Explaining Sex Rate Changes

As the article points out, fewer young men are having sex, but roughly the same number of young women are having sex.<p>I wonder if dating apps (Tinder, Bumble, etc.) are leading women to have sex with a smaller cohort of desirable men. Years ago, OkCupid noted that a small percentage of men get an overwhelming percentage of messages from women. With the rise of &quot;swipe right, swipe left&quot; mobile dating apps, where people choose partners based almost solely on looks and status indicators, I can imagine it&#x27;s getting even more unbalanced.

In a way, this mirrors how technological advances have created winner-take-all markets in other areas. Thanks to CDs (and then the internet), we can now all listen to the very best musicians in the world — where previously we just had to settle for whoever was the best in our town.<p>Similarly, technology may be shifting the dating&#x2F;intimacy market toward a winners-take-most equilibrium, which favors the most attractive young men.

Ask a heterosexual woman in that age range about how many awful conversations she&#x27;s had with men in that age range via dating apps. She won&#x27;t say &quot;a few&quot;, she&#x27;ll say &quot;A LOT&quot;, and be able to show that the vast majority of messages she gets are either very dry or insanely forward (sexually).<p>If you&#x27;re a great-looking guy and you can&#x27;t start or hold a good conversation, you can still get laid on the basis of looks. But if you don&#x27;t look good, you don&#x27;t get those grace points. I&#x27;ve seen guys (who look much better than I do) fail at getting laid on dating apps after LOADS of attempts, and despite being their friend, I must say the messages they&#x27;ve shown me are AWFUL. Not just &quot;this isn&#x27;t that great&quot;, but &quot;WHAT WERE YOU THINKING???&quot;. When I was single (despite my looks), I found it really easy to get dates and get laid using dating apps, because I could actually hold conversations. And I know others just like me, who&#x27;ve gotten similar results.

This is not news to anyone who has been following the changes in gender dynamics in the past ~15 years.<p>Without giving an opinion on any side: there is (and will continue to be) growing instability when inequalities (relationship, wealth, or otherwise) result in a large portion of the population disaffected. Historically the solution to this particular problem has been enforced monogamy + the risk of pregnancy. Clearly that is no longer an option in the West, as sexual attitudes have become more open and birth control is widely available. It remains to be seen what the end result will be this time around.<p>Personally I think that technology will try (and largely fail) to address this imbalance. Think of K&#x27;s &quot;girlfriend&quot; in Blade Runner 2049. This seems to be the route we as a society are heading toward. A civilization of hyper-individuals that attempt to fulfill all social and human needs through market-based product solutions.

&gt;It also won’t do to point to changes over this time period that effected all ages and genders similarly, such as obesity, porn, video games, social media, dating apps, and wariness re harassment claims.<p>I think this is wrong. I don&#x27;t believe these things effect all ages and genders similarly. For instance, I think we would find that the rate of young men playing video games and watching porn are much higher than for young women. I&#x27;m not saying that young women don&#x27;t do these things, but I don&#x27;t believe these things are engaged in at the same rates as young men.<p>Also, many older men are already married. Even if they do view porn at similar rates to young men, this might not affect the rate at which they are having sex with their wives. And, in my experience, older men and women are not playing video games at the same rates as young men.

My napkin paper theory is that for nonmarital* sex the internet has made it easier for people to find partners, with the overall effect that the bottom ~1&#x2F;3 of men cannot find partners. Generally women are more selective than men when it comes to casual sex, and desirable men are usually willing to have sex with multiple partners. I recall studies that found that the top 20% of men on dating platforms account for 80% of the matches. I suspect that the drop in rates of no sex later in life is because that is the age when people start to get married (late 20s, 30s). Unlike the casual sex market, marriage is generally 1:1 so 80:20 dynamic flattens out.<p>\* I&#x27;m using &quot;nonmarital&quot; here to refer to sex outside of a long-tern committed relationship. I originally referred to this as &quot;casual sex&quot; but I think that may be more loaded than what I&#x27;m looking for.<p>Edit: &quot;extramarital&quot; -&gt; &quot;nonmarital&quot; as per respondent&#x27;s suggestion

