9 ms·

Has the 'Sexlessness Epidemic' Been Overstated?

58 points by apsec112 3y ago

sublinear 3y ago
I can only make my local observations... but it's about the same as ever. What's changed is relationships, not sex. If there really are fewer men having sex (however you want to measure that), it's probably because they now have more partners in their lifetime and can't find a woman who will commit. It's everyone's standards that have increased, not just women's. Either way, I just think people are more honest with themselves today compared to the past. I think it's a great thing people today take commitment way more seriously while still being loose enough with the sex when they really need it instead of feeling entitled to it or being too prudish. If guys just want to get laid it's definitely out there. They just have to lower their expectations or be flexible and learn the increasingly diverse world of what women want. I think women are naturally more responsive to handling shifting social preferences and fashions/trends which is why their line on the graph is relatively flat. Men on the other hand depend way too much on "village knowledge" or tradition and they get bitter when it burns them that women really do demand you to "be yourself" more than ever. It makes a ton of sense to me. It's not a big deal just that some of these guys didn't get the memo. Grooming matters, fashion matters, money matters, humor and experience and standards of living matter, etc. It's a very tired and old statement to make but men have gotten a bit lazy (not entirely their fault) and it's currently a huge advantage for those men who put in just the tiniest amount of effort. The god-awful beards, ratty clothes, dirty cars, bad taste in furniture, etc. it definitely adds up to a bad vibe but the biggest one is a sour attitude.
majikaja 3y ago
Porn is better Real life is too many attractive to unattractive 18-80 year old guys chasing after the attractive 18-25 year old women (also other way around but less money involved there) The notion that all the unattractive people will pair with each other is laughable
matrix87 3y ago
Sex without love is worse than no sex at all. Treating sex as an isolated metric is stupidity. Turning that metric into a status symbol reduces women to sex objects
2Gkashmiri 3y ago
https://kashmirlife.net/late-marriages-a-biologically-disastrous-92315/ https://kashmirlife.net/late-marriages-a-biologically-disast... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358646699_A_study_on_the_perils_of_late_marriages_in_Kashmir_Valley_Causes_and_Consequences https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358646699_A_study_o... Some research from my corner of the world. Read how religious insistence on no sex before marriage and shift towards being "financially stable " means young people have no option but to wait. To make matters worse, PCOD stats in the region are like 15-26% of female population so thats an additional penalty.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  My extended family is from Jammu and Himachal, and marriages are later as well there, but that can largely be attributed to people concentrating more so on careers. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar trend is happening in Kashmir Valley as well, given that living standards there have tended to be higher than most of India. > insistence on no sex before marriage and shift towards being "financially stable " means young people have no option but to wait Or move to Chandigarh/Delhi like everyone in HP, JK, and PB Such is the middle income trap
  - mavelikara 3y ago
    Both J&K and HP have < 950 sex ratios - possibly due to selective abortions. This will also affect the ability for men to find brides.
    - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
      selective abortions are banned. at least in jk where i am from. anecdata but i have a relative who had 4 daughters before 1 son. in total he has 5 children.
    - deleted 3y ago
      [deleted]
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      > possibly due to selective abortions Young Families in HP tend to try to have at most 2 kids. If they get a boy in the first try, they generally won't try for another [0]. I can safely say it's a similar story in Jammu, but I can't speak for Kashmir. Kerala (where you appear to be from) actually has a worse Sex Ratio than JK [1]. Us Northies (at least DL/PB/HR/HP/JK/CH) have roughly comparable social indicators to Kerala, despite much more social strife. [0] - https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/low-sex-ratio-at-birth-extremely-worrisome-343297 https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/low-sex-ratio-at-bi... [1] - https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1782601 https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1782601
missingrib 3y ago
These numbers seem kind of low to me, even when I think of people in my life anecdotally. I wonder what is going on there.
- alephnerd 3y ago
  The 18-24 cohort (unsurprisingly) had less sex. Being in high school and starting college will do that to you, especially during a pandemic that prevented students from moving out. You can't have a kid out of high school and expect to raise them with a decent life anymore. This is a global trend btw, not just the US.
  - fanzhang 3y ago
