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Public-Health Puzzle: Young People Having Less Sex, Contracting More STDs
- kick 7y agoYou can bypass the paywall by using the "web" button with HTTP referer/referrer spoofing turned off, or you can click here for a raw pastebin of the article: https://pastebin.com/raw/i7du0Jfy https://pastebin.com/raw/i7du0Jfy
- m00dy 7y agoI think copying copyrighted material from place to another is a fraud.
- edoceo 7y agoBased on the downvotes I got yesterday re:paywalls it seems HN would rather cheat than respect others work.
- nyolfen 7y agoit may be copyright infringement, but it's not fraud
- kryptk 7y agoAnd I think paywalls which allow Google, but not humans, to pass through are scummy. Trying to have their cake and eat it, too..
- jimbob45 7y agoOnce again, PrEP is a miracle drug and future generations will be baffled as to why we were so slow in adopting it.
- DataWorker 7y agoOr, as humans have in many other epochs, they will recognize the superiority of life long pair bonding and understand that sexuality and human dignity are related in a way that the self serving cultural relativists, and most contemporary economists, are unable to conceive.
- EdwardDiego 7y agoOh cool, someone who knows what is objectively the best.
- big_chungus 7y agoNo, it's not. All medications have risks, and it has its own slew of potential side effects: https://www.rxlist.com/truvada-side-effects-drug-center.htm https://www.rxlist.com/truvada-side-effects-drug-center.htm This approach is like putting promiscuous people on constant antibiotic treatment to avoid bacterial venereal diseases. It doesn't make sense long-term. It seems as though in the backlash against complete puritanism towards sexual activity, many people have moved too far and started implying that it is completely safe. It's not, even if you practice it "safely", and it's still important to emphasize that.
- heavyset_go 7y agoIt's not baffling at all, it costs $1,800 for 30 days worth of Truvada. Descovy has less side-effects than Truvada, but Gilead conveniently timed Descovy's indication for PrEP to align with Truvada's patent expiration. Truvada is particularly hard on the kidneys, and can cause kidney damage or failure. Descovy doesn't put its users at risk of kidney damage. The wholesale cost of generic Truvada in the developing world is $6 to $8.
- jimbob45 7y ago
- crb002 7y agoNasty ass eaters and Tinderification of dating networks.
- ajna91 7y agoMaybe remove the first part of your statement so your hypothesis can be debated by cool heads?
- ReptileMan 7y agoWhy do you dismiss wholesale the part that people are having riskier sex? Even if the phrasing is not flattering it is still a good hypothesis
- dang 7y agoPlease don't do this here.
- simonsarris 7y agoCan't read article but solving this theoretical (and perhaps now real) puzzle is the primary story in the relatively poor book "More Sex is Safer Sex: The Unconventional Wisdom of Economics" which came out in 2008. Don't bother with the book, it's essentially a lamer freakonomics, but it's interesting that the central story has come up. Basically if you have many to many pairing up (many one person with one or two partners), there may be less mixing, and less transmission. In a one to many pairing (one person with ten partners) you can more easily transmit disease even if the total number of pairings is fewer.
- diego 7y agoAnd there is a good reason for more one-to-many pairings: more choices. Back in the day less desirable partners had more chances because of proximity. Today it's easier to search for partners (for the same reason it's easier to shop), so more desirable people have more choices.
- wavefunction 7y ago"more desirable" aka disease-carriers 8D
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- dahdum 7y agoI’m not saying it’s causation, but the timing is amusing. Article > “Something changed starting around 2012,” said Gail Bolan, director of the CDC division of STD prevention. “We’ve seen dramatic increases each year in both males and females.” Wikipedia > Tinder was launched in 2012 within startup incubator Hatch Labs,[7][8] a joint venture of IAC and mobile development firm Xtreme Labs.[9] By 2014, Tinder was registering about one billion "swipes" per day.[10]
- TimTheTinker 7y ago> Something changed starting around 2012 One hypothesis to consider: the Affordable Care Act which became effective in 2010. It may be that somehow the healthcare changes that followed had an adverse effect, and that it took 2 years for increased infection rates to compound and begin to be reported.
- chmod775 7y agoDo you have any suggestion as to how that piece of legislation could possibly have an impact on how much sex young people have and with what partners? I fail to see any kind of chain of events here where one might lead to the other. "We wouldn't have had sex if it weren't for Obamacare." doesn't exactly seem like something you'd be likely to hear.
- aianus 7y agoObamacare made non-barrier birth control free so it's possible that some people switched from condoms and were therefore more likely to contract STDs. (I just made this up as a suggestion, I have no evidence this actually happened)
- ReptileMan 7y agoThat is one way to say Tinder...
- TimTheTinker 7y agoHuh, that’s another really interesting hypothesis.
