6 ms·

It's burying the lede to suggest that young people are having less sex. The salient fact is that it's young men who are skewing this average down. Women, on av

by caeril 5y ago

It's burying the lede to suggest that young people are having less sex. The salient fact is that it's young men who are skewing this average down. Women, on average, are doing perfectly fine in the sexual marketplace, along with the top 10-15% of men. edit: The above was my reflexive response to the headline. Now that I've actually read the article, I have to say that the article is very good and quite comprehensive, but it seems that it merely dances around the above issue in the "Tinder Mirage" subsection, but doesn't actually directly confront it. An unfortunate oversight.

blodkorv 5y ago
This, women have an abundance of top tire men to choose from.
- woolion 5y ago
  Of course, since top tyre mens provide the best adherence, a paramount concern in wet conditions.
  - nafey 5y ago
    Not if you run Pirelli intermediates.
    - recursiveturtle 5y ago
      Slick answer.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
halo37253 5y ago
- Wiseacre 5y ago
  Sounds incel-y. Most men have no problem sleeping around. They just don't want the women who are interested in them.
  - malfist 5y ago
    Sounds incel-y? It screams it. Let see, calls women who have sex "sl*ts". Says it's easier for women. Says older men are more attractive than women. It checks all the boxes for a redpill/incel nonsense.
    - halo37253 5y ago
      Yet lets ignore the proven statistics showing woman avg higher number of sexual partners in their life than men.
      - CRConrad 5y ago
        > Yet lets ignore the proven statistics showing woman avg higher number of sexual partners in their life than men. How the heck is that supposed to work, mathematically?
      - malfist 5y ago
        And that somehow makes women sluts? Who cares how many sexual partners they have? That's their business, not yours.
        deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
        halo37253 5y ago
        I could care less. If someone wants to sleep around their entire life, so be it. But the idea the men are the ones that are more willing to sleep around was proven false years ago. Woman have always been more willing to sleep around than men. Which is why articles like this always single out young males. Its not that they are unwilling to have sex. They simply just want to have a relationship with a single person.
Kharvok 5y ago
I think given technology and modern lifestyle choices, top 10% men can signal this more broadly than ever.
cjbgkagh 5y ago
I recently saw a chart that showed that women recently overtook men in the no sex in the last 12 months.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Where?
  - cjbgkagh 5y ago
    I’m having a tough time finding it, google isn’t helping. I’m hoping someone else remembers and knows where it is. I distinctly remember seeing it, it was posted to a group chat so maybe doctored but that’s unlikely. Edit: found it; institute of family studies 2022 of no sex in the past 5 years for under 35 year olds.
    - PaulHoule 5y ago
      Here is the link https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-faith-less-sex-why-are-so-many-unmarried-young-adults-not-having-sex https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-faith-less-sex-why-are-so-ma...
rthomas6 5y ago
Do you have a source for this claim? Specifically that women aren't having less sex too, and that the decline is almost entirely due to men. It's very possible for women to be more selective than in the past, and also everyone being less promiscuous overall.
- embeng4096 5y ago
  This WaPo article and specifically the chart entitled "Young men driving the decline in sex": https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame... I read the chart as indicating a jump from ~15% to 28% of men 18-30 not having sex, and women from ~13% to 18%. So perhaps the simultaneous rise could be due to factors like less promiscuity overall or more selectivity, but I find that GP's reasoning is plausible for explaining why sexlessness in men rose higher and faster than that in women.
  - rthomas6 5y ago
    So, to me, this implies women being more selective of partners than in the past accounts for some of the overall decrease, but not all.
    - embeng4096 5y ago
      Can you elaborate? This particular comment of yours reads to me as agreeing -- as in agreeing that selectivity accounts for some of the decrease in sex, but not all, which I think is what I stated. Your other comment in this overall thread gives me the impression that you actually disagree though, so I think I'm missing something and would appreciate more explanation.
      - rthomas6 5y ago
        No, I agree. My other comment was limited the context of talking about that data only (that 80 percent of women fight over 20% of the men on data sites), not your data. You have promiscuity rates separated by sex, and changes of them over time. The other comment doesn't, and only taking the other comment's data by itself isn't enough, imo, to draw any meaningful conclusions.
NotSammyHagar 5y ago
This looks like the start of an incel complaint. You really think that 1/8 of men are sexing up 8x women, and "taking your opportunity" or something? In reality women are looking for partners too. No one owes anyone anything, just be a decent person, try to get over your expectations of the world owing you something.
- embeng4096 5y ago
  See this WaPo article and specifically the chart titled "Young men driving the decline in sex": https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame... It dances around the point but the GP's logic seems plausible, if exaggerated. If the increase in sexlessness among young men is ~twice that of the increase of sexlessness in young women over the same timeframe, it is quite plausible that the same men are having sex with more women.
- halo37253 5y ago
  Everyone is having sex. It just is more likely for a man to only have 1-2 partners before settling down with one. While a female may have had 2-10x that number by the time they settle down. Its that 1/8 of men that have many partners, while 4/8 woman have many partners. A man can be a sl*t too. But you'll find that these days a young man is more likely to want to start a family than a young woman. And this has been proven over and over again by studies.
- hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
  > This looks like the start of an incel complaint. Do you really think that this matters in a discussion? An argument is either valid or not. It doesn't matter if it's used in a currently ostracized community or by people having unhealthy views.
- PaulHoule 5y ago
  Ought to be a trigger warning for that one. ;-) I was bullied in elementary school which gave me a high sensitivity to social rejection. I was really afraid of dying alone in high school. Although I was not treated cruelly as a teen I heard a lot of "be yourself", "be a decent person", "it will get better in the sweet bye and bye". That was the beginning of seven years of despair which still affect me decades later. In particular, a lot of guys seem to focus on "being a decent person" and find that what they get is a lot of listening to women complain about their bad boyfriends. (I didn't particularly fall for that --it but I have a tenant who tells me all sorts of things that women told him that he shouldn't be repeating to me.) I think a lot of men are in situations where they see no path forward. The blackpill incel stuff is poison but I know I felt absolutely alone (couldn't get any recognition from adults and teens that I had a problem) when I was a teenager and if Wheat Waffles had been around back then I probably would have thought "here is a movement of people like me, for the first time I feel like somebody hears me" (My son had a friend fall under Wheat's spell and he disconnected from my son Scientology-style because my son was taller than him and was concerned my son would "heightmog" him.) Listen or not you're going to hear more and more from people who steal the vocabulary and discursive techniques of the incels. If people pay attention they might discover the magic keys to solving problems like "blacks vs the police", "residential segregation of racial minorities", "women getting paid less than men" and "i can't afford healthcare" that never go away -- all of them have a structure similar to the incel problem in that people are making a demand which could seem reasonable in the abstract that becomes unreasonable or unsatisfiable when you expect that some particular person in some particular situation do something for you.
yorwba 5y ago
Here's one of the studies linked in the article, published in 2014: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4011992/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4011992/ Quoting from the "Age at first sex" section: The median age at first sex declined among women born in the 1950s and 1960s, but beginning with women born in the 1970s, this trend halted at about 17.0 years of age, and the median age actually increased by almost a year among cohorts coming of age in the late 1990s. Accordingly, the “current” median age (i.e., the median for the most recent cohort for which a median can be calculated) at first sex is 17.8 for women. A similar increase beginning with the 1982 birth cohort was seen for men (Figure 2), although median age at first sex was stable for those born between 1960 and 1985, at about 17.0. The “current” median age at first sex for men is 18.1. So young people start having sex about a year later, men 0.1 years later than women. Not really a huge difference compared to the overall change. If you think that women must have a lot more sex than men because they'd have an easy time finding a random man who'd sleep with them, you should consider that most women don't want to sleep with just any random man. Similarly, if men who're not having sex were fine with any random partner, they could just pay a prostitute. But clearly people have higher standards than that.
- CRConrad 5y ago
  > 17.8 for women. > for men is 18.1. > men 0.1 years later than women. 18.1 - 17.8 = 0.3, not 0.1
FinanceAnon 5y ago
I am a young guy and used to believe stats like this. Now, I view it as a conspiracy theory that's meant to make young guys paranoid. And of course, many of those who come up with these theories, have books and courses to sell to those who believe them.
cataphract 5y ago
Wait, how is that even mathematically possible? Most people are heterosexual and there is roughly the same number of men and women. Are you saying that there is a small cohort of men that have sex with most of the women? I find it hard to believe — most people, men and women, are monogamous.
- spywaregorilla 5y ago
  Metrics like this tend to binary outcomes like "had sex within the past n months" not total quantity of sex. They also get distorted because young men are in part losing out to older men. I think the differences are mostly overblown.
- embeng4096 5y ago
  One possible explanation is that, as you say, "most people" are monogamous -- the rest are a group of men who have more partners drawn from the same group of women (excluding the monogamous women), and a group of men who are not having partners at all. See this article [0] discussing a study, and specifically this quote in it which I think reconciles both your point and the GP's: > Most women and men reported at least weekly sex, and most people reported having one sexual partner in the prior year. In the most recent surveys, men age 18 to 44 were more likely to have had no partners in the past year (16 percent) compared to women (12 percent). Men also were more likely to have had three or more partners in the past year (15 percent) compared to women (7 percent). [0]: https://news.iu.edu/stories/2020/06/iub/releases/15-sexual-inactivity-young-men-united-states-no-sex-debby-herbenick.html https://news.iu.edu/stories/2020/06/iub/releases/15-sexual-i...
- walkhour 5y ago
  This wouldn't be so strange, pareto distributions are everywhere. Apparently this could be the case in Tinder, if we believe this Tweet [0] [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/quillette/status/1105679979256389634 https://mobile.twitter.com/quillette/status/1105679979256389...
- rglullis 5y ago
  > I find it hard to believe — most people, men and women, are monogamous. You are forgetting the 4th dimension.
walkhour 5y ago
For those asking for evidence, this is a piece if it [0]. Lack of sex is driven by young people, mainly young men. Although the share of sexless women happens to be at an all time high as well, it is nowhere near the level of men. I don't think though it can be inferred from here that women hook up with the top 10/15% of men. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...

