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[Reason without restraint] Rates of risky sexual behaviors by race and sex in the United States
Reason without restraint is perhaps my new favorite HBD blog. While the topics that he writes about are nothing new (race & IQ, race & crime, etc.), he does a valuable service of marshaling all of the evidence in one place in an easy-to-consume format.
Here, he tackles the topic of racial differences in sexual behavior. He uses survey data taken of high school students where they report on various aspects of their sexual activity. The data starts in the year 1990 and extends to the present day. There are five sections to the article:
(1) Lifetime sexual intercourse (2) Sexual intercourse before 13 years of age (3) Sexual intercourse with 4 or more partners (4) Use of condoms (5) Use of birth control pills
Of the five sections, the first three are the most interesting. Based on the survey data, a couple things stick out:
The young people aren't having sex.
I am a bit, um, obsessed with the "sex recession": the dramatic decline in sexual activity in high school and college-aged people. Sex is perhaps the most human activity there is--the physical enactment of our Darwinian imperative, the raison d'etre of so many hormone-drenched adolescents. And yet: young people aren't having sex. Why?
Based on one of the graphs: in 1990, 65% of white 12th graders report having had sex. While in 2021 only 50% of white 12th graders report having had sex. This drop in sexual activity is not limited to white students, of course. It's a large drop across the board. Why?
Black people used to have a lot of sex but not anymore?
Look, I'm not stupid. At this point, I've had enough experience with the "stereotype literature" to know that, overwhelmingly, stereotypes tend to be true. But even I wasn't prepared for how much sex black teens were having in the 90s. I could cite a lot of different numbers, but just to choose one example: apparently, in 1990, more than 80% of black male 9th graders reported being non-virgins. Over 80%! And even if you rightfully suspect some exaggeration due to male ego, more than 65% of black female 9th graders report being non-virgins.
This is just incomprehensible to me. I'll admit that I grew up sheltered and nerdy, but still: none of my friends were having sex or really even close to having sex in middle school. Maybe the 90s were better after all?
What's interesting though is that there has been a rather dramatic decrease in black sexual activity. By 2021, only 30% of black male 9th graders report having ever had sex. And it's the same story for the other statistics as well: in 1990, black people were way more sexual active than Hispanics and Whites while by 2021, they have mostly converged, especially in the case of black females.
Asians don't have sex.
Not too much to say about this one. Pretty self-explanatory.
Condom usage seems... kinda low?
The survey reports that 60% of teenagers report using a condom during their last sexual encounter. Is that not kinda low given teenage pregnancy rates? I am a prude in real life who dislikes salacious talk, so I haven't talked about condom usage with my friends. So I don't really have a strong intuition here.
Overall, a fun article with lots of great graphs. What do I personally think explains the decline in sexual activity? I basically favor the consensus view as espoused by Jonathan Haidt and others: it's the phones (and social media). I think a lot of sex used to happen because people had nothing to do except each other.
Thank you for the link. Interesting blog. Scattered Thoughts:
-- I need to crunch the numbers, but to what extent is the "Sex Recession" narrative oversold after looking at this data, a reverse of the Coming Apart argument about economics/social class? It seems like what's really happening isn't that middle-class white kids are having moderately less sex than they used to, it's that impoverished Black kids are having massively less sex than they used to and middle class white kids are having a little less sex, and it all adds up to the total sample having moderately less sex.
Murray in Coming Apart argues that if you tease apart economic data and QoL data, the US white lower/middle/working class has not progressed at all since the 1960s, has in fact regressed for a variety of reasons, and that the positive trend of the data over that time is driven by bringing impoverished racial minorities towards parity with whites. In the same way, Blacks used to have a lot of teenage sex, now they are close to parity with white rates of teenage sex, and that shows up in race-neutral data as a big ol' sex recession, when really we're seeing a very mild sex decline.
That doesn't mean the sex recession isn't concerning, a mild decline is still a bad thing to my values, but it should impact the way we think about this more than it does. None of the responses to "What is causing the sex recession?" tend to have much to do with inner-city Black kids and their transition to the lower middle class over the past thirty years. All the responses about helicopter parenting, College Admissions min-maxing, etc seem to be asking entirely different questions.
-- I wish we had cross-cutting class data, as I always do with racial data.
-- I'm always curious about the impact of "last name sex" (oral sex, anal sex, manual sex [the technical name for the handjob/fingerbang], intercrural sex, and even I can't come up with a technical name for titty-fucking) on the data. I suspect that much of the gap between female and male reported numbers can be explained in that way. Men who have gotten a blowjob or a handjob or fingered a girl briefly but inconclusively are more likely to report it as sex, women who have given a blowjob or a handjob or been fingered briefly but inconclusively are more likely not to, to think of it as "fooling around" not as "sex." This could also explain some of the sex-recession data: oral sex was once seen as perverted, and hence "more" serious than vaginal intercourse, many youth today treat vaginal intercourse as more serious than other forms of sex, so they may be under reporting for that reason. Because that is largely a cultural question, I suspect it could have a larger impact on racial spreads, but I have no idea if there is any racial gap in sexual taxonomy. Any evidence for this one way or the other?
-- A lot of people point to an overall lack of independence in teens today, with fewer having jobs in favor of mix-maxing college admissions extra-curriculars. The obvious solution is to, by colleges engaging in best practices if possible but by government requirement if necessary, to make the college admissions min-maxing option to get a serious part time job. Make it priority for kids to have a work record in their application, with preferences given to employed students for admission and for financial aid. If it was well known that the best thing to put in your Princeton application essay is stories about your time as shift-lead at Taco Bell or working on a roofing crew in the summers, our talented upper class kids will be managing Taco Bells and nailing up shingles, instead of interning or doing ineffective traveling altruism. The incentives point away from youth independence, but we have the power to straighten out those incentives.
Getting a part-time job is the very best way to foster independence and freedom in youths. Having obligations and responsibility to adults outside of your family and school, having independent sources of money, having relationships to coworkers on a basis of equality outside the natural hierarchies of family and school systems, getting out of the house. All positives!
