8 ms·

Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?

51 points by rchandna 6y ago

yosito 6y ago
It would be really interesting to see how 2020 and 2021 affected the number of people for every age group who reported no sex in the past year. I'm in my 30s and due to the pandemic I'm currently in the longest voluntary period of abstinence that I've ever had.
PebblesHD 6y ago
While I don’t specifically fall into this category, I’d like to broaden it to younger men starting families. The reason my partner and I haven’t moved toward doing so is primarily economic, we still can’t afford a house and rental laws here mean we could be kicked out at quite short notice. We don’t want to bring a child into an environment that we aren’t even able to keep stable for ourselves. Others we know are in even more limited circumstances, who put off even dating due to how tight their finances are. Money just isn’t making it to the lower and middle classes any more in any real capacity.
- ok_coo 6y ago
  To echo this statement, I wasn't financially stable until ~35. We still do not own a home/condo and I'm not sure it's going to happen at this point. My spouse and I may just move in with family to split costs and live cheap. To be fair, I also didn't have any social pressure from my family to have children and since my gf, now wife, doesn't want to have any children either, it just worked out this way. TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    >TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget. I imagine most people are not sufficiently saving for retirement, and/or don't have sufficient savings for emergency (medical/loss of income/disability/legal/etc) expenses either.
  - souprock 6y ago
    They balance their budget by skipping the expensive day care. There just isn't any way for a normal person to get day care for a family. It isn't even legal for a day care to have the same adult-to-kid ratio as a family can have, so you'd be paying multiple adults to do the job of one parent. If they get normal pay, then the parent must earn much more than normal pay.
    - lotsofpulp 6y ago
      The most strict ratio requirements I've seen for daycares is 4 kids to 1 adult (7 kids to 2 adults in Massachusetts) for toddlers and younger.
      - souprock 6y ago
        3.5 kids per adult then. So for just 3.5 kids, you'd need to pay 100% of a salary plus all the extras of running a business. (insurance, legal, finance, advertising, sewage, electricity, food, toys, etc.) Given the overhead, you'd expect daycare for 2 kids to consume the working parent's entire pay. For a low-paid parent, just 1 kid might consume the entire pay. Obviously that isn't viable. I know a handyman in Massachusetts who had at least 11 kids. It's perfectly legal for his wife to care for 11 kids.
        lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Were all 11 kids under the age of 3? FYI, it takes differing amounts of attention and work to care for children at different ages. I don’t know if you have ever cared for a baby, but I have with a ratio of 2 kids under 3 years old and 1 adult (myself), and I don’t even know how people at daycare do it with a 4 to 1 ratio.
        souprock 6y ago
        I have 12 kids, with one more to be born this summer. The 4th and 5th were twins. Babies are not difficult. Teenagers are difficult. I have experience with both.
- jimmaswell 6y ago
  Poverty is usually associated with increased unwanted pregnancy (which must have come from sex) though.
  - temp-dude-87844 6y ago
    The paper "Declines in Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, 2008-2011" [1] by Lawrence B Finer and Mia R Zolna is linked by the CDC on their page about Unintended Pregnancy, and is a notable source of data on unintended pregnancies. This paper clearly states how they determined whether a pregnancy was intended: "Pregnancy intention was defined according to a respondent's answers to a series of retrospective survey questions about her desire to become pregnant right before each pregnancy occurred. If she reported that she did not want to become pregnant at the time the pregnancy occurred, but wanted to become pregnant in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as mistimed. If a respondent reported that she did not want to become pregnant then or at any time in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as unwanted. We classified a pregnancy as unintended if it was either mistimed or unwanted; an intended pregnancy was one that was desired at the time it occurred or sooner." When others cite statistics from this paper, this definition of "unintended" is nearly impossible to de-tangle from poverty: a reasonable respondent may very well indicate that their pregnancy was mistimed because of well-founded concerns, such as that they were not in a financially secure environment at the time. The paper treats such a response as an "unintended" pregnancy. Careful reading of the paper reveals that there is evidence that poverty (at the time of surveying and/or at the time of pregnancy) causes respondents to retroactively rate their pregnancies as "unintended". This is a far less radical result than one may glean from casual discussion of such statistics. [1] https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsa1506575 https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsa1506575
  - brailsafe 6y ago
    While I've been aware of this for some time, it just occurred to me that unwanted children would actually cause more poverty, and any effort to prevent mitigation of that actually distributes more suffering.
- dylanz 6y ago
  The scenario of not wanting to bring a child into an environment that isn't stable is exactly one of the points of the intro to the movie Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA I definitely understand 100%... I just thought it sounded extremely familiar. In my personal scenario, I had my first kid (unplanned) when I was 25. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way in my case. Once I knew I was having a kid I really started to take things more seriously and tried to set up as good of an environment as I could. That meant studying a lot, surrounding myself with good families, moving into a place with more exposure to nature, etc. We never owned a home, had retirement saved up, or a lot of the other things one would consider good "nest egg" scenarios. We just made it work when we had to, and have 2 awesome teenagers now.
