Personally I feel like the reason behind the change is obvious. Pornography is everywhere. People don't get their kicks from 1970s movie love scenes anymore because hardcore fetish videos are a few clicks away. The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog. But the culture carries this at-will objectification as bleedover into everything else. And I think it's also why the youngest generation right now is fixated on knowing their exact, granular label for sexual identity and orientation, even though young people are having less sex than they've ever had.
Your explanation relies on the idea that any nudity in movies is exclusively for the purpose of gratuitous titillation. I don't think that's true, nor does it explain the decline in portraying the non-physical intimacy in relationships.
>The same way boys no longer lust after the lingerie section of the Sears catalog.
The Sears catalog wasn't replaced by porn, it was replaced by insta/tiktok thirst traps.
Yup. And there's a similar theory that both big comedy movies and comedy sitcoms have been largely disappearing because people are getting their comedy fixes from YouTube and TikTok now.
So when they go to the movies or pull up Netflix, almost all the new stuff being produced is drama. (Comedies haven't died out completely, but proportionally they're far, far less than they used to be.)
I agree but I also think that comedy is too risky for Netflix. Look at the Chappelle shitshow, and that was over something that was agreed on by ~100% of America 10 years ago.
There's always someone willing to crybully, so why bother? And, counter to that, if there's always someone offended, why not be Sam Hyde? Offend everyone, fuckit.
The elephant in the room might actually be US-American prudery. But to confirm, we'd have to check if prudery became stronger in the last 20 years and if non-US movies have still the same (or more) amount of sex in it.
But it's actually a well-known meme in the rest of the world that entertainment from the US has no problem depicting violence, but god beware you see the nipple of a woman...
Game of Thrones was extremely unique and "Non-American" for the nudeness and many sex scenes.
I heard a funny clip of the actors who played the Hobbits in LoTR where, precisely, the best place to drop their one-and-only f-bomb; they’d limited themselves to the whole franchise, maybe? Funny stuff.
> Game of Thrones was extremely unique and "Non-American" for the nudeness and many sex scenes.
Really? My feeling is the other way around - that say HBO shows (made by Americans) always have gratuitous nudity and sex scenes. Even the great ones, like "The Wire" or "Sopranos" had plenty of them. It's as if there's a person at HBO responsible for checking scripts if there's enough sex/nudity in them, because research shows they increase viewership.
CollegeHumor had a famous parody bit where they showed the story of young actors/actresses landing big roles, but when they explain to their peers what is it they do at the job, it sounds like they've been hired by the porn industry. but no, "it's not porn, it's HBO!" Then everyone cheers and is happy for them.
This is a joke, but it's also an important factor: actors and actresses can now push back against being made to film these scenes in ways that range from "uncomfortable" to "actual sexual assault". So there are fewer such scenes, because it's more expensive and requires more planning than just "bully lead actress until she takes her top off".
It's less ambiguous. It's the name of the country. It's not a weird dunk to acknowledge that "America" is two continents (and that one them is in fact not called "Mexico"). What's weird is someone who lives in a country called USA being so insecure about being called USAn.
Europeans love to think when people say America they are referring to the continent, despite everyone knowing they mean the USA. I think it's an inferiority complex/dislike of US thing
Please refer to us with our chosen demonym, it’s just basic manners.
I could dunk on Germans by referring to them as Nazis then acting indignant when they protest, but I won’t, because that would be bizarre and make me look insane
I think it's that and a sort of equal-and-opposite prudishness reaction - those sex scenes no longer fly in mainstream movies, they are generally described as exploitative of the actors (particularly women) and inappropriate in various ways.
To paraphrase something I read on the daily mash - OK, sure, you young folks feel free to shame us gen Xers for getting our teenage kicks from a glimpse of breast in 'that scene' in an action movie... but in the 80s and 90s we didn't have a device in our pocket that could show us the most extreme filth at the touch of a button.
(That all said, nudity does seem to have had a big resurgence in tv in recent years)
Yeah. I feel like Western cinema right now could use a movement like the Pinky movies of 80's/90's Japan - cheap, titillating, often thoughtful art movies that were also basically softcore pornography.
That's a genre problem, porn is by its definition explosive, too fast to develop anything emotionally, erotica however builds up but it is harder to fund, there is an outlier though, 50 shades, however, for 50 shades to get funding it had to be a best seller for a while, released as an ebook at first. So unless you reach such a level you probably wont be funded, which only exacerbates current puritanical trends.
I find this odd, considering the success of 50 shades and the huge amount of female erotica written in books, there should be a large incentive for pouring money on shows for all of that readily available material. I'm a man and even I find the books more alluring than 99% of what's on TV/Movies.
I don't think those two are connected. Yes, we have access to directly sexual targeted imagery , so there's no need to cram it into everything else. That's good.
But that's not related to today's super specific and fluid sexual identities. People aren't sampling the gullt buffet of sexuality and making their precise choice of their perfect blend. They are making guesses, guessing more wildly now that they have more than 2 options to pick from, and now that it's not taboo to explore, so teens being teens, who are constantly searching for an identity, now can include sexuality in that search.
> When revisiting a beloved Eighties or Nineties film, Millennial and Gen X viewers are often startled to encounter long-forgotten sexual content content: John Connor’s conception in Terminator, Jamie Lee Curtis’s toplessness in Trading Places, the spectral blowjob in Ghostbusters. These scenes didn’t shock us when we first saw them. Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
> The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
> We’re told that Tony Stark and Pepper Potts are an item, but no actual romantic or sexual chemistry between them is shown in the films. Wonder Woman and Steve Trevor utterly lack the sexual chemistry to convince us that either of them would be thirsty enough to commandeer a coma victim’s body (as they do in Wonder Woman 1984) so they can enjoy a posthumous hookup. In defiance of Norse mythology, Chris Hemsworth’s Thor smiles at Natalie Portman like a dumb golden retriever puppy without ever venturing to rend her asunder with his mighty hammer, so to speak
Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
There are certainly lots of overlap in audience. Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
> Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
Yes, but that's an artistic and commercial choice in and of itself. Why? One argument is the making of movies for export to China and India, with their censorship, encourages making a sort of internationally compliant pre-censored film.
But the argument doesn't hinge on graphicness; you don't have to be R-rated to imply sexual chemistry. It's one of the things that "pre-code" 1930s movies were good at - and of course got slapped down by American "voluntary" censors for. You don't have to _show_ anything to imply that two characters had sex offscreen, or even that they desire one another.
I would argue that something similar has happened to the Hays code slapdown. The 1980s movies were particularly "objectifying" in their treatment of sex. It was very much a time when female characters were often (not always!) only there for their bodies to be a reward for the male hero and the (male) audience.
(big exception for Sarah Connor in Terminator, of course)
So in the 21st century we've internalised that that was a bad, reductive way to handle sexual relations. But we've failed to _replace_ it with a new set of cinema conventions, or original characters, instead preferring to duck the issue entirely.
I think it’s just a cheap cherry picked argument. Iron man is largely about humility. His relationship stuff is mostly not even off screen, but between films entirely.
The MCU has a fair chunk of horny characters (horniest being overt sexual chemistry, not sex scenes). The horniest off the top of my head being Garfield’s Spider-Man (more Sony, but still), She Hulk, Captain America, most of the guardians of the galaxy, etc.
Top Gun is the emblematic stupid sexual chemistry for no reason film of the 90s for me. It’s dumb. It’s forced. It’s behind the scenes shameful.
Sexuality (not sex scenes) should not be a taboo trait for a character, or a person. It's still PG13 to be human. Looking at past films and TV shows, even those aimed at children, you can clearly see some characters being flirty, some characters falling in love or being very attracted to the obviously attractive counterpart. Who Framed Roger Rabbit is probably the most extreme example, but almost everywhere, from Looney Tunes to Terminator, it was OK to be attracted to a beautiful character.
The gist of this post is that this is mostly gone from MCU-like movies, and this makes sense because little kids want explosions and references instead of human connection. I tend to agree although there are still movies today that don't fall into this category.
