7 ms·
This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex. What westerners might call 'casual sex' -- sex without the framework of a rela
by veidr 13y ago
This is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex.
What westerners might call 'casual sex' -- sex without the framework of a relationships that implies various other promieses/committments -- is normal, and also not likely to be spoken about frankly, especially to a reporter, and much less a British one.
Sometimes I'll witness a young woman asked about it at a social gathering (as people have a few drinks and speak more freely). "I don't have anybody... I can't remember the last time I slept with somebody," she might say. What she means is that she doesn't have a steady boyfriend, and thus it is certainly none of your business who she's fucking.
Or I will see a guy asked about it. "Well, romance is too complicated with all I've got going on... I've learned to live without it," he might say, with just the right amount of sheepishness. What he means is that he is seeking only sex that doesn't come with implied commitments and hassle.
These two people might very well end up leaving together.
- westicle 13y agoThis certainly isn't a phenomenon exclusive to Japan either. I know plenty of western young people who have no interest in marriage, procreation or families. Maybe they're more interested in their work. Maybe they're more interested in rock-climbing. Maybe they're more interested in Pokemon. More power to them, I say.
- jrs99 13y agoI think it's a bigger more existential problem that young people these days have.
- JoeAltmaier 13y agoMaybe they have too many electronic substitutes. There's nothing in the human makeup that says "will procreate even in the presence of unlimited sexual gratification elsewhere". Its certainly something to be studied and understood.
- 001sky 13y agoAnecdotally, this is directly correlated to the price of real-estate, and other parts of the world are only now catching up to Japan in this regards.
- msandford 13y agoA lot of people are looking at the utter destruction of freedom that raising a family is today, and choosing not to. It's not just the price of real estate, it's inflation too. Roll into that the lack of job security and negative real interest rates and it's no wonder people can't think about a future. One of the most basic needs when planning for a future is the prospect that the future will be better than the past. It's now very difficult to arrange that independently of constant advancement at work and constant advancement at work requires tremendous amounts of effort. People are getting squeezed from both sides. I feel this myself, and I'm doing quite well statistically; white, male, educated, highly skilled and gainfully employed.
- speeder 13y agoYou people are forgetting feminism. It has lots to do with it. Brazil for example has PLENTY of space and cheap places to live (unless you want to live in São Paulo... like where I am now, the prices here ARE fucked up) Yet marriages are going down to the point of scare the government too. The reason for it is simple (there has been lots of research, not only here, but on other countries with declining births to dangerous levels): women prefer their careers to motherhood... Even the UN gender economic report, state that it thinks is a good thing women have less kids because they can get richer (yes, that is written in the report, specifically, the report consider that countries where women have less than 3 kids, are countries that are awesome because they are reaching gender equality, since women with less kids can work more) For men, it is the invention of no-fault divorce, that keeps marriage pointless (the point of marriage historically, in cultures where divorce was forbidden by law or by custom or by religion, was to force women stay in the marriage, and indeed in countries with no-fault divorce, no matter where, they keep finding that 70% of the divorces with no reason where started by women)
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- Crake 13y agoI am definitely more interested in Pokemon.
- emiliobumachar 13y agoDo you think that the Japanese would be less inclined to speak frankly about their sex lives with foreign reporters or pollsters than, say, Koreans, Italians or Americans?
- hclee 13y agoHaha. They can't resist hormones and desire. Platonic love forever is lying. Japanese could do better as they have highly advanced porn and sexual industry.
- po 13y agoJapanese are less inclined to speak frankly about anything to anyone. A western reporter is probably more likely to take what they say at face value, without understanding the subtlety of their response and then report it as truth, especially when it supports a click-bait headline.
- lmm 13y agoYes. Japanese culture has an extreme level of politeness that you don't see in Italy or America (I don't know enough about Korea to comment). Even the British are more open.
- desas 13y agoYeah, the British are partly the way they are (reserved, standoffish, polite) because they are a small, crowded, island nation. Japan is the same but more so.
- lotsofcows 13y agoHmmmm, somebody's never been out in town on a Friday night.
- berntb 13y agoI always heard it described that Japanese are shy to a large part for the same reason Scandinavian/Nordic people are shy -- a very violent society, which isn't violent anymore. The shyness is a historic anacronism. (The shyness comes from that in a large fraction of quarrels someone(s) will be carried away, in pieces. You don't cause offense without very good reason. Not sober, anyway.)
- guerrilla 13y agoI have to say, this is the kind of thing I was thinking while reading the entire article. One of the things I remember most about working in Japan is the different manners in which people would answer questions. Everything did seem so extremely indirect, yet not necessarily dishonest.
- steven2012 13y agoWhy is it stupid? Obviously they don't mean every single Japanese young person hasn't stopped having sex. What the author means is that as a trend, they've stopped having sex, as evidenced by the declining population, the lack of young people in relationships, etc. From the data they cited from the surveys, it seems pretty incontrovertible that there is some sort of problem, despite your own personal anecdotes.