Discussions like this drive me crazy. It&#x27;s not hard to see what it is about society that&#x27;s making so many people not have sex, and it&#x27;s not, like, some subtle market effect involving their attractiveness. No matter how much you want find a market effect, it&#x27;s due to _human stuff_, like people&#x27;s actual lives and problems, not their behavior in some sex economy. There is nothing even close to an economy around sex. There&#x27;s just the real world.<p>(This kind of) economics is valuable when it can tease out and explain underlying trends that you can&#x27;t figure out from just looking at the world. But in this case, the only thing you&#x27;ll be missing if you proceed by intuition is, like, numbers on the size of the effect. If you want to solve the problems at a societal level, while numbers are useful for prioritization, maybe, you&#x27;re going to be trying to solve the actual problems that you identify with your human analysis.<p>For instance living in this world provides me ample evidence to dismiss the line &quot;It also won’t do to point to changes over this time period that effected all ages and genders similarly, such as obesity, porn, video games...&quot; as laughable and clueless with, say, 99.99% confidence.

There is no longer an average, middle, median, etc. Hookup culture has consequences; before it was possible for an undesirable male to mate with a female, with the institution of marriage.<p>So you end up with a society where everyone is unhappy. The hookup culture devalues the woman, competing for a slice of a shrinking desirable pool of men, while the undesirable men become angry and frustrated. But desirability is more about status IMO. Status can be decoupled from wealth and the economy. If you’re not playing the status game, even if you’re wealthy, women will not find you attractive.

Burner account to describe my experience.<p>Late 30s male software developer - my long-term, live-in gf dumped me a few months ago and I got on the dating apps. Holy cow.<p>I get dozens of &quot;matches&quot; every single day on Bumble and Hinge, it&#x27;s overwhelming. Don&#x27;t even bother with Tindr or OKC (I tried OKC for a week and I had literally over 900+ &quot;likes&quot;). I&#x27;m not saying this rub it in anyone&#x27;s face, just to confirm the hypothesis of many in this thread: the dating apps have redistributed matches to the top 20%.<p>I have friends and coworkers who are totally normal, regular-looking dudes and they barely get any matches -- my results piss them off so much they won&#x27;t even talk to me about dating anymore.<p>I&#x27;m a decent-looking person but no male model and not rich, I can&#x27;t even imagine how much more intense it is at that level.<p>That being said, I don&#x27;t like the apps and wish there was a different way. Some kind of combination of internet matching and speed dating so you didn&#x27;t have to waste days of your life endlessly texting or drop hundreds of dollars buying drinks (and&#x2F;or dinner) for women who text you after the fact that they&#x27;re not interested.<p>Not that anyone feels bad for me, but even getting a ton of responses it&#x27;s not a process I enjoy either.