> little kids want explosions and references instead of human connection
Another hint from extremely fandom-orientated movies like this: just as kpop bands aren't allowed to have boyfriends/girlfriends, maybe the relationships are taken away from the characters to allow the fans to develop the more intense parasocial relationship with the character/actor without any onscreen partner "getting in the way"?
Superhero films don't have to be sexless, even if kid-friendly. The dating scene between Lois and Clark in Superman (1978) (PG) contains more sexual energy and tension than many scenes in modern streamer series where the sex is shown on-screen in a manner explicit enough to have been considered softcore porn in the 80s and 90s. You can see the desire in Lois's eyes as she thirsts up Superman, and under that gaze Clark becomes nervous and off his game even in his more confident Superman persona. He fancies Lois enough to test her desire (by appearing to her as both Superman and Clark in the same night) and to become tempted to reveal his identity to her. Lois gets way more ribald ("what color underwear am I wearing?") than a late 1970s career woman would with a stranger, especially one she's interviewing for her job. She literally can't help herself.
The whole scene hits way, way different as an adult than when I first saw it as a kid. And nobody even gets undressed.
Ghostbusters is probably the one my argument is the weakest for - but still, its not about the rating but who the most targeted audience is. Ghostbusters is a comedy aimed at adults (or teens at least) which can also be suitable for kids. Super hero movies tend to be aimed at kids first while also being enjoyable by adults (or at most equally aimed. After all so much of the money comes from toy sales).
i think a more fair historical comparison would be original star wars trilogy to current marvel movies.
Famously, Lucas insisted on Carrie Fisher not wearing a bra in some scenes in the white flowing dress, and also put in the somewhat gratuitous bikini scene. You wouldn't get away with that today.
it was a deleted scene. also, maybe people forget these things, but it was common for many people to watch these old movies on TV, where they were heavily edited.
Glad Oppenheimer didn't shy away from those aspects of his life. Help really humanize him, in both good and bad ways even if the relationship(s) weren't necessarily a vital part of history outside of "oh his wife was a communist before he met".
It's just interesting because even 2000's superhero movies did this. Society changes quickly when a trillion dollar corporation azures a studio I guess.
> Maybe because you are comparing r-rated action movies with super hero film made by disney.
It's comparing mainstream action movies with mainstream action movies. The fact that those mainstream action movies used to be r-rated and are not anymore is the whole point of the article.
It has appeal for kids (I loved it as an 80s child) but it was created, written, and performed by a group of comedians with SNL and other sketch comedy backgrounds. It also has a scene that implies Dan Akroyd is receiving a blowjob from a ghost.
> Of course there’s sex in a movie. Isn’t there always?
> > The answer, of course, is not anymore—at least not when it comes to modern blockbusters
In todays gender fluid world, holding back on details, creating more innuendo enables viewers to project their own thoughts into those plot voids when watching tv or film, and obviously it allows more plot twists in future story lines.
Look at the furore thats generated over the TV SciFi character Dr Who kissing companions.
Another way to look at previous tv and films, is, were they more conformist and thus dictatorial to the viewer and society in general?
> Kids watch terminator and adults love super heroes. But the principle target audiences are different.
So are you saying that terminator is filling in as a father figure in psychological terms?
I think people watch films for the entertainment value as well, not thinking too hard to what is going on, partly because there is alot of detail to take in, its a bit like reading a text book through one sitting, you dont take everything in, but what is taken in and then gossiped about face to face or online, becomes interesting because its meta data for what people think is important.
I watched parts of Silence of the Lambs again the other night, and the FBi Starling portrayal of Buffalo Bill, is arguably academic conformism. This time, I was left wondering how much his childhood messed him up, in particular authority figures, which I dont think gets too much focus in the popular press or law enforcement circles.
The scene with the senator using the persons name broadcast to the hostage takers, to "humanise" the victim, instead of making "it" an object, I think hides the objectification of academia, the law and the state on the populous.
tl;dr authority figures influence the cognitive process, reducing the ability of people to think for themselves, which might not be a good thing.
Why are you commenting your opinion on the comments of the article then? Obviously users are going to take the context of the discussion into account in the discussion.
I wonder if the body positivity movement has anything to do with the de-sexualization of reasons to be fit.
In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself - that someone who would be more attracted to me if I were to work on myself isn't worth the effort. I heard this from my sibling-in-law constantly. Honestly started to think they were just trying to justify their own disregard of their health.
I started a 430 lb 6'4 man. I'm 320 lb now and while I still have a ways to go, the difference in the attention I get is mind boggling. Women actually flirt with me now. Initiate even. As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.
Well done for the weight loss. Also funny, I'm quite overweight (a bit lighter than your current weight) and one of the reason I want to get back in shape is because my flirting experience has been dire and non-existent. To be fair, I am not completely in favour of body positivity [1], I wouldn't date myself at this weight, so it's also a me problem.
I guess it's all relative :-)
--
1: In my opinion, accept your body and its flaws, but obesity is not to be celebrated. It is a metabolic disease.
>As someone who's felt invisible for a decade, I can't describe how much my mental state has improved.
This really can't be overstated. Dipping your feet into "attractive privilege" is frankly a life-changing experience.
Everybody treats you differently. It's easier to socialize. I frankly think that the reason as to why some women say they just like wearing makeup is that they are feeling this difference and mistake it for just feeling good.
It's true. Getting expensive veneers, working out, and wearing lifts to bring me up to 6' means I'm treated like a member of a different species - most especially by women. It's truly been a life-changing transition.
I know a lot of guys who believe that their life could have been completely different if they were a little taller or had a bit more hair. Perhaps it's not popular to point out, but I think they're absolutely right. Physiognomy is important and moving from average to somewhat-attractive will change every aspect of one's life.
To people having trouble visualising this: that's 195kg or thirty stone, to 145kg or 23st. That's .. really quite a lot.
> I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself
The problem is there's no real relation between how heavy someone is and how much pressure they apply to themselves. If you feel better at 300lb than 400lb, won't you feel better at 200lb? How about 150lb? 100lb? There's a lot of really quite light people who engage in disordered eating because they feel the drive to be lighter and lighter to be more attractive.
> feel the drive to be lighter and lighter to be more attractive.
Gaining and maintaining some muscle is clearly beneficial (and is actually much easier to do for a significant fraction of the population) but somehow this "lightness" paradigm is so pervasive... And anorexia even doesn't look good imo.
Very interesting, and I generally agree. In other words, how much is enough? If the drug works at 320 but works but works even better at 220, will you succumb to that pressure?
What's troubling is the resulting distortion field. I would love to unpack the brain of someone with disordered eating to hear their thoughts for myself. But also the guy at the gym that's devouring supplements, taking selfies, and wearing a skimpy gym tank to stare at and show off muscles. What's going on in that guy's head?
That said, it is a real and meaningful accomplishment to lose 100 pounds. To that guy, do what you need to do to feel healthy, happy, and confident.
Hoping I don't develop an eating disorder in the process of losing weight is a constant thing on my mind. I've had to deeply cut my calories to keep losing. I don't even really noticing myself experiencing hunger at this point which kinda scares me. But all my vitals are great, the fat keeps coming off, and I haven't really noticed much change in my strength in the gym so maybe I'm fine so far?
My roommate/gym buddy is one of the people you describe and while I can't see inside his head, the story he usually tells is that he was once super overweight (he's 5'11 and said he hit 350) and turned into a proper gym rat to lose it. I don't know how much he weighs now but he's got defined abs and large arms. He said that he's basically addicted to the attention he gets as a super fit person. He's charismatic and funny (and a cognitive behavioral therapist), but he basically seems to sleep with whoever he wants. The amount of times I've heard him say he really wants to get laid that night and then see him crawl in at 3 am with yet another (attractive) woman is nutty.
430lb is a severe disability that interfere with almost every aspect of life, including physical intimacy. Except for Internet activities, it doesn't work for anyone. It's well beyond the body's ability to maintain itself.
It's important to begin a journey of self-improvement from a place of mental health, not a place of dishealth. Public shame is one of the quickest ways to damage mental health.
Yes, I too, was once obese (and currently am overweight again with "modern" BMI stats), but my place of mental health that got me from a BMI of probably 35+ to 23 wasn't my body.