by caeril 5y ago

blodkorv 5y ago

This, women have an abundance of top tire men to choose from.

woolion 5y ago
Of course, since top tyre mens provide the best adherence, a paramount concern in wet conditions.
- nafey 5y ago
  Not if you run Pirelli intermediates.
  - recursiveturtle 5y ago
    Slick answer.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

halo37253 5y ago

Wiseacre 5y ago
Sounds incel-y. Most men have no problem sleeping around. They just don't want the women who are interested in them.
- malfist 5y ago
  Sounds incel-y? It screams it. Let see, calls women who have sex "sl*ts". Says it's easier for women. Says older men are more attractive than women. It checks all the boxes for a redpill/incel nonsense.
  - halo37253 5y ago
    Yet lets ignore the proven statistics showing woman avg higher number of sexual partners in their life than men.
    - CRConrad 5y ago
      > Yet lets ignore the proven statistics showing woman avg higher number of sexual partners in their life than men. How the heck is that supposed to work, mathematically?
    - malfist 5y ago
      And that somehow makes women sluts? Who cares how many sexual partners they have? That's their business, not yours.
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
      - halo37253 5y ago
        I could care less. If someone wants to sleep around their entire life, so be it. But the idea the men are the ones that are more willing to sleep around was proven false years ago. Woman have always been more willing to sleep around than men. Which is why articles like this always single out young males. Its not that they are unwilling to have sex. They simply just want to have a relationship with a single person.

Kharvok 5y ago

I think given technology and modern lifestyle choices, top 10% men can signal this more broadly than ever.

cjbgkagh 5y ago

I recently saw a chart that showed that women recently overtook men in the no sex in the last 12 months.

