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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   34390 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of March 13, 2023

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Monogamous men in long-term relationships aren't doin too hot

A recent post by Aella goes over some statistics on marriage and relationships with a focus on the male perspective. The results are... pretty awful. It's a well-known fact that nearly half of all marriages end in divorce, 70% of which are initiated by women, and that family courts are heavily biased against men. This makes marriage an inherently risky proposition, as people are putting a substantial chunk of their life on the line on what amounts to coinflip odds.

So what about the men who pass that check and remain married? Is it all sunshine and rainbows for all of them? Well, obviously not, as there are common tropes of bitter old couples who argue with each other over tons of small things, and of couples where the passion has long since dissipated but they remain together out of convenience. What proportion of marriages are unfulfilling like this? There hasn't been much research or data on this but Aella reveals that the answer is, unfortunately, most of them.

On the question of "Are you satisfied with your sex life?", men are indeed quite satisfied if they're in relationships that are less than a year old, but the rate of agreement drops precipitously as the relationship progresses. By the time the relationship is 6-8 years old, men flip to being net-unsatisfied with their sex life. It continues getting worse and worse over time, although at a slower rate. For relationships that are 12+ years old, ~53% of men report being unsatisfied with their sex life compared to 41% who are satisfied. More than twice as many men report being severely unsatisfied (13.7%) compared to the number who are strongly satisfied (6%). An unsatisfying sex life has a strong negative correlation with overall relationship satisfaction, and a strong positive correlation to agreeing with statements like ”My partner doesn't excite me” (r=0.47), ”My relationship causes me grief or sorrow” (r=0.44), ”In hindsight, getting into this relationship was a bad idea” (r=0.42), and ”My partner judges me” (r=0.31). It also often leads to cheating. By the time relationships are 22 years old, over 40% of men self-report cheating at least once, while over 20% of women report the same.

So for men, opting for marriage seems like an exceedingly bad option because they not only have to pass the 50/50 on whether the marriage collapses into a divorce, but then they also need to hope their relationship remains net-satisfying in the long run when only around 40% do. Modern relationships age like milk and doing the math on the two probabilities (0.5 * 0.4 = 0.2) means marriage only has about a 20% chance of being satisfying in the long-term. To be fair, relationships in history also had to deal with one or both sides becoming unsatisfied, but the lust-focus of modern marriages make them particularly susceptible to problems compared to the more contractual marriages of history.

Seeing things like these almost makes me feel sorry for westerners, ... almost.

My personal upbringing taught me to always treat all women with great respect/guard their honour. I was never interested in sleeping around for instance. Shortly after I entered university one of my fellow countrymen who was a few years above me told me that the Western women around me were for having fun with and were not suitable for marriage. He told me that when I was ready for marriage I should bring over a sweet girl from back home. At the time I found the statement to be offensive towards women and was somewhat indignant, for surely (or so I thought) these women were just like those back home but without a strong social norms to guide them and in the end they all wanted the same thing, but over the years with experience I have come to see the wisdom in his words. Western women really aren't worth much more than having fun with.

The problem here isn't women as a whole, but women infested with western brain rot specifically. And Western men played a big part in letting their society get to such a point.

If that’s the case why are men of your culture such inveterate users of prostitutes?

Care to proactively provide evidence for this inflammatory claim? You have the relevant stats to share?

First I am hearing of this, I would love to see a source showing high prevalence of prostitution. Ideally for high class people back home (our lower classes may as well be a different species to us) but I'll accept general data from anywhere around the world.

There are 3 million prostitutes in India - presumably someone is visiting them.

3 million?

This here says only 600k: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prostitution_statistics_by_country which is 1/6 of the per capita rate of the US.

Newspapers from India…

https://www.firstpost.com/india/supreme-court-recognises-prostitution-as-profession-what-does-this-mean-for-sex-workers-10726011.html/amp

“While some estimate that there are around 8,00,000 sex workers in India, the actual number could be as high as 20 lakh across the country.”

The Western media like NYTimes says 3 million.

I'm sorry but a "traditional" culture/woman won't save you from a dead bedroom. Evidence? I am from one of those cultures and every kid (other young adults like me) more or less unanimously aggress that their parents never have sex.

The only thing that will save you is if both partners are of solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health.

It's one of those things that sounds good but doesn't work, if there is little mutual want for sex in the beginning like many socially enforced marriages, what hope is there to be sex years down the line?

Given the sizes of families in those traditional cultures, I can guarantee you that married people do in fact have sex in them.

every kid (other young adults like me) more or less unanimously aggress that their parents never have sex.

Were all of you found under cabbage leaves, then? 🤣 I think children - even young adults - may not realise when their parents are having sex. It probably does decline as people get older, but not as much as young people think.

Think of Hamlet in the play - he can't understand why his mother would want to marry his uncle out of reasons of sexual desire, because she's old now, she should be beyond that kind of urge:

You cannot call it love; for at your age

The heyday in the blood is tame, it's humble,

And waits upon the judgment: and what judgment

Would step from this to this?