It was my overall view of myself (mentally, spiritually) and I moved my body in line with that mental picture. When people told me I was overweight (nicely) I agreed with them and I worked on it.
I had this same thing happen to me when I went from 343 to 170. It completely messes with me now going into public and having people actually acknowledge my presence and engage with me. I used to just be a ghost.
All I can remember from my youth was people pounding on me that being fat was basically evil. You see the same sentiment here from time to time so it still exists.
Anecdotally, one of the most charismatic and outgoing people I know is notably overweight. Maybe it's an ingrained compensation mechanism but nevertheless...
Interestingly, I bounce between around 180 and 210, and feel that I get a better response from people when I’m at the lower end. I suspect the effect is mainly as a result of your own confidence and self image.
> In many circles, if I were to say that I wanted to be more fit in order to attract the kinds of people I'm attracted to, the main answer I would get is that I shouldn't feel the need to change anything about myself
This sounds more like red-state FOX News fantasy than reality. Like when my uncle says, “Portland is a war zone” despite me living here and him living 3,000 miles away.
I noticed this when I watched "Raw" recently [0]. It was remarkable because it portrayed horny young students hazing each other and desiring each other and plenty of unselfconscious peer pressuring, which was itself depicted as covertly appreciated and desired by the girls, by way of a license to let go and have fun for a night (like how people often blame alcohol). I kept waiting for the turn or the emotional beat that called out these heinous, sexist, abusive behaviors, but it never came. I noticed something similar when watching Berlin Calling [1] where sex is used in several realistic ways, as both exciting transgression to expressing warmth, friendship and love. Raw is French; Berlin Calling German.
Americans still deal with a great deal of Puritanical shame around sex, I think, and as a very fat country (the fattest ever to exist) where huge numbers are on SSRIs (with sexual side-effects) plus a divisive political climate, you get Disney Marvel sexuality.
BTW if you think Disney doesn't do horny, think again. I mean, look at the "love story" in any classic animated picture. She looks at him, thinks he's hot, he looks at her, he thinks she's hot, and it's on. In at least two cases (Sleeping Beauty and Snow White) that's "love's first kiss" that's given non-consentually -- and his transgression literally saves her life. The older I get the more I realize that this naive notion of what love is actually is the core of truth; the rest of what we add is risk mitigation. In big budget American cinema, the surest way to eliminate risk is to do exactly what they've done. They aren't stupid.
I definitely think SSRIs are a big problem, but the sex problem in general is also not just a US thing. I live in Germany and it is really bad here too. To have sex, first of all you need to meet new people, and it seems that much of the German youth have systematically eliminated all desire to meet new people.
Talking to a bunch of Germans. They all require weeks in advanced to plan any kind of social activity, and if you ask them they admit they would rather just stay at home, and they are really cold to you for a long time (even years). Granted this is mainly scientific people but it’s still way more extreme than anything I experienced in the UK, and all of them also say it’s a general problem with the German youth too. They all value their personal time more than social time
It may also be a money thing. The bars in Germany are either affordable and filled with old regulars waiting to die, or expensive. If you have an expense account, the clubs are great! But if you don't, they'll break the bank.
1. In Germany, alcohol at home is extremely cheap. We're talking, a great Bavarian beer at home is 1 euro per 500ml bottle, and at a bar here in Hamburg at least 5 euro. Similar for wine and spirits. Also, the bars are often low quality, and full of smokers, and have bad music, so the motivation to go to a bar is really poor. There are exceptions, perhaps if you live in Berlin or Mannheim, but in most cities the social drinking situation is not great.
2. In addition, there is no social taboo against drinking at home or alone like in other countries. Even at work, if you pull out a beer at 4pm, especially on a Friday, no one will bat an eyelid. Therefore drinking isn't really an activity in itself so much as a normal part of life.
3. Many of the newer generation are totally straight edge. There is a trend towards not drinking or taking drugs in general compared to older generations or even compared to millennials. They would much rather have a fritz kola or a mate drink
Even on the street its cheap! it's funny when you are choosing a drink its like "Well I'll save some money and get a beer" because Coke is more expensive at your typical Doner spot.
Another interesting effect of this is you see far, far more public drunkenness, especially on the U/Sbahn. But for the most part there are fewer gross-out incidents than on NY subways. Not none, but fewer. You still get the occasional screaming/urinating lunatic. But not as often as you'd expect given the price of beer.
It's all because of smartphones and social media. We stare at screens for hours a day, and rarely meet up in person anymore. It's a global problem though.
And 90% of the time I see young people together they're all on their phones. There's an arms race to prove who cares less about the person in front of you, by checking your phone, and we're all winning.
Not quite -- https://obesity.procon.org/global-obesity-levels/. Kuwait seems to be the only 'big' place that's ahead of the US, but your characterization is inaccurate -- there are many middle-eastern countries right around the US's percentage.
>Raw is an extreme case of a an extreme horror movie
I was only commenting on the setup, not the movie itself. I didn't know what it was and when the horror started I stopped watching it. The other poster who considered it a recommendation was wrong.
And in fact it may be possible to interpret the horror as punishment for licentiousness, which is a common horror trope and undermines my point.
I was not expecting this piece to mention McMansion Hell, but I was expecting it to mention how the Chinese market has caused movies to cut back on edgy films. Or how the international market in general has made movies cut back on dialogue. Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film.
The article isn’t bad, it just describes a trend without ever doing the basic role of a reporter: follow the money.
> Or it could have mentioned sex has moved into HBO and streaming and away from film.
This was my initial impression. No sex on TV? It's a meme that HBO's most popular shows are full of it. Normal People is another recent example of a TV show that did not exactly shy away from intimate moments.
"Follow the money" is right, and the author seems to think that movies in the 80s were full of sex scenes for some reason other than a guy in a suit making a decision that a sex scene would increase revenue. Nowadays porn is on-demand and free so it probably doesn't add as much value to a Hollywood blockbuster.
Maybe I'm just a prude but I find most sex scenes to be awkward and shoe-horned in anyway. Why do we need a sex scene in a movie about a crime-fighting superhero anyway? Maybe characters in modern movies are having sex, just... off camera?
I found the whole thing only applies to American blockbusters.
I watch small budget films all the time and there's sexuality oozing most of the time, specially in European movies. If I have any complaints about those movies it's actually in the other direction: it seems that every time a character looks at another who is their love interest, they immediately hook up and kiss passionately, start taking off clothes after barely a few seconds, and suddenly find themselves having intercourse :D - not that I don't like watching it!! But I don't know, at least for me, it took a whole lot more effort than that to get to that point (and now, being a married man for many years, sex is very, very rare which is why I write in the past tense, hehe).
One thing that is not considered here is that media is far more globalized than before. If you want a big budget movie to do well across markets like China, India, and the middle East, you tone down the raunchy content or run the risk of movie getting banned out of large markets. TV is more fragmented so maybe it gets away with local tastes.
This is it. The source is the spinelessness of studios rather than some greater societal shift. However, that's not to say a societal shift cannot follow from reality mirroring fiction because mass media manufactures much of the attitudes of society.
I value old, foreign, dirty films that transgress taboos because they go boldly without the consent and approval of the morality police god squad or the ministry of harmony and culture.
“[Good] Art should comfort the disturbed and disturb the comfortable.” ― Banksy
That doesn't explain why every single actor has a perfect body. Every man is bulked up, every woman is super slim. 50 years ago it was completely normal that sexy woman on screen had a bit of belly fat, now this is completely unthinkable.
Does it need a more complicated explanation than increased budgets? 50 years ago CGI was virtually nonexistent and now it's close to photorealistic; does this tell us deep things about how spaceships are secretly aircraft carriers and space explosions are a metaphor for Desert Storm, or is it an artefact of trying harder and paying more?
That's not a good explanation because every country can have different cuts of the movie, some containing raunchy content and some not. They already have to do subtitles/dubbing anyway.
Depends on the movie, and it is not always smooth. Also, it leads to higher piracy in countries where cuts are made because people do want the raunchier scenes. Like Oppenheimer had a bunch of cuts in India but it is still doing well, but it is by no means guaranteed.