PaulHoule 5y ago
Where?
- cjbgkagh 5y ago
  I’m having a tough time finding it, google isn’t helping. I’m hoping someone else remembers and knows where it is. I distinctly remember seeing it, it was posted to a group chat so maybe doctored but that’s unlikely. Edit: found it; institute of family studies 2022 of no sex in the past 5 years for under 35 year olds.
  - PaulHoule 5y ago
    Here is the link https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-faith-less-sex-why-are-so-many-unmarried-young-adults-not-having-sex https://ifstudies.org/blog/more-faith-less-sex-why-are-so-ma...

rthomas6 5y ago

Do you have a source for this claim? Specifically that women aren't having less sex too, and that the decline is almost entirely due to men. It's very possible for women to be more selective than in the past, and also everyone being less promiscuous overall.

embeng4096 5y ago
This WaPo article and specifically the chart entitled "Young men driving the decline in sex": https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame... I read the chart as indicating a jump from ~15% to 28% of men 18-30 not having sex, and women from ~13% to 18%. So perhaps the simultaneous rise could be due to factors like less promiscuity overall or more selectivity, but I find that GP's reasoning is plausible for explaining why sexlessness in men rose higher and faster than that in women.
- rthomas6 5y ago
  So, to me, this implies women being more selective of partners than in the past accounts for some of the overall decrease, but not all.
  - embeng4096 5y ago
    Can you elaborate? This particular comment of yours reads to me as agreeing -- as in agreeing that selectivity accounts for some of the decrease in sex, but not all, which I think is what I stated. Your other comment in this overall thread gives me the impression that you actually disagree though, so I think I'm missing something and would appreciate more explanation.
    - rthomas6 5y ago
      No, I agree. My other comment was limited the context of talking about that data only (that 80 percent of women fight over 20% of the men on data sites), not your data. You have promiscuity rates separated by sex, and changes of them over time. The other comment doesn't, and only taking the other comment's data by itself isn't enough, imo, to draw any meaningful conclusions.

NotSammyHagar 5y ago

This looks like the start of an incel complaint. You really think that 1/8 of men are sexing up 8x women, and "taking your opportunity" or something? In reality women are looking for partners too. No one owes anyone anything, just be a decent person, try to get over your expectations of the world owing you something.

embeng4096 5y ago
See this WaPo article and specifically the chart titled "Young men driving the decline in sex": https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame... It dances around the point but the GP's logic seems plausible, if exaggerated. If the increase in sexlessness among young men is ~twice that of the increase of sexlessness in young women over the same timeframe, it is quite plausible that the same men are having sex with more women.
halo37253 5y ago
Everyone is having sex. It just is more likely for a man to only have 1-2 partners before settling down with one. While a female may have had 2-10x that number by the time they settle down. Its that 1/8 of men that have many partners, while 4/8 woman have many partners. A man can be a sl*t too. But you'll find that these days a young man is more likely to want to start a family than a young woman. And this has been proven over and over again by studies.
hdjjhhvvhga 5y ago
> This looks like the start of an incel complaint. Do you really think that this matters in a discussion? An argument is either valid or not. It doesn't matter if it's used in a currently ostracized community or by people having unhealthy views.
PaulHoule 5y ago
Ought to be a trigger warning for that one. ;-) I was bullied in elementary school which gave me a high sensitivity to social rejection. I was really afraid of dying alone in high school. Although I was not treated cruelly as a teen I heard a lot of "be yourself", "be a decent person", "it will get better in the sweet bye and bye". That was the beginning of seven years of despair which still affect me decades later. In particular, a lot of guys seem to focus on "being a decent person" and find that what they get is a lot of listening to women complain about their bad boyfriends. (I didn't particularly fall for that --it but I have a tenant who tells me all sorts of things that women told him that he shouldn't be repeating to me.) I think a lot of men are in situations where they see no path forward. The blackpill incel stuff is poison but I know I felt absolutely alone (couldn't get any recognition from adults and teens that I had a problem) when I was a teenager and if Wheat Waffles had been around back then I probably would have thought "here is a movement of people like me, for the first time I feel like somebody hears me" (My son had a friend fall under Wheat's spell and he disconnected from my son Scientology-style because my son was taller than him and was concerned my son would "heightmog" him.) Listen or not you're going to hear more and more from people who steal the vocabulary and discursive techniques of the incels. If people pay attention they might discover the magic keys to solving problems like "blacks vs the police", "residential segregation of racial minorities", "women getting paid less than men" and "i can't afford healthcare" that never go away -- all of them have a structure similar to the incel problem in that people are making a demand which could seem reasonable in the abstract that becomes unreasonable or unsatisfiable when you expect that some particular person in some particular situation do something for you.