- sho 7y agoWhat an outstanding thesis you've unearthed. Why don't you go suggest it on r/the_donald? I think you'll find a very receptive audience there - and a lot of new friends!
- ceilingcorner 7y agoThe sexual marketplace, like all marketplaces with few restrictions, has returned to a “winner take all” state. Fewer men have sex with more women. Thus STDs rise as more people have a smaller and smaller “sexual range.”
- RangerScience 7y agoDo you have any sources for this?
- guelo 7y ago"In recent years, the agency reports, more than half of local STD programs have experienced budget cuts that led to clinic closures, as well as reduced screening and patient follow-up. "Federal spending has also been curtailed." “In the federal government, there is one dedicated STD funding line, and that is the line item in the appropriation bill funding the division of STD prevention at the CDC,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “That appropriation has been whittled away over the last 18 years.”
- dev_dull 7y agoBlaming this on budget cuts is absurd. There didn't even use to be something such as an "STD clinic", let alone easy access. In many states STD testing is totally free and anonymous. How long has that been around? Besides, have you seen sex education in schools these days? Let's just say it's... comprehensive. Compare that to the 70s, 80s, 90s, ANY other time. Children today go into sexual relationships with way more information that any previous generation.
- UglyToad 7y agoYours is one of the few reasonable responses so far (an influx of 'people are lobsters' believers at the moment maybe). This also correlates with what has happened here in England. Because public health/sexual health is funded by councils at the local level and not the NHS it has borne the brunt of cuts to council budgets. As a result we've seen decreased rates of testing and increased rates of infection [0]. While there's a case to be made that Tinder et al. have something to do with it it seems like the funding view is one with actual data behind it rather than 'all the girls are sleeping with Chads and I'm forever alone' finger pointing. [0]: https://www.bashh.org/news/news/sexual-health-experts-highlight-grave-concerns-over-syphilis-and-gonorrhoea-rates-and-call-for-urgent-implementation-of-national-strategy-and-proper-service-funding/ https://www.bashh.org/news/news/sexual-health-experts-highli...
- buboard 7y agoWhat an interesting X-Ray of the sexual marketplace in the graph. Apparently young men have less than half infections as women (i.e. less than half sexual partners than women do - all things being equal) , but the situation tapers in later age and slightly reverses in the 40s when men have slightly more sexual partners. Other than that, the data shows that the sexless generation is driving itself to extinction. That's just natural selection at work.
- toomuchtodo 7y agoLikely because men’s sexual and partner value goes up as they age, where women peak around 21 and rapidly decline after 30. This is based on Okcupid and other dating marketplace data.
- sho 7y agoLooks like you brought facts to a virtue-fight!
- shademaan 7y agoYou're delusional
- toomuchtodo 7y agoCitations are in a previous comment I contributed on the topic: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21086796 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21086796 Please consider contributing to the discussion in a more meaningful way in the future. Name calling doesn’t help anyone.
- catalogia 7y ago> " Apparently young men have less than half infections as women (i.e. less than half sexual partners than women do - all things being equal)" All things certainly aren't equal though. There is a very large asymmetry in the chance to contract some STDs (specifically HIV, maybe others as well but I'm not sure.) > In general, receptive sex is riskier than insertive sex. This means that women have a higher risk for getting HIV during vaginal or anal sex than their sex partners. https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/gender/women/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/group/gender/women/index.html (There are some CDC documents that put numbers to this generality, but I don't have the time to go find them right now.)
- WhyNotThough 7y agoMaybe top 80% of one gender are having sex with top 20% of another?
- dev_dull 7y agoThis study is funny to me because there's such obvious answers to the trends: Having less sex: more and more people are putting off marriage. I'm sure happily married couples are leaving even their most promiscuous peers in the dust with their nuptial regularity. Rise in STDs: the risk of unwanted pregnancy is much lower these days then in say, the 60s and 70s allowing for "riskier" sex. Longer time to marriage + hookup apps + less risk of pregnancy = more partners, more chances for STDs to spread.
- grumple 7y ago> I'm sure happily married couples are leaving even their most promiscuous peers in the dust with their nuptial regularity. The traditional wisdom is that this isn't true at all.
- kd3 7y agoYeah, getting married is a sure way to stop having sex.
- dev_dull 7y agoFortunately there's great study and statistics so we don't need to rely on conventional wisdom: > Married couples have on average sex 5 times a month[1] Under 30 it's even higher, over 8 times a month. Honestly consider your average 30 year old unmarried coworker. You think they even have the time to go out and get laid that often? That sounds exhausting! 1. https://healthresearchfunding.org/sexless-marriage-statistics/ https://healthresearchfunding.org/sexless-marriage-statistic...
