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Are you a man? Do you have a partner? Do you watch porn? If yes to all three then I propose the following. Stop watching porn for 2 weeks and see how your relationship with sex changes.
For me, porn absolutely reduces the desire to have sex.
But sex is not a reliable cause of fertility in developed countries.
Sure it is. Not 100% of pregnancies are planned. In fact, it's quite possible that a majority are unplanned.
Consistent with what I said.
What's your evidence? In places with the morning after pill and abortion on demand, why do you think that it is plausible that a majority of children are accidental?
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Yes to all three (though I do try not to watch porn). Trust me, it doesn't reduce my desire to have sex. It's an outlet at those times when I can't have sex, because I can't have sex.
I genuinely have no idea why anyone would prefer porn over sex. Availability aside, it is a strictly inferior substitute for the real thing. So based on my experience, no, I don't think availability of porn is causing people to have less sex.
Because porn features different actors and my sex life features the same actors. I'm an N of 1 here sure, but it's common knowledge that the first thing men do when their wives leave the house is enjoy a good wank session.
If you'd said wife and kids i might have bought it, but as is, no I don't think that's common knowledge at all.
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To the extent that is true (and I do not think it is literally true at all for most people), I would surmise that's because they aren't getting as much sex as they want and prefer to be alone to take care of their needs. I certainly have enjoyed a nice wank when my wife is out of the house, but it isn't replacing sex (and never will). Variety is cool and all, but pales in comparison to the pleasure of actually interacting with a real live woman.
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Ease. No need to get your partner in the mood, no need to pleasure your partner, you get to focus solely on your own pleasure when you want to be pleasured and you're done when you want to be done.
My personal controversial belief about this is that people are often against porn for this very reason. They want actual sex to be like this, where you focus solely on your own pleasure. Porn "raises the bar" in a way that makes them uncomfortable about their own performance.
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These are two of the main enjoyable activities in sex, though.
It's a specific instance of the more general loving vs. being loved distinction. Being loved by someone isn't a tremendously enjoyable experience in itself, because it's passive. Loving someone, insofar as your actions tend to succeed, is about as enjoyable as life gets, because it's active and you can recognise the meaningfulness of your actions towards a valued goal.
See also being rich vs. getting rich, being famous vs. getting famous, being academically successful vs. getting academically successful etc. Most of the enjoyment comes from recognising that your actions are helping you to achieve a valued goal.
If you don't have a sexual partner, then your actions aren't meaningful for the goal of achieving intimacy with a sexual partner, and hence they lose most of their meaning. Hence "masturbatory" as a metaphor for "meaningless".
It's still more work. Like cooking a steak vs having a microwavable meal for dinner. The sex/steak's going to be better, but if you don't feel like putting in more than a lazy five minutes in, the porn/microwave is the choice people will go for.
But whether the time over five minutes is worth it is not independent of people's evaluations of the end goal.
In Love and Friendship, Allan Bloom argued that the net effect of Freud, Kinsey, and the pseudo-scientification of sexuality was to de-eroticise a lot of American culture. There was more open sexuality in the culture, but less of a sense of majesty to the sexuality, and hence a loss of eroticism. Perhaps the appeal to pornography to people is not that they have been desensitized to real-world sexual activities by pornographic experiences, but that they have lost the hope of a genuinely erotic experience in the real-world.
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I did say "availability aside". Yes, sex is harder to get - but when you can get it, it blows porn out of the water. That is why the "people are having less sex because of porn" hypothesis doesn't ring true to me, because that hypothesis basically says that people are willingly forgoing a superior experience for an inferior one.
Even if your partner is happy to have sex and all you need to do is ask, the reasons I listed are reasons why someone might not want to.
I disagree. I cannot envision someone seriously citing those reasons to not have sex in favor of having a wank. I certainly never would.
I don't get that much sex, but I don't find it as vastly pleasurable as you do. There's a decent chance that this is because I've wanked too much and have desensitized my penis, but whatever, it's reality now for me. If I had a partner who rarely would initiate sex, but would always say yes if I initiated- I imagine I'd have sex lots in the beginning of the relationship, then the experience would get a bit stale and I'd go down to a couple times a week.
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I agree. Allan Bloom once said that sado-masochism was a substitute for natural eroticism when people had lost any hope for the latter, e.g. even if you are being abused and deprived by someone, or you are abusing/depriving them in various ways, that's at least some sort of connection, and humans will often prefer even painful and tormented connections to loneliness.
I think that the same dynamic appears in many other parts of life. For example, I have done volunteer work where I met many abused/formerly abused women, and they had always lost hope of a loving relationship with anyone other than their abuser.
Porn, and masturbation more generally, seems to be an instance of the same phenomenon: a substitute activity for when people don't think that they can have the alternative. Note that the alternative is not just sex, but intimacy. A lot of porn users think that they could use prostitutes, unattractive partners, and so on, but don't see that as a path to intimacy. Or they see intimate relationships as too much work, like those men who see sex as a burden of pleasing their partner, rather than as a fun and spiritual (for lack of a better word) activity.
Christian thinkers were really on to something when they said that hope was the most important virtue.
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sex is much more expensive in more ways than just money
What do you mean?
false rape accusations , for one
there are so many hidden costs
I mean, that is bad. But anyone for whom that is a serious risk needs to really reevaluate their sex life. You shouldn't be banging someone you have so little trust in for that to be a realistic possibility.
And this has quite clearly already happened; that's the entire reason for why there's less sex now. (Socioeconomic conditions changed such that women could demand a higher price from men; traditionalists agree with the feminists that this is good, but they're the only ones.)
That's certainly plausible, though I can't really say it's a bad thing if people have learned that promiscuity is bad actually. But in that case, people aren't having less sex because of porn, really. At most one might say it's a contributing factor (risks of casual sex + no-risk porn), but to me that's not the same thing.
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I don't think appeal to personal experience is a very strong. Particularly in my case: I'm a bi furry and have a variety of circumstances where I'll not have access to porn (or any serious personal privacy) for upwards of a month, or sometimes just not watch the stuff at all for my own reasons. It doesn't seem to have much an impact on my sex drive, but I'm hesitant to generalize that to anyone else.
More broadly, though, even assuming and accepting that it reduces desire for sex, we're talking a chart that looks like this. There's ways to talk about a big decrease in sex after the 1990s, but they end up with most sex not being baby-making.
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this is not a good argument, imho
i don't think it's easy to generalize a personal experience to society
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