive amounts of porn and run off to use it multiple times a day… which wouldve honestly been fine, except for the fact that it did really affect their ability to connect with me. After theyd use porn their mood and empathy / behavior towards me would markedly change for the worse.
I am a fairly attractive, _very_ willing and attentive partner.
These experiences have honestly really damaged my self esteem and willingness to date.
I have also since stopped using porn a) to fix the first line and b) i cannot watch it without being reminded of my experiences with these men and their criticisms of my body.
1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/s.htm#sexualact... 2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm#numberlif... 3: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/sexual-fantasies-our-mispercepti... 4: https://bespokesurgical.com/2021/06/24/sexual-history-by-sta...
And yes, having _sex_ is only a swipe away for women. But having decent sex that you enjoy and is another matter altogether. And that's before thinking about safety.
If I was looking for reasons why fewer women seem to be into porn, I'd say it's because the vast majority of porn is explicitly made to cater to male desires.
For many of these "porn addiction" cases, there's more going on than just "he is addicted to porn and now he won't have sex with me". Communication is a two-way street and women are a little eager to play the 'passive princess who can do no wrong' without realizing most of society is training men to avoid making assumptions.
Not to go into too much detail, but I've had to seriously recalibrate my "respect women" upbringing to make my wife happy. And I'm not even talking sub/dom stuff or outright rape-fantasy things like I've heard tell of from my (somewhat shell-shocked) unattached and actively-dating friends.
Sex is weird.
But it's really hard to hear all day long from every source how terrible men are, and how we need to be gentler creatures.
And then a shocking percentage of women actually do seem to want you to be that animal they decry as soon as you get into the bedroom.
I've seen tons of "the media" contradicting your point, but I guess if you said "some people say this, others don't", your point wouldn't be as compelling
Whenever someone pretends that modern mass media is not overwhelmingly in favor of the current zeitgeist, it seems to me that person is either arguing in bad faith, or is startlingly naive. Finding one minute counterexample of a publication that no one has ever heard of does not imply an overall balanced media landscape. It would be as strange as arguing that western 'the media' doesn't support Ukraine over Russia; just absurdly incorrect to a cursory inspection.
yes, literally dozens, like fox, OANN, breitbart (I will happily continue to follow suit if you want to as well)
> Whenever someone pretends that modern mass media is not overwhelmingly in favor of the current zeitgeist
modern mass media is a product of the people, who determine the zeitgeist, so it is pretty unsurprising that the attitudes of media overall reflect the attitudes of people overall
similarly, we would obviously expect to see less content advocating extreme views that society largely rejects like "all abortion should be illegal", compared to content conforming with social norms
but let's get off this tangent and back on topic: whether you say "the media" or "media", my original response remains true: "media" says plenty to the opposite of what you claim it says, and you're simply cherry picking observations that fit your own narrative around "media" itself
but I guess "media says this sometimes, and sometimes the opposite" doesn't make for as compelling of a narrative
That's not to mention the onus of taking charge is still put onto men, while men are actively punished for making a mistake, and women tend to get off without social repercussions despite continuing to play passive. We're already seeing the cracks forming.
Do you expect any of this getting better if porn vanished overnight? If anything, it would get much worse.
Fuck it I’ll lead or be part of a crew to get on a space ship and maybe never come back. Being stuck at a laptop all day is so fucking boring now because work from home means I’d rather not.
I want to be out and about. Not stuck inside ALL day (along with everyone else).
We don't want them here, though, which is why they can't do it. If pre-contact America/Australia had strong passport controls, Europeans wouldn't have been 'venturing out to it', either.
Worst case scenario if I move across the Atlantic is that I don’t go bankrupt because I had a medical emergency. You know what? That doesn’t sound so bad.
My chances of going there are slim though so you're going to have to do it alone.
A one night stand is way way more risky for women in most ways whether with regard to the risk of being assaulted or catching STIs or unplanned pregnancy. On top of that, society heavily views sexually promiscuous women more negatively than the same behaviour in men. All of this means women can't treat no-strings sex as flippantly as men can and you shouldn't discount those risks and costs by saying sex is a swipe away for them. It is very much like if I were to say any man could get laid whenever they want by hiring a sex worker while ignoring the risks and costs involved.
These arguments also seem to ignore that the vast majority of women are not so universally attractive that getting on a dating site immediately results in a plethora of matches that they would want to have sex with (even ignoring my first point). If they lacked any standards and were willing to have sex with anyone yes it would be very easy to find a partner, but thats true for the vast majority of men as well.
The fact is most people, quite reasonably, only want to have sex with people they find attractive in situations where they feel safe, even when its only meant for physical pleasure, and this limiting factor greatly reduces the number of opportunities that are available regardless of the person's gender.
These arguments also don't fit with the real world statistics. In the US men on average have sex sooner than women[1] and have sex with more partners during their lifetime[2][3]. It differs by country and its possible to find studies and demographics where the more promiscuous gender switches, but the numbers never align with an assertion like "women don't like porn cause they can just go have real sex instead".
While its true a larger percentage of men consume porn, its very clear a large number of women do as well. You likely think you haven't met women that enjoy it because of stigma making them unwilling to discuss it openly. The biggest pornographic video site finds more than 1/3rd of their visitors are female[4].
Its also possibly because most discussions you see use a too narrow definition of "pornography". For instance, academic analyses often do not include types of pornography heavily preferred by women. When they do include things such as written erotica and not just images or video they find a majority (60%) of women enjoy porn[5].
