According to the Post, polls say 28% of US men age 18-30 report not having sex in the last year, almost 3 times as many as a decade ago. Women that age show a much smaller increase, and other ages don’t show noticeable changes:
From what I've read, traditionalism is a big predictor of marriage & children. Attractiveness less so. For example, it has been noted that college educated urbanites tend to be relatively attractive, while less educated folks in the provinces are less so, but it is the latter who are having more children. Population geneticists looking at current fertility patterns say that the trend is toward less height and more weight, which is not typically considered an attractive combo. However, my recollection was that statistic applied particularly for women (for whom education has a particularly significant negative correlation).
The question that comes to me is whether the delay in marriage age, the lower number of marriages and the increase in number of divorces have reduced the access of men to sex. The exchange of providing for sex between men and women is quite old.It could be simply that unmarried men, unless they are very attractive, aren't getting any, and that women no longer need/want to marry unattractive men because they no longer need/want a provider, and thus can simply play the field in order to have sex and sons from the most attractive men only.
If this is the case there will be a big change in a few generations (sexual selection is quite fast): unattractive men will be expunged from the gene pool, and the percentage of very attractive men will increase a lot.
PS The above presupposes that most women are attracted to the same general type of man, and that's most likely the case.
«If you are a man and top 10% in looks (face and height) you get lots of women who initiate contact and practically beg you to have sex with them»
A subtle detail here about the "top 10%": in my experience what turns on women (who don't need a provider) is not a "top 10%" man but more precisely one that is way out of their league.Since most women are average, "top 10%" are those men who are way out of league of average women, which creates the impression that "top 10%" is what matters. But I reckon that what matters is not the absolute attractiveness of a man, but their relative one.My guess is that broadly speaking women want/need sons who outcompete other women's sons in spreading their genes, and therefore want sons who are more attractive than their mothers, and that requires a father much more attractive than their mother.
I have now done an analysis using the old GSS interface and concluded that there isn't evidence for an increasing variance within the 18-29 group, and instead some evidence for a shift toward older men relative to younger men (with the overall mean number of partners for all men going down), even though younger men still average the highest number of partners.
1) Fewer men are lying about sexual activity? Women always went for the few.2) Perhaps there is more focus on marriage. Women may be picky in the short term. Men are picky about who their wife might be. When men are struggling to find mates they become more conservative.
Both sexes become undesirable with age. I suspect more young men are waiting for women to ask for consent because it has become a recent cultural norm. I ran some experiments, For every 2000 men that message a women, 1 women will initiate a message. For a highly attractive man, the numbers were very close, 2000/2 so. It suggests a biological component.
I believe there is a genetic and cultural component. People would look for partners that would not mate with other people. Though a 30% percent still do. Standoffish behavior in the online world is a bad trait to have. Add an information war and growing economic divide. Forgoing sex until you have a suitable partner and circumstance is the best choice for survival.
If you think dating apps are having little impact on sex lives, you must be old + out of the market.
Questions:1- dating apps are this generation bars, dances, group-of-friends outings; bonfires, discos... what impact did those have on your generation ?
2- what if the cute guys in your time could have "dated" (I'm using that term loosely) several girls, w/o having to commit publicly to one ?3- is the overall same amount of sex being had by the "young men" cohort, but by fewer within that cohort ?
I'm sure there are other factors (women not looking for a provider, not having a room not even a car, casual sex being socially OK...) re at play. But the dating/mating scene is utterly dominated by apps and the behaviours they entail.
There's an unfortunate overlay to all of this which is an assumption that people want and should want sex, and that it's unfortunate and problematic that they don't. Few seem to agree with Plato: "How does love suit with age, Sophocles, --are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many."
This unwillingness to accept an alternative normative weighing of this outcome apparently leads to an unwillingness to consider alternative understandings of why the outcome has occurred. Why don't we simply go out an ask some large number of young men about this rather than trying to infer things from imperfect and indirect indicators.
MY suspicion (and this is only a suspicion) is that we the demand side has changed substantially. Specifically while sex is not, per se, less desirable to these young men than fifty years ago, it is a lot more "expensive" while the costs of alternatives are a lot less.