yorwba 5y ago

Here's one of the studies linked in the article, published in 2014: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4011992/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4011992/ Quoting from the "Age at first sex" section: The median age at first sex declined among women born in the 1950s and 1960s, but beginning with women born in the 1970s, this trend halted at about 17.0 years of age, and the median age actually increased by almost a year among cohorts coming of age in the late 1990s. Accordingly, the “current” median age (i.e., the median for the most recent cohort for which a median can be calculated) at first sex is 17.8 for women. A similar increase beginning with the 1982 birth cohort was seen for men (Figure 2), although median age at first sex was stable for those born between 1960 and 1985, at about 17.0. The “current” median age at first sex for men is 18.1. So young people start having sex about a year later, men 0.1 years later than women. Not really a huge difference compared to the overall change. If you think that women must have a lot more sex than men because they'd have an easy time finding a random man who'd sleep with them, you should consider that most women don't want to sleep with just any random man. Similarly, if men who're not having sex were fine with any random partner, they could just pay a prostitute. But clearly people have higher standards than that.

CRConrad 5y ago
> 17.8 for women. > for men is 18.1. > men 0.1 years later than women. 18.1 - 17.8 = 0.3, not 0.1

FinanceAnon 5y ago

I am a young guy and used to believe stats like this. Now, I view it as a conspiracy theory that's meant to make young guys paranoid. And of course, many of those who come up with these theories, have books and courses to sell to those who believe them.

cataphract 5y ago

Wait, how is that even mathematically possible? Most people are heterosexual and there is roughly the same number of men and women. Are you saying that there is a small cohort of men that have sex with most of the women? I find it hard to believe — most people, men and women, are monogamous.

spywaregorilla 5y ago
Metrics like this tend to binary outcomes like "had sex within the past n months" not total quantity of sex. They also get distorted because young men are in part losing out to older men. I think the differences are mostly overblown.
embeng4096 5y ago
One possible explanation is that, as you say, "most people" are monogamous -- the rest are a group of men who have more partners drawn from the same group of women (excluding the monogamous women), and a group of men who are not having partners at all. See this article [0] discussing a study, and specifically this quote in it which I think reconciles both your point and the GP's: > Most women and men reported at least weekly sex, and most people reported having one sexual partner in the prior year. In the most recent surveys, men age 18 to 44 were more likely to have had no partners in the past year (16 percent) compared to women (12 percent). Men also were more likely to have had three or more partners in the past year (15 percent) compared to women (7 percent). [0]: https://news.iu.edu/stories/2020/06/iub/releases/15-sexual-inactivity-young-men-united-states-no-sex-debby-herbenick.html https://news.iu.edu/stories/2020/06/iub/releases/15-sexual-i...
walkhour 5y ago
This wouldn't be so strange, pareto distributions are everywhere. Apparently this could be the case in Tinder, if we believe this Tweet [0] [0] https://mobile.twitter.com/quillette/status/1105679979256389634 https://mobile.twitter.com/quillette/status/1105679979256389...
rglullis 5y ago
> I find it hard to believe — most people, men and women, are monogamous. You are forgetting the 4th dimension.

walkhour 5y ago

For those asking for evidence, this is a piece if it [0]. Lack of sex is driven by young people, mainly young men. Although the share of sexless women happens to be at an all time high as well, it is nowhere near the level of men. I don't think though it can be inferred from here that women hook up with the top 10/15% of men. [0] https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-record-high/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/2019/03/29/share-ame...