And hopefully its clear I'm not trying to attack you personally. One study I came across while digging up the numbers found American men think women on average have 27 and men 21 sexual partners in their lifetime while the real numbers they found were 12 for women and 20 for men[3]. The perception that women have more sex is quite common and shared by a large number of men despite not being true. I simply hope my wasting an hour of my life writing all this up with citations will do a bit to change that.
1: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/s.htm#sexualact... 2: https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/key_statistics/n.htm#numberlif... 3: https://www.ipsos.com/en-uk/sexual-fantasies-our-mispercepti... 4: https://www.pornhub.com/insights/yir-2021 5:
Personally I would blame social media much more than porn, especially on young women and teens/pre-teens. Porn addictions, if such things exists (WHO is currently undecided on that fact), seems a minor issue compared to addictions caused by social media. Remove access to internet for a large group of teens and lets observe which kind of withdraws will firsts pop up.
Fewer men are sleeping with more women.
but assuming your hypothesis is correct, to what do you think that choice can be attributed?
If we observe that women are choosing from a smaller pool of men, one way to describe that would be that women turning into more tournament-like in their strategy for reproduction and away from pair bonding. Tournament and pair bonding strategies have both benefits and drawbacks, and both are related and possible influenced by perceived social status of potential mates.
>the cause of this can also be attributed to the choice of the women
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2017/09/has-the...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex...
I found 4Chan when I was maybe 11 or so and grew up on /b/ where I saw all manner of horrific deaths and shock porn.
Nowadays I don't really find the idea of porn interesting because I've seen so much of it.
I’m not against porn, but believe for some (many?) people it can develop into an addiction, and/or warp their view of normal bodies, and reduce their capacity to relate / be intimate / empathetic.
For some people, I think viewing porn is mostly harmless; for others, they are not able to consume it without negative effects on themselves and their potential partners…
I’m also very progressive, sex positive; i find its hard to discuss this with friends or strangers because theres such a stigma against decrying porn. It’s difficult to discuss with nuance.
And those "dating" apps can hardly be called dating apps in most cases. They're designed to mess with the underlying sexual dynamic of men and women. If they were meant for romance, they'd have more mechanisms in place to help strangers actually date and get to know each other. Instead, they're a meat market, and the sad thing is more and more people are growing up in a world where they know no different. If you think about it, dating apps have no incentive to try and get people to actually meet in real life. Not only does that raise the potential for liability, but that means fewer eyeballs on their product at any given time.
Tinder knows very well that their product is selling attention to women and the promise of sex to countless men they know have next to zero chance based on their looks alone. As OK Cupid was losing its position as a dating app, I remember them putting out an advertising campaign featuring the initialism "DTF", which tells you all you need to know. They might even still be doing it, for all I know. I remember it from billboards and posters in Santa Monica.
> I don't think tech or porn is the main culprit. It's that people now have way more entertainment options other than sex. Of course, a lot for those entertainment options are being driven by tech.
I don't buy this one bit. The number of entertainment options is correlative, but who has demonstrated that it's causative? Yes, there is a chance that the proliferation of entertainment options is the primary cause, but unless a double-blind study has or will be done to test whether the sex drive is actually in competition with entertainment, I have very sincere doubts.
Furthermore, the porn industry is in no way declining. If people were losing an instinctive interest in sex, why would they be watching porn? What if people actually want sex, but they are too ill equipped to obtain it IRL?
And we haven't even brought up declining androgen levels in males.
Sex isn't going out of fashion. If anything, we are hypersexualized. The goal of sex isn't merely to propagate genes, but to propagate selected genes. Our current environment allows us to select our mates to such an extent that even more people are seleced out of the gene pool for a variety of reasons. Either we're perpetually thinking we can do better, or that we're never good enough or are too ugly, or are totally clueless because Boomer and Gen X parenting have been a disaster.
This is analogous to how regular social networks actively encourage unreasonable maximally-controversial discourse because it maximizes engagement, to the detriment of rational discussion of social and political issues. If people can reach a solution to issues like tradition vs. personal freedom, abortion, guns, etc., then they might spend less time on social media debating them and trolling and fighting about them and social media engagement might decline.
As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort.
Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.
Yes. This is absolutely a fundamental problem not just with dating apps but with any business whose employees and/or customers have surpassed Dunbar's number. It's not so much a problem of money or capitalism as it is with the dehumanization of financial transaction.
> As far as porn goes, it's absolutely a substitute for sex for some people. It's less fulfilling but it's enough to get off and have the desire go away and it requires far less effort.
It is a substitute as far as it can surpass the cost/benefit of meatspace. If too many people are ill prepared to be self-reliant adults and attract the other sex, and thereby unable to be sufficiently attracted or aroused by their peers, then porn completely makes sense. The proliferation of isolation only further encourages porn use, as it does with any form of escapism.
But this is coming from the standpoint that I have which is that far too many adults from my generation onward are objectively less self-reliant and have more pathologies than their proximal ancestors. Not everyone agrees with this, but I know enough Millennials and have enough Gen Z and Alpha family members that my experience is informing me that said generations aren't destined for greater success than the previous.
My point being that I think if more people were socially functional and able to make themselves attracted to whichever sex(es) they are attracted to, porn might not be quite as normalized as it currently is. (it would still be normalized by virtue of the internet)
> Another thing about porn I haven't seen mentioned much in this thread is how unrealistic it is and how people raised with a lot of porn probably have really unrealistic ideas about what sex is like. If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.
I generally agree... it can set people up to have expectations that lead to disappointment and even personal failure that leads to poor self esteem, animosity, and lack of fulfillment.
