
The Percentage of American Adults Not Having Sex Has Reached a Record High - buboard
https://www.sciencealert.com/the-percentage-of-americans-not-having-sex-has-reached-a-record-high
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0db532a0
The articles misses one important factor: Tinder, Bumble, Hinge, OKCupid et
al. have changed the market in such a way that in a large city, even the
homeliest of girls can log on and within hours arrange sex with a guy who she
would otherwise have no prospects of a long-term relationship with, but is
well above the attractiveness level she would have previously had access to.

I haven’t just read this online; I have seen this with my own eyes, with
multiple female acquaintances, none of them exactly venuses, showing me the
guys they’ve been meeting up with.

The fact stands that guys are a lot less choosy than girls, and this
necessarily includes the guys who are also more physically attractive than
most.

As online dating has become the norm, this causes a drought for a larger
portion of men than before.

~~~
86carr
I agree! As a man, you're in for a really hard dating life (and life in
general as a result) if you're relying on these apps. Meeting women in person,
an increasingly rare opportunity, is far more likely to result in a positive
outcome.

At some level I hold the apps them selves responsible. I think they create
some kind of negative loop in the dating world. I don't believe the results of
these apps are a net positive for society but my perception is colored.

~~~
blablabla123
> Meeting women in person, an increasingly rare opportunity, is far more
> likely to result in a positive outcome.

Yeah, it will take another 100 years until women are hired 50:50 into
engineering jobs. Or probably so many jobs.

~~~
toomuchtodo
I thought the new school of thought was never, ever attempt to date a
colleague. Too much risk, even in considering.

~~~
jsilence
Yeah, you could also hang out with your actually funny and interesting female
colleague and meet her female engineering college friends. In pre online
dating times you'd meet people by physically hanging out in groups, having fun
and eventually meeting other friends. Good times. Y'all should try it
eventually.

~~~
toomuchtodo
And have your after hours discussions and activities now possibly jeopardize
your job if something is misinterpreted? Not even once.

~~~
Frondo
I think the risk of this is widely exaggerated.

I have had many, many long and interesting conversations with women
colleagues, and there's never been any risk of anything being misinterpreted,
because I:

* don't joke about how I would like to date them (because I don't want to and it isn't a good joke),

* don't suggest that we should meet in places that would be appropriate for dating (romantic restaurant, one of our places, quiet bar, etc),

* don't joke about having sex with people (because those aren't good jokes and I wouldn't discuss having sex with people who aren't close friends),

* don't talk about or joke about pornography.

Carving out that handful of broad exceptions of things I don't discuss with
colleagues (men or women) leaves a huge amount of things to discuss -- and
places to discuss them -- that aren't really open to misinterpretation.

I also don't think most women _want_ to call out their coworkers, because of
the intense social scrutiny turned back on them when they do so, even when
their initial calling-out was warranted.

~~~
jsilence
So telling that these simple behavioural rules actually have to be spelled out
instead of being normal common sense behaviour.

~~~
toomuchtodo
You can follow the rules laid out and still be accused of saying something
offensive. The risk reward isn’t worth socially engaging with colleagues.

~~~
Frondo
Certainly, it's possible one can be accused of anything, with or without any
basis in reality.

I don't believe the risk of being accused of inappropriate behavior is
anywhere near what you seem to, and accordingly have spent many, many hours
and evenings socializing with colleagues, many of whom (men and women) remain
friends long after the job is over.

Govern yourself according to what you deem appropriate, but suggesting that it
is a fact of society that women are untrustworthy is neither true nor useful
to society at large.

------
Blackstone4
Technology could be creating a 'winner-take-phenomenon' in dating by massively
expanding the options people have. The top X percentage of guys get all the
women. There's also the social argument, since marriage is less common, sought
after males are no longer locked down the way they once were.

~~~
arandr0x
What I don't understand with this argument, is sex is usually a 1:1 activity
that takes up a bit of time (like interviewing). Even if you have a population
H (for Hottie) of men every woman would wave her panties for (doubtful but
let's assume) the men in H can't possibly have sex with every woman every day.
Meaning some of the women, even if they can have sex with the men in H, and it
probably does affect how they view men in not-H (less well due to inferior H
factor), must be spending enough time sexually frustrated to be available for
not-H.