Also to consider is that it might be easier for Netflix to get away with a semi raunchy movie than it is for cinemas.
So we will likely see raunchy non-English movies made in Europe and which will have world wide audience. A current example is the Swedish 'Young Royals' which has been dubbed and subtitled in surprising many languages.
So cinemas end up with boring violence and Netflix ends up with everything else.
I agree that movies are less horny in general, and that it’s not unreasonable to draw inferences since demographics also seem to show American society is less horny.
BUT let me propose a counter-hypothesis. If we widen our scope to not just movies but all media, and consider the same time period (80s vs now), the vibes are a bit different
- movies: less horny
- television: slightly more horny?
- books: roughly unchanged
- music: roughly unchanged
- video games: much, much hornier
So it’s possible we have a rough conservation of thirst across media.
Agreed. And another large part of "media", which didn't exist in the 80s: social media.
I think that much of social media has become more blatantly sexual. In the earlier days of Instagram people would post pictures of themselves in scant clothing or somewhat "compromising" positions but always under pretense of something else. It would be accompanied by text in the form of a "thought provoking" quote and/or refer to something in the background of the image. The poster would be trying to say "this is not a picture of my bottom in a small bikini at the beach, it is a picture of the beautiful sunset and I just happen to be in it in a small bikini". People would poke fun at others for posting "thirst traps".
Today it is done blatantly and people often refer to their own posts as "thirst traps".
But perhaps the case could be made that this horniness has been taken out of advertisements, which seem a lot more timid today.
Instagram and tiktok exist in the shadow of Onlyfans (+), and quite a lot of those posts are disguised content marketing that goes exactly up to the boundary of what you can do without getting banned from the platform.
(+) or perhaps the other way round; onlyfans exists in the penumbra of other social media, detectable only in veiled references and indirect links, but unable to be mentioned directly.
It really depends on your scope of game. Big budget AAA games more or less abandoned sexualization. CDPR seems to be the only company that bothers with genetalia or sex at all. Compare this to the 90's/00's AAA games and it's not even the same genre.
For adult specific games, no, but yes. In the context of Japan, there's surprisingly little change in VN's. In fact it got a less loss sexual as certain VN realized they didn't need sex scenes to sell a game. But Japanese VN's are still very similar as a whole.
For the english market, it went from "small adult game shareware" in the 90's to absolutely exploding due to PC platforms allowing for independent publishing. AAA level entities (outside of Japanese VN's) never touched that market, but smaller developers always had a steam stream, and Steam allowing 18+ titles opened the floodgates.
Then there's the mobile scene. It's more or less not a factor for western branches (indie nor AAA. AAA is obvious, but the Indie market simply targets Steam), but Japan is starting a second coming with the market. It's mostly a difference in market; Google/Apple don't allow 18+ titles, so Nutaku is your best bet in the west. Meanwhile, DMM is a humongous entity in Japan has always had an entire separate 18+ wing of titles for media. Mobile games are no different, and Asia in general has a huge attach rate with mobile games.
It was scandalous when Madonna sang about sex, and masturbation in 1986, not as much when Christina Aguilera did it in 1999. And today you have people like Troye Sivan singing about taking poppers and the biggest drama is that the music video only has skinny and athletic young people.
In my opinion music, specially pop music, got horny as (the proverbial) f…
It might depend whether the GP equates horny undertones and horny overtones.
Popular music has always been horny as hell, but used to have more lyrical fig leafs. When Elvis sings about parking where it's nice and dark, it's not to play connect 4 (especially given it didn't exist yet).
It’s that, yeah. But also it was pretty overt too, people just forget because they’re oldies now
- “Hot for Teacher” Van Halen, 1983
- “Love in an Elevator” Aerosmith, 1989
- “Cherry Pie” Warrant, 1990
- “Shook Me All Night Long” AC/DC, 1980
- “Paradise by the Dashboard Lights” Meatloaf, 1978
- “I’ll Make Love to You” Boys II Men, 1994
- “Baby Got Back” Sir Mix-A-Lot, 1992
- “Black Dog” Led Zeppelin 1971
- “Brown Sugar”, The Rolling Stones, 1971. Off the album “Sticky Fingers” no less
Those are just the ones off the top of my head. But yeah IMO music hasn’t really changed much. People have and continue to love singing and listening to songs about bonin’.
It goes back to blues, and obviously much further back. Probably back to when people first started making music.
"I Didn't Like It the First Time", Ida Lee, 1947 (aka the Spinach Song ;) )
"One Hour Mama", Ida Cox, 1939
"It's Tight Like That", Clara Smith, 1929
And the most explicit of all these, "Shave 'Em Dry", Lucille Bogan, 1935, which makes some modern music look prude in comparison. (originally Ma Rainey in 1924)
you listed mostly just rock music - IMHO rock music was always more horny than different genre. But these days pop music or even k-pop is more horny if not for the lyrics then for artist how they dress, how they look. Today music is not what you hear in the radio but video (youtube) is the integral part of music
HBO certainly traded on some raunchy TV: Californication, Sopranos etc. GoT had raunch and nudity, but overall that trend feels like it peaked and is trailing off too.
It occurs to me that those shows are pre-Netflix. Netflix and the other video streaming platforms could be pushing for more family friendly content in general, and discouraging anything remotely like "porn" on their platform..
GoT is a great example of the evolution of raunch; explicit nudity and sex scenes were HBO's bread and butter for a while, especially obvious in S1 (even episode 1) of GoT.
But as it got successful - and the actors set boundaries - they realized the show didn't actually need it.
If sex scenes and nudity were a crutch to hide bad writing, I'm all for getting rid of it. Of course, you can have both.
Maybe the movie audiences, particularly the blockbuster theater-going audiences, are skewing older and more conservative/old-fashioned now. So the sexuality there tends to be a lot more repressed (while at the same time needing to be optimized around those highly defined abs, in order to maximize profits).
I think it's the opposite. I think the adults are watching series that have more complicated plots, and require a longer attention span. They're taking their kids to go see movies like Thor and Transformers where there might be sexuality (Megan Fox doing pretty much anything) but no one is actually getting it on. Part of this is almost certainly large movie studios not wanting to push the bounds of conservatism, but it might also be that actors nowadays are less willing to get their kit off.
Of course, my head canon is that Neo and Trinity killed off the movie sex scene in their Zion romp in The Matrix Reloaded. I can't put my finger on what it is that makes it so offputting, but it makes tortoise sex look hot by comparison.
That's actually just about what I was thinking though, not really the opposite.
I guess I should have said that it isn't the horny teenagers going to movies on date nights by themselves these days. It is more Mom, Dad and the kids.
I can remember the "zion rave scene" in Reloaded, but I didn't remember they were getting it on at all. Must have just blanked that entirely out of my memory.
The Matrix scene just wasn't necessary, and went on too long. And was intercut with a raunchy-music-video dancing scene. It was a bit odd all round, especially in the generally clinical, straight to the point world of the Matrix movies.
I think a lot of other folks elsewhere throughout comments are right when they say more overt sex, rather than anodyne “sexiness”, just doesn’t have much of a place anymore in (western, at least) movies now. Everyone has a device in their pocket that can instantly deliver you whatever kind of sex you care to see.
Anime is weird and honestly got less horny when comparing to the 80's. Even the hentai market in particular has been shriveling for a while; the days of full adaptations of eroge like Bible black are long over. But it can still be comparatively more sexual compared to most other medium, especially western medium.
Manga has always been a steady stream, and never really stopped. Maybe the largest publishers have toned it down, but the manga market has always been a wide medium with dozens of different publishers. And The doujin market has only grew over the decades.
It's the censorship of the distributors. Video games are distributed directly, for the most part, and don't have to deal with religious censorship pressure like Hollywood.
Maybe there is a backlash against the "obligatory sex scene".
I have always find them boring and it is not because of the lead couple bodies. First, they tend to feel out of place. When an epic battle is coming up, I want to see an epic battle, not a couple fucking. And then the fucking is often done in the least exciting way possible, as if the producers main goal was to minimize the number of erections in the audience. You don't want your movie to be mistaken as porn do you?