I almost want sex-ed classes to find a way to teach about this, but that's a whole can of worms that I ultimately think would backfire and be a bad idea. My intentions are good, though. :)
However, I don't entirely agree with the use of the word "unrealistic." Putting aside the theatrics in porn, telling people that porn is unrealistic can give them the impression that their particular sexual interests are abnormal and can't be lived out in real life with consensual partners, which is by no means true. I'm not sure I know what the best alternative is, but there's got to be some way to communicate that. It's actually a very nuanced point of discussion, I think.
> If they try to literally act out porn in the bedroom with their partner, it's likely not to go that well. In some cases they might go right for things many partners won't be interested in or would only be interested in after establishing a lot of trust and a real relationship.
Yes. I think this is where parents (and unfortunately probably teachers of some kind) are going to have to grow the cajones to actually talk about these issues with their kids at an appropriate age. We can't pretend like we live in a world where young people can't watch explicit material online instantly and for free. The "birds and the bees" doesn't cut it anymore.
On a related note, I've found it interesting that apparently girls get way more sexual education from their mothers than boys do from their dads. My dad tried... not well, but he tried. And it was way too late. I already knew what he was trying to say by tip-toeing around the words. Most of the men I know have told me the...
Online dating apps which have a huge incentive to keep people on their site as long as possible too...
The bigger issue is that figuring out good matchings is a crapshoot and users' self-described desires and priorities aren't actually in-line with what will make them happy. Everyone wants someone hot (almost by definition), and so the hot people get a lot of interest: the ones actually interested in relationships quickly end up off the market, and those remaining are more than capable of soaking up all the available interest.
Be real.
I think the effect can be true without anyone having ill intent. The dating app companies are generally trying to make as much money as they can, which will indrectly lead to decisions that optimize for serial dating.
As a parallel I don't think Facebook is full of evil people who want to increase the amount of hate and anger in the world, but it does have a lot of people who just want to make money and encouraging negative reactions happens to be an effective way of doing that, so that's what we get.
I mean even OKCupid is being turned into Tinder, so it might not be so indirect after all.
Obesity was much lower and bodies were much healthier and more vigorous. Erectile dysfunction was much less common, and average serum testosterone levels were higher.
I guess it's uncouth to suggest that physical acts are more enjoyable with more physically attractive and capable populations, but I don't think it's something that should be discounted.
I have no doubt that self-reports of erectile dysfunction were probably less common at that time.
I will say that information about it was certainly less common, and the stigma associated to it was stronger and more prevalent.
> I guess it's uncouth to suggest that physical acts are more enjoyable with more physically attractive and capable populations
On "capable": Erectile dysfunction can be caused by low levels of testosterone, as well as sexual desire. However, sexual prowess doesn't orbit around the male penis as much as our fathers thought. That is but one dimension.
On the subject of attractiveness: I question that men with high levels of testosterone are actually more attractive to women. High testosterone has some obvious advantages (higher strength, bigger muscles, stronger sexual desire) but it also bring some things that are not so universally appraised (more body hair, less head hair, stronger body smell, mode violent behavior, less empathy). That group of traits, and the fact that we live in a more informed society, might be making high-testosterone males less attractive to women, overall.
Perhaps that is what is making the testosterone levels go down - the same thing that is making us taller: artificial selection. My (totally unverified) impression is that this is what happens in Japan. Most famous male Japanese actors tend to look "effeminate" to me, as an European. There seems to be very little "strong jaw, big muscles" amongst that group, compared to Europeans or Americans.
I believe Cicero, in one of his speeches, complained about women being into young clean-shaven men, and not the robust full-bearded patrician look.
I wonder if younger people know what it's like to go a week or two without orgasm. I don't know many teens/young adults, much less well enough to ask about sex culture. I came of age in the 2000s, when online porn was a thing, but not ubiquitous, not HD, and still taboo. I do know that deprivation of orgasm makes it that much better when it does happen, and it changes your mind in both increase of sexual drive, and for me, increase in the desire for true intimacy, rather than just an anxious need to get off. When I kick the habit, my interest in talking to women goes higher than normal, and not "simply" because I'd like sex - it's because my entire mind is changed to wanting intimacy and to meet people.
So ubiquity of porn and its normalization is a big factor in people not seeking true human contact.
I think that people are also becoming more and more shy/anxious in general, at least by my flawed observations. Between rapidly changing social cues/acceptable behavior, being constantly connected, etc., it is difficult for people to connect and disconnect appropriately.
I think about the pre-Internet era when people could maybe date or hook up, and if it didn't work, it was out of sight, out of mind. Now with social media, I see people staying connected despite falling out. Maybe out of curiosity, maybe thinking they can still be friends, but I think that the inability to have a clear head/fresh start makes things difficult.
At least in my area/life, there isn't a huge sense of community. It takes a lot of effort to find non-bar oriented things to do that has a decently high number of people attending, who are all interested in the same things, and where it's likely to find a person to date. Say what you want about religion, but church really does serve a valuable purpose when not used to direct people toward bigotry.
Gotta run to a meeting, this was a bit of a braindump, but the topic of human interaction and macro loneliness is an interesting topic, and a serious one that truly scares the shit out of me for my society and myself.
I certainly didn't when I was a teenager in the 80s, and I had zero access to porn or sexual partners.
Watching most people continue to be addicted to systems that take more than they give (social media) is difficult. And it affects the people around them deeply, too. It doesn't happen in a vacuum; the emotional un-presence is palpable. It is so common it feels very difficult to bring up.
Sex is beautiful, but I would always prefer a meaningful human relationship with common interests and good communications without sex over an sex-filled relationship without the rest. Or to put it simply: Love without sex is greater than sex without love. Prefarably both, but it is a thing two people need to want : )
Another way to consider this is that people find it easier to divert themselves than to exert themselves only to be disappointed. (Think of the universal pain of the characters in "Marty". [1])
Even though the cost to "view" people has been cheapened by technology, what we find is that disappointment remains the likeliest outcome.