    Mostly because the definition of decent life has shot upwards way faster than economic standards. From fixed standards, the median kid being raised today is doing way better than 100 years ago, even though people chose to have way more kids 100 years ago: - Cars were death traps. - Dying in infancy and 20s, 30s was common. - Very few people went to college. 100 years ago, no one felt "indecent" to raise a kid they can't afford to send to college, or knew at a 1% chance of dying due to malnutrition. Now, for many people, they would feel indecent bringing someone into the world in that state.
    - alephnerd 3y ago
      Exactly! Living standards have grown (as have life expectancies), and people are as such much more ambitious.
    - brailsafe 3y ago
      > Now, for many people, they would feel indecent bringing someone into the world in that state. I think you're overdramatizing how prevalent such a concern is, and would wager that's mostly relegated to people in a certain social class and who've been instilled with the idea that University specifically is the key to success. Otherwise, many people in certain geographies aren't having kids because the prospect of being able to continue putting a roof over our own head seems tenuous at best, and we're just not so driven to have kids that moving quite far out of our communities is worth it, which leaves us in a limbo state of having scarce upward mobility but access to other valuable attributes, and the ability to keep that going for a while. Granted, I'm not personally driven to have kids anyway, but if my early thirties starts catching up to me, my first concern is not going to be whether I can pay for their college, it's whether or not I have a stable mother in the picture, and whether or not having a kid is something we're equipped to shelter, feed, cloth, and support through basic public education. Considering that even getting a separate room for ourselves would nearly double our rent, and buying a place with one could cost nearly 850k (without leaving even approximately where we currently live) it's not looking good.
s5300 3y ago
[dead]
teunispeters 3y ago
With the high demands of work and school ramping up (just like in Japan ...) - who has time and energy for that? Especially with either the long commutes and/or the multiple jobs necessarily to keep one from being homeless? (look up country-wide median incomes to find out how many people are affected, especially cross referenced even roughly against rentals/housing and other costs of living). Japan ref is just due to reading a lot of references to "why is the population shrinking?" discussions read over some years..
- ethbr1 3y ago
  If people found time to have sex in the middle ages, I daresay there's not currently a novel lack of time and overburden of work keeping modern people from having sex. And, indeed, as the post concludes its investigation: >> To summarize the main points: >> The sexlessness epidemic has likely been exaggerated as the GSS data appears to have began with an underestimate and ended with an overestimate judging by the subsequent survey results and more reliable survey data >> The trend which does exist doesn’t appear to be gendered but is affecting both genders equally, even if the implications aren’t the same for each gender >> About half of the sexless men may be voluntarily so
  - orwin 3y ago
    The number of hours worked per year in the middle age are so much inferior to now, it's not even funny. I've talked to a blacksmith who sometimes use traditional forge and studied the medieval craft, he told us that it is not even a question , despite the tools improving, we work a lot more.
  - xeromal 3y ago
    I've felt the same argument can work for many things. I've heard the same excuse about kids but I don't buy it. Humanity has had children in much more terrible times. For not having kids, my hunch is that we just don't want to anymore for convenience. For sex, I think it's our sedentary lifestyle.
  - harimau777 3y ago
    My understanding is that people in the middle ages didn't work more than most people do now. In particular because there are stretches of the year (e.g. winter) when a farmer has significantly less work to do.
boguscoder 3y ago
«It’s probably not a stretch to say that these are the most famous graphs in history» Hmm no, its a long stretch
moshegramovsky 3y ago
[flagged]
- xwolfi 3y ago
  For me it has ! I have way more sex (I try to have it everyday) than my parents seem to have but a lot less children :D At 35, I feel I'm peaking to a point it's almost too much. What really seem to work to have sex a lot is to have lots of money (to get partners you wouldnt otherwise get), look exotic by emigrating (I live in Asia but was born in France), immediately ditch low libido partners (it's not always their fault, maybe you re just not attractive enough to them and that's totally okay), and be ready to really go the extra mile in bed to make it a bit new and exciting even with a long term partner: for instance I think it's important both climax each time and if it's hard then you buy tools and use them, no shame in that. My friends find it shameful to need a vibrator, but do they understand how exciting it is for a girl to climax while making love absolutely each time no matter what, and quickly, and how boring it is when it's a struggle and frustration instead ? I m a straight male, and Im into straight females, and I find many of them have submissive fantasies they have trouble to express and materializing them makes the sex absolutely addictive to them. My current gf is 19, likes to be roughed a little bit, have rape fantasies even I have trouble to play fully and her peak excitement is when I make her cry: this is not even rare, if you dare to ask. I even found it quite common but they are very shy to express it if you're too goody goody. If you dont have enough sex and it matters to you, then spend more money on it, look more exotic (or find foreign girls locally who will find you exotic), and be ready to be a bit mean, in a playful way. I dont have abs but I never met a girl who didnt fantasize on it: sounds like a cheap way to move up a few ranks, for instance.
