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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.
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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