The article is written for humour, but it is worth noting that although "sex" cannot go out of fashion, the illusions of Bernaysian manipulation [2] certainly can. And, as a society with a changing set of prevailing group behaviours, the delights of companionship can certainly be lost.
An enjoyable sexual relationship isn't just a matter of presenting (or hunting for) some pastiche of beauty: people must want to charm and please one another. This cultural trait definitely has gone "out of fashion" in Western society.
Add to these discouraging considerations the fact that the financial calculation of a relationship (even if children are not planned) has much more risk today than even just 10 years ago.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marty_(film)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edward_Bernays
This is an exceptionally succinct description of the problem, thank you. A societal shift from exertion to diversion. Creation to consumption. Scary stuff.
> the illusions of Bernaysian manipulation [2] certainly can
What do you mean here, in reference to Bernays? For context, I’m familiar with his work and legacy — the documentary ‘The Century of the Self’[1] is still perhaps the most important piece of media I’ve ever consumed.
[1] https://youtube.com/watch?v=eJ3RzGoQC4s
By "Bernaysian" I mean much of what is discussed in that documentary by Adam Curtis. The out-sized notion of self in pursuit of the baubles, bangles, and beads of a glorified pageant of passion and love.
When two such highly-conditioned specimens meet, they probably will reject each other. Or if not, they will test each other's endurance in the illusion.
And it's sad, because sex is very fun and porn is a very poor approximation of the real thing.
Like many people outside of the US, I am as far from puritanism as possible, yet I maintain that porn is a cancer. We should have more sex instead. The hippies were onto something.
Free, healthy, frequent consensual sex with real people for fun or otherwise, is miles better than either, and doesn't fit in any of the two black and white categories you have identified.
I thought it was a decent book, seemed to cite a good number of sources, but I'm no scientician. But Gary makes a pretty rational argument -- If you're finding yourself in a certain situation[1], without a known underlying medical cause (as ruled out by a doctor), then cutting out porn never killed anyone, and anecdotally has cured many. So why not just give it a try?
[1]: I'll keep it PG here, but the book is clear what this situation is
For example, yes, single people tend to watch more porn. But are they single because they watch porn (demonstrating that porn is a social inhibitor)? Or do they watch more porn because they are single (in which case porn is just a way to get some of the pleasure they would otherwise have with a partner)?
Same for depression, which does not help going out and meet people. Should we then deduct that porn causes depression? Of course not, and yet this is the starting point of a lot of anti-porn rants.
These arguments also fit too well with puritanical and repressive world views, which makes me very suspicious as motivated reasoning is pervasive in these discussions.
> anecdotally has cured many
That’s the thing, anecdotes are not data. I also have anecdotes of people who have a healthy life and watch porn regularly. Without an epidemiological study it does not mean much. From my experience, “watching porn never killed anyway, and anecdotally has cured many” is just as true as your assertion.
Actually anecdotes are data and they're one manner in which we find, for example, unexpected side effects of treatments https://vaers.hhs.gov/ . I say this not to specifically boost Gary's claims, but to encourage us to not wholesale discount anecdotes. They're too often clues to the right path to be ignored.
I found the book to be pretty clear in it's wording saying essentially (to paraphrase) If you're not having any problems, then you don'd need a cure. But if you're experiencing these symptoms then here's what has worked for 100s, and by simple rationale there's no cost or danger to trying it (eliminating porn for a time). That's the part I found particularly compelling the simple deduction of "It might work, costs nothing, has no risk, so why not try it?"
Right, but there are plenty of plainly stupid ones (“my kid is autistic and, surprise, surprise, had a vaccine weeks before being diagnosed”), and there are plenty of conflicting ones (like on the current subject, but also on things like CBD, though the picture is getting clearer on that front).
They are also unverifiable most of the time, and are commonly just made up.
The only way of knowing whether the anecdotes are significant is to verify them and do some statistical analysis, at which point they are data that we can analyse quantitatively or qualitatively, and not anecdotes anymore.
“Trust my anecdotes” is an argument one makes when reality is inconsistent with one’s position.
> I found the book to be pretty clear in it's wording saying essentially (to paraphrase) If you're not having any problems, then you don'd need a cure.
Which does sound reasonable. But that was not the OP’s message, which was based on the same book. There is no reason to assume that stoping watching porn will help with anything. It’s like homeopathy: sure, trying costs nothing, but it’s still stupid and can occasionally backfire.
Again, watching porn also never killed anyone, costs nothing and has no risk. So why not simply say “do whatever you want to do” and consider those anti-porn arguments for what they are: pseudo-science?
Is this reality for the HN audience?
https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/jomf.12603
My priors probably differ from yours, though.
If they aren't using apps for quick thrills, they are moving to the Villages and using an upside-down pineapple as an ironic bat signal for some fruitless copulation.
At least for me it was very different. I never had a problem with women attention and two of them were frank enough to spell it out for me (this was very unexpected). Still in both cases I just refused the opportunity.
I'm still kind of bitter about it, lol.
14 hours a week a lot of time
eg.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23502427
- With people working ridiculous overtimes, "double shifts" or working two jobs just to make ends meet, there is simply no time to maintain a relationship. That one is offset a bit by Tinder and other "casual sex" opportunities, but nevertheless it's going to impact people.
- With rents being ridiculously high, a majority of young adults are forced to live at their parents', a record number not seen in many decades. And without one's own place, it's hard to even enter a relationship, much less have sex.