- maxk42 6y ago
  Alright unpopular opinion time: You could afford a house if you were willing to move to a more undesirable area. With the rise of remote work in the past year, people (not necessarily you) have more options than ever before for housing, yet they continue to cluster in small, desirable, high-rent areas rather than living less glamorously in exurban or rural areas. House prices in my neighborhood have broken the $500k mark (and much more in other places nearby), yet a quick zillow search shows housing in several areas less than an hour from my house available for below $100k with stagnant prices. If I were willing to live even further afield, I could get a mobile home for below $75k, and in the eastern half of the US I see hundreds (thousands?) of places available for below $50k. If you want the prices to improve then stop paying high prices.
jimmaswell 6y ago
I'm betting on dating sites and the internet in general. Our evolutionary biology is for the women to only get pregnant by the fittest available male in the "tribe" because it's such an investment in time and resources (also why men are inclined to go around with whoever they can, it's all benefit and no cost to "dine and dash"), and now the "tribe" we percieve is artifically extended with the fittest possible specimens constantly on display. Where a woman of the species might have been content settling for someone in their small town 100 years ago, the part of their brain that evolved to discern mates screams at them that they can do better because of the men on dating sites with perfect bodies these days, and the rest of the men are just left to simmer in discontent, probably a reason for a lot of social unrest. I don't know what we could do to fix this but completely ban dating apps, which is impractical. Optimally in the far future we'd be able to rewrite the human genome to update our standards of attraction from the stone age - beefy muscles, tall height, other such signals are generally irrelevant to life today yet they're still such strong factors for men to be able to break into dating.
- staticman2 6y ago
  You have some odd ideas there. You might want to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a more nuanced view of human nature by an evolutionary psychologist. (A field which is controversial at the best of times- but if you're going to believe something controversial but possibly true you can do a lot better than what you posted here) If I wasn't on my phone i'd type more, but in brief you have a weird idea of what fitness means for a woman looking for a mate. It doesn't necessarily mean "big muscles" but could mean something like a guy who loves her and will raise the kids with her. Because that's optimal for passing on genes. Furthermore fitness for a male in search of a woman might mean a guy who is monogomous and caring (because faking those traits to manipulate a woman might be too difficult) because he can convince a woman to mate with him because he will help her with the kids.
  - mxschumacher 6y ago
    The original statement isn't about women in general but the dynamics on dating apps for people under 30. I think we can agree that Tinder and others are more focused on physical attributes than the ability to finance and support the raising of children
adflux 6y ago
Fewer men are having sex with about an equal amount of women. So there are a few men who statistically have the most sex and then the rest barely gets any. Tinder and the like very heavily favor attractive men. Then there's a whole bunch (like in my compsci major) who don't even talk to women on a daily basis... https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo graphs like this dont inspire hope either and serve to support my previous points
- satyrnein 6y ago
  Don't be discouraged by that graph; Okcupid also described how looks matter much more to men than women when it comes to actually sending messages.
- aidenn0 6y ago
  Don't forget the other big chart OKCupid posted which was how few men are willing to have date even slightly older women. There are more women in their 20s having sex with men in their 30s, than men in their 20s having sex with women in their 30s. In most states it's not legal to have sex with women under 18, so (assuming serial monogamy) at any given time there just aren't enough women that are younger than a 20-something male who aren't in a relationship with someone older than that 20-something male.
  - SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
    In most states the age of consent is 16, not 18. (31 states vs. 13 states; the remaining six set their age of consent at 17.)
- staticman2 6y ago
  But women generally don't want to be part of harems. If they want something besides sex, they pretty much need to stop sharing a small group of attractive guys and start settling down with the less attractive guys. Perhaps tinder is not the place to find a guy for settling down.
  - deleted 6y ago
MarkMc 6y ago
The data in that article only goes up to 2018. It will be interesting to see if that 27% figure is now higher. It's pretty clear what is happening: Online dating has become the main way romantic partners meet online [1] and the average man finds it far more difficult to find a partner than, say, in a bar or the workplace [2] [1] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-way-u-s-couples-meet/ https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w... [2] https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard-to-be-an-average-man-on-dating-apps/ https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...
do_not_cancel32 6y ago
I am in my late 20s and a senior engineer at FAANG. I am conventionally attractive and have been asked out by numerous women over the years, even when I did not have my FAANG salary. However, I have had very few sexual partners. The article has four ideas on why men like me have fewer partners. That men lack the money for partners, that the top 10% of men outcompete the bottom 90% on social media apps, that at least some of these men are homosexuals, that men prefer pornography over the actual act. The answer for me (maybe not you) is the fourth one, "Rise of the tube sites." It is easy to fit a tube site into my schedule. It is hard to fit another human in to my schedule. After going on a tube site, I have no incentive to go to parties, go on tinder or to otherwise meet women. If I did not have tube sites, I likely would have gotten married in college when my future earnings potential became obvious.