-- How much turnover has there been in the racial groupings outlined? To what extent are today's Black teenagers descendants of yesterdays Black teenagers, versus replacement by West Indian and African immigrants? I'm sure this data is available but I'm not sure how to look it up.
Your point about the "sex recession" being mostly driven by decreased sex among black people is an interesting one. However, black people are only 13% of the population. I would have to crunch the numbers to be exactly sure how much the decline is attribute to each ethnic group, but my default assumption is that US population trends can be safely substituted for white population trends as whites are still approximately 60% of the population (and a lot of the other 40% of the population are Hispanics who don't deviate that strongly from whites in their behavioral indicators).
I don't think social class data would be as interesting as one would think. For one, we can't measure social class directly, but only proxy it by income. There is a strong correlation between income and social class, but not a perfect one: this would cause attentuation.
Also, looking at data like SAT scores by parental income made me realize that there is a large difference between say the 90th percentile income and the 99.9th percentile. Basically, there is a small percentage of people who are upper class such that I worry that wouldn't be enough sample size to say anything interesting about them.
Also, because of (a) social media (b) the top-down nature of educational policy, I'm not sure that there are large differences in the school experience and media environment of teenagers across different socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed, the decreasing gap between blacks and whites in risky sexual behavior constitutes strong evidence that there is an increasing homogenization of teenage life: everyone goes to school, goes straight home to Snapchat and play Fortnite with their friends. As virtually all households, regardless of wealth, have smartphones, gaming consoles, and WiFi, the social experience of teenagers is in the broad strokes the same across different income brackets. A big difference between different income brackets is I suspect the prevalence of extracurricular activities: lacrosse practice, piano lessons, starting a non-profit foundation, etc. But I don't think any of these activities have an impact a student's sexual life.
I agree that some proportion of the male-female reported sex gap is that men tend to include "third base" (non-penetrative "sex") as sexual partners while women tend not to. If I had to make up numbers, it would that the gap is 50% attributable to differing definitions of sex, 50% attributable to lying (I'm agnostic about which sex is lying more often. If I had to guess, it would be men though).
I agree that the current extracurricular rat race is both a waste of time and detrimental to the healthy development of teenagers. I don't think you're proposed solution would work, however. I could try and outline a detailed critique, but it comes down to the fact that colleges neither have the institutional resources nor the incentive to audit employment claims closely. So by default, I would expect any employment requirement to be gamed and manipulated by upper class parents just as masterfully as they've manipulated the extracurricular pageant show.
A more feasible solution would be to (a) make college admittance solely be based on grades and test scores and (b) make it a lottery for the top X%. This would reduce incentives to compete endlessly to perfect your profile, but would create problems in that there would be no way for a one in a million student to distinguish themselves. This runs the risk that an alternative signalling ecosystem would emerge to replace the function that college currently performs.
Also, I think even with all of these changes, you wouldn't see the return of part-time jobs. It's not just that the opportunity cost of having a job is higher now, but the actual benefit (disposable income) isn't all the beneficial. Disposable income is useful so that you can buy a car and have money to spend at the mall. But if all your friends are at home playing video games, what's the point?
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I want to note that the linked data is only re: "ever had sex," not "are having sex", which is not the same thing. For example, the data here says that, while 38 percent of teens have had sex, only 27 percent are currently sexually active. I know a young man who lost his virginity at 13 when he and the young woman were drunk at a party, and that was it for him for years. It might be that such opportunities are fewer these days (more helicopter parenting, other avenues of entertainment). I would like to see trends re the pct sexually active.
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Another possible contributing factor: rising obesity rates causing reduced sex drive/erectile dysfunction etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obesity_and_sexuality
But of course that would contradict the evidence from Japan, where obesity rates are fairly flat over the last fifty years but the rate of sexlessness has skyrocketed.
Or perhaps East Asians just have lower testosterone levels/sex drives in general and so the recent technological/cultural driven drops in sex drive is effecting them to even more dramatic levels?
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From a pretty significant amount of observational experience, there's little chance that obesity can account for most or even much of the reduced amount of sex, at least via inducing ED.
Are you saying you have seen a lot of fat guy's erections? Being a doctor is so glamorous.
No, that's the lot of my prettier colleagues 🦋
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There seem to be a lot of cultural elements in Japanese society which may be contributing to that. I can only speak from "stupid crap I've seen online" but for entertainment there is a sub-genre of "[name] texts" which are a sort of misery porn for women, so far as I can make out? And while they're all supposedly set in America, it's fairly clear they originate in Japan (and other East Asian countries mimicking them).
The main scenario is "wife/daughter-in-law" (and daughter-in-law status is mega-important here) or "daughter/sister/sister-in-law" is being taken advantage of by husband/in-laws/own family.
The cultural assumptions are heavily biased towards what, in the genre, are acknowledged to be old-fashioned, traditional ideas, but even the 'yeah this is how everyone lives' assumptions are pretty eye-opening.
(1) Men will stay late after work for drinking parties with co-workers/clients. They won't come home. This is fine and normal. (2) Men will work a lot of overtime, to the point where they won't come home for days at a stretch. This is fine and normal. (3) Men will be sent overseas/to another area to work, even for years at a time. They won't come home except for flying visits. This is fine and normal.
(All the above is "fine and normal" until wife finds out that husband is using this as an excuse to cheat, kicking off the revenge scenario of the texts).
In family life:
(1) Mothers-in-law expect to rule over the household with a rod of iron. This is how it always was, and even if it's now an old-fashioned notion, you owe filial respect to her. (2) This can extend to "give me your bank book, send me money, clean the house, do my errands, obey my every whim". Granted, this is in the context of setting up the misery porn/revenge scenario, but there is the underlying expectation that, as the daughter-in-law, you try and get on with her and do a heck of a lot more obedience and biting your tongue than any Western woman would accept. (3) You may be derided as a stay-at-home housewife only living off your husband's money or as a working woman who is not taking proper care of the household. Damned if you do, damned if you don't. (4) Grandkids. You have got to produce grandkids, or else. Perfectly acceptable for threats of divorce if you don't get pregnant.
