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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.
Read. My. Lips.
They.
Have.
No.
Money.
Forget your bullshit socio-economic-policital-technobabble explanations. This isn't about cell-phones, or aids, or sex-ed, or work-life balances, or aids, or gender studies, or social media, or tv shows, or Donald fucking Trump!
It's the economy stupid.
Younger Millenials are fucked. They have less jobs, less stable jobs, less income, more debt, higher rents, etc, etc,... and most importantly less opportunity to buy a home. They cannot afford one, they will not be given a loan, they cannot hope to get the cash together to get on with their lives and pay for the dating scene. It's the economy stupid.
This happened in Japan. It's happenning here. The sexy-time rate, house-buying rate, and baby popping rate are directly proportional to the opportunity and stability on offer to young people in society. Millenials have been fucked over to pay for Boomer's plummeting pensions and guess what, the goose has stopped laying the egg.
It's the economy stupid.
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.
it isn't because they don't have money, sex is cheap, it is convincing the girl to have sex that can get expensive.
It is because they have more things to do, the freedom to do them, and options.
50 years ago the average age a couple married and started popping out kids was 20.
30 Years ago the average age a couple married and started popping out kids was 22.
The last time I looked it was 28 and rising quickly.
18 may start your adult life, but you need 4 years of college to earn more than $50k a year for the rest of your life.(yes some exceptions are available but not that many)
Then you get to 22 and you need to start working.
50 years ago women were not even allowed to buy a car or home without a male cosigner. (Equal credit act wasn't passed until 1974)
We gave women freedom, they no longer need to be bound fiscally, physically,or socially to a man to survive. This is the natural result. Why people can't understand it or find it shocking proves just how stupid they are.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
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.
Well, they obviously lying about their age, so chances are they are less than truthful about their sex lives as well.
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
True. Porn was just recently invented...
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.
Actually I thought the Milenials lack of sex, drugs & rock'n roll was because that's the only way they have left to rebel against their parents
Build a Man a Fire, and He'll Be Warm for a Day. Set a Man on Fire, and He'll Be Warm for the Rest of His Life.
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?...
---
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...
As a late member of the boomer generation I was able to get a job as a computer programmer that 2 years in enabled me to buy an apartment at 3 times that salary.
25 years on I still live in the apartment. It's worth four times what I paid for it. If I was in the same job, I'd be on about twice what I was then. Therefore I wouldn't have a hope of getting on the property ladder, and wouldn't benefit from inflation to ensure that the real cost of my mortgage payments faded away. And that's before issues of exploding university debt etc.
It's therefore true that boomers like me have benefited from an opportunity that has now gone to gain prosperity, and so it's the next generation that should get the leg up from the grandparents, not the boomers who've already benefited.
It was at the beginning of 1967, first as a limited test market rollout in the Bay Area. So many people thought it was a big improvement over the cell division we had practiced up t that time that by April the press was already proclaiming a "summer of love." By fall, it had spread nationwide, and my generation became legend.
So apparently today's young people are going back to cell division. Who could have known?
Dude, women have been crazy forever. That isn't a new thing. Millenials think everything is new.
Dye your hair pink, get a dozen piercings, cut your dick off, change your name to Sally and have an orgy at the public library kids' section to protest transmisogyny and you'll be asked to speak at the DNC. Go shoot up a bunch of cops to protest racism and the worst the President do will is shrug and say things got "messy."
Today being an unapologetic straight white Christian male is about the only subversive thing left you can do.
We don't have a state-run media we have a media-run state.
What rape hysteria? Rape culture is where a rapist like Brock Turner gets a scant 6 months because the the judge says a prison sentence might have a bad impact on him.
*One* case does not rape culture make. Despite what you are led to believe, women are actually *safer* on college campuses than anywhere else. You often hear the 1 in 3 stat mentioned, but that stat is based on a piss poor study that's only quoted because it supports an agenda.
What's far more prevalent are the rape accusations, which is really no surprise when you think about it. Rape is a heinous crime, and folks that commit it are rightfully shunned and hated. However, what's happening is that the merest accusation can be enough to ruin someone's life ( men, not women incidentally ). As false accusers are rarely punished for their behavior, it creates a very effective tool for women to deploy against men. Think: Duke, Rolling Stones, Mattress Girl, and those are just off the top of my head.
In our culture of fear and snap judgments and "Dear Colleague" letters, you'd have to be crazy as a man to have sex on a college campus. Hell, you'd have to be crazy to even GO to college, seeing how an unsupported accusation would be enough to get you expelled. No, it's worse than that; not just unsupported, but an evidence refuted accusation can get you kicked out with no recourse.