So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it. The alternative of making really good sex scenes would push the movies into 18+ territory, and I understand the reluctance. And looking and actors with great bodies and sexy outfits is enjoyable as it is, no need for a half assed sex scene that reveals nothing more.
> So yeah, ultimately, they removed the sex scene, and I think the movies are better for it.
My opinion is that, just like with "foul language" and violence, we are speaking of artistic devices. These are tools. Does it aid the story or detract?
I was a child of the 80s, so I remember the 90s very well. I remember people complaining about "gratuitous" sex scenes.
But how do you tell the story of Basic Instinct or Cape Fear without the sex scenes? You know, the ones where the murderer kills during sex.
In forbidden love stories, a well placed sex scene can represent crossing the Rubicon. The point at which the characters decide to break taboos and expectations and proceed with their relationship, despite the inevitable consequences that are to follow.
I never read or saw 50 Shades of Grey, and I know it's probably a bad example due to it's reception, but from what I understand of that story it could not work without sex scenes.
As with everything, use the right tool for the job. If a sex scene is a good way to drive home an important beat in a story, then I say go for it. Just like if a well placed "f-bomb" in a stand-up comedian's joke can drive impact.
One last example / analogy: during the early 00s I began to develop an extreme distaste for CGI and action sequences in movies. Just like with the "gratuitous" sex scene, it was blatant, in your face, over done and didn't seem to advance the story. As a practical FX lover, I thought that CGI was a cheap alternative. These days CGI and modern technology are used in conjunction with practical FX more than ever, so that each can contribute what it does well. At least, when the FX themselves are done well. And I don't remember too many recent examples that remind me of The Matrix 2, where the highway chase scene felt like it went on for hours and contributed nothing but boredom.
When we recognize that these elements are tools, and that the best result comes from choosing the best tool for the job / problem at hand, then anything and everything ought to be on the table.
Although I do see your point, Good practice in storytelling has always been show don't tell, this is because stories themselves can always be shortened drastically and a plot can be summarized to a sentence, this is why the importance of storytelling is not the story, but the experience the writer can impose on its audience.
A writers primary weapon and tool to manipulate its audience is engaging their empathy, being told "they loved each other" might make someone think about a loved one, but it wont work on the majority.
Basic Instinct is about an author/psychologist who writes books that foretell/confess murders.
Sex isn't the essence of the story, it's a choice of set dressing.
Sex scenes are usually bad. The sex scenes of prior movies are often distracting and dumb. Sex scenes in the 80s and 90s weren’t porn, and also they weren’t realistic. They were dramatizations of sexual encounters. They do not hold up.
Craig’s Bond character had a few AWFUL sex scenes and it just does not work for modern audiences. Not because audiences are prudes, but because they’re more savvy.
Slasher horror was built on this premise, although with more of a slant to punishing horny teens. Scream largely stopped it imo. Hell look at the recent Scream VI. Both female leads are clearly horny women. They don’t fuck on screen. They don’t go topless for no reason. And why would you want them to? It’s not shying away from anything. If anything it is WAY more grounded and honest than earlier stuff. The original Scream was super smart on this too.
Films really haven't adapted well to the invention of the cellphone, let alone the smartphone. Being able to instantly communicate anywhere ruins so many plots.
I mean if you take the Marvel films, it's because interesting stuff is actually happening (to them) all the time. I wonder how many behind-the-scenes shots there are of the actors checking their phones in between shots, lol.
A more general remark would be that nobody in films ever uses the toilet.
I guess it depends on on the movie, but wealthier cities have significantly less obesity rates then others, like cities in the US south east. There's not that many obese people where I live.
Yeah, I'm not just talking about obese people, cinema is almost completely devoid of even slightly overweight and out of shape people - ie. normal people.
> It's weird that all movies seem to play in a parallel universe where everyone looks like the fittest people ever.
It's not weird if take consider commercial cinema for what it is - an escapist fantasy meant to induce short-term pleasure in the viewer. It's much more pleasant to look at attractive members of the opposite sex, than at the ordinary people.
> It's much more pleasant to look at attractive members of the opposite sex, than at the ordinary people.
Not only opposite sex! When I was a kid everyone watched action movies with fit guys like Schwarzenegger or Stallone shooting some ridiculous-looking machinegun or rocket launcher while being topless for no practical reason what-so-ever and everyone wanted to look like them! Granted, now I'm not into actions and don't watch modern superhero movies at all but I suspect people still like to associate with heroes of the movies they watch, so I wouldn't enjoy watching average fat American John McSmith acting as Rick Deckard that much...
I mean, who actually talks like the dialogue in a novel? Movies aren't supposed to be real life. You don't have to go to the cinema for that, it's all around you, in 3D, surround sound, even smell!
This is a pretty extreme article, but I think the argument is not that it doesn't exist but rather that it is blown out of proportion. The metric that is used to calculate obesity (specifically at the time they reference) was BMI which is a fairly flawed metric and significantly the obesity line was lowered. Idk how it is calculated now.
BMI is a pretty decent measure of fat percentage for the vast majority of people, it really only fails for people who have far more muscle mass than most people (body builders). It is highly correlated with health outcomes - people with a BMI over 30 (obese) have significantly higher risk of death from heart disease, stroke, diabetes, and cancer - this is true at a BMI of 30 and it only gets worse from there. 40% of americans are obese. It's not overblown - if anything, I think most people don't understand just how big of a health crisis it is.
On the margins it may not be useful, but for the "average" person, it is definitely useful. I'd suggest there is no one with a BMI of 30 (besides people with a ton of muscle) that is at a healthy weight. Its a gut check, which is what is helpful.
You know what they say, most of the volume of a high-dimensional orange is in the skin. The average person is very rare.
BMI is best for populations since it's so easy to calculate from easily and frequently collected data. For an individual, you can fairly easily get more accurate measures to predict whatever it is you want to predict.
If you're not a bodybuilder and not pregnant, it's one of the simplest useful calculations we have. You'd be amazed at how many medical decision-making tools[0] are very simple and are based on outcomes, not rigorous mathematical theory.
Claiming that BMI is flawed is a lazy half-argument. Finish the argument, what should be used instead of BMI? Look at the correlation plots and draw your own BMI line [0]. I think the BMI lines look pretty good for men, but for women who fall into the common BMI range of 25 to 30, the BMI formula tends to underestimate the amount of body fat.
It would be nice if everyone could get a DEXA scan regularly, but the data shows that 50% of people would find that they have even more body fat than the BMI charts predict. Again, it's worse for women, most women near the overweight threshold would find that their body fat is higher than expected.
This needs to become more widely known. BMI underestimates obesity, not the other way around. Studies that use better measures of body fat percentage consistently find even people who are "normal" weight are fatter than they think. It's why doctors are supposed to now use waist to height ratio as a secondary predictor.
I think due to its generalized nature there are exceptions where it doesn't even apply (like people who are weight training, pregnant women etc).
I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed. It doesn't do a great job of identifying whether or not someone is healthy.
So maybe it is the best that institutions can do to gauge the health of a population with the data given, but I think it could be improved drastically with extra metrics (I've heard of measurements around the body being used).
There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant.
Obviously there are edge cases when applying statistical tools at a population level. That's not the purpose of BMI though. If you're pregnant or weight training then OBVIOUSLY your BMI score is not comparable to others. Most people are neither pregnant nor weight training. I'd even bet that most people haven't performed a weighted squat.
>> I also think it is becoming apparent that weight alone is not as useful of a metric as was once believed.
Being fat is bad for your health. That is a fact. No amount of body positivity advertisements will change that fact. It is healthier to be thinner than obese. Look at the graph above to see BMIs impact on other health outcomes.
Also, if you think the obesity crisis is fake/blown up then simply go outside in most American cities and you'll see that many people are obese.
> There is a subset of people who are being misidentified as unhealthy or overweight. Idk how large it is but it seems significant.
Again, this is not relevant as the subset of people is so small compared with the whole population.
The "data given" is included in BMI. Your relative weight is an indicator of multiple other health outcomes.
> There is a healthy body fat % range but it is all very dependent on someone's activity and consumption.