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    Maybe people are onto something when they say sex should be reserved for someone special that you love. Because this is just... wow. An honest take and probably not all that uncommon with the commodification of sex. But completely unhealthy.
    - 3y ago
maxbond 3y ago
I think there's a real problem with adverse selection in our media environment, whereby outlier polls attract more attention and end up driving discourse and policy making, but are most often noise.
rpmisms 3y ago
No. Teens are disturbingly non-horny these days, and it's carrying over to adulthood. I blame the relative lack of genuine human interaction and microplastics.
- maxbond 3y ago
  How did you come to this conclusion? What did you think about the part of the article discussing the much larger NSFG survey? What about the part discussing volcels?
  - busterarm 3y ago
    Have you looked at young people fashion lately? Their clothes are deliberately unflattering. Your grandmother would consider their looks conservative.
    - maxbond 3y ago
      The young people I've seen recently would've fit in at my school. We didn't dress all that provocatively either. I don't think we should conflate how people choose to dress with whether or not they're having sex - Victorian fashion was more conservative than today, but they had plenty of sex. I think fashion just ebbs and flows, independent of our sex lives.
      - lelanthran 3y ago
        > I don't think we should conflate how people choose to dress with whether or not they're having sex I think GP was correlating provocative dressing with horniness, not with how much sex they were having. It doesn't seem like an extraordinary leap to make.
        maxbond 3y ago
        You can substitute "horniness" into my comment and the point stands. The Victorians were plenty horny and raunchy too. Fashion is about doing something different. If everyone is wearing skimpier and skimpier clothes, it's natural that wearing conservative clothing will become the way to stand out. We should expect this to ebb and flow independent of our sex lives. Not to mention everything presented in the linked article, and that I don't know how people around you are dressing, but people around me are dressing about as conservatively as they always have.
talldatethrow 3y ago
I've been a serial online dater since probably 1998 when I was 14. I had my mom drive me 30 minutes to meet a girl I talked to over Sparkmatch, a dating site for teens. Men are using porn more than ever. Yes, it reduces drive. Women are using online dating to meet up with guys they normally don't get attention from in day to day life. I date a lot, but not THAT much, and I know three early 20s women that slept with professional athletes (one married) from tinder (pre 2016) and bumble. Basically every girl is scoring way out of her league atleast once or twice from online dating, and getting burned by it. Women used to get burned by long term relationships of they chose poorly. Now they're getting burned by internet playboys before they even make it to a relationship. I have decent guy friends that can barely get a date. Every single girl no matter how average is drowning in attention online, so they focus on the top 5-10%. No guy in the top 5%, and especially not an athlete, is going to settle down with a 6. Yet afterwards, that 6 isn't very likely to settle for a 6 male. Until women start being more honest with each other and saving the younger ones from making these mistakes, it's going to be a bad time for young people.
- sublinear 3y ago
  Porn has definitely had the same impact on what men like. Before the internet we were overrating local women just the same. Lots of guys I know don't want to believe it, but there are a ton of lonely women out there that will fix themselves up for you just as you will for her. It's a matter of being willing to put in the work. People are not products on a shelf and they will change. It's up to you and your partner to guide that process for each other. You don't even have to commit to get that. Just be good friends.
  - lelanthran 3y ago
    > Porn has definitely had the same impact on what men like. Maybe, but I seriously doubt it has an impact on what men actually do. Men aren't going "That woman is a 6; no way I'm sleeping with her" while women are saying "I know what I'm worth, because I dated[1] a top-5% man". It's always been the case that 80% of the women are chasing 5% of the men. Having the pool expanded by online-dating just means that even more women in absolute numbers have unrealistic expectations. [1] They didn't date them, they slept with them, couldn't get them to commit, and don't realise why they couldn't get them to commit.

