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Millennials Are Less Likely To Be Having Sex Than Young Adults 30 Years Ago, Says Survey (theguardian.com)
An anonymous reader writes: A survey of nearly 27,000 people suggests that millennials are less likely to be having sex than younger adults were 30 years ago. The Guardian reports: "The research, conducted in the U.S., found that the percentage of young adults aged between 20 and 24 who reported having no sexual partner after the age of 18 increased from 6% among those born in the 1960s, to 15% of young adults born in the 1990s. Published in the journal Archives of Sexual Behavior by researchers from three U.S. universities, the study involved the analysis of data collected through the nationwide General Social Survey that has asked U.S. adults about their sexual behavior almost every year since 1989. The results reveal that young adults aged between 20 and 24 and born in the 1990s were more than twice as likely to report that they had had no sexual partners since the age of 18 than young adults of the same age born in the 1960s. Just over 15% of the 90s-born group reported that they had not had sex since they turned 18, compared to almost 12% of those born in the 1970s or 1980s. For those born in the 60s the figure was just over 6%. The shift [towards increasing abstinence seen among all adults since the 1960s] was greater for white individuals, those who had not gone to university, and those who attended religious services. The trend was also greater for women than for men: the authors found that 2.3% of women born in the 1960s are sexually inactive, compared to 5.4% of those born in the 1990s. That, the authors suggest, could in part be down to a rise in so-called virginity pledges as well as concerns about social stigma. As for why this is the case, the authors of the study suggest it could have something to do with the fact that young people are living at home for longer, thus "stifling their sex life," and playing video games and consuming media in their free time. In addition, easy access to pornography may also be playing a role. A co-author of the research, Ryne Sherman, also suggests another factor could be that the way in which people interpret questions asked in the survey has changed. "Young people in the 1950s, when they were asked if you had a sexual partner, [might] say 'oh oral sex, that counts,' whereas young people today might say 'oh no that doesn't count because I didn't actually have sexual intercourse,'" he said.
And who on earth wants to hang around a moaning feminist? I'll just look at porn thanks and save my money.
Drug use, alcohol use, smoking is in decline, not just in the USA but in most developed nations. Violent crime of many kinds is also on the decline in developed nations too. In some categories these stats are quite dramatic (homicide and drug use in particular have halved since all time highs in 80s/90s, wow).
In fact I am very genuinely concerned that kids these days don't party as hard as we did. In fact it's been years since I've had to tell any to get off my lawn!
After logging in slashdot still does not take you back to the page you were on. It's been that way for 20 years.
The summary ignores the most obvious finding: Far fewer men are having sex than women. If the virginity rate is 15% in the 90's-born population as a whole and 5% among 90's-born women, the then rate among 90's-born men must be about 25%.
It also means that a significant fraction of the men are having multiple partners. The women may also be having multiple partners but the data doesn't necessarily demonstrate that.
"He took a duck in the face at 250 knots." -- William Gibson, Pattern Recognition
The grandparents are either still alive, active and living independently spending that money, or they're paying for expensive health care to keep their ailing bodies going, or they're living in an assisted care facility that costs $100k/year and requires you sign over all your assets.
We're also kind of past the era where the "grandparent" generation easily acquired a lot of wealth in the form of meaningful hard assets like real estate. I think that was more common 1-2 generations ago, but in many ways the current grandparent generation probably came of age in the 1960s, got hammered in the stagflation of the 1970s during the peak of their earning power and then suffered the long-term stagnation of wages like everyone else.
We're literally onto the 3rd or even 4th generation of "middle class" people who have lived in an era of stagnant wages which generally means stagnant or zero wealth accumulation, and much of the accumulated wealth they have ends up burned up by college tuition and health care.
Sex isn't cheap. You need privacy, and privacy is expensive. You might be lucky and get it at your parent's house, but chances are you will have to pay for it. Dorm rooms, rented apartments, mortgaged houses. None of them are cheap.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
It's not money but oversocialization and overpopulation.