The amount of body fat being detrimental doesn't change if you just exercise more or eat healthier. It's still bad by itself. You might have a better life expectancy than someone who is a sedentary lump at the same body fat, but that isn't saying much. Hence, again, BMI is a gut check. If you're at BMI=27, you almost certainly need to lose weight. Period.
> I do however think BMI has its flaws and that those flaws are pretty significant when it comes to assessing individual health.
While this is not untrue, I don't understand why people single out BMI as a measure to criticise. No measure is perfect, or even particularly good in many cases, and yet it's BMI that gets it.
What do you mean by "weight alone"? Even BMI is kg/m^2 rather than just weight. Do you mean total body fat percentage isn't a metric of health, or BMI doesn't closely track BF%, or literally that weight isn't a good metric?
Sorry if this is nitpicky, but responding to the claim is difficult without defining it precisely. For example, see this figure from a study comparing BMI and BF% in Greece: https://www.researchgate.net/figure/BMI-versus-body-fat-perc.... You can see that BMI incorrectly says a lot of people are healthy when they're obese in terms of body fat, but if you don't agree that body fat is a metric of health then I'd first need to convince you of that.
Edit: I'll also note that in that figure you can see the number of people who are incorrectly labelled as obese by BMI but not by BF%, and it's much smaller than the other way round. BMI tends to make your population look healthier than it really is, whereas most people who say BMI is flawed are making the opposite argument.
> I think due to its generalized nature there are exceptions where it doesn't even apply (like people who are weight training, pregnant women etc).
All models are false, some are useful. BMI is imperfect, but arguing we should ignore it because it has exceptions is like arguing we should ignore that the Earth is round because it isn't perfectly spherical. Looking at BMI alone is occasionally misleading, but it's a hell of a lot better than not looking at anything, which is the realistic alternative.
> So maybe it is the best that institutions can do to gauge the health of a population with the data given, but I think it could be improved drastically with extra metrics (I've heard of measurements around the body being used).
No-one has identified any such drastic improvements. Measuring body fat percentage gives you a small improvement over BMI alone, but it's hard to do at home and only really matters for people with very high muscle mass (who are most likely already using more advanced measurements than BMI alone).
My eyes tell me that the obesity epidemic is real. Go to any public gathering of a couple dozen people or more and count the obese people you see. Heck, pick up a middle school yearbook, we’re starting obesity young these days.
We were hoping our future was Star Trek, but it’s looking more like Wall-E.
As a counterpoint - as a non-American millennial watching American movies as a child I couldn't understand why there should be sex/romance everywhere. I was not watching romance not to say erotic movies, just action, comedy, horror - yet every director felt obliged to add a pinch of sex everywhere. That felt pretty awkward and weird.
I’m France, I felt the opposite: American movies are so surreal with so much violence and guns for everyone, and sex is weirdly depicted.
I think French movies contained some sex scene almost all the time, mainly because it’s what happens in life so it’s just normal to see it in a movie. I think you can see some boobs in a movie if it’s rated for age 12 and up.
Nowadays, I think the American culture has rubbed off on Europe a bit more, and nudity alone is less ok in films or movie. So you can go to a movie where it’s expected to not show boobs, and then head up to the public beach where 20% of women are topless and nobody gives a shit. A bit dissonant.
Yet, I agree that having a sex scene in a movie sometimes feels like it’s wasting time if it’s not a good part of the story.
Well, US is the very definition of christian conservatism in talk and action, southern half would be considered bible nuts in western Europe, so movies are made with that optimization in mind
> just action, comedy, horror - yet every director felt obliged to add a pinch of sex everywhere
I can't find references to this, but there certainly have been situations in horror movies where nudity was added simply to up the rating, in case audiences felt that a non-r-rated horror movie was going to be inadequate.
I've also seen scenes and indeed entire films where I got the strong impression that the sole purpose was to get the lead actress naked so the director could see her. (non-nude example: the foot scene in Tarantino's Dusk Till Dawn)
I've read that for many years, it was considered a truism in Hollywood that any movie needed a romance element in order to keep the females in the audience interested. Hence, many war and science fiction movies had a lone woman with romance on the mind shoehorned into an otherwise all-male story.
You just say it. "Why does every movie." Doing that makes you categorize it as what a movie is. Simple, but subtle. It gives a certain level of legitimacy.
While this is unpopular to say, I think the advanced age of marriage and promiscuity earlier in life plays a role here.
My parents were together from 19, and knowing their style, they may both have been each other's first. As a teenager, I noticed my mother being extremely difficult. Even more so now. My father is no walk in the park either. But I believe they have a deep rooted love from decades and went through every event and basically adult stage in life together.
I'm 38. I date in my age group. Which means both of us are dating people that have been sleeping with others for two decades. Each of us has been overseas with countless friends and exs. Many women have been engaged, some married, and we've all had our hearts broken. We've all gained a few lbs. My hair is starting to grey.
Can I find someone that enjoys being with me? Sure.
Can I find someone that doesn't just say "wtf am I doing here" if times get tough for health or financial or just plain old age? I'm not sure.
I've heard many long time married old men say that when they look at their partner, they still see the beauty glimmering through that they saw at 19.
If I meet a partner at 40, when we start really getting old and annoyed, what am I going to hold on to? How lucky I am to be her 23rd partner?
I know this is a judgemental view, but I think it's human nature.
Edit: for those that think this is just some personal issue, you should look up divorce stats by number of previous sexual partners. There is a clear rise in divorce rate per increase in partners, and at about 7 it's 50%+.
Don't automatically assume the couples who divorce in this age would have been in a happy marriage in the past.
I've been in both ages. As a kid, in a small village, nobody got divorced. Really, it was just not done, the concept was alien to them. We came from the city, my parents were divorced, and I had to explain it as other kids would literally not grok the idea.
There was a lot of pain, abuse and unhappiness in those marriages. Years later something happened in that village and a lot of women claimed their rights: it rained divorces, often very long marriages that fell apart. A lot of these former wives banded together in self-help groups to encourage each other and process their sometimes traumatic marriages.
A divorce itself is never fun I guess, but it isn't automatically a negative and the outcome can be vastly superior to staying together. You may say: but what about all those divorces? I tend to assume those would have been unhappy marriages in the past, at least they have a new chance at life. So yes, what about them? Good they have ended their misery.
It really depends. a not super happy marriage also isn't automatically abusive and dysfunctional marriage either. You can probabbly think of your best and worst roomate but what about the most middle of the road? One you barely interacted with but seemed to get along with the few times you spoke. Never had problems with rent and would do their part (but not perfectly, they'd do chores if asked once).
It's safe, secure, and boring. Not happily ever after, but you get by. I think these are the kinds of relationships that break down more in an age where "meh" isn't good enough anymore. Why not strive for the best if there's no pressure disengage?
That number doesn't lead precisely to your conclusion, it can be higher or lower.
Current US stats are 14.04/100k, with men 3.9x more likely than women.
As the following example doesn't depend on the actual numbers, let's eyeball that and imprecisely say the married women's suicide rate was 5/100k before and 4/100k after: this is a 20% reduction, but I don't even need to look up marriage rates for it to be clear that nowhere near 20% of all marriages end in suicide.
In the other direction, suicide isn't and never was the only was out of abusive relationships. It's a desperate path for very extreme situations, and the divorce rate being much higher than 20% means there may be a correspondingly higher abuse rate.
Fair enough. I simply wanted to highlight the middle of the road, which is often lost in the increasingly polarized online discourse. I probably shouldn't have bothered responding, given that it brought it back once again to the most extreme option to escape what is likely the worst marriages
Islam really solved the problem here. It strongly encourages (to the point it happens to be a tradition) marriage after puberty is reached, while disencouraging divorces. The newly-married spouses generally stay in one of their parent's houses until the husband has a job and and able to provide for her wife. The wife and husband essentially grow together, their characters form simultaneously, reflecting each other not really unlike a sister and brother.
Islam also allows the husband to divorce as per his will but doesn't allow it for the wife, the wife needs to go to a judge and show evidence of unagreement (unwillingness of her husband to treat her reasonably well) between the spouses. If women were allowed to divorce willy-nilly, as they are generally emotionally less stable, they would lead to divorces in a rough patch of life which are regretted soon after, just like it is usually seen in the modern society. The husband has 3 rights to divorce, when he uses one of them, it's a reversable divorce. If all 3 of them are used the husband can't remarry his wife until the wife marries and divorces another man. All these together successfully lead to people not divorcing unless it's really necessary.
