6 ms·

The answers, from the abstract seem to be "young people" are living at home more, drinking less and gaming more than they used to. "Among young women, the decl

The answers, from the abstract seem to be "young people" are living at home more, drinking less and gaming more than they used to. "Among young women, the decline in the frequency of drinking alcohol explains about one quarter of the drop in the propensity to have casual sex. Among young men, declines in drinking frequency, an increase in computer gaming, and the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex."

nlbrown 6y ago
I'm quite surprised to see that the leading theories in many of these studies revolve around competing forms of entertainment. I'm personally more concerned with how economic difficulty, mental health, and hormonal imbalances could be causing these sort of changes in society.
- estsauver 6y ago
  The study did examine economic difficulty. "The authors find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances, internet use, or television watching explain the recent decline in casual sexual activity."
  - wittyreference 6y ago
    If they find no relationship between changing economic circumstances and the outcome, and but a positive relationship between likelihood of co-residence with parents and the outcome, the likelihood that they have made statistical blunders greatly outweighs the likelihood that changing economic circumstances do not play a role.
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
    - watwut 6y ago
      Or, maybe poor people have about as much sex as rich ones when both live with parents.
    - Armisael16 6y ago
      When looking at any one variable they’re controlling for the others.
      - hntrader 6y ago
        Living with your parents and facing economic difficulty are going to be correlated. If they're included together in a multivariable regression (which is often what people mean when they say "controlling for") then they're going to have multicollinearity and it's not possible to disambiguate the unique role of one versus the other. It's plausible that the former variable is "stealing" some of the statistical significance of the latter, leaving the researchers with the impression that the latter is irrelevant.
        Armisael16 6y ago
        Is that a statistical blunder? If economic circumstances provide no additional explanatory power beyond coresidence...
        hntrader 6y ago
        Not really, it's normal. If you have two independent variables that are highly correlated, and you include both into the model, it's going to be pretty arbitrary which one ends up with statistical significance. If we're dealing with weak effects and small data, there's very little one can do. That's why epidemiological studies like this kinda suck.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        wittyreference 6y ago
        It is, because another way of phrasing that is "coresidence provides no additional explanatory power beyond economic circumstances." When that's what your data looks like, proper study design either involves testing that hypothesis, or staying the fuck away from making conclusions that take one of those as significant and one as non-significant.
    - Liquix 6y ago
      Great point. A percentage of those playing video games in their parents' basement would gladly be out traveling Europe or learning social skills at a state college - they just can't afford it.
  - bopbeepboop 6y ago
    > the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex > find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances I... uh... can’t make sense of these two statements together, both of which seem quoted from the paper.
  - nerdponx 6y ago
    You would have to dig into the paper to find out what exactly that means. It might be that society is changing as a whole, and that individual variations of internet use don't contain any relevant information.
- gameswithgo 6y ago
  Well perhaps reality doesn’t agree with your assumptions?
- jawns 6y ago
  The study talks about how more young people are residing with their parents because of economic difficulty, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a major factor in the decline. Many people become sexually active before they move out of their parents' houses, and although it might be more challenging to find a private space, where there's a will, there's a way. Teenagers have been sneaking around to fool around for generations, and I don't think teenagers and young people of today are any less adept at finding a way to shack up if they're sufficiently determined. So I think the focus is about what forces were not present in previous generations, and the Internet is certainly the most conspicuous factor. I'm not saying it's the decisive factor, but I'm not surprised it's a prime culprit.
  - wittyreference 6y ago
    The real earning power of minimum wage (aka, the standard teenage job) has declined by, what, 70% since the 70s? If it's more expensive, in real terms, to have a car, to rent a hotel room, to go out, then yes, it's going to be more difficult to get laid.
    - the_af 6y ago