A ton more assumptions around elder and younger siblings, respective places of in-laws, etc. Now of course, I realise all this is exaggerated in the same way romance novels are exaggerated, but by the same token, there has to be a certain level of grounded in reality for this to work. If nobody had a nagging mother-in-law and a mama's boy husband in reality, then this stuff wouldn't resonate.
The takeaway is, if I were a Japanese woman, I certainly would have no interest in marriage under those conditions. Parents-in-law expect to move in to household or at the very least be taken care of by me, constant interference by in-laws, and a husband who may be absent more than he's present due to work, and I am supposed to put up with all this and take it.
No wonder there is a high rate of sexlessness. Even on the best showing "Sorry honey, I won't be home all week because work is sending me someplace/keeping me working overtime, I'll get a hotel room" isn't the way to have a flourishing sex life.
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It's ubiquitous porno usage, not obesity. The Japanese example supports this heavily
I'm very skeptical that there has been a significant change in access to porn in the past 25 years.
25 years puts us before the heydey of online porn. There's been an enormous change since then.
25 years puts us in 1999 when internet porn was already widely available. Make that 20 and people even have broadband and can watch videos too. I don't know what you think the heyday of porn is, pornhub? They didn't invent internet pornography, there were plenty of before then. But really, mindgeek was founded almost exactly 20 years ago. Time flies.
Broadband was nowhere near as ubiquitous as it is now. Pornographic content was not as extreme or 'hardcore' as it often can be today. There's also a portaling effect where any one of the major video platforms (in a whole sea of them) can keep serving you up not just the one video you sought, but a dozen others loaded up to go on the sidebar or right beneath the player. I don't know how frequent the "Finish, close 30 tabs" meme came up back then, but it's surely more common now? Don't even need to get into video streaming quality, or quality in general. Live shows were a joke, in retrospect.
I dunno, man. I remember what it was like downloading porn as a teenager in the late 90s and early 00s. A lot of grainy 30-second clips, a lot of slow download speeds, a lot of waiting for Kazaa to finish up (sometimes days). Give me this evening and I could probably hoard and/or access more porn than I ever could during my entire adolescence. Maybe it was a gradual phenomenon that sloped real hard with the advent of 'hub sites. But that's still good enough as a marker IMO.
Also, widespread smartphone usage didn't start until roughly 2014, which is also a big factor.
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My guess is that anyone who wanted broadband in 2004 had it. In the US penetration was 25% for broadband and 30% for dialup and dialup started declining in 2001. And dialup back then was completely fine for porn. The internet adoption curve post 2000 is a lot flatter than you'd think
Hard disagree on this one. Back in the Kazaa days you would easily download CP by accident.
I have a hard time believing any of this would make much of a significant difference.
Fair enough but even hub sites are almost 20 years old at this point, youporn for example launched in 2006.
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There's a lot of good hypotheses put forward in the thread, many of which I hadn't considered before. I have generally thought that that reason they're having less sex is largely due to that generation having internalized the prudish leftist messaging that "sex is harmful, you're likely to harm women if you don't ask for permission every
minute, no wait,30 seconds, no wait10 seconds, no wait just don't ever stop asking for permission just to be safe. Or just avoid fucking alltogether because only jerks and potential rapists feel like they need to have sex in order for a relationship to be fulfilling, and if you feel that way then you're just someone who thinks that women owe you sex, and you might as well be raping them."In addition I've felt like there's a component by which younger people (and even millennials, too) kinda feel like bodies are gross. This has been a trend for a long time, with promotion of obsessive cleanliness to the point of it probably not even being useful, like people feeling they need to take showers multiple times per day, and also wear deodorant and cologne/perfume. I hear about historical views towards sex, like apparently Napoleon might have written a letter to Joséphine telling her not to bathe for 3 days before he came home to her from war, because her smell turned him on. The modern reaction to that story generally disgust and confusion. But think about how much the world much have smelled strongly like people's bodies, and bodies must have smelled really strong, for milennia before regular bathing was a thing, and people still has lots of sex back then.
Sex is very connected to bodies, sweat, fluids, and smell. People are raised on porn these days, with tissues at the ready to mop up any fluids shortly after their release. Sometimes when I watch porn, I think about how different it is to watch these recorded sex acts than it probably was for the actors to make them. Just thinking about the smell is interesting, considering that that sensation is completely absent when watching porn. I suspect that many people these days may have watched so much porn from a young age that the thought of sex being so much more messy and smelly with someone else's body that they'd rather just keep their nice, contained, fairly clean method of getting off to porn instead.
In addition to porn presenting a stylised, sanitised version of sex in which all of the participants are impossibly gorgeous and up for anything, and lacking any of the gustatory and olfactory stimuli central to the real thing - you can also watch animated porn, which depicts things that are literally physically impossible in the real world. I'm sure there are young people out there whose entire "sex lives" consist of masturbating to hentai throughout adolescence, without ever having ventured into the comparatively earthy and raw world of live-action.
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I’ve often wondered if our current culture is so regimented that kids don’t take risks at all as they fear that messing up is going to alter their life trajectory too much to be safe. They hear parents and older siblings talk about, or worse live out the consequences of one bad decision made in the moment. Maybe sex and you either get the girl pregnant or get accused of rape afterwards — there goes the hope of being comfortably middle class in adulthood. Or drinking. A car accident, saying the wrong things, maybe partying and possibly not doing well enough on your grades to get into the right school. It’s almost, just looking at the trends like kids have a sense that being spontaneous, doing something crazy, means messing up, and that messing up is unrecoverable.
This actually is much more true than it used to be. For example, my grandfather only went to elementary school and worked in a factory. He was considered poor even then, but he didn't have a bad life. He could raise a whole family on his factory wages, in circumstances no worse than many people today.
Today you would need both parents to hold a decent, respectable office job to have a similar quality of life. Anything below that, you're competing with the entire Third World (either through imports or immigration). Add to that things like stringent environmental laws. The mines are gone, the factories are almost all gone, and the EU is currently in the process of de facto outlawing agriculture. What'll even be left for you to do, if you don't get the respectable office job?
There are many more people, and there are fewer opportunities to achieve the living standards of a factory worker 50 years ago. And so, life has turned into a vicious, high-stakes game of musical chairs. There's no room for slip-ups.