- SapporoChris 7y agoA couple of comments. I think education is a huge factor. Anecdote: I took human sexuality at university. We had pop quizzes daily. For quiz on birth control someone comes in and states, 'Oh I didn't need to study for this, I've been using birth control since I was 16' They failed the quiz. Honest communication is a huge factor in prevention. My current girl friend let me know early in our relationship she had chronic hepatitis B. I'm in process of testing for my own exposure, and will get vaccine if needed. If you're not 100% sure about your history, get tested, lots of stuff can be asymptomatic. Some healthcare systems offer free testing for some diseases. Isn't STD Sexually Transmitted Disease a bit of a misnomer? While sex might be the primary method of transmission, from the article CDC attributes increased drug use as one of the factors. Or am I just being pedantic? additional info: I'm definitely not young anymore.
- kd3 7y agoHaving riskier sex and sexual perversion (think anal sex and other more extreme forms) go hand in hand with sexual suppression/repression. Sexual suppression/repression also results in people having less sex. Its very clear what's happening. The root cause are all the policies in society promoting sexual suppression/repression which have only increased and are becoming more absurd every year.
- ronnier 7y agoThe world is changing rapidly. The magic year of 2012 is when Tinder was release and then grew rapidly. Move forward to today: a large percentage of men are totally removed from the dating market (not by choice), they do not have sex, they have no hope of getting into a relationship. The reverse is not true for women, who have countless options and can at any time open their phone and have their pick of men. In general, women still have sex but are increasingly only doing so with the top few percentage of men, which is why we see the skewed std rates. Another issue, there are a lot more single men in cities, especially west coast cities, than single women. Indian and China aborted so many women that there are men there that will never be with a woman. Marriage rates are down, there no pressure to get married anymore. So, when it says young people are having less sex, it’s primarily men who are having less sex. The world changed, women do not need your money or your protection. The fancy jobs do not matter like they did before, nor does having a ton of money. What matters more than anything now are your looks.
- golergka 7y agoThis. The shape of the graph have changed, with much more "stars" – as in, top men who have several partners at the same time. Amount of active nodes may have even gone down, but the connectivity went up.
- EliRivers 7y agoa large percentage of men are totally removed from the dating market, they do not have sex, they have no hope of getting into a relationship Well perhaps if they were in the dating market, they'd have a bit more hope of a relationship. This is like not buying a lottery ticket and then complaining about not winning. This is both true - if you don't enter a competition you simply can't win - and unpopular.
- ronnier 7y agoIt’s not by choice that they are not in the dating market. Nobody buys what they have to offer.
- 7y ago
- pharrington 7y ago"The CDC attributes the recent surge in STDs to decreased condom use, increased drug use, poverty and cuts to prevention programs run by state and local health departments. In recent years, the agency reports, more than half of local STD programs have experienced budget cuts that led to clinic closures, as well as reduced screening and patient follow-up. Federal spending has also been curtailed. “In the federal government, there is one dedicated STD funding line, and that is the line item in the appropriation bill funding the division of STD prevention at the CDC,” said David Harvey, executive director of the National Coalition of STD Directors. “That appropriation has been whittled away over the last 18 years.”" Seems we know what the solution to the puzzle is.
- refurb 7y agoA gov’t agency telling the public they just need more money? Color me shocked.
- wolco 7y agoSo less young men are having sex but the ones that are, are spreading more diseases. So everyone having sex with fewer partners is better overall than less people having sex with more partners. Makes me think society is getting less sexual which is turning into a major health problem.
- abjKT26nO8 7y agoI'm bisexual (male) and for a long time now I have had a lot more sexual success among men than among women (i.e. zero success in the latter case). I've been meaning to change this situation, so I tried Tinder with the settings adjusted, so that Tinder thinks I am only "interested in women". First try - no matches. Second try - one match, conversation ended with no explanation after 2 exchanges. Third try - 3 matches per day (here I tried different photos and a shorter bio). But it turns out that, even though men were quite willing to partake in one night stands, women - not a single one I matched with. Well... that's not entirely true. There were pairs who were willing to do that. And there were women looking for threesomes. I wouldn't want that to be my first time with a woman. Too stressful for a first time. And I am not interested in a relationship. I've been alone for such a long time (not of my own volition, just didn't have too much success) that after all the time during which it was painful, this way of living got ingrained into me and I can't see myself sharing a life with anyone anymore. I do everything in my own peculiar way now. And if I wanted a relationship, I would want that to develop from a friendship, or generally more naturally, not "search for love" over the Internet... I would like to have sex from time to time, but now it seems I can only do that with men. What a weird world I live in.
- marchenko 7y agoI think you are discovering that women, on average, have different expectations from a sexual relationship than men. In fact, it is not weird at all to find that men are much more interested in one night stands than women. Even women who are interested in casual sex tend to want their partner to be at least open to the idea of entering into a relationship. If anything in your bio hints that you are only interested in sex, you will pare your respondent pool down to exactly the type of women you discovered to be receptive: adventurous women interested in threesomes and those who want the safety of having a trusted third party along with their new bit of strange.