The costs of sex today are less the traditional costs of pregnancy and STDs (which can be handled by mechanical technology) and more the costs of humiliation (or worse) in misinterpreting signals. I know this is going to sound like an incel or misogynistic rant, but I suspect that the insistence on absolute clarity at every stage of a relationship, and at ever younger ages, with zero room for ambiguity, has created a population that has very little experience with/knowledge of how to become intimate with others. It's always seemed terrifying to even start, and the traditional ways of starting (jokes and flirting, tentative minor touches in a dark movie theater) are now out of bounds.
So we have -a certain male population whose charisma and confidence get them past this (as has always been the case), - perhaps another population with enough spare cash and the particular outlook necessary to hire hookers (though I expect that's becoming ever less feasible with the crackdowns on things like Craigslist), - perhaps another population with an outlook that's compatible with things like Tindr (and the appearance necessary to get noticed on such sites); - and the rest (25% or so, maybe this will grow).
That's the cost side. Meanwhile alternatives proliferate. Depending on your tastes you can cope with a lack of sex through drugs, video games, or porn. One thing that may happen, however, is that if you go for long enough without traditional type sex, you may lose much of the taste for it. (I don't know if we know the answer to this. We do know that married/LTR people lose this taste, and that it fades with age; I don't think we know more than that for the generic population. And I'm not sure that proxies from the past or even today [prison or military populations] have much to tell us insofar as they mostly represent the lack of sex side, but not so much the frequent indulgence in one's preferred sexual sublimation.)
I do, however, suspect that young women's current complaints about the state of men are only going to get much much worse. Having created an environment that seems to make it much more difficult for young men to be socialized in this particular way (ie to learn appropriate male/female interactions), I've no idea how this plays out. Do we get people learning this behavior at much older date (when they're 25 rather than 12)? Will we get a wild counter-reaction in one generation's time that's going to make the hooking up of the 70s look like Victorian England?
I've heard an explanation that fits... As we become richer we abandon farmer norms and adopt forager norms. Women are earning more, there's government support, less social disapproval => shift in norms.
It would be interesting to know whether this is due to polygamy or sub-year serial monogamy.
From what I've read, traditionalism is a big predictor of marriage & children. Attractiveness less so. For example, it has been noted that college educated urbanites tend to be relatively attractive, while less educated folks in the provinces are less so, but it is the latter who are having more children. Population geneticists looking at current fertility patterns say that the trend is toward less height and more weight, which is not typically considered an attractive combo. However, my recollection was that statistic applied particularly for women (for whom education has a particularly significant negative correlation).
The question that comes to me is whether the delay in marriage age, the lower number of marriages and the increase in number of divorces have reduced the access of men to sex. The exchange of providing for sex between men and women is quite old.It could be simply that unmarried men, unless they are very attractive, aren't getting any, and that women no longer need/want to marry unattractive men because they no longer need/want a provider, and thus can simply play the field in order to have sex and sons from the most attractive men only.
If this is the case there will be a big change in a few generations (sexual selection is quite fast): unattractive men will be expunged from the gene pool, and the percentage of very attractive men will increase a lot.
PS The above presupposes that most women are attracted to the same general type of man, and that's most likely the case.
«If you are a man and top 10% in looks (face and height) you get lots of women who initiate contact and practically beg you to have sex with them»
A subtle detail here about the "top 10%": in my experience what turns on women (who don't need a provider) is not a "top 10%" man but more precisely one that is way out of their league.Since most women are average, "top 10%" are those men who are way out of league of average women, which creates the impression that "top 10%" is what matters. But I reckon that what matters is not the absolute attractiveness of a man, but their relative one.My guess is that broadly speaking women want/need sons who outcompete other women's sons in spreading their genes, and therefore want sons who are more attractive than their mothers, and that requires a father much more attractive than their mother.
I have now done an analysis using the old GSS interface and concluded that there isn't evidence for an increasing variance within the 18-29 group, and instead some evidence for a shift toward older men relative to younger men (with the overall mean number of partners for all men going down), even though younger men still average the highest number of partners.
https://entitledtoanopinion...
I seemed a lot more attractive to youngish (25-40) women in my 50's than I ever was in my 20's.
A worse choice of men and more damaging consequences for a mistake.
1) Fewer men are lying about sexual activity? Women always went for the few.2) Perhaps there is more focus on marriage. Women may be picky in the short term. Men are picky about who their wife might be. When men are struggling to find mates they become more conservative.
Interesting.
That's a distal cause of long term trends, but still leaves open the more proximate causes of shorter term trends.