- to expand on that point, maintaining a relationship or having casual sex requires money, which a lot of people simply don't have available. Cinema tickets, going eating out to a restaurant, other joint activities... you get the drift, no money means no dates means no sex.
- Especially for the US: as sex can result in children, even when using condoms, the pill or IUDs, many women elect to abstain from sexual activity entirely since the access to abortion is under ever more and more attacks.
- Additionally, the cost of giving birth [2] and raising a child [3] is prohibitively expensive for many people, further reducing the amount of people willing to search for a partner in the first place.
[1] https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/09/04/a-majority-...
[2] https://www.businessinsider.com/how-much-does-it-cost-to-hav...
[3] https://www.usda.gov/media/blog/2017/01/13/cost-raising-chil...
For which I don't think this is true at all...
Edit: I found it funny when he was complaining to me about it because all I could thing of is that these girls probably don't know they are hitting on a guy with grandkids.
Glad you pointed this out. As a bisexual guy, I'd like to give some input. Sex between homosexual men is definitely not getting out of fashion. As a lot of these dating apps encourage short-lived relationships, it incentivizes a lot of these men to not commit in relationships and just have "fun." On the other hand (note that this is only based on my experience), a lot of women seem to have set higher and higher expectations within these dating apps similar to how it is in a typical social media platform like Instagram. I can't blame them though, it's part of human nature to aspire for more.
I don’t even think it’s any kind of aspiration, it’s just that women are completely overloaded with matches. All the claims of “women pass 99% of the time” really don’t paint the whole picture, because in my experience men swipe right 99% of the time. Wouldn’t you also only pick the best of the best if you had hundreds of options?
The contrast in experience on them versus heterosexual apps is shocking. Apps are kind of ideally suited for a relatively homogeneous population of gay men, but the bifurcated population that uses heterosexual dating apps leads to pretty bad outcomes. Particularly for men, but for women as well.
No. Many men are turning to gay sex because they can’t get any women. Lots of guys are “bi” but it’s like 10% gay 90% straight attraction. Getting a guy is 100x easier than a woman so even though they’re mostly straight, they become gay in practice. I expect that 50% of all sex will be between men within the next few decades.
Imagine 80% of the population is elderly and retired (or want to be retired) - that is where the world is heading by the end of the century.
From 2018: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex...
From 2022: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/12/the-sex...
Empty Planet: https://www.amazon.ca/Empty-Planet-Global-Population-Decline...
We can afford a contraction.
Humanity can afford it, you might not
Humanity can afford it, you might not. But policy should probably be set to benefit humanity.
I don't think it makes much of a difference in practice for this scenario if retirement is funded by savings/investments of the elderly or through taxes and other transfers from the working population. As much of the population is retired the value of the investments will go down as now now people are selling than buying new investment. It would become a indirect transfer.
It's not that bleak, only until humans are extinct.
You need a certain tax base to keep services funded. Then at some point on the curve, you start running out of service workers for the care industry.
I think automation will help to a degree but healthcare services is right at that sweet spot of both physically intricate and nonroutine that is so hard to automate.
I don't know who are "we" and if they can afford it. I suspect most don't know either and think they "afford" part is not their part or imagine it's having one less latte/month in exchange for less traffic.
In the past, some people argued for a much smaller world population (however they imagine we could possibly get there), but now that it might happen, we realise our economies run on young people.
And yet we don't pay young people enough and we don't give them the opportunity to start families. Much of this is definitely also a policy problem: make sure young people can buy a house and start a family, can afford to raise kids, have time off with their family, etc.
So in a sense, that's inevitable, isn't it?
The alternative would be to ensure that birth rates are such that the population distribution across ages is always vaguely balanced, but due to the changing socioeconomic conditions, I doubt that's viable. So all that can be done for the most part is just to have social safety nets and support for the older people in the forms of affordable housing, discounts, pensions and other such systems.
Here in Latvia a certain part of each salary is put towards our retirement funds, be it through a privately managed set of funds (typically through one of the banks) or otherwise. The sizes of pensions and living expenses are still a hotly debated topic, given that those still aren't always sufficient for a comfortable lifestyle, but the idea of accumulating enough money for when you age seems like a sane approach to the problem at hand.
Money in a retirement fund is just an IOU. The actual labour of your retirement - the bartender serving you drinks, the doctor performing surgery, the carer taking you to the toilet - is done by young people. If there's not enough of them around, the money will very quickly inflate towards worthlessness.
There’s simply fewer high school graduates available, so enrollment counts will go down and universities will have to fight harder or lower admission requirements to keep the same number of students year over year.
It could also be that young people today simply don’t want to pay the high cost of college, and honestly I get that. But even cheaper or budget colleges are seeing enrollment dips.
The Amish.
I'm not quite joking. They're some of the best farmers on the planet and they have huge families. I suspect, if you do the math, they smoothly replace the rest of us as we "grey out" so to speak. ;)
While some current projections do predict a steep decline in population growth - it's still gonna take roughly a hundred years, just to reach zero growth. Which means we are looking at another 100 years of population actually still growing.
If the trend continues unchanged, and population growth goes negative, it would take another 100 years just to return to exactly the same population numbers that we do have today.
If the growth then grew even more negative for another 100 years, that's when you'd be able to talk about an population implosion - 300 years down the line. So no, I don't think there will be any implosion within our lives.
The problems you describe though - that's not implosion, but population aging and the economic problems that causes down the line. Those issues have been around in some countries for multiple decades already - and yes they are going to get worse. Still, growing population numbers to levels beyond what this planet can sustain just to keep the economy afloat does not seem like a well thought-through plan to me.
We will have to achieve zero population growth - and if the world economy can't take that... we really need to radically change the economy, not increase population growth again.