One can look up SWB (subjective wellbeing) rates of women and men in non-muslim and traditional muslim countries.
It’s the 21st century now. We can drop the “women are generally emotionally less stable” pseudoargument that allows men to own women as if they were property.
It seems like you are stating that women of the past were secretly unhappy, so the modern divorce rate is the system hitting it's relaxed state. That's a confusing way to support the way things are.
I'm not sure I'm supporting the way things are, so I don't know exactly what is confusing.
The comment I responded to has a fairly big assumption: that divorce is always a bad thing. I don't think that is a given.
People used to be quite stuck in the family or marriage system. Even when faced with violence and sexual abuse, there was often no way out. I've seen heartbreaking examples of this.
Though the tightness of past bonds may feel attractive in this era of fleeting connections, it was often not quite as cosy as what we long for. The freedom to move out of these traps was and is liberating for many. And yes, there is a cost to that freedom as well of course. I don't want to support anything, I just put a nuance here against a naive kind of nostalgia.
This style of concern trolling drives me up the fucking wall, given what we know about abuse statistics.
Step-fathers and live-in boyfriends are several times more likely to commit sexual or physical abuse on the mother's children than biological fathers. [1][2]
If biodad is actually abusing the children, then yes, by all means, get out.
But if you're leaving a non-abusive dad in order to "find yourself", or because you're "just not happy", you are, statistically speaking, endangering your children, unless you accept a lifetime vow of celibacy.
> This style of concern trolling drives me up the fraking wall,
It shouldn't because it isn't.
> given what we know about abuse statistics.
If marriages are safer for female spouses, I suggest it's because marriages have to compete with other relationships.
In my parents day (silent gen), marriage had little competition and were commonly a safe environment for abusers.
I personally witnessed mom in traction & my brothers broken. Most of her relatives/friends were mistreated by their husbands (possibly all but not everyone confided). Similar stores could be said by the children of that generation. And, my observations were far from unique. Family abuse was everywhere (victims confide in victims).
For my cousins' generation, many things are improved. eg:Their understanding of abuse. eg:The meaningful expectation for men to not mistreat their loved ones. eg:The expectation for men to support all obligations in a household (not just the ones they want).
Meanwhile, if we are more vocal about More Marriages than we are about better marriages, I suggest we have lost our way.
It didn't read to me as if the parent was talking about the abuse being done to the children but to the partner themselves, something that is far more common.
All of the divorces I know firsthand from my peers do not involve violence or sexual abuse, but more nebulous or obtuse statements about personal happiness and expectations from life.
I do think a culture of instant gratification and the myriad of stimulus that hits in rapid fire from all sides sets up even the most stalwartly to succumb to feelings or urges to do something opposite of their rationale, because they don't spend a lot of time ruminating and re-examining the source and cause of these feelings and harmonizing them with their goals and values, a sort of re-programming.
I am divorced, but do not want to go into the personal details. I did meet my ex when we were both in our twenties and did not have high body counts. Our divorce would be hard to define with cause(s). I know a large part of it was that my ex-wife struggled with giving up her career (that made her unhappy when she did not have kids) to be a stay-at-home mom when she pushed for having kids, but rejected my offer to stay at home if she wanted to work, and then happy she stayed home and vice versa all over again. Film and media echo this dislocation and dichotomy all the time. Films that show people working through things against all odds (yes a filmic reference but not to the point ;)) or the reality of dealing with everyday life with all of its tensions and releases, and unforeseen events and emergencies, is not common in non-action movies. Call it naive nostalgia, but I don't see that many happy divorced people who have not found someone. And the older we get the harder it is to find someone that can be more than a platonic friend.
I have now been remarried for many years with younger children, and we are all friends - my ex-wife and my current wife and my older children love their young siblings. I am very grateful to have kept those I love and care about around me. I will say that my current wife is traditional and not American and our differences and desires are not so dramatic and easy to harmonize with our life and family.
> It seems like you are stating that women of the past were secretly unhappy,
There's nothing secret or exclusive to women about it, much of our culture still reflects that it was widely recognized, including things like the wide variety of derogatory names for spouses (“ball and chain”, for instance.)
If you're not done with your share of sex when you get married, you are at risk of giving in to temptation when you're married. Mostly from a guy's point of view because a guy tends to have more opportunities when he gets older, but the same logic works for women to a degree.
One of my friends would get laid constantly in our 20s. Not just bragging about it, he provably had the gift for it when we were out. He was banging chicks constantly, to the point where he had to phone me from work to stop his various chicks from finding out about each other. I thought for sure this guy would not be able to hold out in a marriage.
15 years on and he hasn't cheated on his wife, that last of this parade of women.
My boss married his high school sweetheart. He started going to a lot of meetings with a broker. I was joking that he was having an affair. Turned out to be exactly what happened.
My other boss also got married early. Religious guy, 5 kids. I go to see him a decade after we last worked together, what does he do? He wants me to wingman him. Also shows me all his messages from various women. (He's also in politics, so maybe it's par for the course.)
Sex is pretty powerful by nature, but like many things evolution has left us, there's a point where our curiosity is satisfied. We can move on with forming relationships when the urge is not quite so strong.
I can't relate to this - with most things I enjoy, the more I am able to do them, the more I want to do them. When I go without for a while, I forget about the pleasure something brings.
Backpacking for a year didn't get me "traveled out", it made me want to travel more.
I married young and certainly would have found a lifetime of monogamy challenging. At the same time, I don't believe I could have gotten the desire for different partners out of my system before marriage. It's an itch that doesn't appear it can be scratched. Fortunately my wife and I discovered swinging, and get the best of both worlds: a lifetime partnership built on a deep love and years of shared experience, and the occasional opportunity to have sexual variety.
Basically nothing else in life works that way. If you punch or yell out your anger, you get angrier over time. The biggest predictor of donating to charity is past donations. The more marriages someone has, divorce rate dramatically rises (almost twice as high for a second marriage).
I strongly suspect the ladies man, statistically, is more likely to cheat during marriage.
Anecdotally, I've been with the same woman since I was 15 and neither of us would dream of cheating.
Yeah your logic makes sense. It just doesn't seem to agree with what I see among people I know, admittedly a small section of the world.
> I strongly suspect the ladies man, statistically, is more likely to cheat during marriage.
The weird thing is that the cheaters I know of are all guys with weak game. It's the opposite of what common sense would suggest, and I'm not sure of the mechanism, other than what I proposed. Perhaps another way to say it is that if you've had enough, you don't think it's worth the risk. I mean to be quite honest, it often isn't even worth the bother when you're a free man.
My experience some people with weak game settled with who they thought would take them but aren't 100% happy they did and will jump at expanded opportunity. If I want a Porsche and buy a Toyota it doesn't stop me from wanting a Porsche. If I have a Porsche I get over it and I want a Toyota for my daily vehicle.
Our genes don't care bout our beliefs, only that we procreate with a partner whose immune system is different from ours, which is signaled via pheromones. It does not matter to them if we are able to form a stable bond. My ex is still a pain five years after breakup, even though she has a new partner and child with him. Our son is doing fine.
Not that this is really the core of your point at all - but I believe the state of the science currently suggests that pheromones in humans are a myth at worst, at best unproven. We only have a vestigial vomeronasal organ, which no longer functions - as I've understood it:
Do you think it's a coincidence that almost every perfume uses some pheromone-like ingredients?
Musk and civet are the most famous examples but also see hedione, a major ingredient in perfumes since the 1960s, because it enhances pretty much any floral smell. Hedione seems to directly stimulate the vomeronasal organ (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S003193842...).
There's also the case of sandalwood, a perfume ingredient since antiquity. It just happens to smell almost like androstenol, an androgen believed to act as a pheromone, even though it's not really chemically related.
PS, fwiw my wife sometimes tells me she married me because of how I smell like. Apparenlty I smell like violets to her.