Indeed, if you look at sex not as a matching problem between males and
females, but as an event distribution, then let's say "desirable men" want sex
at a rate of K events per week and all women want sex at a rate of J events
per week. Let's say the population has 10 desirable men, 90 undesirable men,
and 100 women. In the past where the desirable men were married off, they had
sex avg(K,J) times per week, for a total of 10xavg(K,J) events involving a
desirable man, leaving 90xavg(K,J) events involving an undesirable man.

Let's say now all those people move in the new, "casual" world. The desirable
men can have sex to their heart's content: K times per week. The undesirables
must use the remaining times that a woman in the population would like to have
sex but the desirables are satiated: 100xJ-10xK. Now, if 100xJ - 10xK > 90xK,
so if men and women want sex roughly as many times, or if women want more,
undesirable men are not really negatively affected. Indeed they have more
variety under the new system.

However if J = 0.5xK, then roughly half the undesirables are unsatisfied, or
they're all unsatisfied half the time, which does feel like a step down.
Anecdotally I don't think it's the case that 50% of less desirable dudes are
just not having sex, but let's say it's 10, or 20%, that's believable. It
would mean women want sex slightly less than men -- 10 or 20% less. Note that
the 10 or 20% not having sex aren't necessarily less desirable than the other
undesirables, just less lucky.

Clearly a solution for the leftover guys is obvious: They must increase all
women's libido past the points where the hotties can satiate it.

(Obvious caveats: silly analysis, doesn't model gay people, assume libido is
constant or normally distributed across populations, assume partners for every
event are independent, etc)

~~~
apostacy
This has actually been studied quite a bit, and it would appear that the
increased optimization of dating apps has caused a huge inequality in the
dating "market". It can even be quantified with the Gini Coefficient, a
measure of economic inequality. [1]

> It was determined that the bottom 80% of men (in terms of attractiveness)
> are competing for the bottom 22% of women and the top 78% of women are
> competing for the top 20% of men.

And anecdotally, it is consistent with what I have observed. I am troubled by
the effect this might have on our society. I am sure that it is sowing
resentment among those who have been left behind. Our society is more
sexualized than ever; people are bombarded with messages about how great sex
is, and yet it is less available than ever.

[1]: [https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-
ii-g...](https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-guys-
unless-you-are-really-hot-you-are-probably-better-off-not-wasting-
your-2ddf370a6e9a)

~~~
arandr0x
I'm arguing that if sex is more casualized, which it is, then partners are not
"competing"; they can have sex with Man A on Monday and let Jody from
Accounting have Man A on Tuesday.

The failure modes for this system are twofold: if women want sex much less
than men, by a huge factor (which for casual sex may well be true) or if the
most desirable men are insatiable nymphomaniacs and quite capable of finding a
spot for every groupie. I'm not sure if the second part is amenable to change,
but I'm sure it's possible to increase women's libido because surveys tend to
indicate women have much less satisfying sexual experiences than men do, so
changing that would show room from improvement.

~~~
apostacy
It really isn't a distribution problem, although it is tempting to look at it
that way. But I think you are neglecting human behavior.

It would seem that what is happening is that the majority of women are
competing for the attention of a small minority of men. The goal of the
players is not to make sure that the most people have sex.

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amanaplanacanal
The data presentation in that article is probably a little misleading. It's
not entirely clear that young men are having less sex than young women.

Somebody has created another graph showing the confidence intervals, and there
is a large overlap:

[https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1111695055541161992...](https://twitter.com/graykimbrough/status/1111695055541161992/photo/1)

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thrax
Yawn. Everybody is beating it to internet porn. It's probably the main reason
that being seated for long periods isn't killing more people.

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kerng
I think the article could go into more depth and analyze this much further.
One aspect that is entirely missing is how dating changed over the last
decade. The rise of dating apps for instance would be interesting to put into
the mix when discussing this.