      You can have sex while living with your parents, no car or hotel rooms needed. Not having money to go out might be a problem to meet people, true. Note that in many countries, teenagers owning cars (and related activities) are not as prevalent as in the US. When I was a teenager, almost nobody I knew owned a car, and we all used public transportation, so there was no (dating) car culture around this.
      - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
        There is a difference between “you can” and “you will bother to when there are plenty of easier and equally enjoyable things to do.”
        the_af 6y ago
        I know I did bother. Sex is very interesting when you're a teenager. Like I said, other countries don't have the same car-centric culture of the US. We've been managing to successfully have sex -- and find sex interesting -- without such an early access to cars!
- ovi256 6y ago
  This study does not address hormonal changes, but I'd like to see the secular testosterone decline studied. Testosterone directly mediates sexual desire, so that should play a role.
  - mywittyname 6y ago
    You can want to have sex, but not have an available partner.
  - Beaver117 6y ago
    I think this is the reason too. There could be many possible reasons why young men have less testosterone than their ancenstors. Maybe the high child obesity rates? Chemicals in foods?
    - ovi256 6y ago
      The high obesity rate is both caused and causing the lower testosterone. Endocrine disruptors (estrogen-like chemicals everywhere, not just in foods, originating from plastic manufacture, among others) are the biggest suspect IMO. They're probably causing both obesity and testosterone decline. It's an emerging topic of research with growing evidence. I think in a century we're going to be looked upon as barbarians by our ancestors for some of the things we did to our bodies, just as we look upon the earlier generations who leaded gasoline, or smoked pervasively.
- hwbehrens 6y ago
  One of the cited works [0] did look at the relationship between mental health and sexual activity, if you're interested. They found that higher sexual activity correlated with greater levels of depression, especially in men. Sexually active women also correlated with decreases in mental health, but the authors' interpretation was that that decline primarily stems from higher rates of victimization among that population, which would obviously lead to negative mental outcomes. [0]: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-019-01482-3.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-019-014...
- temp0826 6y ago
  There’s a joke here in South America when you see a family walking around with many children....”no television”
- mywittyname 6y ago
  Boredom leads to sex. From that, it stands to reason that less boredom leads to less sex. And entertainment is a way to reduce boredom.
- imbnwa 6y ago
  > I'm quite surprised to see that the leading theories in many of these studies revolve around competing forms of entertainment. Really? If there's anything Game of Thrones kept reminding us of, its that males find defeating/killing other men in battle (and the "in battle" part is important, human warfare is very ritualistic just like Chimpanzee warfare) and fucking women equivocal if not related activities. Our ape brains don't appear to make much difference between virtual and physical, at least not enough to make one a lot less addictive than the other.
nerdponx 6y ago
Personal anecdote: when I was single in a big city, I stayed at home playing games on Saturday because I had no social group with single people in it and no place to hang out other than a bar. Bar culture always sucked (and still sucks) and I wasn't pretty enough for Tinder. The music scene I was involved with was fading out and I wasn't part of the core clique anyway. Would I have liked to go out and meet people to have casual sex with? You bet I would have. But it was such a chore to even put myself in a position where such a thing was even a possibility (make new friends who hosted parties and invited single friends? go out and take nicer photos for a dating site?), that it seemed like it wasn't worth the effort. The flipside is that, while I was at a 4-year university with a nice campus, the setup for making connections for casual sex was a lot better. But I also was a lot more willing to put myself in weird grimy situations, so I don't know if it's a fair comparison. Moral: beware the direction of causality. Some people aren't having casual sex because they are gaming. Other people are gaming because they aren't having casual sex, whether it's by choice or for lack of opportunity.
- the_only_law 6y ago
  Yeah I’m still trying to figure out how people even met pre dating apps. It’s not uncommon for me to go somewhere and be the youngest person in the room by a decade, everyone else around me married, etc.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    School, church, work, family, friends. Everyone in your network has their own network, and they can introduce you or you might meet someone at an event who is in their network.
  - seneca 6y ago
    > Yeah I’m still trying to figure out how people even met pre dating apps. We used to have civil-society. It facilitated a lot of these things. Read Robert Putnam's books and research if you're curious.
  - goatinaboat 6y ago
    Yeah I’m still trying to figure out how people even met pre dating apps. Introduced by a mutual friend is the traditional way.