Both sexes become undesirable with age. I suspect more young men are waiting for women to ask for consent because it has become a recent cultural norm. I ran some experiments, For every 2000 men that message a women, 1 women will initiate a message. For a highly attractive man, the numbers were very close, 2000/2 so. It suggests a biological component.
I believe there is a genetic and cultural component. People would look for partners that would not mate with other people. Though a 30% percent still do. Standoffish behavior in the online world is a bad trait to have. Add an information war and growing economic divide. Forgoing sex until you have a suitable partner and circumstance is the best choice for survival.
If you think dating apps are having little impact on sex lives, you must be old + out of the market.
Questions:1- dating apps are this generation bars, dances, group-of-friends outings; bonfires, discos... what impact did those have on your generation ?
2- what if the cute guys in your time could have "dated" (I'm using that term loosely) several girls, w/o having to commit publicly to one ?3- is the overall same amount of sex being had by the "young men" cohort, but by fewer within that cohort ?
I'm sure there are other factors (women not looking for a provider, not having a room not even a car, casual sex being socially OK...) re at play. But the dating/mating scene is utterly dominated by apps and the behaviours they entail.
Spotted Toad points out that the group with the highest rates of celibacy in that analysis are low-income women:
https://spottedtoad.wordpre...
This effect will be very small though.
There's an unfortunate overlay to all of this which is an assumption that people want and should want sex, and that it's unfortunate and problematic that they don't. Few seem to agree with Plato: "How does love suit with age, Sophocles, --are you still the man you were? Peace, he replied; most gladly have I escaped the thing of which you speak; I feel as if I had escaped from a mad and furious master. His words have often occurred to my mind since, and they seem as good to me now as at the time when he uttered them. For certainly old age has a great sense of calm and freedom; when the passions relax their hold, then, as Sophocles says, we are freed from the grasp not of one mad master only, but of many."
This unwillingness to accept an alternative normative weighing of this outcome apparently leads to an unwillingness to consider alternative understandings of why the outcome has occurred. Why don't we simply go out an ask some large number of young men about this rather than trying to infer things from imperfect and indirect indicators.
MY suspicion (and this is only a suspicion) is that we the demand side has changed substantially. Specifically while sex is not, per se, less desirable to these young men than fifty years ago, it is a lot more "expensive" while the costs of alternatives are a lot less.
The costs of sex today are less the traditional costs of pregnancy and STDs (which can be handled by mechanical technology) and more the costs of humiliation (or worse) in misinterpreting signals. I know this is going to sound like an incel or misogynistic rant, but I suspect that the insistence on absolute clarity at every stage of a relationship, and at ever younger ages, with zero room for ambiguity, has created a population that has very little experience with/knowledge of how to become intimate with others. It's always seemed terrifying to even start, and the traditional ways of starting (jokes and flirting, tentative minor touches in a dark movie theater) are now out of bounds.
So we have -a certain male population whose charisma and confidence get them past this (as has always been the case), - perhaps another population with enough spare cash and the particular outlook necessary to hire hookers (though I expect that's becoming ever less feasible with the crackdowns on things like Craigslist), - perhaps another population with an outlook that's compatible with things like Tindr (and the appearance necessary to get noticed on such sites); - and the rest (25% or so, maybe this will grow).
That's the cost side. Meanwhile alternatives proliferate. Depending on your tastes you can cope with a lack of sex through drugs, video games, or porn. One thing that may happen, however, is that if you go for long enough without traditional type sex, you may lose much of the taste for it. (I don't know if we know the answer to this. We do know that married/LTR people lose this taste, and that it fades with age; I don't think we know more than that for the generic population. And I'm not sure that proxies from the past or even today [prison or military populations] have much to tell us insofar as they mostly represent the lack of sex side, but not so much the frequent indulgence in one's preferred sexual sublimation.)
I do, however, suspect that young women's current complaints about the state of men are only going to get much much worse. Having created an environment that seems to make it much more difficult for young men to be socialized in this particular way (ie to learn appropriate male/female interactions), I've no idea how this plays out. Do we get people learning this behavior at much older date (when they're 25 rather than 12)? Will we get a wild counter-reaction in one generation's time that's going to make the hooking up of the 70s look like Victorian England?
I've heard an explanation that fits... As we become richer we abandon farmer norms and adopt forager norms. Women are earning more, there's government support, less social disapproval => shift in norms.
It would be interesting to know whether this is due to polygamy or sub-year serial monogamy.