In the 1960s John B. Calhoun conducted extensive experiments with mice, examining changes in their social behavior in an Utopian world.
Calhoun gave the mice clean housing and unlimited access to food.
After day 600, the social breakdown continued and the population declined toward extinction. During this period females ceased to reproduce. Their male counterparts withdrew completely, never engaging in courtship or fighting. They ate, drank, slept, and groomed themselves – all solitary pursuits. Sleek, healthy coats and an absence of scars characterized these males. They were dubbed "the beautiful ones." Breeding never resumed and behavior patterns were permanently changed.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
A documentary on the subject:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
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There's also a controversial opinion piece that partly aligns with Calhoun's scientific findings.
Theodore Kaczynski's manifest "Industrial society and its future".
http://editions-hache.com/essa...
I think, though, that it takes a generation or two for the social attitudes about gender relationships to become really ingrained. The women who first came of age in an era of real financial independence were raised by women who didn't know any better in an era where the expectations were different, so they mostly internalized the older value system.
Their daughters were raised with slightly different expectations and those women's daughters (more or less the millennials) were one of the first generations raised in an era of expanded options and different attitudes.
Now, you couple that in with some evolutionary reproductive biology instincts that are oriented towards not selecting a mate who isn't seen to be a resource-rich provider for offspring and you have a situation where they don't need a male partner in any social or economic sense, either, so they've kind of selected themselves out of situations where sex is likely to happen.
"We must be careful to avoid ending up like Japan, with a rapidly falling population."
Why?
I'm not being difficult, but I am challenging this assertion that everything has to grow all the time.
If you start citing the requirements of the economy, please reflect on the concept that the economy is supposed to be serving the needs of civilization, not the other way around.
1. So many people are over weight these days. Fat is unattractive therefore fat people will not have a lot of sex.
2. Rape hysteria and the associated laws act as a disincentive.
3. Men are being taught to be wimps, single mothers can't teach men how to be desirable.
4. Free, easily available online porn and video games offer men huge outlets for their energy that require no risk, all reward, no matter how fleeting.
5. Technology addiction via cell phone and "social" media are killing real-life social skills, increasing awkwardness around the opposite sex.
6. The economy is still crap, and dating/mating/having kids is expensive.
7. The globalist propaganda says global warming and overpopulation is rampant, discouraging people from having children.
8. Slutty women and their STD's, pregnancy scares and personal drama make a man think twice about chasing tail.
The bottom line? Dating is a buyer's market and the buyers are women. Men will need to work even harder on self-improvement instead of wallowing in the status quo if he wants to attract the opposite sex.
a lack of commonality between men and women of the millenial generation, as well as the generation before/after it (IE less millenials dating Gen-Xers or the post millenial crowd.)
I just got over a messy hookup this past weekend. A girl I met online who spent over a week chatting with me daily to bi-daily (for longer email responses) pestered me on a sunday to have sexy talk with her. Long story short, she was just really horny, convinces me to come to her place to hook up. Upon hooking up work related stuff comes up (which she'd blown off to hook up) resulting in me leaving early. So a week passes with only two interactions from her. That weekend she says she's going somewhere. Having asked me to phone her when I got home from her place, I thought it acceptable to ask her to do the same when she got back from her night out. No reply. So a couple days go by. I text her just to ask if she's doing alright and if her week is okay. Nada. Couple more days and I send her a message asking her to let me know what our status is and to at least clearly break up if that was her intention (girls and guys both appear to prefer passive-aggressive 'just don't talk to them until they go away' breakups, rather than clearly letting people know so they can move their shit on faster. Y'know instead of being the asshole playing 3+ different people to see which one works out, assuming they don't get caught double, triple, or quintuple timing.) So finally that saturday, exactly a week since I last heard from her I go and drop off some things at her house I'd borrowed for my sooner than expected trip back home. Turns out she's home. Not wanting to leave them to get dirty on her porch and be immature by just calling as I drove away, I knock. She opens the door, doesn't look too hot, but I figure it was just a long week at work. Hand her the items, answer her questions, then leave. Get where I am going and remember I left my cellphone turned off for the drive. Turn it back on to a bunch of texts cussing me out and how she never wants to hear from me again. Turns out she was in the hospital for a couple days. She made a big point of proving that she was *AFTER* saying she never wanted to talk to/see me again and that I was immature, clingy, and some other things. Normal to crazy in one misunderstanding. And this happens both ways, guys and girls.