To me this sounds a bit backwards. Much of the working class has it better than ever and their skills are increasingly in demand and paid better and better.
It's the lower rung of office workers (and some service workers) that have precarious situations and are struggling to keep up.
If you're actually ready to work in the industry, construction or in a trade things are really good. Farming seems like a pretty raw deal though, I agree.
Most farmers today have a ton of assets. Even if liquid cash isn't always easily available. Simply owning enough land to make the irrigation, crop storage, and harvesters worth it is a multi million dollar endeavor. In bad years they have to leverage those assets with the bank for loans. In good years they pay back those loans, or expand the land/equipment they own.
If we are talking about "farmers" as in farmhands, the people that just work at a farm. Then yeah they have a raw deal. Its difficult physical labor for minimal wages.
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Growing up in an upper-middle class family, childhood was basically presented as a straight line passing through a set of exams and good schools to a good degree at a good university and then finally to a magical world where I would ‘meet interesting people’ and be able to do worthwhile things. My parents weren’t strict or particularly regimented but they clearly, genuinely believed that significant slip-up at any step along that path would doom me to mediocrity or poverty. Looking at how some of the other children I knew ended up, they weren’t wrong.
This was a while back. I can’t imagine how much stress my zoomber counterparts are under.
I have this sense as an adult. But the only way to find out if it’s true is to try, and what if you turn out to be right?
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Maybe this is difference between Sweden and the US but when I grew up in the 90s in a completely white, affluent suburb my estimation was that some 20-25% had sex before the end of middle school, with women having slightly more sex (due to being able to find marginally older partners). Another 30-40% had sex some time during high school (weighted towards the end) and the remaining 40-50% during university.
Who the hell uses condoms for anything but one night stands? You might as well not have sex at that point.
I guess I was a high-risk sex haver but I had probably ~25 one-night stands with no condom and no adverse consequences and my only criteria “does she give off ho vibes,” which seemed to work pretty well. I mean I’ll definitely tell my son not to follow that strategy but I think ho-dar is pretty accurate.
My brother, having one-night stands with no condom is the ho vibe.
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I will begrudgingly accept it as the cost of having sex if the woman is intractable on the matter. I wouldn't say it's quite as bad as getting back with Rosie Palm and her five sisters, but it certainly ruins much of the charm, as well as my hard-on.
As I've said down-thread, I'm circumcised, late enough in my childhood that I can remember my glans becoming de-sensitized after the procedure.
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So when you're in a monogamous relationship, your assumption is that your partner will be on the pill? (I'm assuming you're a straight man.)
Or you just pull out on days where she’s fertile? My wife got pregnant exactly when we wanted her to and not a moment too soon following this time tested method.
I'm not sure if I have enough confidence in my pull-out game or my ability to track my missus's menstrual cycle.
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Yes, or some other contraceptive or planning.
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Wait, you guys are using condoms with one night stands? were_the_millers.jpg
I’m definitely team rawdog and second @Ioper’s remark on condomed sex as eating candy with the wrapper on, a saying of which I hadn’t heard before now.
If I feel like I need a condom with a chick, her slutiness to hotness ratio is too high and I shouldn’t be banging her in the first place.
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I would like to suggest that perhaps you are not quite doing it correctly.
Fucking with condoms is like eating candy with the wrapper on, only worth it if you're starving.
Perhaps it's different if you're circumcised and have somewhat limited sensitivity in the first place.
I honestly don't understand this perspective. What about the rest of the meal?
If I were a woman and a guy told me that, I would be insulted.
Edit: And some of the best sex I had did not end in an orgasm, at least not for me.
Good foreplay only makes it worse.
Also, regardless of whether the sex ends in orgasm or not, the sex is so much better without a condom. The goal is as intimate and pleasurable sex as possible, condoms are a major impediment to both, with or without orgasm.
But your initial claim was not merely that sex without a condom is better; rather it was that it was pointless: You said, "You might as well not have sex at that point." That was the claim that I was skeptical of.
That's not what I said and I don't see a contradiction.
I don't understand. I literally quoted you.
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It's high-variance, but there are a subset of men (both straight and gay) who can't get very far with a condom on during penetration, sometimes up to the point of losing the ability to maintain a decent (or rarely, any) erection entirely. The exact causes cover wide ground, such as low-level skin sensitivity, mental overhead, performance anxiety, mumblemumbles-it's-not-just-soccons-afraid-of-jerking-it, or for... not entirely understood reasons (one fun hypothesis: American condom sizes are moronic).
This class of problem is less 'well, I guess I just have slightly reduced sensation and might just be edging with my partner today', 'it's time for a long oral session!' or even 'I'd rather bottom', and more 'this is going to be actively frustrating for everyone involved, and not even in a fun chastity cage sorta way'.
Contra some of the other posters, I don't think this is universal, or even disliking condoms is universal -- there are a surprisingly large number of people with condom-related kinks, for entirely unsurprising reasons. Some of these frustrations might even be solvable with practice and familiarity. But a lot of the mainstream model of the complaints is dismissive in unhealthy ways.
Please elaborate on this if you've a theory.
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As a victim of MGM I have always found complaints about condoms to be wild, I can hardly tell the difference, so maybe you are onto something.
The sensitivity thing is also interesting as, to my mind, increased sensitivity would be strictly a bad thing as a man. If I could magically wish for more of it, I wouldn't. The physical pleasure from sex is pretty far from the top of the list of things I enjoy about sex. It seems to me that sensitivity would trade off directly with endurance. I really viscerally enjoy the sense of masculine prowess I get from absolutely destroying a woman for a prolonged session, but I am only really able to achieve that with mental and physical tricks to actively reduce my sensitivity.
I had the procedure done for (in hindsight, unnecessary) medical reasons, in early childhood but not so early I can't remember it, and I know for a fact that my glans became less sensitive, since for the first few weeks post-op the mere sensation of it rubbing against fabric was unbearable. I still can feel the superiority of not using a condom, even using the thinnest latex you can get here.
Oh well, at least it gets me more head, I've had a number of women tell me that it was a relief compared to the finely marinated stench of smegma.