- code_duck 6y ago
  If your primary or sole motivation to get married would have been to secure a sexual partner, it probably saved a lot of trouble to have filled that space with porn.
- theodric 6y ago
  I'm curious why a relationship with another person isn't something you'd want to prioritize. What fills your hours, and moreover, what fills your mental needs to such an extent that it can override biological imperatives?
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
  - supercanuck 6y ago
    Probably because it’s a lot of work.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    Is there a biological imperative for a male other than orgasming, which ostensibly, content from a website can accomplish?
theodric 6y ago
I was in my 20s 8-18 years ago and despite any sort of stability or decent employment I was still sexually active with female partners. I had a smartphone before most people knew that was a possibility, and essentially unlimited porn. I don't get it. Birth control and condoms have been widely available for one billion years at this point. Doesn't anybody want personal contact, a relationship, etc.? Are people really just holding out on experiencing life in the hope that either someone richer or richer times might suddenly appear? Because that would be monumentally stupid.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >Are people really just holding out on experiencing life in the hope that either someone richer or richer times might suddenly appear? Because that would be monumentally stupid. It seems reasonable to me to not have children if you do not feel secure about your housing prospects and overall cash flow projections.
- phobosanomaly 6y ago
  > Birth control and condoms have been widely available for one billion years at this point. Many, many women prefer not to use birth control (for a variety of reasons), and many men find that the decreased sensation from condoms doesn't make the experience worth all of the effort. As a result, after going through a few pregnancy scares, sex may just not be worth the trouble. Especially if you're not past a threshold of attractiveness and have to put in a ton of effort to be able to have that sex in the first place. If sex is going to wind up being only a marginally-pleasurable activity that requires an enormous amount of effort to secure and is accompanied by regular pregnancy scares, then why bother? Fuck the species. Why not just smoke some week, sip a beer, and play videogames with your buddies (guys or gals)? Sounds like a much better way to spend an evening to me!
bsder 6y ago
Because we have cheap entertainment that is a lot less annoying than dealing with the opposite sex? I can't speak to the unrealistic demands from men, but, if you aren't from an area with a surplus of women, the dating demands of women who are effectively average are absurd. I seem to remember that there was some dating site analysis that basically backed that up--men mis-estimate average-ness some but most women are just way off. Ding: Thanks to adflux for finding the OKCupid data: https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo You clearly don't know what the inside of a gym even looks like, but you want me to have six pack abs? Your degree barely qualifies you for Amazon warehouse worker, but you want me to be pulling six figures? Oh, and I also have to be over 6 foot tall. Uh, yeah, I think I've got lots to do until someone a little more grounded in reality comes along.
throwawayA666 6y ago
I find women to be too shallow. But I don't feel anger towards women or feel upset about it, rather I devote my life to the things I enjoy doing.
- float4 6y ago
  You should probably meet more/different women then. Or at the very least you should know that there are many women who are not shallow. The funny thing is that there are both: - communities of men who think women are shallow (they spend all their time on instagram, they only care about their looks and about how wealthy and good looking their partner is); - communities of women who think men are shallow (they only want to fuck, they don't care about you at all, they spend more time on their cars than on their girlfriends). Both communities are wrong.
  - throwawayA666 6y ago
    I don't use any social network besides linkedin, reddit and hn if the last one counts as a social network, spending an average of 45 minutes on all of them each week. But you're right not all of them is, but the majority I have meet country wide are from all the professions one can think of and all the life backgrounds you can imagine.
  - Uwqye2134trf 6y ago
    > communities of women who think men are shallow (they only want to fuck, they don't care about you at all, they spend more time on their cars than on their girlfriends). Because most of them are ignoring nice guys, at least while the women are in their 20-s. The book "Land of the Losers" nailed it.
  - jfengel 6y ago
    It's certainly not the case that women think all men are shallow, but any woman who has been on any dating app will tell you that she has met a lot of creeps. Men who open the conversation with "DTF?" are a daily occurrence. There's a certain survivorship bias there: such men don't get removed from the market. Men genuinely seeking long term commitments, or even medium term ones, will often find them and leave.
jsisto 6y ago
what about smaller dating pool due to obesity
bawbag 6y ago
I am in my late 20s and I don't do all that new age stuff. Girls are literally just for getting my balls emptied. Never is Next. No is Maybe. Maybe is Yes. Yes is Yes. I am here, I work and eat and sleep just to have sex with girls. I am unashamed and unburdened. I don't use the internet, I just talk to all girls from 18-40 everywhere and 60% of them make me blush. When I die, I won't look back crying over how I could have been more woke. Get over it guys and girls. WELCOME to nature.
anotherevan 6y ago
Seeing the dip in the graphs, there seems to have been a lot of bonking going on in 2008. Wonder why that is.
eucryphia 6y ago
I don't think it's changed that much since a few decades ago when I was in my 20's, perhaps men are more truthful with online surveys.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

