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> Americans: why isn't anyone having sex anymore?? Also Americans: Abstinence only! You'll get pregnant! No abortions! STDs will kill you! Men deserve sex! We'r
by ancillary 1y ago
> Americans: why isn't anyone having sex anymore?? Also Americans: Abstinence only! You'll get pregnant! No abortions! STDs will kill you! Men deserve sex! We're not going to teach you how your body works!
None of that is new in America. If anything, I'd expect that these forces were stronger 20-30 years ago, when sexual activity rates were higher.
- f-securus 1y agoRoe V Wade reversal and the extent they rolled back women’s rights has certainly changed the atmosphere.
- add-sub-mul-div 1y agoTrue. The decline has been in effect for a while, but as for recent chages losing reproductive freedom can't be helping, nor AI and legal weed as two new ways for people to opiate themselves.
- lazide 1y agoEh, having lived in many other countries - lack of reproductive freedom definitely doesn’t cut back on sex. Same with public shaming, or other coercive control. It’s not like there are 1.5 billion Indians because no one has sex there.
- notahacker 1y agoI don't think the overturning of Roe vs Wade was the key driver in trends which started long before that decision, but there's a big difference between a society where girls marry who they're expected to marry and have sex with him when he expects it and a society where girls get to choose whether to hookup or not and if and when to marry but don't get to choose how they deal with the results...
- lazide 1y agoI take it you’ve never lived in India? Both are true in large part there, at least in the cities. Except Indian politics are at least 10x as crazy as current US politics on the ground, and probably 10x as potentially (violently) serious if someone ‘steps out of line’, so people are better at hiding what is going on.
- notahacker 1y agoSpent enough months in India to be aware that hookups happen, including ones parents would be very disapproving of and ones which were illegal at the time. Pretty much everything happens in India to some degree, but we're talking about the effect at the margin here, and I don't think India has a 1.5bn population because hookups are more of a thing there than the West.
- lazide 1y agoFair point - the population numbers are largely due to the (most common) marital structure, and societal expectations around having kids. The amount of sex though definitely includes hookups and a lot of sex outside of the acknowledged marital structure. A large number of those kids may well be illegitimate, I suspect no one wants to look too hard. I also suspect what is happening in the US is a combination of defacto ‘strikes’ from both sides of the equation, combined with general confusion as to what to do or why. Essentially a ‘why would I want to engage with this mess? What’s even in it for me?’.
- notahacker 1y agoI suspect that for all the attention certain politics and niche subcultures promoting disengagement get, it mostly comes down to spending less time in mingly social environments with the opposite sex, something young unmarried Indian men frequently expressed disappointment with and is also increasingly the case in the West for a different balance of reasons. The average reason may be different, but of course the US has its small towns full of conservative parents and India has its internet addicts and workaholics. (Not sure if there are directly comparable surveys, but I wouldn't be surprised to discover that unmarried Americans were rather more sexually active than unmarried Indians, even with the downward trend)
- fennecbutt 1y agoWell they do also have 6-10 kids per family there so...
- margalabargala 1y agoI don't think any meaningful segment of the population is using AI to "opiate" themselves. AI is a useful tool but I haven't heard of it having parasocial effects on any meaningful scale. Happy to be shown otherwise if there's data?
- fragmede 1y ago"Meaningful" is quite the qualifier. It's possible http://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI http://reddit.com/r/MyBoyfriendIsAI is entirely one person's work of fiction but also maybe not. From there you have to guess at how many people are doing that and just not telling anybody or posting about it online. So there's no data that proves it one way or the other, and all we've got to go on is anecdotes.
- hiatus 1y agoThe reversal of Roe v Wade has changed people's sex drives?
- Yossarrian22 1y agoYes? There’s now additional risk of dying
- platevoltage 1y agoI would imagine it has for a certain portion of the population with a certain organ that is the subject of legislation.
- xboxnolifes 1y agoRoe v Wade reversal happened well past the observed decline in sex occurrence.
- nutribueno 1y ago[dead]
- msgodel 1y agoThat's very recent while this started quite a while ago.
- ryoshu 1y agoSocial media and phones with cameras has made a lot of people risk adverse. When a video can hit Twitter or TikTok or Reddit about something that can ruin your life why risk it?
- hiatus 1y agoThere are people running around poisoning produce and posting it online—I don't think camera shyness is an element of it.
- fruitworks 1y agoThose people are psychopaths and the exception to the rule
- exe34 1y agojust don't go to Coldplay concerts!
- more_corn 1y agoIf both you and your date are marred to other people.
- onetimeusename 1y agoI'm not sure that's it. It's a contradiction that we have social media where people share their lives and that people are risk averse to having videos made of themselves.
- seattle_spring 1y agoIt's not a contradiction: people don't share their real lives, they share a curated and often dishonest version of their lives. Obviously people don't want negative videos shared publicly.
- Ekaros 1y ago
- saulpw 1y agoIt takes about that long for the message to embed itself into the generational psyche.