Finally, you mention a rapist who got a light sentence. I agree that's wrong, but if you really want to be outraged about that I'd like to know your stance on the legion of women teachers who continually get suspended sentences or community service for sex with minors. It seems there's another in the paper every week, with kids as young as grade school.
Ironically, that may be where the real rape culture is; in our elementary and high schools.
As far as the younger generation not having as much sex; maybe the men are smarter than we were. They see that all the effort and time spent just increases their risk factor of having their lives ruined and are noping out. Smart.
Mod me down with all of your hatred and your journey towards the dark side will be complete!
I get all the arguments about declining buying power, wealth disparity and our media/online culture turning everybody into aloof nerds with no time for sex and the successful social interaction that is required for that, and it could very well be that that all factors into this development.
However, I don't think that that is the sole problem. In Germany I observe the women of my generation and a decade or so younger caught up in demands and expectations that can only be called patently absurd. And I think it is very much the same in the USA, as in certain dynamics and structures in society these two countries are very similar.
There are a lot of factors playing into this, such as women not yet completely atuned to having equal rights vis-a-vis their male peers and not yet having fully adjusted their expectations and their true responsibilities and 'duties' that come with it. Such as carefully balancing resource acquisition, mating and active survivaly strategies - by evolutionary and thus old-testatment definition a classic "mans job".
There are studies that women are actually more unhappy today than they were back in the sixties, when they basically were second-class citizens. This could be due to the fact that despite all the media hype about women wanting to lead corporations and earn the big bucks, the vast majority of women would maybe rather have a guy doing all that annoying external survival stuff and rather sit at home with the tribe nurturing little humans.
I very much think this is also due to some choice-effect coming up with equal rights and an abundance of goods needed for pure survival. For the first time in this planets history more people are obese than hungry or starving and a woman doesn't need a set of leader-warshipping willing-to-die-for-the-honor men close by to survive the other tribe warriors or the sabretooth lions roaming the area. She is free to choose when and if she takes a man and doesn't even need one to reproduce.
That a modern society that succsessfully has decoupled sex from reproduction and moves everyting concerning mating and reproduction squarely into the domain of conscious decision shouldn't be too surprised about the development described in TFA.
I expect this development to get worse and only change once society has moved into some sort of utopian mating-and-reproduction ritual or mechanism that tries to mitigate the effects of humanity moving further away from their mammal originins.
Then again, statistical analysis of humanities gene-pool show that throughout the history of mankind, 4 out of 5 men never got to reproduce whereas 4 out of 5 women did - which very much fits the fact that women take 9 months to build a human but men roughly 20 minutes to squirt one into a woman. In evolutionary terms a male individual is measurably less worth than a woman, which these numbers, odly enough, reflect again.
It's complicated, but I defenitely observe first-worlds women, equal rights and a choice effect with women playing into this. Especially after just having visited a classic macho-culture the last two weeks and observing mens and womens behaviour there. I was in moscow and my fairly recent new sweetheart is a russian lady. A difference of night and day in some aspects of socialisation vis-a-vis German or US women. No doubt. I wouldn't say it's all good that way, but until society fully grows up about these things I'd rather go 'classic couple' than have no stable relationship at all.
Bottom line concerning this aspect of the problem:
Women in the west need to emanzipate further and need to notice what work comes with being more independant. I'm sure us men can help by keeping a wide berth around women who aren't quite there yet and who's demands and expectations reflect that.
My 2 cents.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
1. Rough play and fighting (even is sports)
Are you talking about rough play, sports or actually fighting. They're not the same. I can't think I've ever seen anyone[*] claim that playing rugger makes you evil. Starting fights after closing time however, you can keep that.
2. Risk-taking of any kind
that's just stupid and you're making it up.
3. Hunting (especially with guns)
We don't have much of a hunting culture here unless you're a toff and even then it's with dogs, not guns.
4. Loyalty to your male friends
Again, that's just stupid and you're making it up.
5. Tinkering and do-it-yourself culture
Third time, you're just making shit up. No one's revoked my SJW license for owning tools and actually using them.
6. Self-reliance and individualism
Are you talking about actual self reliance, or going your own way on ot the internet where you grouse about women and SJW?
[*]The internet is big. If you can find one lone nutcase, that doesn't make it a trend.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
When we act the same way to these pussies of the special snowflake generation we would be called racists, misogynists, homophobes, and so on.
Okay...
No, what has happened is that the media has become so extremely politically correct that 'micro-aggression' is now a thing and that we have let the radical feminists decide what social norms are for the rest of us. The system is rigged against men being men.
So you are annoyed at people calling other people bigots, and then call other people bigots. You are annoyed that people feel upset about what other people say, and then get upset about what other people say.
There is a flaw in your argument.
const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
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.