Links - 12th June 2020 (1) (Sex Recession)

Young People Are Having Less Sex - The Atlantic - "These should be boom times for sex.The share of Americans who say sex between unmarried adults is “not wrong at all” is at an all-time high. New cases of HIV are at an all-time low. Most women can—at last—get birth control for free, and the morning-after pill without a prescription.If hookups are your thing, Grindr and Tinder offer the prospect of casual sex within the hour. The phrase If something exists, there is porn of it used to be a clever internet meme; now it’s a truism. BDSM plays at the local multiplex—but why bother going? Sex is portrayed, often graphically and sometimes gorgeously, on prime-time cable. Sexting is, statistically speaking, normal... Meanwhile, the U.S. teen pregnancy rate has plummeted to a third of its modern high. When this decline started, in the 1990s, it was widely and rightly embraced. But now some observers are beginning to wonder whether an unambiguously good thing might have roots in less salubrious developments. Signs are gathering that the delay in teen sex may have been the first indication of a broader withdrawal from physical intimacy that extends well into adulthood... Over the course of many conversations with sex researchers, psychologists, economists, sociologists, therapists, sex educators, and young adults, I heard many other theories about what I have come to think of as the sex recession. I was told it might be a consequence of the hookup culture, of crushing economic pressures, of surging anxiety rates, of psychological frailty, of widespread antidepressant use, of streaming television, of environmental estrogens leaked by plastics, of dropping testosterone levels, of digital porn, of the vibrator’s golden age, of dating apps, of option paralysis, of helicopter parents, of careerism, of smartphones, of the news cycle, of information overload generally, of sleep deprivation, of obesity. Name a modern blight, and someone, somewhere, is ready to blame it for messing with the modern libido...
1. Sex for One...
In the Netherlands, the median age at which people first have intercourse rose from 17.1 in 2012 to 18.6 in 2017, and other types of physical contact also got pushed back, even kissing. This news was greeted not with universal relief, as in the United States, but with some concern. The Dutch pride themselves on having some of the world’s highest rates of adolescent and young-adult well-being. If people skip a crucial phase of development, one educator warned—a stage that includes not only flirting and kissing but dealing with heartbreak and disappointment—might they be unprepared for the challenges of adult life?... For nearly a decade, stories in the Western press have tied Japan’s sexual funk to a rising generation of soushoku danshi—literally, “grass-eating boys.” These “herbivore men,” as they are known in English, are said to be ambivalent about pursuing either women or conventional success... Early on, most Western accounts of all this had a heavy subtext of “Isn’t Japan wacky?” This tone has slowly given way to a realization that the country’s experience might be less a curiosity than a cautionary tale... Japan is inventing modes of genital stimulation that no longer bother to evoke old-fashioned sex... There is scant evidence of an epidemic of erectile dysfunction among young men. And no researcher I spoke with had seen compelling evidence that porn is addictive. As the authors of a recent review of porn research note in The Archives of Sexual Behavior, “The notion of problematic pornography use remains contentious in both academic and popular literature,” while “the mental health community at large is divided as to the addictive versus non-addictive nature of Internet pornography.”... many people saw their porn life and their sex life as entirely separate things... Pornhub, the top pornography website, released its list of 2017’s most popular searches. In first place, for the third year running, was lesbian (a category beloved by men and women alike). The new runner-up, however, was hentai—anime, manga, and other animated porn. Porn has never been like real sex, of course, but hentai is not even of this world; unreality is the source of its appeal... An intriguing study published last year in the Journal of Population Economics examined the introduction of broadband internet access at the county-by-county level, and found that its arrival explained 7 to 13 percent of the teen-birth-rate decline from 1999 to 2007...
2. Hookup Culture and Helicopter Parents...
Millennial college students weren’t having more sex or sexual partners than their Gen X predecessors... “It’s hard to work in sex when the baseball team practices at 6:30, school starts at 8:15, drama club meets at 4:15, the soup kitchen starts serving at 6, and, oh yeah, your screenplay needs completion”... “We hook up because we have no social skills. We have no social skills because we hook up.”... “my undergraduates tell me they try hard not to fall in love during college, imagining that would mess up their plans.”... Solomon jumped in with a sort of relationship litmus test: “If I get the flu, are you bringing me soup?” Around the conference table, heads shook; not many people were getting (or giving) soup...
3. The Tinder Mirage...