- kalleboo 13y agoNeither "declining population" nor "lack of young people in relationships" indicates people not having sex. It only indicates people not wanting families or kids.
- marcofloriano 13y agoWitch is worst, in my opinion.
- gaius 13y agoRight, but those aren't the only two signs we're talking about. If people are having lots of sex but don't want kids, we might see that in booming contraceptive sales. If people are having lots of sex but not using contraception and not having kids, well that would show up in wider culture too (e.g. gay dating sites would proliferate). Sex on a personal level is a very private thing for many people in many cultures, but trends can always been seen because there is always a commercial side.
- sanxiyn 13y agoIndeed, people not having procreative sex would be more correct.
- veidr 13y agoIt's stupid because they have multiplied a couple anecdotes, conflated decreased reproductive output and formalized relationships with a decrease in actual sex, and gotten all breathless and hyperbolic about it. There's no evidence of any trend that young people in Japan have stopped having sex. That is what I was trying to point out: not being in an old-fashioned relationship, and not actually bearing children, does not any longer have any kind of direct relationship to how much sex you are having. There may well be ongoing generational changes to reproductive and marriage/relationship behavior in Japan, as there is elsewhere (c.f. everywhere on Earth), but this article doesn't go there.
- hannibal5 13y agoThis is not stupid article. The journalist in question used these few people just to add human interest in a story full of statistics. 1. Increasing number of Japanese have just casual sex. 2. Increasing number of Japanese don't have sex (with other human) at all. There is statistical data from several surveys backing this up.
- greghinch 13y agoI think what the parent is saying (and is reiterated by several other posts here) is that premise of young Japanese people not having sex is based on a lack of understanding in the cultural subtexts implied by the way those young people are answering the questions. The reporter is taking their answers at face value, when in fact they shouldn't be at all.
- berntb 13y agoYou missed the claim that it is well documented that the Japanese young have less sex. A quick check of condom sales (and/or VD statistics) can verify if people have less sex. But, of course, the article really might be just pure fantasy with invented statistics. (I have no idea. Since it is easily testable, any fact checkers at the magazine would find out quickly. But maybe only NYTimes have them, these days.) Edit: Grammar fix. ferongr, I wrote condom and VD sales like that, since they obviously play off each others -- we do talk about short term affairs... (Ok, gaius did note the third case -- pregnancies/abortions :-) Also supports my points, the amount of sex is easy to measure.)
- michaelochurch 13y agoThis is a stupid article, and young people in Japan have not stopped having sex. It doesn't claim that. It says that 25% of young men and 45% of young women are repulsed by sexual contact. That means that 75% of men and 55% of women are still open to it (and, presumably, having it). I'd bet that if you looked at an American college campus, you'd find similar behavioral statistics, due to the declining ability of young Americans to form intimate relationships (which may not be their fault). Casual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't. Still, a 35% sexlessness rate among people in their 20s means that something is wrong. It doesn't mean that people have stopped having sex (65% are) but it's still a sign of something unhealthy. I don't take those numbers (which are probably not very different from those in the West) to indicate voluntary disinterest, but artifacts of undue stress. When the cause of the sexlessness (which is not just a Japanese problem) is unnecessary corporate stress, it's worth looking for solutions.
- Sukotto 13y agoCasual sex doesn't fit most people. Many people (including most men) can't get it and many (including most women) don't want it. Only about 50-60% participate in the casual market even once, and half of those end up wishing they hadn't. I'd like to read about that in more depth. Can you cite that gender breakdown and participation/satisfaction stat to a specific set of published research?
- octaveguin 13y agoI don't know where the parent's source is but the kinsey institute has super interesting stats on similar questions. http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#frequency http://www.kinseyinstitute.org/resources/FAQ.html#frequency
- dsj129 13y agoI would argue that it's not so much that most women "don't want" casual sex, but that they are judged more harshly for having it. I believe women's sex drives are quite a bit higher than is reported, mainly because women are ashamed to admit their strictly sexual desires.
- kstenerud 13y agoYour two fictional quotes are vague enough for subtext to creep in, but the quotes in the article are quite plain and clear. Speaking to reporters (especially foreign ones) is one of the few cases where Japanese people feel free to speak frankly, because there is a significantly reduced feeling of social judgment. They generally won't talk within their social circle about causal sex because it will lead to talk (or more likely implication) of marriage, which is an uncomfortable subject nowadays, for reasons outlined in the article.
- mrcactu5 13y agoare we just being "gaijin" by taking the article at face value. japanese are particularly good at keeping different segments of their identity separate.
- rurabe 13y agoThe title is linkbait, to be sure, but I think that in focusing on the hyperbolic linkbaiting, you miss the ultimate point of the article, which to me is to describe a growing cultural shift in relationships, which is having major social and economic repercussions.
- dclowd9901 13y agoAnd speaking with the sex therapist, who also acknowledges the shift in young peoples' cultural approach to sex? Should we disregard that as well? Also, while the title is certainly link-baity, I think the point of the article is more about the lack of desire to cultivate meaningful intimate relationships that turn into families.
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