Whenever stuff like this comes up I'm left wondering, who the fuck doesn't wash his dick?
Quite a few men, sadly.
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He lives in India, hygiene norms might be different there and a significant portion of the population doesn't have running water.
Datapoint of one, but I live in the US where my parents were of the "buy the kid books in lieu of having a puberty discussion", and the books definitely talked about needing to wash under your foreskin, so I'm assuming it's the default here for uncircumcised English-speakers.
I've heard similar complaints made by Western women about their men, not that I'm in a position to compare base-rates.
I don't recall ever being explicitly instructed to do that myself, though it would be a bit moot.
At any rate, these guys were certainly capable of accessing running water, I wasn't dating women from the ghetto. Men can be slobs, and unlike a stinky armpit, they can get away with it until..
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I'm not sure about that.
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I despise condoms and avoid them where I can, and I'm circumcised myself.
The only people I've heard offer apolagia for them (from a non-std prevention pov) are circumcised men, which leads me to believe that there is a connection.
I would think the "fuck condoms" attitude is only possible in places where most of the women are on birth control.
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Am circumcised, condoms suck -- I think you need to do some more field research man.
I think you misunderstood me, perhaps I was unclear.
I'm not saying that everyone who's circumcised defend condoms, I'm saying that the ones that I've heard defend condoms are cricumcised.
Anyone who's saying condoms aren't that bad is an extreme outlier in some way -- to the point where I'd question their honesty.
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I have yet to hear a man tell me, in person, that sex with a condom on is just as satisfying as going bareback. It's usually women insisting on it, and me protesting, but it might still be a necessary evil for the usual reasons.
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80% of the difference is pornography in my opinion, and briefly: Dopamine/addiction effects mean they don't seek it out and perform badly when they get it; they get bad ideas from porn which affects their partners and these are sexual mores that used to be considered 'out there' such as choking/anal/facials/etc; masturbation aids being normalised for women mean they are often happier by themselves than with a partner and finally this all compounds because it causes women to raise their standards whilst many men fall through the floor.
You’re presenting this as asymmetric, but men and women mirror each other here. They all have more and more access to superior substitutes for sex, so their standards rise and their willingness to meet their partner’s standards diminishes. No further explanations necessary. People just need each other less nowadays.
I was visiting friends, and the heating in my room was on the fritz. I was about to have a sleep-tight jerk-off, but that night I really wished I had an energetically independent, whole lotta woman, instead.
But the substitutes pale in comparison to the real deal. I don’t get it.
Sex is a skill. [cw: spoilers are pretty tmi]
The extent this matters clearly can't have been static across the years. I want to think there's some biochemical reason. The secular collapse of testosterone is a popular target, but it would mostly cover men. Some sex studies suggest it's more common among people who haven't had partnered sex before their mid-twenties, but it's hard to separate cause and effect, and it's very hard to come up with explanations why this would be a new issue now rather than the many periods in the past where access to sexual partners was much more difficult. The soccon emphasis tends to go the availability of porn, but neither communities where people abstain entirely and programs like No Nut November don't turn people into rutting beasts by the third week.And, as anecdote, abstaining for months hasn't gotten me into that mood where I just need to fuck/get fucked by someone.
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It comes with a lot more social cachet, but revealed preferences tell another story. The substitute doesn’t need to be superior in every way to displace the original, it starts on the margins. And the margin is some costly, impractical, subpar sexual encounter versus a costless, unbounded, coolidge-effect boosted masturbation fantasy. But there will always be a niche for real sex purists, like the people who weave their own clothes.
Well I guess sexual satisfaction less cost to acquire could be greater in situation one v. situation 2 even if situation 2 has greater sexual satisfaction.
It seems like marriage solves the cost to acquire factor though…
Ha! You must not be married.
For real though, dating is for having an easily accessible sexual partner. Marriage is for having a partner in life in general. And unless sex is the most important thing for one of the partners, that means it is going to take a lower priority than other things.
Been married for 8 years. Still have regular sex! Shouldn’t be something you give up. Honestly it makes the other stuff easier (eg free and intimate entertainment)
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IIRC married couples are more sexually active with each other than dating couples in general.
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I think there must be a high degree of variability between married couples.
The physical aspects of our marriage are very important. I don't know that we'd have been married if the sex wasn't there.
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There's more to it than that. It's more that people like talking to each other, and if that talking is generally in-person*, there is a much-higher likelihood of sex occurring because they're in proximity to each other.
*Phones, that is to say dumbphones, didn't change this very much because you wouldn't generally have someone's number except via meeting that person, so you are almost necessarily at least capable of meeting in person.
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It's interesting how some on the right has shifted from decrying how there is too much promiscuity (pre-20210 or so), to now from a trad-perspective decrying how young people are not having enough sex and lowered fertility rates. The left have become the new prudes, in a figurative neopuritan sense but also literally in terms of everything becoming rape or unfounded rape accusations.
not too surprising , at least to me. Black culture is heavily sexualized especially during the pre-2000s: movies, TV, music, etc. Blacks always playing oversexualized or hyper-masculine roles. Blacks in the early 90s had more relative social statis in high school back then even compared to now, before the influx of Hispanics and other groups became more common.
As someone who is somewhat socially conservative it does bother me that the youth seem uninterested in vice. It is one thing to want but push a vice off until it becomes virtue (eg having sex in the right situation isn’t vice but virtue; that is many vices are not inherently immoral but become vices based on context in which the action occurs).
So I would celebrate young people having less sex if it was because they controlled their desires when the context was wrong. But it’s troubling to me they don’t seem to even have desire!
This is actually something most people tend to heavily under-rate (parents tend to actively foster a lack of desire and independence because it makes their jobs easier, the young confuse a lack of desire and independence as virtue, and some of them are slowly noticing there's something wrong but only once it's too late).
It might be the fact we broke the need to physically work for a living, it might be something unique to Boomer parenting styles (n > 10), it might be that there's a law against everything fun or anything encouraging independence in any way, and it might just be something wrong with the kids. Every teenager I know (most of them having parents of advanced age themselves) is about as interested in having sex as pandas are, something that is common to my generation as well, and that concerns me just as deeply as the concept of 12 year olds having sex concerns some commenters downthread, for the same reasons.