51 points by rchandna 6y ago

It would be really interesting to see how 2020 and 2021 affected the number of people for every age group who reported no sex in the past year. I'm in my 30s and due to the pandemic I'm currently in the longest voluntary period of abstinence that I've ever had.

PebblesHD 6y ago

While I don’t specifically fall into this category, I’d like to broaden it to younger men starting families. The reason my partner and I haven’t moved toward doing so is primarily economic, we still can’t afford a house and rental laws here mean we could be kicked out at quite short notice. We don’t want to bring a child into an environment that we aren’t even able to keep stable for ourselves. Others we know are in even more limited circumstances, who put off even dating due to how tight their finances are. Money just isn’t making it to the lower and middle classes any more in any real capacity.

ok_coo 6y ago
To echo this statement, I wasn't financially stable until ~35. We still do not own a home/condo and I'm not sure it's going to happen at this point. My spouse and I may just move in with family to split costs and live cheap. To be fair, I also didn't have any social pressure from my family to have children and since my gf, now wife, doesn't want to have any children either, it just worked out this way. TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  >TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget. I imagine most people are not sufficiently saving for retirement, and/or don't have sufficient savings for emergency (medical/loss of income/disability/legal/etc) expenses either.
- souprock 6y ago
  They balance their budget by skipping the expensive day care. There just isn't any way for a normal person to get day care for a family. It isn't even legal for a day care to have the same adult-to-kid ratio as a family can have, so you'd be paying multiple adults to do the job of one parent. If they get normal pay, then the parent must earn much more than normal pay.
  - lotsofpulp 6y ago
    The most strict ratio requirements I've seen for daycares is 4 kids to 1 adult (7 kids to 2 adults in Massachusetts) for toddlers and younger.
    - souprock 6y ago
      3.5 kids per adult then. So for just 3.5 kids, you'd need to pay 100% of a salary plus all the extras of running a business. (insurance, legal, finance, advertising, sewage, electricity, food, toys, etc.) Given the overhead, you'd expect daycare for 2 kids to consume the working parent's entire pay. For a low-paid parent, just 1 kid might consume the entire pay. Obviously that isn't viable. I know a handyman in Massachusetts who had at least 11 kids. It's perfectly legal for his wife to care for 11 kids.
      - lotsofpulp 6y ago
        Were all 11 kids under the age of 3? FYI, it takes differing amounts of attention and work to care for children at different ages. I don’t know if you have ever cared for a baby, but I have with a ratio of 2 kids under 3 years old and 1 adult (myself), and I don’t even know how people at daycare do it with a 4 to 1 ratio.
        souprock 6y ago
        I have 12 kids, with one more to be born this summer. The 4th and 5th were twins. Babies are not difficult. Teenagers are difficult. I have experience with both.
jimmaswell 6y ago
Poverty is usually associated with increased unwanted pregnancy (which must have come from sex) though.
- temp-dude-87844 6y ago
  The paper "Declines in Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, 2008-2011" [1] by Lawrence B Finer and Mia R Zolna is linked by the CDC on their page about Unintended Pregnancy, and is a notable source of data on unintended pregnancies. This paper clearly states how they determined whether a pregnancy was intended: "Pregnancy intention was defined according to a respondent's answers to a series of retrospective survey questions about her desire to become pregnant right before each pregnancy occurred. If she reported that she did not want to become pregnant at the time the pregnancy occurred, but wanted to become pregnant in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as mistimed. If a respondent reported that she did not want to become pregnant then or at any time