I'd prefer a source for this claim over the patronizing tone
TIL sex is cardinal sin.
Or every good Christian having children is commiting sin when procreating? How do Christians procreate without sex, through the prayer and then some holy mother come to their house and bring child?
You can have lust without sex, though it's quite unplesant to have sex without lust.
Many of my friends in those environments grew up, figured out how to navigate society a bit better, and stopped saying this kind of stuff. But these threads are a reminder that loads of people didn’t.
That very few people are mentioning things like the AIDS epidemic (and the abstinence only education that came from it), plus the conservative effort to censor sex positive media from organizations in the 80s-90s like moral majority, PTC (probably in response to the free love of the 70s), etc., is telling that they didn't live through it.
Or maybe they're just intentionally ignoring it, I dunno, but young adults today are a product of this.
Yes the comments in this thread is surprisingly bad and I got flagged on my comment.
HN seems to have had their eternal september event.
Self-improvement isn't at odds with pursuing healthy relationships with the opposite sex.
I never got a misogynistic vibe from them. But it's literally years ago I had read about them. They could very well have gone the Incel route over time. Which was a non-toxic movement in the beginning as well.
I used to study online right-wing and fascist movements as they evolved. The incel and MGTOW crowds absolutely went towards a fearful, hard-right-wing view of the world as fast as they could be led towards it. It is difficult to gin up another reading of the core stuff that doesn't depend on being super, super credulous.
ETA: 'XorNot, in a sibling reply to yours, raises a really good and thoughtful point about the self-improvement gimmick being a good way to rope suckers into your movement, and it's worth thinking about.
There doesn't seem to be any weird stuff there but I'm not a social scientist so I will have to take your word for it. I'm not so invested to start a heated discussion about this anyway.
It didn't. In this pipeline, the incels are an earlier stage; MGTOW is for the incels that (ostensibly) are giving up on women entirely. Of course in practice they do no such thing - instead they focus even harder on blaming women for their problems.
Personally I'm just a lazy, irresponsible, and selfish person, so I think a life of relationships and children is not appropriate for me, so I don't pursue those things. That does not appear to be the case for most of the men who adopt the label. There seems to be genuine hate there.
The solutions may be seen as bad or the takes as not good, but the problem still is very real, and for many people bad solutions are better than no solutions or the advice people give that doesn't work at all. Things like this should alert you to the fact something is wrong, not make you recoil from all the bad people.
But don't go out of your way to tell us how much you dislike reading it. That's virtue signaling and it's silly in this context.
"I dislike you so much I'm going to post comments talking about how much I dislike you"
Turns out that despite all my achievements and failures, despite all my joys and pains, despite all my loves and losses, despite everything in my mind and body that makes me 'me', I've ever only truly been motivated by the desire to find a strong provider and reproduce before my eggs expire.
"Oh, but not you, you're different" - hears every women in a male-dominated field at some point or another. Nope, I'm not. No different brain-chemicals, no differently testosterone. Not in denial of my gender identity nor my sexuality. Just a plain old human slob like the rest of you.
There's one claim about the amount of sex people may or may not be having, GRANDPAS HAD MORE ACTION IN THEIR TIME, but it is totally unqualified in any real way. Today's Grandpas could have been born in the 80s-90s... What time are we actually talking about?
The next sentence talks about boomers having more kids, and the next sentence assumes they only had marital sex. If that's the only evidence given for having sex, then this is nothing more than a thinly veiled think piece from the religious right (and the subsequent casual racism doesn't help), and I fail to see how that meets any of HN's standards, either.
EDIT -
The number of replies by people in denial that being horribly out of shape and having excessive body fat isn't related to attractiveness and sexual enjoyment is... well not surprising. Though it is indicative of how in denial our infantilizing culture is and how effectively it enables people to live out slothful, narcissistic, and self-destructive lifestyles, while blaming others for not accepting them.
Now, obesity might possible lower sex drive, but that would be a completely different mechanism.
Sex, even soft and slowly sex, is a bit like sport. It is body work, you have to train it a bit, you have get the other persons feeling.
Finally you need time, even for a quicky somewhere.
Personally, I find the article's supernatural stimulus theory compelling.
Sex takes a lot of time if you aren't being selfish about it. It's also boring, compared with other forms of entertainment and creative pursuits, pornographic or not.
I'm not sure this is all that new, either. Jokes about the declining frequency of sex after marriage have been around for longer than I have. Maybe we're just hitting that wall sooner as the entertainment that we fall asleep to becomes more compelling.
"These threads are always fun, because they often say more about us commenters than the subject matter."
I will not quote anything else from you and leave it at that.
If you do find sex to be the most fulfilling part of your life, it might be worth asking where that sense of fulfillment comes from. It's probably a "who", not a "what".
Is this the necessary projection for someone who values sex?
If you find sex boring, you probably need to take a look at yourself or maybe find a different partner. Sex is rarely mind-blowingly great after your first few times but I can't say I've ever been bored by it.
I don't think I've ever heard sex described as "boring"?!
Maybe you just need to change things up a bit?
Can you put a number on what you mean by "a lot of time"?
Yikes. Go worry about your own T levels.
As an example, a slightly above average man who generates 16561 swipes on Tinder will generate 7666 likes and 8675 dislikes. Out of these there will be 290 matches and 7596 no-match. A rate of 2.5 matches per day and an overall 3.7% match rate. Out of 290 matches he will send 87 messages and receive 12. 191 matches will never result in a message. Of the 99 messages 31 will be left on read or never even opened the initial message, resulting in 68 conversations. 40 of these women ghosted him, and our subject gave up on 17 of them. Ultimately this resulted in getting 11 phone numbers. These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates and 8 gave up on texting, declined the dating offer, or our subject simply gave up on them. All 3 dates did not materialize into anything long term. It was a complete waste of time. Considering that online dating is the most common method used to find a date these days, the options are grim for men who are less than very appealing if they use these online platforms.