But the fact remains that we have failed to teach kids the concept of want. I get that living under Psalm 23 conditions is the ideal end state of a Christian society- if you're literally living in the garden of Eden, the amount of sin you can come up with is limited- but there's no growth potential there, and to that end, no defense against bad actors who will inevitably ruin it all by taxing all remaining desire right into the ground.
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Who's shifted? I was one of those saying there was too much promiscuity - and I still think there's too much, though I do appreciate that trendlines are going in the right direction. And I see various people complaining about the "sex recession", but not anyone that I would have previously considered to be a fellow traveler.
Same, I used to think there was too much promiscuity and still think that. Basically for me unless you are a high decoupler who is easily able to shrug off the side effects of social interactions (quick test: if you were to make a fool of yourself in public with 30 strangers around, how fast would you be able to get over your shame and return to a basline mental state as if that had never happened? If the answer is more than an hour, by which time those 30 strangers will have long since moved on with their lives, you're probably not a high decoupler at least in this area) or alternatively have other strong reasons to believe the sex won't leave a lasting impact on you (e.g. you're a promiscous gay person) then you should avoid having sex with anyone you could not see yourself genuinely marrying a few years down the line.
If you're unsure then wait a little longer and see how that changes things. And if you really need to get the sexual urge out of the system masturbation with porn is healthier than sleeping with a random, which I see akin to using a free prostitute you have convinced to do the deed with you (applies for both men and women, many men are just so horny they will pay via dates etc. to be able to prostitute themselves out to basically any women above a very low baseline who wants to have sex with them).
Just as visiting a prostitute has negative impacts on people's psyches (unless they are high decouplers yada yada etc.), this form of free prostitution also has negative impacts on people, and society as a whole should be more aware of them.
I guess I'm a medium decoupler, because I don't care about making a fool of myself (as my post history demonstrates) but I find your perspective upsetting. The most important thing about sex isn't the climax, although that's certainly the best thing ("You guys know what my favorite part of having sex is? That end part. That crazy feeling."), it's the connection you form with another person. Masturbation engenders apathy and narcissism, and while I (already a schizoid narcissist) strongly sympathise with the Norm Macdonald philosophy of finding the need for connection kind of pathetic, I see it like exercise or bathing, because I am just straight up a better person in everyone else's eyes when I work to achieve and maintain those connections. Besides, I feel like 'using a free prostitute' strips agency from your partner, who, like you, is getting something out of it. (And if they wait an hour or so they can get it again.)
Do you really want to form a long and deep connection with someone if you aren't sure you want to be with them long term? I don't want to form a long and deep connection with the barista who serves me my coffee every day, I would see it as a significant negative and probably even shift the shop where I get my morning brew if it looked like this was happening.
Why am I like this? Simply because by virtue of being a human there are only so many different people I can have a long and deep connection with at the same time, and having one with the barista uses up a portion of my social bonding brain capacity that I believe could be put to better use elsewhere, no different to how if I was forced to always keep the number 1731 in my short term memory it would be a net negative for me because I only have so many "short term memory" slots in my brain.
Plus having lots of deep connections with other people means you are more likely to be emotionally hurt yourself over time when something bad happens to one of these people, simply by virtue of "more connections" -> "more likely one of them has something bad happen to them which then ends up hurting you".
Hence if you're sure you're the kind of person who can avoid this sort of connection then go free and have wild "no strings attached" sex (and if you're feeling charitable to humanity, maybe make sure your partner is probably also this kind of person), you'll have fun and it'll be great, but if you're not this kind of person then it's probably for the best that you avoid the sex in the first place if you aren't yet sure that this person here is someone you are willing to dedicate one of your "deep bonds with" slots and accept all the consequences (good and bad) which come with that, including the consequences of the eventual breaking up of the relationship if you're intending to serially sleep with multiple different people.
Really? Prostitutes also get something out of having sex, namely money, however they are still looked down upon (unfairly in my opinion, a self aware prostitute is more respect worthy than the vast majority of normal western women). I also wouldn't say prostitutes have less agency than the average person, I'd say they probably have more than the average woman sinply because their job means they've chosen to go against a big societal taboo.
Having sex with someone definitely forms a deep connection with them, but it doesn't have to be permanent. I see sex, or one element of it, as the ultimate expression of rebellion against the fact that we will die alone. Inevitably futile, but that doesn't stop me in any other arena of life.
I'm with you on managing Dunbar's number, but these connections aren't supposed to be deep in a way that impacts that variable, they are deep but fleeting. Which still means you are more likely to suffer emotionally, yes, but that's the trap of modern society, of atomisation and antidepressants - you are limiting the suffering you may experience, but you are also limiting the joy you may experience. You can not avoid being hurt in this life, and trying to avoid it just lessens your capacity to deal with the really rough stuff.
It's definitely important to make sure your partner doesn't have different expectations though, that's for sure. But that's more a problem for people who go out and pick up at last call, or by getting blackout drunk and taking someone home. Forming a deep connection, even a fleeting one, requires getting to know the other person - including what they are getting out of it, and most people can change their perspective, sans some underlying issues.
In that arena the most common red flags are from the women who see these kinds of relationships as primarily vehicles for drama. They feel something missing from their lives but don't realise it's connection, and instead see its common side effect drama as the point.
And fair enough re prostitutes, I didn't realise you were coming at it from that'll angle.
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I suspect that the average prostitute is less ‘brave rebel defying societal taboos’ and more ‘impoverished women without any access to social support taking a well known but despised option out of extreme desperation, often not entirely voluntarily’.
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I think this is more a case of "classical liberals joining the right" than it is the people who were there before shifting their opinions.
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I think there are a few under-appreciated explanations for this one.
One reason is that kids are, frankly, surveilled by their parents to a degree that was literally impossible in the 90's. Tons of kids today have phones and tons of parents use location tracking apps so they know where their kids are at basically all times. And these kids often know they are being surveilled, which surely changes their behavior. In the 90's you could plausibly lie to your parents about your location to go hang out with your friends or SO. That is much harder today.
It is much harder today to engage in the kind of deception required to have sex when one's parents wouldn't approve than it has been historically.