He couldn’t escape the sense that hitting on someone in person had, in a short period of time, gone from normal behavior to borderline creepy... for every 300 women he swiped right on, he had a conversation with just one... This shift seems to be accelerating amid the national reckoning with sexual assault and harassment, and a concomitant shifting of boundaries. According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now believe that a man inviting a woman out for a drink “always” or “usually” constitutes sexual harassment. (Among older groups, much smaller percentages believe this.) Laurie Mintz, who teaches a popular undergraduate class on the psychology of sexuality at the University of Florida, told me that the #MeToo movement has made her students much more aware of issues surrounding consent... others have described less healthy reactions, like avoiding romantic overtures for fear that they might be unwelcome. In my own conversations, men and women alike spoke of a new tentativeness and hesitancy. One woman who described herself as a passionate feminist said she felt empathy for the pressure that heterosexual dating puts on men... I mentioned to several of the people I interviewed for this piece that I’d met my husband in an elevator, in 2001. (We worked on different floors of the same institution, and over the months that followed struck up many more conversations—in the elevator, in the break room, on the walk to the subway.) I was fascinated by the extent to which this prompted other women to sigh and say that they’d just love to meet someone that way. And yet quite a few of them suggested that if a random guy started talking to them in an elevator, they would be weirded out. “Creeper! Get away from me”... Many critiques of online dating, including a 2013 article by Dan Slater in The Atlantic, adapted from his book A Million First Dates, have focused on the idea that too many options can lead to “choice overload,” which in turn leads to dissatisfaction... couples who meet online tend to marry more quickly than other couples, a fact that hardly suggests indecision. Maybe choice overload applies a little differently than Slater imagined. Maybe the problem is not the people who date and date some more—they might even get married, if Rosenfeld is right—but those who are so daunted that they don’t make it off the couch... Lisa Wade suspects that graduates of high-school or college hookup culture may welcome the fact that online dating takes some of the ambiguity out of pairing up... apps are quite useful to those who are in what economists call “thin markets”—markets with a relatively low number of participants. Sexual minorities, for example, tend to use online dating services at much higher rates than do straight people... In all dating markets, apps appear to be most helpful to the highly photogenic... online daters of both genders tend to pursue prospective mates who are on average 25 percent more desirable than they are—presumably not a winning strategy...
4.  Bad Sex (Painfully Bad)...
“If you’re with somebody for the first time,” she said evenly, “don’t choke them, don’t ejaculate on their face, don’t try to have anal sex with them. These are all things that are just unlikely to go over well.”... she was deeply concerned by all the vulvar fissures she and her colleagues were seeing in their student patients. These women weren’t reporting rape, but the condition of their genitals showed that they were enduring intercourse that was, literally, undesired. “They were having sex they didn’t want, weren’t aroused by,” O’Sullivan says. The physician told her that the standard of care was to hand the women K‑Y Jelly and send them on their way... for most people, casual sex tends to be less physically pleasurable than sex with a regular partner... If young people are delaying serious relationships until later in adulthood, more and more of them may be left without any knowledge of what good sex really feels like...
5. Inhibition...
a new discomfort with nudity might stem from the fact that, by the mid-1990s, most high schools had stopped requiring students to shower after gym class... for both men and women, social-media use is correlated with body dissatisfaction... feeling comfortable in your body is good for your sex life. A review of 57 studies examining the relationship between women’s body image and sexual behavior suggests that positive body image is linked to having better sex... single Millennials were 66 percent less likely than members of older generations to enjoy receiving oral sex. Which doesn’t bode particularly well for female pleasure: Among partnered sex acts, cunnilingus is one of the surest ways for women to have orgasms. Ian Kerner, the New York sex therapist, told me that he works with a lot of men who would like to perform oral sex but are rebuffed by their partner... Over the past 20 years, the way sex researchers think about desire and arousal has broadened from an initially narrow focus on stimulus to one that sees inhibition as equally, if not more, important... Rates of anxiety and depression have been rising among Americans for decades now, and by some accounts have risen quite sharply of late among people in their teens and 20s. Anxiety suppresses desire for most people. And, in a particularly unfortunate catch‑22, both depression and the antidepressants used to treat it can also reduce desire... Among people who are sexually inexperienced at age 18, about 80 percent will become sexually active by the time they are 25. But those who haven’t gained sexual experience by their mid-20s are much less likely to ever do so... Over the course of a year, he reports, only 50 percent of heterosexual single women in their 20s go on any dates—and older women are even less likely to do so. Other sources of sexual inhibition speak distinctly to the way we live today. For example, sleep deprivation strongly suppresses desire—and sleep quality is imperiled by now-common practices like checking one’s phone overnight. (For women, getting an extra hour of sleep predicts a 14 percent greater likelihood of having sex the next day.)... We live in unprecedented physical safety, and yet something about modern life, very recent modern life, has triggered in many of us autonomic responses associated with danger—anxiety, constant scanning of our surroundings, fitful sleep...“Along with posture and brain size, sexuality completes the trinity of the decisive aspects in which the ancestors of humans and great apes diverged.”"