nlbrown 6y ago

I'm quite surprised to see that the leading theories in many of these studies revolve around competing forms of entertainment. I'm personally more concerned with how economic difficulty, mental health, and hormonal imbalances could be causing these sort of changes in society.

estsauver 6y ago
The study did examine economic difficulty. "The authors find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances, internet use, or television watching explain the recent decline in casual sexual activity."
- wittyreference 6y ago
  If they find no relationship between changing economic circumstances and the outcome, and but a positive relationship between likelihood of co-residence with parents and the outcome, the likelihood that they have made statistical blunders greatly outweighs the likelihood that changing economic circumstances do not play a role.
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - watwut 6y ago
    Or, maybe poor people have about as much sex as rich ones when both live with parents.
  - Armisael16 6y ago
    When looking at any one variable they’re controlling for the others.
    - hntrader 6y ago
      Living with your parents and facing economic difficulty are going to be correlated. If they're included together in a multivariable regression (which is often what people mean when they say "controlling for") then they're going to have multicollinearity and it's not possible to disambiguate the unique role of one versus the other. It's plausible that the former variable is "stealing" some of the statistical significance of the latter, leaving the researchers with the impression that the latter is irrelevant.
      - Armisael16 6y ago
        Is that a statistical blunder? If economic circumstances provide no additional explanatory power beyond coresidence...
        hntrader 6y ago
        Not really, it's normal. If you have two independent variables that are highly correlated, and you include both into the model, it's going to be pretty arbitrary which one ends up with statistical significance. If we're dealing with weak effects and small data, there's very little one can do. That's why epidemiological studies like this kinda suck.
        deleted 6y ago
        [deleted]
        wittyreference 6y ago
        It is, because another way of phrasing that is "coresidence provides no additional explanatory power beyond economic circumstances." When that's what your data looks like, proper study design either involves testing that hypothesis, or staying the fuck away from making conclusions that take one of those as significant and one as non-significant.
  - Liquix 6y ago
    Great point. A percentage of those playing video games in their parents' basement would gladly be out traveling Europe or learning social skills at a state college - they just can't afford it.
- bopbeepboop 6y ago
  > the growing percentage who coreside with their parents all contribute significantly to the decline in casual sex > find no evidence that trends in young adults’ economic circumstances I... uh... can’t make sense of these two statements together, both of which seem quoted from the paper.
- nerdponx 6y ago
  You would have to dig into the paper to find out what exactly that means. It might be that society is changing as a whole, and that individual variations of internet use don't contain any relevant information.
gameswithgo 6y ago
Well perhaps reality doesn’t agree with your assumptions?
jawns 6y ago
The study talks about how more young people are residing with their parents because of economic difficulty, but I'm not sure that's necessarily a major factor in the decline. Many people become sexually active before they move out of their parents' houses, and although it might be more challenging to find a private space, where there's a will, there's a way. Teenagers have been sneaking around to fool around for generations, and I don't think teenagers and young people of today are any less adept at finding a way to shack up if they're sufficiently determined. So I think the focus is about what forces were not present in previous generations, and the Internet is certainly the most conspicuous factor. I'm not saying it's the decisive factor, but I'm not surprised it's a prime culprit.
- wittyreference 6y ago
  The real earning power of minimum wage (aka, the standard teenage job) has declined by, what, 70% since the 70s? If it's more expensive, in real terms, to have a car, to rent a hotel room, to go out, then yes, it's going to be more difficult to get laid.
  - the_af 6y ago
    You can have sex while living with your parents, no car or hotel rooms needed. Not having money to go out might be a problem to meet people, true. Note that in many countries, teenagers owning cars (and related activities) are not as prevalent as in the US. When I was a teenager, almost nobody I knew owned a car, and we all used public transportation, so there was no (dating) car culture around this.
    - PurpleFoxy 6y ago
      There is a difference between “you can” and “you will bother to when there are plenty of easier and equally enjoyable things to do.”
      - the_af 6y ago
        I know I did bother. Sex is very interesting when you're a teenager. Like I said, other countries don't have the same car-centric culture of the US. We've been managing to successfully have sex -- and find sex interesting -- without such an early access to cars!
ovi256 6y ago
This study does not address hormonal changes, but I'd like to see the secular testosterone decline studied. Testosterone directly mediates sexual desire, so that should play a role.
- mywittyname 6y ago
  You can want to have sex, but not have an available partner.
- Beaver117 6y ago
  I think this is the reason too. There could be many possible reasons why young men have less testosterone than their ancenstors. Maybe the high child obesity rates? Chemicals in foods?
  - ovi256 6y ago
    The high obesity rate is both caused and causing the lower testosterone. Endocrine disruptors (estrogen-like chemicals everywhere, not just in foods, originating from plastic manufacture, among others) are the biggest suspect IMO. They're probably causing both obesity and testosterone decline. It's an emerging topic of research with growing evidence. I think in a century we're going to be looked upon as barbarians by our ancestors for some of the things we did to our bodies, just as we look upon the earlier generations who leaded gasoline, or smoked pervasively.
hwbehrens 6y ago
One of the cited works [0] did look at the relationship between mental health and sexual activity, if you're interested. They found that higher sexual activity correlated with greater levels of depression, especially in men. Sexually active women also correlated with decreases in mental health, but the authors' interpretation was that that decline primarily stems from higher rates of victimization among that population, which would obviously lead to negative mental outcomes. [0]: https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-019-01482-3.pdf https://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/s10508-019-014...
temp0826 6y ago
There’s a joke here in South America when you see a family walking around with many children....”no television”
mywittyname 6y ago
Boredom leads to sex. From that, it stands to reason that less boredom leads to less sex. And entertainment is a way to reduce boredom.
imbnwa 6y ago
> I'm quite surprised to see that the leading theories in many of these studies revolve around competing forms of entertainment. Really? If there's anything Game of Thrones kept reminding us of, its that males find defeating/killing other men in battle (and the "in battle" part is important, human warfare is very ritualistic just like Chimpanzee warfare) and fucking women equivocal if not related activities. Our ape brains don't appear to make much difference between virtual and physical, at least not enough to make one a lot less addictive than the other.