And you wonder why there's a fairly large community that have the so-called 'incel' behaviour. It didn't used to exist back in the pre-net dating era!
Evidence: The ridicule.
In the Western world if you aren't a >= 7 in the looks department you will definitely struggle.
Are their SOs conventionally attractive? Not really, but I think their intimacy with their best friend makes up for it.
I don't think it's as one sided as you make out. Yes women probably want to trade up, but so do men but then if you actually want a relationship those things aren't really important so it's more a case of filtering the dross to find someone who actually wants a relationship. I'm not sure that would be easier as an 'attractive' male or female, your still going to get all the dross.
To add to your 1 data point, I'm currently in a long term relationship with someone I met online.
I attribute it to being able to display more about myself in a quick snapshot for women to peruse. Rather than just see my average face, they get the sense from my profile that I am interesting.
They don't bite, if you make a move with enough respect and confidence.
In my opinion while convenient, they should be last resort.
The thing is Tinder has 75 million active users. If we assume 75% of these active users are men, and only the top 10% of men will reliably match, approximately 51 million men are gambling their time away (75×.75×0.9=50.625)
There’s no such thing as a 1-10 scale everyone falls on. We all have types, and sometimes those types run counter to the mainstream definition of “attractive”.
The trick is to figure out what type you are, and try to become the best version of that.
The analyses were like gender x attractiveness x willingness to approach x receptiveness to being approached. It looked like all four variables interacted at some level.
Maybe it wouldn't generalize and maybe I'm remembering it incorrectly but it was something like that.
I'm not sure when that changed, but the comments in the thread don't suggest to me it changed for the better.
“Willing” even sounds that you don’t even really want to.
That's how it was for a long time. And, IMHO, it was not a bad setup.
I certainly would not call it a miserable reason to participate in those events. For example as a youth I went to dances (which, not knowing how to dance felt very uncomfortable), "intellectual" movies and classical concerts (which, for a small-city oaf who only thought about science, were way out of depth), but looking back I think I got a very good return on the time I spent on those.
Yes. I couldn't agree more. Spent 2-3 frustrating years on Tinder without much success. At the start of the pandemic, I was done with being alone in my apartment and decided to try to approach women on the street. My takeaways:
1. Heart rate goes over 130 (according to the Garmin smartwatch)
2. It's **much** more fun to be rejected. Instead of being ignored, you get cool stories like me asking "Hey, you look nice. Would you like to chat?" and getting as response "Uhm... No, I'll continue walking".
3. Get inspiration/courage from watching lots and lots of YouTube videos from people who do nice approaches. I personally liked ThatWasEpic a lot. See for example https://youtu.be/cj9tvIFcUeU.
4. It's much more effective in my case. I'm with my girlfriend for 2 years now and she was the 6th person that I approached... I'm not kidding. After years of Tinder.
So, delete dating apps and go out and talk to people.
This thesis is sound.
>Get inspiration/courage from watching lots and lots of YouTube videos from people who do nice approaches. I personally liked ThatWasEpic a lot. See for example https://youtu.be/cj9tvIFcUeU.
This is just weird, though.
Yeah no. Creepiest advice in the whole thread. idk where you live but this is the easiest way to get cop called on.
If you follow her around, especially after being asked to leave her alone, then we're getting into harassment territory. But if she calls the cops because you talked to her, she's 100x more crazy than you are creepy.
IMO success comes down to 3 key things: profile, conversation and managing expectations.
First your profile, take high quality photos and weave in a story about your life in there. Guys think that it's the shirtless 6 pack that will get dates and while that's true, what I found is you have to build an "attractive lifestyle" through your profile. All my photos are of me doing things, on boats, outside, etc and all my prompts are things like "We should go kayaking together" and stories about travel. It's not one thing on my profile, it's the entire thing that builds a persona of a person that likes going outside alot and traveling, women find that very attractive in my experience.
Second is the conversation. You have to get good at actually "closing" a girl on a first date. There's a ton of "science" that guys will spew but it comes down to practice. The first couple of girls you talk to you will probably fuck it up, keep going and you will get better. My strategy here is to talk "lifestyle", where are you traveling, what shows have you seen, and NEVER EVER EVER BRING UP SEX.
Finally it's managing expectations. Most of these girls "fall through" not at the matching/conversation stage, but after the first couple of dates. Most of the time it's not something either person did, rather us realizing that we are just not right for each other. At this stage it's very easy to get bitter, the key is to keep going and not get bitter, and understand that if you're going to be playing the "online dating game", you're going to get a shit load of rejections.
At this point I do not even consider the "1st date" to be a real "1st date", rather I consider it to be a magic "0 date" that only applies to online dating. Usually on a first day you've already had one interaction with that person to figure out that they are worth going out with; however, with online dating you don't have that. So I consider the first time we meet to be more of a screener date, don't expect to go home with the girl, don't even expect a kiss, just make sure you like them and think if you would like to see them again. For these dates I usually go to a coffee shop mid-day, if it goes well we can schedule a longer dinner/activity date, but if it goes off the rails you can cordially end the date in about 15 minutes.
The difficulty for most men is getting those 1-3 dates per week, not the follow-through. As much as you might want to attribute your success to your charm and conversation, even getting a match per week, let alone enough to turn into 1-3 dates, is the barrier. And anyone who's getting 1-3 dates per week is likely going to be able to find a relationship if they're looking for one after a couple months.