58 points by apsec112 3y ago

I can only make my local observations... but it's about the same as ever. What's changed is relationships, not sex. If there really are fewer men having sex (however you want to measure that), it's probably because they now have more partners in their lifetime and can't find a woman who will commit. It's everyone's standards that have increased, not just women's. Either way, I just think people are more honest with themselves today compared to the past. I think it's a great thing people today take commitment way more seriously while still being loose enough with the sex when they really need it instead of feeling entitled to it or being too prudish. If guys just want to get laid it's definitely out there. They just have to lower their expectations or be flexible and learn the increasingly diverse world of what women want. I think women are naturally more responsive to handling shifting social preferences and fashions/trends which is why their line on the graph is relatively flat. Men on the other hand depend way too much on "village knowledge" or tradition and they get bitter when it burns them that women really do demand you to "be yourself" more than ever. It makes a ton of sense to me. It's not a big deal just that some of these guys didn't get the memo. Grooming matters, fashion matters, money matters, humor and experience and standards of living matter, etc. It's a very tired and old statement to make but men have gotten a bit lazy (not entirely their fault) and it's currently a huge advantage for those men who put in just the tiniest amount of effort. The god-awful beards, ratty clothes, dirty cars, bad taste in furniture, etc. it definitely adds up to a bad vibe but the biggest one is a sour attitude.

majikaja 3y ago

Porn is better Real life is too many attractive to unattractive 18-80 year old guys chasing after the attractive 18-25 year old women (also other way around but less money involved there) The notion that all the unattractive people will pair with each other is laughable

matrix87 3y ago

Sex without love is worse than no sex at all. Treating sex as an isolated metric is stupidity. Turning that metric into a status symbol reduces women to sex objects

2Gkashmiri 3y ago

https://kashmirlife.net/late-marriages-a-biologically-disastrous-92315/ https://kashmirlife.net/late-marriages-a-biologically-disast... https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358646699_A_study_on_the_perils_of_late_marriages_in_Kashmir_Valley_Causes_and_Consequences https://www.researchgate.net/publication/358646699_A_study_o... Some research from my corner of the world. Read how religious insistence on no sex before marriage and shift towards being "financially stable " means young people have no option but to wait. To make matters worse, PCOD stats in the region are like 15-26% of female population so thats an additional penalty.

alephnerd 3y ago
My extended family is from Jammu and Himachal, and marriages are later as well there, but that can largely be attributed to people concentrating more so on careers. I wouldn't be surprised if a similar trend is happening in Kashmir Valley as well, given that living standards there have tended to be higher than most of India. > insistence on no sex before marriage and shift towards being "financially stable " means young people have no option but to wait Or move to Chandigarh/Delhi like everyone in HP, JK, and PB Such is the middle income trap
- mavelikara 3y ago
  Both J&K and HP have < 950 sex ratios - possibly due to selective abortions. This will also affect the ability for men to find brides.
  - 2Gkashmiri 3y ago
    selective abortions are banned. at least in jk where i am from. anecdata but i have a relative who had 4 daughters before 1 son. in total he has 5 children.
  - deleted 3y ago
    [deleted]
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    > possibly due to selective abortions Young Families in HP tend to try to have at most 2 kids. If they get a boy in the first try, they generally won't try for another [0]. I can safely say it's a similar story in Jammu, but I can't speak for Kashmir. Kerala (where you appear to be from) actually has a worse Sex Ratio than JK [1]. Us Northies (at least DL/PB/HR/HP/JK/CH) have roughly comparable social indicators to Kerala, despite much more social strife. [0] - https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/low-sex-ratio-at-birth-extremely-worrisome-343297 https://m.tribuneindia.com/news/himachal/low-sex-ratio-at-bi... [1] - https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1782601 https://pib.gov.in/PressReleasePage.aspx?PRID=1782601

missingrib 3y ago

These numbers seem kind of low to me, even when I think of people in my life anecdotally. I wonder what is going on there.