in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as unwanted. We classified a pregnancy as unintended if it was either mistimed or unwanted; an intended pregnancy was one that was desired at the time it occurred or sooner." When others cite statistics from this paper, this definition of "unintended" is nearly impossible to de-tangle from poverty: a reasonable respondent may very well indicate that their pregnancy was mistimed because of well-founded concerns, such as that they were not in a financially secure environment at the time. The paper treats such a response as an "unintended" pregnancy. Careful reading of the paper reveals that there is evidence that poverty (at the time of surveying and/or at the time of pregnancy) causes respondents to retroactively rate their pregnancies as "unintended". This is a far less radical result than one may glean from casual discussion of such statistics. [1] https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsa1506575 https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmsa1506575
- brailsafe 6y ago
  While I've been aware of this for some time, it just occurred to me that unwanted children would actually cause more poverty, and any effort to prevent mitigation of that actually distributes more suffering.
dylanz 6y ago
The scenario of not wanting to bring a child into an environment that isn't stable is exactly one of the points of the intro to the movie Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA I definitely understand 100%... I just thought it sounded extremely familiar. In my personal scenario, I had my first kid (unplanned) when I was 25. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way in my case. Once I knew I was having a kid I really started to take things more seriously and tried to set up as good of an environment as I could. That meant studying a lot, surrounding myself with good families, moving into a place with more exposure to nature, etc. We never owned a home, had retirement saved up, or a lot of the other things one would consider good "nest egg" scenarios. We just made it work when we had to, and have 2 awesome teenagers now.
maxk42 6y ago
Alright unpopular opinion time: You could afford a house if you were willing to move to a more undesirable area. With the rise of remote work in the past year, people (not necessarily you) have more options than ever before for housing, yet they continue to cluster in small, desirable, high-rent areas rather than living less glamorously in exurban or rural areas. House prices in my neighborhood have broken the $500k mark (and much more in other places nearby), yet a quick zillow search shows housing in several areas less than an hour from my house available for below $100k with stagnant prices. If I were willing to live even further afield, I could get a mobile home for below $75k, and in the eastern half of the US I see hundreds (thousands?) of places available for below $50k. If you want the prices to improve then stop paying high prices.

jimmaswell 6y ago

I'm betting on dating sites and the internet in general. Our evolutionary biology is for the women to only get pregnant by the fittest available male in the "tribe" because it's such an investment in time and resources (also why men are inclined to go around with whoever they can, it's all benefit and no cost to "dine and dash"), and now the "tribe" we percieve is artifically extended with the fittest possible specimens constantly on display. Where a woman of the species might have been content settling for someone in their small town 100 years ago, the part of their brain that evolved to discern mates screams at them that they can do better because of the men on dating sites with perfect bodies these days, and the rest of the men are just left to simmer in discontent, probably a reason for a lot of social unrest. I don't know what we could do to fix this but completely ban dating apps, which is impractical. Optimally in the far future we'd be able to rewrite the human genome to update our standards of attraction from the stone age - beefy muscles, tall height, other such signals are generally irrelevant to life today yet they're still such strong factors for men to be able to break into dating.