…O shame! where is thy blush? Rebellious hell,

If thou canst mutine in a matron's bones,

To flaming youth let virtue be as wax,

And melt in her own fire: proclaim no shame

When the compulsive ardor gives the charge,

Since frost itself as actively doth burn

And reason panders will.

I was created in a lab.

My parents seriously don't have sex, but they got other problems so that confounds it. But parents not having sex or there being absolutely no signs of it ever happening seems to be common if not universal belief around me, at least some of that should points to a trend I suppose. Very speculative but no one is really out there counting sex frequency by nationality so sentiments on the ground serves as the closest proxy I can get.

My parents managed to have four kids even though circumstances would appear to have made it very difficult for them to get the opportunities to do so, for various reasons 😁 So I do take "I don't see any signs of my parents sleeping together" with a grain of salt; it depends how old the parents are, how old the kids, etc. As you get older there will be a reduction in libido and a feeling that "yeah I could get wild in bed or I could read my book then have a good night's sleep" and people choosing the book and sleep.

no one is really out there counting sex frequency by nationality

Yes they are. https://www.statista.com/statistics/245194/most-sexually-active-countries-worldwide/

I don't know the veracity of this data but it came up on the first page of google.

120+ times a year?? Yeah, I strongly doubt the veracity that people are out there having sex at a rate of roughly once every 3 days, that too people in relationships where I suppose a majority of the sex would come from.

Your parents are either outliers or are keeping it quiet. Hat tip. Most parents keep it quiet.

Well sure, if I was really trying to draw conclusions I’d look for multiple sources of hard to fake data(marketing data from condom companies and percentage of arrests for prostitution, for example) and try to make it robust enough that the confounders cancel out. But equally clearly there is (probably quite low quality) data out there on sex frequency by nationality.

The only thing that will save you is if both partners are of solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health.

Fair, but western culture significantly reduces the probability someone is of "solid mental, physical, hormonal and psychological health."

We're often so bombarded with claims of faux xenophobia that when the real thing pops up upon reading you're like ' wait, what? '

As if Chinese, African, and South American subcultures are just ripe with mentally & physically healthy people.

Maybe your small part of the world is doing groovy, or has yet to succumb to the soda, pop & burger bombardment, but that's from a lack of access or (as it reads) you being in the tippy top of your people's (whichever that may be) class hierarchy.

Source?

See how rates of mental health issues are significantly higher in the west than elsewhere. And before you say this is due to underreporting elsewhere notice the dose effect relationship between mental illness and how close you are to the "centre" of it all, e.g. see how liberals are more mentally ill than conservatives, women are more mentally ill than men, see here: https://www.eviemagazine.com/post/over-50-percent-white-liberal-women-under-30-mental-health-condition , urban dwellers are more mentally ill than rurals, people now are more mentally ill than people 10 years ago, people in the Anglosphere are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere, people outside the anoglosphere who speak English are more mentally ill than people outside the anglosphere who don't etc. (see https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/share-with-mental-or-substance-disorders-by-sex for a graph of mental illness rates for a chart that uses multiple sources/regressions to correct for underdiagnosis). We wouldn't expect to see so many disparate links if it was all due to reporting bias.

"centre" of it all

Centre of what? The West? Why is that progressive people in Anglophone cities?

Also, the liberal/conservative and male/female differences in neuroticism are cross-cultural, as far as I know.

We wouldn't expect to see so many disparate links if it was all due to reporting bias.

Why not? These reference classes are also correlated with the medicalisation of mental illness... But then again, medicalisation could be due to a dose-response relationship between progressivism and mental illness! Causality of mental illness is VERY complicated and opaque.

Centre of what? The West? Why is that progressive people in Anglophone cities?

Because Anglos absolutely dominate the culture of other western countries. When was the last time you were forced to conform with some bizzare non-Anglo idea?

These reference classes are also correlated with the medicalisation of mental illness

Non-anglos speaking English correlate with medicalization of mental illness more than non-anglos not speaking English?

Because Anglos absolutely dominate the culture of other western countries. When was the last time you were forced to conform with some bizzare non-Anglo idea?

Critical theory and postmodernism are products of France and Germany, and I work in academia, so probably some time today.

However, it's true that Anglos have cultural dominance of progressive media (not so much e.g. what happens in churches) and I think that the fundamental point you are making is conceivable, but nonetheless speculative.

Non-anglos speaking English correlate with medicalization of mental illness more than non-anglos not speaking English?

But your hypothesis is not "speaking English causes mental illness", but rather "being exposed to certain Anglophone ideas causes mental illness." One of these Anglophone ideas is progressivism; another is the contemporary conceptions of depression and anxiety, which may have increased reporting rates.

Interestingly, in the case of schizophrenia (which standards apart from depression and anxiety in many ways, e.g. there's no non-pharma way to effectively treat schizophrenia) rates seem to be similar all over the world, and there is no clear Western/non-Western pattern:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epidemiology_of_schizophrenia#By_country

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