Percent of Americans not having sex reaches record high: report - "Twenty-three percent of respondents, or nearly 1 in 4, reported having no sex in the past year, according to the Post. More than 30 percent of adults reported having monthly sex and nearly 40 percent reported having sex weekly or more.Young men between 18 and 30 years of age saw one of the biggest declines in sexual activity, with 28 percent saying they had no sex over the last year. The same data from 1989 shows just 14 percent of men of the same age range reporting no sex.Young women in the same age range, however, report higher rates of sexual activity, with only 18 percent saying they had no sex in the past year."

Young men giving up on marriage: ‘Women aren’t women anymore’ - "Fewer young men in the US want to get married than ever, while the desire for marriage is rising among young women... Pew recently found that the number of women 18-34 saying that having a successful marriage is one of the most important things rose from 28 percent to 37 percent since 1997. The number of young adult men saying the same thing dropped from 35 percent to 29 percent in the same time. Pew’s findings have caught the attention of one US writer who maintains that feminism, deeply entrenched in every segment of the culture, has created an environment in which young men find it more beneficial to simply opt out of couple-dom entirely... As a writer and researcher into the trends of marriage and relationships, Venker said, she has “accidentally stumbled upon a subculture” of men who say “in no uncertain terms, that they’re never getting married.”“When I ask them why, the answer is always the same: women aren’t women anymore.” Feminism, which teaches women to think of men as the enemy, has made women “angry” and “defensive, though often unknowingly.”“Now the men have nowhere to go. It is precisely this dynamic – women good/men bad – that has destroyed the relationship between the sexes. Yet somehow, men are still to blame when love goes awry.”“Men are tired,” Venker wrote. “Tired of being told there’s something fundamentally wrong with them. Tired of being told that if women aren’t happy, it’s men’s fault.”"

The Sex Recession Is Making Young Americans Unhappy - "In the antiseptic language of two economists who study happiness, “sexual activity enters strongly positively in happiness equations.”... Controlling for basic demographics and other social characteristics, married young adults are about 75 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not married... Young adults who attend religious services more than once a month are about 40 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who are not religious at all, according to our analysis of the GSS. (People with very infrequent religious attendance are even less happy than never-attenders; in terms of happiness, a little religion is worse than none.)... young adults who see their friends regularly do seem to be about 10 percent more likely to report being very happy than their less-sociable peers... Young adults who have sex at least once a week are about 35 percent more likely to report that they are very happy, compared with their peers who have no sex. But the share of young adults having sex at least once a week has fallen from 59 percent in 1972 to 49 percent in 2018. This decline is far steeper among men: down from 58 percent of young men having sex at least weekly in 2010 to just 43 percent in 2018. And the share of young adults reporting no sex in the past year has risen as well, now at 22 percent for young men and 14 percent for young women in 2018... changes in sexual frequency can account for about one-third of the decline in happiness since 2012 and almost 100 percent of the decline in happiness since 2014. If Americans still had sex like they did in 2008, or even 2012, we might be a much happier country. Declines in marriage and religiosity have also played some role, but the effects are much smaller... Clearly, the United States is in the middle of a “sex recession.” Nowhere has this sex recession proved more consequential than among young adults, especially young men... the decline in sexual frequency is itself related to postponed marriage: Married people have sex more often. Finding a spouse can be hard and, crucially, one of the places young adults have historically found their spouses is church."