Quality of pictures and persona certainly plays a role, but there are immutable traits that apps prioritize that radically reduce the amount of inbound interest. Getting off the apps as suggested in the parent comment is the only real way to deal with that.
https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&qu...
In fact, it gets repeated so frequently in threads/topics like this one, that I wonder if the true origin of this "statistic" is in fact some of the... more interesting corners of Reddit/4chan.
Your toxic-sounding relationship is holding you back.
You are in an abusive relationship.
What if the 53% of men swiping right ("accept") are attempting to date "up"
I think there may be some hidden assumptions you should investigate, there.
To throw another wrench in the process, swiping excessively to the right may further derank your profile, causing a positive feedback loop. It's an insane system.
Draw a diagram to see the effect, or look at world cultures where polygamy is normal and most men are single or dead.
Spending 15 hours to get 3 hookups is good. One could do more swipes to get more, spending proportionally more time, if the city they live in is good enough (and yes Tinder is a numbers game so it works for guys only in big cities)
Is there even anybody who wouldn't be positively affected by some limitation on sexualised content and online dating?
> You will have a much higher success rate as an average guy simply with a completely cold approach
This is where I think you're wrong.
First, I'm probably never going to cold approach in public and neither are most men I know. It's not a matter of "growing a pair", it would require a personality change or being disingenuous.
Second, cold approach is a terrible way to meet someone. It's like a tinder swipe where both parties have only 1-2 photos and no profile. Dating like this is a strict needle and haystack approach to finding a compatible partner.
> These 11 phone numbers in 4 months led to 3 dates
Before apps I was at 1-2/year. Now 1-2/week is possible, though time and energy keeps me at 1-3/month.
You may not realize it but you are already in the top percentages of men.
I dug up some SLR photos of me with buzz cut hair and a nice shirt, and tried out Tinder. I actually went out on some quality dates once in a while. It was even then still a time sink, and after thinking through the algorithm a bit, I started just blindly swiping right. A month or so later I was in a relationship with my eventual wife.
Just imagine the scale of the psychopathology if 17 million of these men are essentially living in a casino in just one country.
Likewise, unless these women plan to date for the rest of their lives and never settle down, they can't all end up marrying that small group of men, so they will end up marrying "down".
Then the strategy becomes clear: ditch the dating apps and look to meet women who are ready to settle. Easier said than done, sure, but it sure looks like dating apps are useless to all but the top percentile of men, so why bother?
I'm not saying that in the sense of "10% of some gender has sex with 90% the other gender due to [tinder/bumble/hinge]", but rather that in my countries - dating apps have become the de-facto way to hook up with others. And these apps have sort of redefined that scene - mainly because women have pretty much endless choices, but also because the opposite is absolutely not true for most guys on these apps.
With that said, the old ways are still working. People do go out and meet people, but I think most of my peers (late 20-somethings to early 30-somethings) mostly use a bunch of different dating apps for that initial screening. You are exposed to people that you'd NEVER meet in the more traditional sense.
Also, as other people have mentioned - there are more options for entertainment today - even for poor people / those in the lower classes.
Sex toys are also becoming way better and more advanced for all sexes. If your _only_ goal is to chase an orgasm, lots of modern toys will give you a better shot at that than some random hookup.
I’ve never used a dating app, but I’m curious about this. My assumption has been that people filter pretty heavily on politics and religion, which are less advertised in person. Meeting people at a party or through social activities seemed to moderate people’s views long term because an initial attraction could lead to encounters with really different sorts of personalities and backgrounds and counter reinforcement of naive views of the world.
For instance, more couples used to realize their votes cancelled out, so they would make a deal to just stay home and have sex instead of heading the the polls.
For example, in my extended friend-aquaintance group, there's not a single young woman who would consider dating a conservative. Obviously conservative women exist, I have seen many on dating apps, the point is that the natural social circles have already formed strong bubbles such that hanging out let alone dating outside the tribe is unheard of.
I'm not really complaining about this either, I'm not going to get along with a conservative in a normal sort of idle chatter situation. We could work or play a sport or videogame together but beers aren't going to be enjoyable once they start talking about wokeness poisoning the country.
This is also a recent "feature", at least in the USA. My older extended family (parents, aunts, uncles) have political views all over the map, including between married couples, and it's no big deal. Back when they all got together, people weren't so much wrapping their entire identities into their political views. It was more taboo for a Protestant to marry a Catholic than for a Democrat to marry a Republican. Today, it seems people have replaced their religion with their political party, to the point where they consider "the other side" to be totally off-limits for dating or even friendship.
I've got friends on both sides and it just seems so ridiculous to me, but I guess tribes gotta tribe.
IMHO, that has been a result of said philosophies pushing harder than ever on said viewpoints, angry that yelling them louder is failing to convince most people they don't suck
On one hand, this is great! Unfortunately, text conversations between strangers who's only cues are a handful of photos and snippet of text are miserable.
Im almost sure if I had met someone I've met in dating apps in more traditional environments, I'd at least have more friends.
I spent about 20 minutes trying to find some series of historical surveys somewhere, and meanwhile 65 comments popped up with their own personal beliefs on why people are having less sex, but none of those comments and the article itself don't present any actual evidence that people are having less sex. What they do show is people, at least in the US and most OECD nations, are having fewer lifetime children. But that is clearly explainable by widespread availability and use of contraceptives and protected sex or even by the increasing popularity of anal sex. It doesn't require that people not have sex at all.
I'm not saying this claim is wrong necessarily, but if this is going to be discussed, shouldn't we have some evidence allowing us to quantify to what extent there has actually been a decrease, where this has happened, and over what span of time it has happened?