Another reason might be changing social mores about sex. There's been a big push to normalize ideas like enthusiastic consent and similar. If a lot of the sex in the 90's was dubiously consensual on the part of one party or the other it may be that kind of sex is happening less frequently, leading to less sex over all. I don't have hard data on this unfortunately but my impression from being on the internet is also that zoomer-age people tend to be more skeptical about significant age gaps. Sometimes to the point of silliness (I've seen Discourse about 25 year old being with a 21 year old) but if that translates to younger gaps as well that may be another factor.
I just don’t buy it. We figured out ways. Why not turn off your phone or leave it somewhere etc.
Lots of people, younger people especially I think, rely on their phones for many things. Navigating unfamiliar areas. Coordinating logistics with others. Phones are powerful tools of convenience. If you're young enough you might just not know another way to do a lot of these things. I had a bit of a shock with this recently when I left my phone in a friend's car on accident and so was without it for a few days.
Leaving your phone off is probably its own signal. If your parents are the type to track you with it what are they going to think when they see your location isn't in the app? Leaving it somewhere that would not arouse suspicion presents its own set of logistical hurdles.
I was of the first generation to be tracked(and my mother was a very early adopter; my dad is less technically savvy). If I went to the library she wanted to know what book I checked out, and she still doesn't understand why I didn't like that at the time. I don't know if she just thought she was being friendly or if she honestly believed constant surveillance was necessary; certainly I hadn't actually given her cause to believe that I would leave my phone in the trunk of my car parked at the library and meet a friend there who drove someplace, but I heard her spitballing the scenario with her friends when they talked about how to spy on their teenaged children(I never heard anyone express any reservations about the teen not liking it, and indeed it never seemed to occur to them that a teenager could not like their parents spying on them. I suspect it's extremely difficult for parents of teenagers to realize that the trust relationship between them now goes both ways).
My point is, a parent who really wants to spy on their kid can double check whatever story they're given and get at the real one.
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I think it’s in large part about zoomer males being much more reticent to approach a female, probably some of which is pence effect and some of which is just living in a lower trust society.
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Hormonal birth control and access to abortion probably explain a bit of that.
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I can only chuckle ruefully at what I imagine similar statistics might suggest for Indians (in India).
I'd be surprised if more than 5% of Indian males get laid by the time they're in high school, maybe ~30% by the time they're done with college. Well, at least they have an arranged marriage to look forward to if nothing else, but if you've ever wondered why some Hindu deities are displayed with cyan skin, know that it's subconscious cultural symbolism representing our chronic blue balls.
I snorted.
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And Ganesha’s four arms represent how many times the average Indian male jerks off per day. (His trunk represents a dong.)
This is a widely promulgated yet glaringly incorrect interpretation.
According to Ay Mehdit Up et al, the archaeological record suggests that the length of his trunk and his morbid obesity is more suggestive of auto-fellatio.
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A long, long time ago (2012? 2010?)
I read a rather robust study comparing a lifetime sexual partners of the average person divided by country.
If I recall correctly, Turkey was number one and a big outlier at ~12 per person.
India was the lowest at around 1.8 per person.
A lot of thing made sense to me after that.
Why is Turkey so high? I would think as Muslims they would be conservative and have fewer partners.
Extramarital affairs are super common there apparently, also up until the last 10-15 years Turkey was extremely secular.
I wouldn’t be surprised if that numbers come down in the intervening years, both because in general people are having less sex and more particularly Turkey is noticeably more social conservative now.
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As always when the data only goes back 30 years, we need to consider the possibility that the rates were just unusually high in the 90s, and have since returned to the norm (see, eg, the recent increase in suicide rates, which has simply brought us back to the rates of the mid-1980s. Which is normal, the rates of 10 years ago, or the rates of now and the mid-1980s?).
I was in a grade 8-12 high school covering the transition to the 90s, and it'd take a lot of convincing to be made to think that the preceding cohort were having less sex than we did -- from what I can tell the 70s were also highly unlikely to have been less wild than the 80s.
In support of your hypothesis I've heard that the 60s were a bit overrated in terms of free love -- but probably still easier to get laid than now.
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Re: condoms, this is also a secondary result of pornography which has erotocized (for lots of men and at least some women) the external cumshot. Coitus interruptus used to be an absolute last resort, bottom tier sex act in literature, with the presumption being that the semen would then be spilled on the ground or on the bed. Now it's erotocized, many would choose to finish on a woman's back/breasts/face even absent safety concerns with finishing inside her pussy.
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Please tell me that this is pretty much blank, because if I have to contemplate "well we need a survey question on teen sex about them fucking before they're 13 otherwise we won't have all the data", I am going to pray for the sweet meteor of death to strike us all in 2024.
Depending on how you define this i had sex before 13 and I know a few people who had m/f piv sex before 13. All of it was with same age partners and as far as I can tell none of it was abusive or had any negative consequences.
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Depending on the phrasing and reading comprehension some of this could have been reporting themselves as non-virgins as a result of being sexually abused.
Which is horribly depressing whatever way you slice it: either the majority of the respondents had been sexually abused in an age range from (?) to 12 years of age, or a bunch of kids are being pressured into sex from the ages of (?) to 12.
How the hell does a 12 year old boy have sex? I know age of puberty is dropping and allegedly adolescents of particular races are more physically developed earlier, but goddamn. A lot of adults out there needed to be put into the stocks for taking advantage of younger partners. Even if it's "I'm 12 and my boyfriend is 15" that's not the greatest, either; where the heck are the parents?
Normally, he finds a 12 year old girl who wants to have sex with him. This is the main challenge. I only knew about two guys like this, but they did exist at my not entirely depraved school.
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I agree that a lot of this sex likely wouldn't pass the modern standards of consent. It's not "12 yo boy falls in love with a 12yo girl, they discuss their relationship and agree that sex is the next logical step in their relationship". It likely happens in extremely offline (to contrast them with extremely online) groups of youngsters of different ages that hang out together. You want to join the cool crowd of "grown-up" kids? Do you swear? Do you drink? Do you smoke? Do you fuck? No? Well, you're just a widdle kid then, go back to your sandbox.