Trying to find answers for the sex recession, we’ve reached a double standard - "Some media coverage tried to leave no stone unturned in seeking possible explanations for male millennials’ lack of hooking up, pointing the finger at everything from antidepressants to social media and video games... Others have interpreted these findings as a positive sign, that perhaps young American adults are simply making better decisions about sex. But according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, sexually transmitted infections (STIs) are skyrocketing... those taking part in the published study may not have considered newer sexual outlets, such as sexting and webcamming, to be defined as sex, thereby leading them to underreport the amount of sexual activity they’ve partaken in. It’s possible that rates of sex haven’t actually declined as drastically as it would seem, but that young men are choosing to interact with their partners online, instead of in real life. As for the belief that pornography is to blame, some research has shown that those who view porn actually tend to have more sex. For women who are sexually active, they are likely choosing from a smaller pool of male candidates. Although some have heralded this as good news – that perhaps women are taking greater initiative and turning down partners they see as unfit – if one plans to settle down in a committed, monogamous relationship, it is women who will eventually be partnering with currently celibate young men. When the time comes, these men will be less experienced, not only in the bedroom, but in navigating romantic relationships too. Few seem concerned about what this signals as part of the larger picture. Imagine if a study found that women were being adversely affected because of not having the means to provide for themselves. Multiple organizations would surely be falling over themselves with initiatives to help women improve their situation. If the numbers showed that women were having drastically less sex, no doubt there would be outrage and countless op-eds lamenting how unjust this was. Let’s not forget that when a study came out last year showing that women tended to have fewer orgasms during sex than men, the corresponding onslaught of media reportage blamed men for being bad lovers."

The decline in sex is a symptom of male joblessness - "there’s simply no question the drop in male employment has had a direct effect on their love lives.“The survey showed,” Ingraham adds, “that 54 percent of unemployed Americans didn't have a steady romantic partner, compared with only 32 percent among the employed.”No one wants to admit this, because it’s unfashionable to do so, but an unemployed woman is not the same as an unemployed man. A woman without a job doesn't make her any less attractive to men. But we cannot say the same thing about a man. An unemployed man who lacks purpose and direction just isn't sexy, especially if he lives in his parents’ basement, which more than a third of men ages 18-34 do."

Why Men Can't Write About Sex Anymore - "Fast-forward a quarter of a century and it feels like we’ve all become characters in dystopian Samizdat novels, our actions proscribed by the progressive thought police who wield power over our lives and careers. Sexuality, which was once seen as liberating, and the purest expression of a free society, is now perceived through the lens of sexual harassment and the #metoo movement. Male desire has become entangled with the contentious issue of consent, so that its every expression has the potential to be exploitative. Having sex for a male in America now is like driving drunk: things might work out fine despite the risk, but you might just as easily crash and burn... A friend who had written an innocent and sweet essay about losing his virginity for a big name American magazine years ago was now fearful that it might be used against him in this new climate of sexual inquisition. It’s no wonder that bad boy male writing has almost completely disappeared from contemporary literature... It now falls to female novelists like Gone Girl’s Gillian Flynn to write openly and dangerously about sex and desire. It’s a comment on the West today that bad girl writers are more prevalent than their male counterparts... The neutering of male desire in literature and the arts has, however, also spilled out into real life. There has been a rash of articles recently in publications like the Atlantic—and even the New York Times, which has been a tireless cheerleader for the #metoo movement—bemoaning the decrease in sexual activity among Millennials and other Americans. The Atlantic article was originally entitled “The Sex Recession,” while Ross Douthat’s New York Times column was headlined “The Huxley Trap” and talked about the taming of the sexual revolution.According to a November 2017 Economist/YouGov poll, 17 percent of Americans ages 18-29 now believe that inviting a woman out for a drink constitutes sexual harassment. It’s no wonder that sex has been tamed in this climate of fear. The U.S birth rate has hit a record low for the second year running this year: half a million fewer babies were born in 2017 than ten years earlier in 2007. The number of children born to an average American woman has fallen from 2.1 in the early 2000s to 1.76. At this rate, America will desperately need more immigrants to sustain its population"