staticman2 6y ago
You have some odd ideas there. You might want to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a more nuanced view of human nature by an evolutionary psychologist. (A field which is controversial at the best of times- but if you're going to believe something controversial but possibly true you can do a lot better than what you posted here) If I wasn't on my phone i'd type more, but in brief you have a weird idea of what fitness means for a woman looking for a mate. It doesn't necessarily mean "big muscles" but could mean something like a guy who loves her and will raise the kids with her. Because that's optimal for passing on genes. Furthermore fitness for a male in search of a woman might mean a guy who is monogomous and caring (because faking those traits to manipulate a woman might be too difficult) because he can convince a woman to mate with him because he will help her with the kids.
- mxschumacher 6y ago
  The original statement isn't about women in general but the dynamics on dating apps for people under 30. I think we can agree that Tinder and others are more focused on physical attributes than the ability to finance and support the raising of children

adflux 6y ago

Fewer men are having sex with about an equal amount of women. So there are a few men who statistically have the most sex and then the rest barely gets any. Tinder and the like very heavily favor attractive men. Then there's a whole bunch (like in my compsci major) who don't even talk to women on a daily basis... https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo graphs like this dont inspire hope either and serve to support my previous points

satyrnein 6y ago
Don't be discouraged by that graph; Okcupid also described how looks matter much more to men than women when it comes to actually sending messages.
aidenn0 6y ago
Don't forget the other big chart OKCupid posted which was how few men are willing to have date even slightly older women. There are more women in their 20s having sex with men in their 30s, than men in their 20s having sex with women in their 30s. In most states it's not legal to have sex with women under 18, so (assuming serial monogamy) at any given time there just aren't enough women that are younger than a 20-something male who aren't in a relationship with someone older than that 20-something male.
- SpelingBeeChamp 6y ago
  In most states the age of consent is 16, not 18. (31 states vs. 13 states; the remaining six set their age of consent at 17.)
staticman2 6y ago
But women generally don't want to be part of harems. If they want something besides sex, they pretty much need to stop sharing a small group of attractive guys and start settling down with the less attractive guys. Perhaps tinder is not the place to find a guy for settling down.
- deleted 6y ago

MarkMc 6y ago

The data in that article only goes up to 2018. It will be interesting to see if that 27% figure is now higher. It's pretty clear what is happening: Online dating has become the main way romantic partners meet online [1] and the average man finds it far more difficult to find a partner than, say, in a bar or the workplace [2] [1] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-way-u-s-couples-meet/ https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w... [2] https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard-to-be-an-average-man-on-dating-apps/ https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...

do_not_cancel32 6y ago

I am in my late 20s and a senior engineer at FAANG. I am conventionally attractive and have been asked out by numerous women over the years, even when I did not have my FAANG salary. However, I have had very few sexual partners. The article has four ideas on why men like me have fewer partners. That men lack the money for partners, that the top 10% of men outcompete the bottom 90% on social media apps, that at least some of these men are homosexuals, that men prefer pornography over the actual act. The answer for me (maybe not you) is the fourth one, "Rise of the tube sites." It is easy to fit a tube site into my schedule. It is hard to fit another human in to my schedule. After going on a tube site, I have no incentive to go to parties, go on tinder or to otherwise meet women. If I did not have tube sites, I likely would have gotten married in college when my future earnings potential became obvious.

code_duck 6y ago
If your primary or sole motivation to get married would have been to secure a sexual partner, it probably saved a lot of trouble to have filled that space with porn.
theodric 6y ago
I'm curious why a relationship with another person isn't something you'd want to prioritize. What fills your hours, and moreover, what fills your mental needs to such an extent that it can override biological imperatives?
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- supercanuck 6y ago
  Probably because it’s a lot of work.
- lotsofpulp 6y ago
  Is there a biological imperative for a male other than orgasming, which ostensibly, content from a website can accomplish?