I struggled with sexlessness as a young man, even before the rise of popular dating apps. I&#x27;ve a history of self esteem issues directly related to my own attractiveness. Most of this was from my religious upbringing, being sheltered from people my own age and knowledge of sex, and being punished for girls being attracted to me.<p>Now, as a young man who has gone through counseling, I have begun to have success in dating within the last two years. I&#x27;ve gone on about 25 dates last year, more than my entire life put together before. I even had sex twice last year, which I had never had before. One time was horrible, but the other time was genuinely wonderful. I loved cuddling in eachother&#x27;s arms and talking about what was deep and meaningful and lovely within our own lives.<p>I remember the feelings of worthlessness, looking at statistics from online dating websites and population studies, remembering the hundreds of women who weren&#x27;t interested, comparing myself with other men who were genuinely horrible, cowardly, and lazy people being very successful sexually from a young age, speaking with friends who were girls who complained that their lives were hard because they hadn&#x27;t had sex in so long (2 months). Add onto this, there is a stigma of being extra-broken or unclean or an &#x27;incel&#x27; if you have these problems.<p>The reality is this: most of the dating advice, from various sources, given to young men now doesn&#x27;t work. Young men are given few other options other than rehashed &#x27;self improvement&#x27; lectures, dating-game philosophies from pua, or arranged marriages. It&#x27;s no wonder to me why young men my age are buying into some crazy nutcase ideas like government-given girlfriends. The reality is that no other genuinely dating-helpful options are being given to young men.<p>What helped me was slowly loving my life whether or not there was a lady present, not really caring about what people I don&#x27;t know think about me, and most importantly getting out more and interacting with more people. I am not sure that this would work as well for everyone I know though.<p>Dating is still extremely hard for many young men. Counselors need to be ready to deal with this as an increasing issue. Solutions and answers need to be found and given to young men rather than casting them out or patronizing them.

I think the trend is true but this study did not have a large sample size. It was 31 out of 105 men in this age range saying they did not have sex.

If you accept the premises: free information leads to higher female promiscuity aimed at top % males<p>Lower % males will always be aware of this<p>At some point this leads to increased violence and conflict<p>There&#x27;s no way to put any of this back into the bottle (how can you enforce cultural (or even enforced) monogamy given free information and anonymous encounters? It&#x27;s harder than trying to prevent people doing drugs, incel fantasies aside.<p>The closest thing to a way out is to try and change the culture of sex as power and status and deconstruct the whole thing somehow? (As in all you change point 3, get low status guys to care less). It seems difficult though, it&#x27;s beyond politically incorrect to say but I can&#x27;t imagine guys ever being happy to know that they were a compromise choice by their girlfriend who had to really prove himself after 10 years of sleeping with men far more attractive than them that just had to swipe. Hard to see outside your own culture though, maybe that will just become accepted.

&gt; Explaining Sex Rate Changes<p>&quot;An ironic side-effect of feminism is to free men from the burden of being the head of the house.&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RPETpCVrH9Y" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=RPETpCVrH9Y</a><p>&quot;Why you can&#x27;t find a man: Hypergamy Floats&quot; <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4UWpmd1yjVc" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=4UWpmd1yjVc</a>

Perhaps off-topic, but if someone here on HN is from Saudi-Arabia or a similar country:<p>How does this work in societies where rich&#x2F;succesful males can have multiple women? Are there simply a bunch of leftover men? Or is the number of men who have multiple women today too small to make a dent?<p>Assuming there&#x27;s 50&#x2F;50 men&#x2F;women there too...

My theory is that it could be related to the economy getting worse. My belief is that women are generally more likely to have sex with someone that they consider to be viable long-term reproductive partners or marriage material. Fewer men have the financial success and stability that many women are looking for in a serious relationship that would make them comfortable with routine sex.

Why is nobody mentioning the potential biological basis for this?<p>Men&#x27;s sperm counts are going down 3% a year and have been consistently for over 30 years. Nobody knows exactly why, but environmental contamination through &quot;xenoestrogens&quot; (e.g. BPA in receipt paper) is a major theory.<p>This is no freak trend and has been researched by over a thousand papers with no good answer (so don&#x27;t reply with a pet hypothesis like exercise-- it&#x27;s not).<p>1. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;family&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;sperm-counts-continue-to-fall&#x2F;572794&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.theatlantic.com&#x2F;family&#x2F;archive&#x2F;2018&#x2F;10&#x2F;sperm-cou...</a><p>2. <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C33&amp;q=sperm+decline+men&amp;btnG=" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;scholar.google.com&#x2F;scholar?hl=en&amp;as_sdt=0%2C33&amp;q=spe...</a>

Can we look to other cultures where widespread celibacy (especially extramarital) is already practiced for cues as to how this will affect the US?