The point of my story is: People don't relate to each other any more, especially members of the same generation (she was 2 months older than me), and prefer to throw away relationships over the slightest misunderstandings (and unstated boundary issues!) without being willing to try and resolve them before 'throwing out the trash.'
I know quite a few people of both my and the younger generation who are single for this exact reason. While the financial and living situations affect some of them, the majority simply cannot find partners they relate to, whether because of differences in sexual actvity, social activities, education, time available to spend together, etc. I don't have a good description of the difference between the older generation's relationship success/failures and the current ones, but these past few generations are definitely not providing the same foundation for the future that past generations did. Whether that will be a blessing or a curse is something only time will tell.
If they're all poor who is stealing all their dates? I doubt the young women are sleeping with 40yos just because they have money.
That's how it was when I was in my 20s, 30 years ago. And it's not like younger women with older men is some kind of new social concept nobody has ever heard of.
Girls in their mid-20s often dated "established" guys with full time jobs, cars, and lots of disposable income. My peers and I just getting started financially all lamented it. You just couldn't get a young woman's interest if you didn't have money.
At that time, too, I think a lot of women were very future-life oriented, too, looking at people they dated in terms of "could he be my husband?" which meant that the selection criteria was very resource focused.
A friend's dad, who was in his late 40s and divorced, told us it was much easier once you hit your 40s if you were single. The pool of women were either divorced (and thus had criteria not based around the little house with a picket fence fantasy), never married and not interested in marriage, or were younger women with a preference for older more financially established man.
I ended up married in my 40s, so I never got much of a chance to test this prediction.
In countries with a lot of people living at home, they have more by-the-hour hotels and using them may not even be seen as automatically sleazy. Panama has drive-in hotels where each room has its own garage; you make an appointment ahead and then you drive straight into your garage, and you never even see any other guests unless they happen to be coming or going (no pun intended) when you arrive.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Well, there are two different trends now affecting men. The first is that marriage is now all downside, no upside, but that's true only because it doesn't cause less sex. The other is that the traditional male theme of "put up with her, however crazy, because that's just how relationships work" is fading.
Men my age and older are used to resolving all domestic arguments and conflict of any kind by just letting her win. The new, far healthier IMO approach is "it's not worth the drama". Men less willing to put up with daily drama for sex are, of course, getting less sex.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
You could not be a respectable part of middle class society beyond a certain age unless you were married. Heck, you don't have to go that far back until it applied to basically everyone. There was also a much stronger expectation of a stable relationship being a path to marriage, and the general sense that while sex before marriage could be overlooked, marriage and family was the point of it all (which, before the pill, was a reasonable idea). Sex was just a lot less available, for both sexes, unless you were at least pretending to be working up to marriage, and very often pretense would lead through inertia to reality.
Mechanically (so to speak) the pill changed everything, but society lags reality. From what I saw, it was only really in the 90s that it started to be OK to be in a long term relationship with no plans for marriage.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
In the 1960's it was possible for most Middle Class people to have a child in their early 20's and go on to live a successful life. Today it's almost mandatory for Middle Class people to attend college to have any hope for good paying jobs with the ability to be promoted, and good luck being able to raise a kid at the same time when you're paying today's ridiculously high tuition rates. The easiest way to avoid this little complication is to wait until you're done with school to even have sex at all. Sad but unfortunately true for people with average means.
Ironically, for people who have no way to attend a good college today, they might as well have children because there is little or no hope for any kind of economic advancement anyway.