alephnerd 3y ago
The 18-24 cohort (unsurprisingly) had less sex. Being in high school and starting college will do that to you, especially during a pandemic that prevented students from moving out. You can't have a kid out of high school and expect to raise them with a decent life anymore. This is a global trend btw, not just the US.
- fanzhang 3y ago
  Mostly because the definition of decent life has shot upwards way faster than economic standards. From fixed standards, the median kid being raised today is doing way better than 100 years ago, even though people chose to have way more kids 100 years ago: - Cars were death traps. - Dying in infancy and 20s, 30s was common. - Very few people went to college. 100 years ago, no one felt "indecent" to raise a kid they can't afford to send to college, or knew at a 1% chance of dying due to malnutrition. Now, for many people, they would feel indecent bringing someone into the world in that state.
  - alephnerd 3y ago
    Exactly! Living standards have grown (as have life expectancies), and people are as such much more ambitious.
  - brailsafe 3y ago
    > Now, for many people, they would feel indecent bringing someone into the world in that state. I think you're overdramatizing how prevalent such a concern is, and would wager that's mostly relegated to people in a certain social class and who've been instilled with the idea that University specifically is the key to success. Otherwise, many people in certain geographies aren't having kids because the prospect of being able to continue putting a roof over our own head seems tenuous at best, and we're just not so driven to have kids that moving quite far out of our communities is worth it, which leaves us in a limbo state of having scarce upward mobility but access to other valuable attributes, and the ability to keep that going for a while. Granted, I'm not personally driven to have kids anyway, but if my early thirties starts catching up to me, my first concern is not going to be whether I can pay for their college, it's whether or not I have a stable mother in the picture, and whether or not having a kid is something we're equipped to shelter, feed, cloth, and support through basic public education. Considering that even getting a separate room for ourselves would nearly double our rent, and buying a place with one could cost nearly 850k (without leaving even approximately where we currently live) it's not looking good.

s5300 3y ago

[dead]

teunispeters 3y ago

With the high demands of work and school ramping up (just like in Japan ...) - who has time and energy for that? Especially with either the long commutes and/or the multiple jobs necessarily to keep one from being homeless? (look up country-wide median incomes to find out how many people are affected, especially cross referenced even roughly against rentals/housing and other costs of living). Japan ref is just due to reading a lot of references to "why is the population shrinking?" discussions read over some years..

ethbr1 3y ago
If people found time to have sex in the middle ages, I daresay there's not currently a novel lack of time and overburden of work keeping modern people from having sex. And, indeed, as the post concludes its investigation: >> To summarize the main points: >> The sexlessness epidemic has likely been exaggerated as the GSS data appears to have began with an underestimate and ended with an overestimate judging by the subsequent survey results and more reliable survey data >> The trend which does exist doesn’t appear to be gendered but is affecting both genders equally, even if the implications aren’t the same for each gender >> About half of the sexless men may be voluntarily so
- orwin 3y ago
  The number of hours worked per year in the middle age are so much inferior to now, it's not even funny. I've talked to a blacksmith who sometimes use traditional forge and studied the medieval craft, he told us that it is not even a question , despite the tools improving, we work a lot more.
- xeromal 3y ago
  I've felt the same argument can work for many things. I've heard the same excuse about kids but I don't buy it. Humanity has had children in much more terrible times. For not having kids, my hunch is that we just don't want to anymore for convenience. For sex, I think it's our sedentary lifestyle.
- harimau777 3y ago
  My understanding is that people in the middle ages didn't work more than most people do now. In particular because there are stretches of the year (e.g. winter) when a farmer has significantly less work to do.

boguscoder 3y ago

«It’s probably not a stretch to say that these are the most famous graphs in history» Hmm no, its a long stretch

moshegramovsky 3y ago

[flagged]

xwolfi 3y ago
For me it has ! I have way more sex (I try to have it everyday) than my parents seem to have but a lot less children :D At 35, I feel I'm peaking to a point it's almost too much. What really seem to work to have sex a lot is to have lots of money (to get partners you wouldnt otherwise get), look exotic by emigrating (I live in Asia but was born in France), immediately ditch low libido partners (it's not always their fault, maybe you re just not attractive enough to them and that's totally okay), and be ready to really go the extra mile in bed to make it a bit new and exciting even with a long term partner: for instance I think it's important both climax each time and if it's hard then you buy tools and use them, no shame in that. My friends find it shameful to need a vibrator, but do they understand how exciting it is for a girl to climax while making love absolutely each time no matter what, and quickly, and how boring it is when it's a struggle and frustration instead ? I m a straight male, and Im into straight females, and I find many of them have submissive fantasies they have trouble to express and materializing them makes the sex absolutely addictive to them. My current gf is 19, likes to be roughed a little bit, have rape fantasies even I have trouble to play fully and her peak excitement is when I make her cry: this is not even rare, if you dare to ask. I even found it quite common but they are very shy to express it if you're too goody goody. If you dont have enough sex and it matters to you, then spend more money on it, look more exotic (or find foreign girls locally who will find you exotic), and be ready to be a bit mean, in a playful way. I dont have abs but I never met a girl who didnt fantasize on it: sounds like a cheap way to move up a few ranks, for instance.
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  Maybe people are onto something when they say sex should be reserved for someone special that you love. Because this is just... wow. An honest take and probably not all that uncommon with the commodification of sex. But completely unhealthy.
  - 3y ago