nerdponx 6y ago

Personal anecdote: when I was single in a big city, I stayed at home playing games on Saturday because I had no social group with single people in it and no place to hang out other than a bar. Bar culture always sucked (and still sucks) and I wasn't pretty enough for Tinder. The music scene I was involved with was fading out and I wasn't part of the core clique anyway. Would I have liked to go out and meet people to have casual sex with? You bet I would have. But it was such a chore to even put myself in a position where such a thing was even a possibility (make new friends who hosted parties and invited single friends? go out and take nicer photos for a dating site?), that it seemed like it wasn't worth the effort. The flipside is that, while I was at a 4-year university with a nice campus, the setup for making connections for casual sex was a lot better. But I also was a lot more willing to put myself in weird grimy situations, so I don't know if it's a fair comparison. Moral: beware the direction of causality. Some people aren't having casual sex because they are gaming. Other people are gaming because they aren't having casual sex, whether it's by choice or for lack of opportunity.

the_only_law 6y ago
Yeah I’m still trying to figure out how people even met pre dating apps. It’s not uncommon for me to go somewhere and be the youngest person in the room by a decade, everyone else around me married, etc.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  School, church, work, family, friends. Everyone in your network has their own network, and they can introduce you or you might meet someone at an event who is in their network.
- seneca 6y ago
  > Yeah I’m still trying to figure out how people even met pre dating apps. We used to have civil-society. It facilitated a lot of these things. Read Robert Putnam's books and research if you're curious.
- goatinaboat 6y ago
  Yeah I’m still trying to figure out how people even met pre dating apps. Introduced by a mutual friend is the traditional way.