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I think you are highly underestimating how horny 12-year-old boys are. I would gladly have had sex in sixth grade if any of the girls at my school would have let me. I’m sure the sex would have been very awkward and very short, but it certainly would not have been nonconsensual. I knew some kids who were sexually active; we had some very physically-developed kids at my school - both girls and boys - and some of them bragged very persuasively about having had sexual encounters.
I feel like this is an area where your extreme prudishness about the subject is causing you to significantly (and perhaps intentionally) misunderstand the realities of the psyche of (at least some) kids that age.
Look, I understand that the hormones of puberty are now revving up and kids are experiencing sexual sensations which are pretty overwhelming.
But this is not the 16th century, where "okay you're 12, you're old enough to get married and start having babies" was an acceptable attitude, because you had a fair chance of being dead by 40. If kids of that age are having sex, and are fertile, then they're going to get pregnant - unless intervention. And that means getting girls on the pill or hormonal contraception of some kind, getting boys to use condoms, and the whole mess of "you can't get pregnant" which even I agree that a 12 year old having a baby is too damn young.
The same way we wouldn't shrug off 12 year olds smoking tobacco (whatever about weed) or drinking alcohol or "okay leave school, get a job, live independently" because we don't think they are adults yet, the same with sex.
You can have the state of nature, where animals start reproducing as soon as physically capable, or you can have "12 year olds should not be fucking, not even each other". Pick one.
Please point me to the part of my comment where I advocate for letting 12-year-olds have sex.
Your original comment was expressing skepticism that 12-year-olds are even interested in sex, and appeared to even be expressing doubt that they’re even physically capable of having sex. What I’m telling you is that some considerable percentage of people that age do in fact experience sexual desire and are physically capable of acting on that desire. That’s just a fact. What we as a society decide to do in order to erect safeguards to prevent those desires from being fulfilled is a totally separate question. My issue is with head-in-the-sand denialism - “kids are not sexual beings until the precise age where I personally am comfortable with thinking about them being sexual beings!” - of the type that I believe is embodied by your comment.
You misunderstood me, then. I wasn't saying "12 year olds are not sexual" (though I do think the sex-saturated culture around us where kids of that age are accessing porn isn't the best idea), but that if they are actually engaging in sex, this is not a good thing, due to their mental and emotional immaturity, the risks of disease, pregnancy and exploitation, and in short the cutting short of childhood.
Puberty is the big change when your body is developing into its adult form, but you're anywhere near being an adult yet.
Y’all aren’t disagreeing with each other. He’s saying that at least some portion of 12 year old boys are both physically capable and wanting to have sex. You’re saying that it’s a bad thing when they do. These are not contradictory statements; that I would be capable of magdumping an AR-15 into the air in my backyard does not stop it from being a very bad thing if I did so.
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It's below 5%.
Back in 1990 it was 5% for females and 15% for males (which I personally find implausible).
We were a couple of same age boys that had sex with each other (oral and anal) when we were 10-11... Ie. just before or very early stages of puberty. This wasn't something we were pressured into by some adults but rather something we did on our own and hid from them.
Note that none of us were homosexual and I believe I'm the only one that had sex with a man as an adult.
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I really hope so, because if we have to have horrible things happening, let's try and have it as low as possible.
I do find it very difficult to think that 10-12 year old boys are having sex (oh god oh god oh god I don't even want to think about that) but as mentioned, some of that could be sexual abuse or at the least, older teenagers initiating sex with them.
Let's hope it's all stupid teen boasting where "yeah of course I'm having sex" when they've just about learned how it works, because - and I can't even finish that sentence, because what the hell culture are you coming out of when you're young enough to think admitting to being a virgin at 12 is shameful?
For a boy? All of them.
Literally all of them.
All of them are watching porn at this point (or at the very least, aware of why one would want to watch it), all of them are making sex jokes, and all of them are masturbating. The ones who say they aren't are either intentionally resisting, usually for various religious reasons, or they're lying because they're embarrassed about it.
This is something most adults tend to forget about, for the exact same reasons- either they're intentionally forgetting, usually for various religious reasons, or they're embarrassed about it. Or they're too close to the problem; after all, their generation invented sex, they had to wait a long time to get it, and it'll be a cold day in hell before those twerps lay their hands on it.
Well, they are objectively the most unattractive cohort of, from a biological standpoint (puberty), grown men- no achievements, money, or other family-raising stability to their name. It's like belonging to a network of premium clothing shops and some penniless unshowered vagrant walks in and asks for a price on the bag in the window- absolutely disgusting.
For reference, this is how the average man thinks about it.
In contrast to some of the other commenters, I first stumbled upon porn at age 10 (decades ago). While I didn’t know what it was at first, I still got an erection and proceeded to take care of business (albeit with some false starts and a significant amount of uncertainty about exactly what was happening).
My age group was aware of sex at that time, but in a more theoretical way. It was something obviously cool to do, even if we were fuzzy on the details, and if you didn’t want it then you were obviously gay, or so we thought, and that was bad.
Notably, despite years of porn and masturbation, I didn’t actually become genuinely romantically attracted to women for a number of years after that (14-16, maybe?).
So my experience suggests the physicality can be there early, and some will be curious and have the opportunity.
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The average 12 year old boy is so early on in puberty to still be a kid.
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Hyperbolic use of "literally" when the context doesn't make it obvious leaves me feeling like I must correct the record, lest someone take it exactly as literally as written.
When I was 12, 13, and 3/4 of 14, I:
I can see how that "have I mentioned I'm heterosexual today, and that y're totally a gay skank?" culture seems explanation enough for why middle school boys would over-report sexual experience, "literally all of them"? Did I misinterpret this?
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that is going far too far
for start, that fails when it is blatantly false and everyone knows that: in such case silly lying is not even improving your standing
And " Literally all of them." includes literally all of them, including turbonerds, avowed asexuals and ones with not as rapid sexual maturation as you claim.
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You're overselling it. 12 is when you start going through puberty and thinking about sex, but there's a long road from there to feeling like a failure because you're still a virgin.
You might be making her point for her, re: "what the hell culture are you coming out of "
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