maxbond 3y ago

I think there's a real problem with adverse selection in our media environment, whereby outlier polls attract more attention and end up driving discourse and policy making, but are most often noise.

rpmisms 3y ago

No. Teens are disturbingly non-horny these days, and it's carrying over to adulthood. I blame the relative lack of genuine human interaction and microplastics.

maxbond 3y ago
How did you come to this conclusion? What did you think about the part of the article discussing the much larger NSFG survey? What about the part discussing volcels?
- busterarm 3y ago
  Have you looked at young people fashion lately? Their clothes are deliberately unflattering. Your grandmother would consider their looks conservative.
  - maxbond 3y ago
    The young people I've seen recently would've fit in at my school. We didn't dress all that provocatively either. I don't think we should conflate how people choose to dress with whether or not they're having sex - Victorian fashion was more conservative than today, but they had plenty of sex. I think fashion just ebbs and flows, independent of our sex lives.
    - lelanthran 3y ago
      > I don't think we should conflate how people choose to dress with whether or not they're having sex I think GP was correlating provocative dressing with horniness, not with how much sex they were having. It doesn't seem like an extraordinary leap to make.
      - maxbond 3y ago
        You can substitute "horniness" into my comment and the point stands. The Victorians were plenty horny and raunchy too. Fashion is about doing something different. If everyone is wearing skimpier and skimpier clothes, it's natural that wearing conservative clothing will become the way to stand out. We should expect this to ebb and flow independent of our sex lives. Not to mention everything presented in the linked article, and that I don't know how people around you are dressing, but people around me are dressing about as conservatively as they always have.

talldatethrow 3y ago

I've been a serial online dater since probably 1998 when I was 14. I had my mom drive me 30 minutes to meet a girl I talked to over Sparkmatch, a dating site for teens. Men are using porn more than ever. Yes, it reduces drive. Women are using online dating to meet up with guys they normally don't get attention from in day to day life. I date a lot, but not THAT much, and I know three early 20s women that slept with professional athletes (one married) from tinder (pre 2016) and bumble. Basically every girl is scoring way out of her league atleast once or twice from online dating, and getting burned by it. Women used to get burned by long term relationships of they chose poorly. Now they're getting burned by internet playboys before they even make it to a relationship. I have decent guy friends that can barely get a date. Every single girl no matter how average is drowning in attention online, so they focus on the top 5-10%. No guy in the top 5%, and especially not an athlete, is going to settle down with a 6. Yet afterwards, that 6 isn't very likely to settle for a 6 male. Until women start being more honest with each other and saving the younger ones from making these mistakes, it's going to be a bad time for young people.

sublinear 3y ago
Porn has definitely had the same impact on what men like. Before the internet we were overrating local women just the same. Lots of guys I know don't want to believe it, but there are a ton of lonely women out there that will fix themselves up for you just as you will for her. It's a matter of being willing to put in the work. People are not products on a shelf and they will change. It's up to you and your partner to guide that process for each other. You don't even have to commit to get that. Just be good friends.
- lelanthran 3y ago
  > Porn has definitely had the same impact on what men like. Maybe, but I seriously doubt it has an impact on what men actually do. Men aren't going "That woman is a 6; no way I'm sleeping with her" while women are saying "I know what I'm worth, because I dated[1] a top-5% man". It's always been the case that 80% of the women are chasing 5% of the men. Having the pool expanded by online-dating just means that even more women in absolute numbers have unrealistic expectations. [1] They didn't date them, they slept with them, couldn't get them to commit, and don't realise why they couldn't get them to commit.