I&#x27;m often surprised that there is not more discussion about hacking the sexual market place on Hacker News.<p>We talk a lot about growth hacking and hacking technical systems. Hacking in the meaning of &quot;Using intelligent, unusual approaches to gain an advantage over the typical approach&quot;. Yet for sexual market place it&#x27;s completely silence here on HN.

1) Internet porn is training young men to have sex with fantasy images, making sex with a real partner an alien concept.<p>2) People are way more engaged with screens than in person<p>3) Masculinity is labeled &#x27;toxic&#x27;, etc. Young men are not getting the support&#x2F;encouragement&#x2F;mentoring they need.

Reading through the comments, there&#x27;s a shared narrative that emerges:<p>Tinder, etc. leads to a skewed distribution of access to sexual partners based on attractiveness, which leads to unattractive men not having as many partners, which leads to pick-your-favorite-bad-consequence.<p>And there are a lot of men in this thread feeling worried and depressed about this. While it&#x27;s certainly true that you get more matches on Tinder if you&#x27;re attractive, this overall narrative is vastly oversimplified, and the conclusions drawn from it are inaccurate. It&#x27;s the result of men projecting male attitudes onto women&#x27;s behavior. I understand that it&#x27;s easy to feel resentful. I don&#x27;t fault anyone inherently for this-- these are complex issues, there are exceptions to every generalization, and it&#x27;s difficult to judge because it&#x27;s hard to experience the dating &quot;market&quot; through different eyes.<p>But before you buy into that narrative, take a moment to think about what it&#x27;s like for women. I&#x27;ll indulge in some generalizations (yes there are exceptions) because brevity is of the essence. Compared to men:<p>- Women care less about physical attractiveness - Women are less interested in hookups and enjoy them less - Women are more interested in romantic and emotional connections and long-term relationships<p>Do you really think the majority of women are happy with the recent societal changes in dating? It&#x27;s not hard to find thinkpieces written by women lamenting these issues. I haven&#x27;t met a single woman who was happy with it. And I&#x27;ve heard many bad date stories from my female friends and my own dates. One article described it as &quot;searching for a diamond in a sea of dick pics&quot;. And you have to worry about physical violence or men who treat you like an object and try to run some PUA algorithm on you. Maybe you believe that some women are doing things you don&#x27;t condone. But can you honestly blame them? No one&#x27;s perfect, dating is a shitty and exhausting experience for everyone.<p>As a man it&#x27;s easy to fixate on physical attractiveness because we notice and care about it more. But I assure you, once you meet your date in person your looks stop mattering (as long as you didn&#x27;t lie) and at that point it&#x27;s up to your personality. There are a lot of women who&#x27;d be excited to date a decent and kind man who&#x27;s willing to explore some level of emotional commitment without trying to &quot;keep it casual&quot;. Explaining these changes purely on the basis of an attractiveness&#x2F;status market is a cop-out for men who are too insecure to confront whether they&#x27;re actually enjoyable people to be around.<p>I see a lot of proto-incel thoughts in this thread. That shit is a downward spiral, you need to pull yourself together and get out of it before you internalize how physically &quot;unattractive&quot; you supposedly are. Once the incel ideology destroys your self-confidence and skews your outlook on the world you will actually become an unattractive <i>person</i> even if you look fine physically.

Anecdote: Take it with a grain of salt as a mid 20&#x27;s male in the dating scene<p>Maybe it&#x27;s me, but I get the feeling that even if I improve myself (start hobbies, go to the gym more, etc) That will not be enough to secure a serious relationship because its so much easier for partners to &#x27;upgrade&#x27; and find someoene else. There are fewer incentives to stick it out and build on a relationship, not unlike how the norm for getting a raise is to change jobs (instead of company loyalty)

In my case, I’ve always found partners (including my wife with whom I’ve been in a strong relationship for 8 years) in gatherings with friends and friends of friends.<p>I would absolutely DREAD today’s dating scene through a screen. Maybe older men do it the old way?<p>I don’t know, this is one revolution I hope regresses.<p>If you’re young and looking, I’d suggest you try to mix and match your circle with your friends’ circles and hope for the best.