theodric 6y ago

I was in my 20s 8-18 years ago and despite any sort of stability or decent employment I was still sexually active with female partners. I had a smartphone before most people knew that was a possibility, and essentially unlimited porn. I don't get it. Birth control and condoms have been widely available for one billion years at this point. Doesn't anybody want personal contact, a relationship, etc.? Are people really just holding out on experiencing life in the hope that either someone richer or richer times might suddenly appear? Because that would be monumentally stupid.

lotsofpulp 6y ago
>Are people really just holding out on experiencing life in the hope that either someone richer or richer times might suddenly appear? Because that would be monumentally stupid. It seems reasonable to me to not have children if you do not feel secure about your housing prospects and overall cash flow projections.
phobosanomaly 6y ago
> Birth control and condoms have been widely available for one billion years at this point. Many, many women prefer not to use birth control (for a variety of reasons), and many men find that the decreased sensation from condoms doesn't make the experience worth all of the effort. As a result, after going through a few pregnancy scares, sex may just not be worth the trouble. Especially if you're not past a threshold of attractiveness and have to put in a ton of effort to be able to have that sex in the first place. If sex is going to wind up being only a marginally-pleasurable activity that requires an enormous amount of effort to secure and is accompanied by regular pregnancy scares, then why bother? Fuck the species. Why not just smoke some week, sip a beer, and play videogames with your buddies (guys or gals)? Sounds like a much better way to spend an evening to me!

bsder 6y ago

Because we have cheap entertainment that is a lot less annoying than dealing with the opposite sex? I can't speak to the unrealistic demands from men, but, if you aren't from an area with a surplus of women, the dating demands of women who are effectively average are absurd. I seem to remember that there was some dating site analysis that basically backed that up--men mis-estimate average-ness some but most women are just way off. Ding: Thanks to adflux for finding the OKCupid data: https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo You clearly don't know what the inside of a gym even looks like, but you want me to have six pack abs? Your degree barely qualifies you for Amazon warehouse worker, but you want me to be pulling six figures? Oh, and I also have to be over 6 foot tall. Uh, yeah, I think I've got lots to do until someone a little more grounded in reality comes along.

throwawayA666 6y ago

I find women to be too shallow. But I don't feel anger towards women or feel upset about it, rather I devote my life to the things I enjoy doing.

float4 6y ago
You should probably meet more/different women then. Or at the very least you should know that there are many women who are not shallow. The funny thing is that there are both: - communities of men who think women are shallow (they spend all their time on instagram, they only care about their looks and about how wealthy and good looking their partner is); - communities of women who think men are shallow (they only want to fuck, they don't care about you at all, they spend more time on their cars than on their girlfriends). Both communities are wrong.
- throwawayA666 6y ago
  I don't use any social network besides linkedin, reddit and hn if the last one counts as a social network, spending an average of 45 minutes on all of them each week. But you're right not all of them is, but the majority I have meet country wide are from all the professions one can think of and all the life backgrounds you can imagine.
- Uwqye2134trf 6y ago
  > communities of women who think men are shallow (they only want to fuck, they don't care about you at all, they spend more time on their cars than on their girlfriends). Because most of them are ignoring nice guys, at least while the women are in their 20-s. The book "Land of the Losers" nailed it.
- jfengel 6y ago
  It's certainly not the case that women think all men are shallow, but any woman who has been on any dating app will tell you that she has met a lot of creeps. Men who open the conversation with "DTF?" are a daily occurrence. There's a certain survivorship bias there: such men don't get removed from the market. Men genuinely seeking long term commitments, or even medium term ones, will often find them and leave.

jsisto 6y ago

what about smaller dating pool due to obesity

bawbag 6y ago

I am in my late 20s and I don't do all that new age stuff. Girls are literally just for getting my balls emptied. Never is Next. No is Maybe. Maybe is Yes. Yes is Yes. I am here, I work and eat and sleep just to have sex with girls. I am unashamed and unburdened. I don't use the internet, I just talk to all girls from 18-40 everywhere and 60% of them make me blush. When I die, I won't look back crying over how I could have been more woke. Get over it guys and girls. WELCOME to nature.

anotherevan 6y ago

Seeing the dip in the graphs, there seems to have been a lot of bonking going on in 2008. Wonder why that is.

eucryphia 6y ago

I don't think it's changed that much since a few decades ago when I was in my 20's, perhaps men are more truthful with online surveys.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]