- abjKT26nO8 7y agoI explicitly signaled what I was looking for in my bio. The weird part is, a lot of women ignored that and hoped that something (I don't know, their photos maybe? :D) will make me more willing to exploring a relationship. Also, there was no "would you at least be open to the idea of entering into a relationship?". It was simply "casual? nope". Another weird bit - the cherry on top - is the fact that most people are heterosexual and yet all my sexual experiences were strictly homosexual - again, the proportions are not the result of my choice. And again the idea of "looking for love" on the Internet on Tinder sounds ridiculous to me. Think about it: you're essentially swiping photos left and right. It's what this app is focused on. And yet a lot of women seem to want to find the love of their lives there. I just can't... You want something meaningful? Grow a relationship IRL, don't swipe photos thinking "is this the one?". You are right that I am simply discovering that men and women have different expectations. But the proportions are mind-boggling to me + the means by which so many women seem to hope to fulfill their expectations are absurd.
- 90stosser 7y agoI was in college in the early 2000s. I've never used a dating app. I have dated since the advent of dating apps. The generation that has grown up with apps (esp social media apps) for everything has really gotten the short end of the stick in my opinion. There's an image consciousness that underlies everything now. Everything needs to have that Best Life sheen. Take for example, the differing experiences of getting a tattoo. When I got one, it was a classic impulsive decision. I didn't save up for it for months, I didn't even think about what I wanted until I was in the studio (a word applied loosely here...) looking at a binder of the art (a word applied loosely here...) people got tattoos of. I didn't have a voice in my head that said "picking from the same 50 tattoos as everybody else is BASIC", didn't seek out a renowned artist who might pose with me for a selfie and @mention me afterward, none of that. I was incapable of even forming the thought. There definitely wasn't some heart-rending, inspiring story behind it that would get hundreds of likes on Instagram. I just got a little tipsy, got a questionable idea in my head, went down to a very working class strip mall and bam, from then on I had a tattoo. Consider also: I didn't try to hide that tattoo from my parents and they still didn't find out about it for nearly an entire year. The other day a friend of mine was able to deduce that in the beginning of the past decade they had slept with someone who was now in a relationship with their coworker/acquaintance based on an internet search, and my parents didn't know I had a tattoo for an entire year! Once everyone could see what everyone else was doing, you couldn't just get a tattoo out of the tattoo binder any more. The average tattoo I see nowadays is far more artfully executed, well thought out and tastefully designed. The freedom to not worry about these things, however, was vastly underrated. You still had to worry about your image back then, but it wasn't this always-on national pastime. When you were around someone you wanted to impress, you tried to impress them. When you weren't, you just did other things. If you and your friends went hiking and decided to get a photo of yourselves at the top of the mountain? Decent chance the film was never developed at all. Best case, it ends up on someone's corkboard as a happy memory. You could eat a cheesesteak when you visited Philadelphia without the exhausting worry about whether this particular place was the too-famous one that marked you as a lame tourist because everybody knows <x> is strictly for out-of-towners only. You just ate a sandwich and moved on with your life. Life was better when we weren't so acutely aware that we were being observed. Dating is harder now. I agree with some of the somewhat controversial comments on here in that it probably is more of a winner take all game now than it was in the past. The mistake to my way of thinking is in throwing up your hands, going full on misanthrope and dismissing everybody who is having success on these platforms as a bunch of Chads and Stacys. You don't have to play the Tinder game even if you're of this generation. It can work even if your not the sort who can just sit down on a barstool and wait for opportunity to find you. Cultivate an IRL social network. You'll be surprised how much mileage you get out of friend of a friend or friend of a friend of a friend dating.
- Engineering-MD 7y agoUu I Up
- TheCapeGreek 7y agoI've read through the comments related to relationships here and a lot of the same arguments were made. One that stood out was "Women are selectors and men take what they can get" (paraphrased) and a few similar statements. This isn't a bad thing. [1][2][3][4] If you as a straight man are putting some effort into being a decent human being and better dating prospect, in the long term you're far more likely to have a good outcome than a woman of "equal" "value" (subjective concepts). [1] https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/why-women-lose-the-dating-game-20120421-1xdn0.html https://www.smh.com.au/lifestyle/why-women-lose-the-dating-g... [2] https://putanumonit.com/2016/02/03/015-dating_1/ https://putanumonit.com/2016/02/03/015-dating_1/ [3] https://putanumonit.com/2016/02/10/017-dating_2/ https://putanumonit.com/2016/02/10/017-dating_2/ [4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stable_marriage_problem