Clearly caused by the same (unknown) thing that&#x27;s been causing the double-digit decline in testosterone levels of Western men for the last few decades, regardless of job market or dating apps or whatever. So I&#x27;m leaning toward physiological explanation, not social.

I’d guess HD porn + addictive video games + ubereats plays a nontrivial role in keeping young men from leaving the house, and also keeping them out of shape, making it more difficult to find a partner even if they wanted to.

I would be interested in having some stats by education level and profession. From my current personal experience as a CS student, I would say it is easily above 50%.

Artificial AI-driven-wife (for example &quot;Geminoid F&quot;) with artificial womb would solve the problem.

I ask some right-wing young men and they&#x27;ll tell me, they believe in survival of the fittest and darwinian society.<p>The same young men then tell me, that I should be worried about race-mixing, and I should be worried that most men are not having sex.<p>This is, quite frankly, a fascinating duality of thought.

or maybe respondents are just more honest nowadays

It&#x27;s genuinely depressing to think that a large number of guys now has no access to explore intimacy and partnership (or very little). No one&#x27;s owed sex of course but it&#x27;s like we&#x27;re breaking aspects of society. And I think you&#x27;d naturally find women are less able to find meaning themselves here so it&#x27;s not just a men&#x27;s pity party.<p>I wonder, if this is a dating app phenomenon, if there&#x27;s anything that can be done thats healthier for our society. Banning the apps isn&#x27;t the right way, but is there some means of adding balance?

Sex is not the be all and end all of living an awesome life. Just because blind nature created you rife with the instinctual passion of desire does not mean you have to live as a slave to it.<p>Channel that desire into hobbies that are actually interesting to you, and enjoy life.<p>Sex, intimacy, relationships, marriage and the like do not automatically guarantee you happiness, as perfectly illustrated by this masterpiece: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0147612&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.imdb.com&#x2F;title&#x2F;tt0147612&#x2F;</a>

The reality is that about 50% or maybe as high as 80% of men are not attractive as sex partners to women who are able to have many choices. And young women are attractive to men of all ages...<p>That is, the top 20% of men are the ones that are most desirable(however defined) .<p>In the past the desire to have kids(and the result of needing the man to stick around), and the shame of being considered a slut if a woman&#x27;s slept with many men, kept much of this in check.

Why are articles like these yanked so quickly from the front page of HN?

pretty tone deaf tbh

Watch what comes next.

First, I think it&#x27;s interesting to put some error bars on the actual numbers. One, it&#x27;s from the Post, so their pro &quot;feminist&quot; bias could skew toward narratives (Young men driving the decline in sex) that emphasize declining male potency. Two, this is &quot;US people&quot; so it&#x27;s limited to one culture.<p>Second, to explain the effect, I offer the following two theories:<p>- degraded sexual endocrinology. Hormones are very important in arousal and libido so this is likely the biggest effect.<p>- society punishing male sexuality. The low evidence standard (in the court of public opinion) to female fake accusers, creates substantial risk for men. Under this theory, the age group effect can be explained as bigger on the young, who are still forming their attitudes about sex and observing society&#x27;s discourse, than on older people who came of age in a less risky era.<p>It&#x27;s unclear to me how &quot;downregulating sex&quot; by social &#x2F; hormonal mechanisms is affected by the massive viewership of porn.<p>The other most interesting theories I think are the economic ones (changing income), because sexual biology is intimately wired with resources seeking in our brains, in ways more pronounced for women than for men.

The ammount of borderline incel rethoric in this discussion thread is concerning.

The most populous nation on the planet has a misbalance of men:women. That’s all it really takes.