Another one would be a very popular taste/smell: Vanilla, chemically close to human pheromones as well. Never used perfume, but my Ex loved my smell too.
Well, do you know the experiment where women were asked to smell shirts worn by men overnight? When they were ready to conceive they liked the smell of male sweat, otherwise they'd say it stinks. When women get off the pill to have children, it happens that they don't like their partners smell anymore.
[edit]
Seems i expressed myself badly in my original comment. It quite possibly is my central point and i feel sorry for scientists believing this. I fear they have an antisexual religious upbringing like i had.
Why should the organ which tasked to find a mate, to have healthy children with, not work in us anymore? It can be damaged in people having their nose done, it gets broken in the process.
> Why should the organ which tasked to find a mate, to have healthy children with, not work in us anymore?
I can't member where I read this, but I have read that the human sense of smell stopped being hugely important for food when we developed three colour vision.
It's conceivable that vision enhancements also gave us a different path to mate-finding than smell; if so, the smell genes can randomise without much risk to reproductive success.
> The question is, can we do the same for humans? It seems highly unlikely. “In humans it would be pretty much impossible to do the classic isolation of a pheromone,” says Hurst.
Sounds like saying "i have no clue how to do it" and protecting the ego to me, could be wrong though.
Pheromone perfume feels like a scam to me. If they work, and a male succeded in having sex, she might notice she does not like his real smell later, that she got tricked.
How much is this like the "vestigal <appendix> which no longer functions" according to decades of scientific consensus until people discovered the gut microbiome?
My wife and I were high school sweethearts and got married out of college. When people ask us how we made it work, I always say that during college we grew and changed together. We had hard times and we worked through it, as we learned and grew we worked together and compromised. We grew up together through college. When you have a long term partner, they soften your edges. I don't think people want to have their edges softened anymore, which makes compromise and sacrifice less and less common. Note that this is not to say you should just settle for anyone, but I don't believe we as humans are puzzle pieces.
I completely agree; the same thing happened to me with me and my wife. The risk of marrying/pairing off early is that you can grow apart in your 20's, but the reward is that you can grow together in a way that I think is harder to do later in life. I feel that my wife and I grew from two individuals into one partnership in a way that we couldn't have replicated if we met later in life.
I can't related to the timeline of your relationship but I love your phrasing "soften your edges" - that is so great.
Completely agree with you. Strong relationships survive on compromise and very strong communication about the ebb and flow of one partner's compromise vs. the other. But everyone has things they want. One way (IMO) to be a great partner is to learn when to proactively soften your own edges vs. being told to do so.
I think this is a silly Disney view. I don’t think it’s about the history and the sunk cost specifically, but taking the difficult path to learning compromise, communication, patience and forgiveness. That takes a lot of time, decades at least, and it requires having enough incentive to stay together that you work through the rough patches to the other side where you grow instead of breaking up at the first sign of trouble.
If there’s a correlation between number of partners and divorce rates, it’s because someone is consistently failing to learn how to be a better partner.
It sounds like you're supporting OP's view. If someone hasn't put it the time and effort to learn these compromises, communication, patience, and forgiveness previously, why would they do it now with you after they meet you at age 40?
There's an excellent film by Miranda July, The Future, where an older person is discussing relationships with a 30-something having a difficult time in marriage. The older person says that they haven't experienced a real relationship yet because, 'neither of you has done something unforgivable'.
Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you?
All experienced people start off inexperienced. At least with experienced people, they are more likely to know what they want.
I am a woman the same age as you. I am only interested in long-term monogamy. As such, I have a lot of sexual and relationship experience due to my age, but all if it is with just 3 people. Not only that, but all of my experience is with who, themselves, had never previously had casual sex experience.
The first 2 were young and inexperienced like me, and they initially thought they wanted the same thing that I want. But as time went on, they realized that they felt confined by long-term monogamy and actually wanted more experiences with more people. After we broke up, they proceeded to have a series of flings and casual sex. They did have some attempts at long-term polyamorous relationships, but nothing that lasted more than a year or two.
By the time I met my 3rd partner (who I have been with a long time now), I was pretty gun shy about dating men. My experience was that men talk a big game about wanting a stable partner for the long haul, but get bored and break your heart.
What helped me give my new partner a chance was that we were both older by this point and more settled into our lives. He had plenty of relationship experience by that point, and his history demonstrated that he stayed dedicated in long-term monogamous relationships and that he was not interested in casual sex, despite plenty of opportunities for it.
If I were advising someone whose goal was to only ever have one partner in their life, my advice would be to only date people with a lot of life experience. Inexperienced people are a wild card. You can't manipulate them into only ever wanting you. Maybe back in the day, you could lock them into marriage, but modern DNA evidence suggests that a huge percentage of children back then (some estimates as high as 25%) were not genetically related to their fathers, so I'm not so sure that marriage was actually what you imagine it was.
If you want to date women who are fully dedicated to long-term monogamy, then date people with a demonstrated history of exactly that. (However, be aware that this only works if you yourself have such a history. You can't expect to date women with high standards if you don't actually live up to those standards.)
modern DNA evidence suggests that a huge percentage of children back then (some estimates as high as 25%) were not genetically related to their fathers
The surprising result of these new studies is that human EPP rates have stayed nearconstant at around 1% across several human societies over the past several hundred years. This poses an immediate puzzle for behavioural scientists, who estimated that without the availability of modern contraceptives the historical EPP rates should have been much higher, in the range of 10–20%, based on present behavioural measures of EPCs and observed kin investments of matri- and patrilineal family members, which are known to be inversely related to EPP [13]. Hence, it appears that people were more faithful in their relationships in the past, or – put differently – that the recent widespread adoption of modern contraceptives has sexually liberated women, resulting in a relatively greater number of extra-marital affairs, but in EPP rates that have remained as low as they were before.
My only complaint is that the method of study seems like it would not be great at differentiating paternity between relatives (i.e., cases where the affair partner is related to the husband, such as his brother or cousin) due to shared Y chromosomal DNA.
> Would you be luckier to be her 1st, knowing that it would be short-lived and 22 others would follow after you?
The answer is a definitive yes, from an emotional standpoint.
When you are young, you make partner choices based on primal, raw desire. As you "age out" of your youth, start a career, etc, you make more practical partner choices based on provisioning capacity, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc. Particularly when you are the sexual selector.
The problem is that that primal desire never goes away, even though people get better at making practical choices. If you're #1, you have the emotional security of knowing that your partner loves you at a deep, primal, biological level.
If you're #23, that emotional security is gone. You've been selected because you earn $X, you're stable, you're capable, and you get along well. And maybe that makes for a great partnership, in the sense that you could have a great partnership with your co-founder. But you still know, in the back of your mind, that your partner doesn't love you in a deep biological sense. You're a practical, rational choice. And your partner's body will never crave you like it does others.
And in a world of no-fault divorce, it's a trivial matter for your partner to give in to just a taste of the old days.
The word "insecurity" gets thrown around a lot here as some sort of pejorative. And it's true that #23 often has "insecurity issues", but those "issues" are not unfounded. Insecurity is often an emotional response to a genuine lack of security that actually exists in interpersonal relationships.
> When you are young, you make partner choices based on primal, raw desire. As you "age out" of your youth, start a career, etc, you make more practical partner choices based on provisioning capacity, conscientiousness, agreeableness, etc.
Hopefully, as you age, you choose partners based on many factors, the most important being both your abilties to understand yourselves; see others in a sophisticated, mature, and especially non-objectifying way; feel love; and form deep, healthy, emotional bonds.
It's the non-objectifying factors that count. Sex object, money-producing object - that is all the same misunderstanding of other humans. If that's what someone wants, they should hire someone and not marry them.
>You've been selected because you earn $X, you're stable, you're capable, and you get along well
Is that a bad thing over "oh she thinks I'm hot"? Like you said, youth is fleeting and I can't be hot forever (in this alternate timeline where I'm considered attractive).
Besides, these aren't mutually exclusive. Are you just worried your spouse will cheat on you with a 20 year old? That has bigger red flags for you and the spouse than any rational choice.
Have you ever been in a relationship? Because, unless it's an absolutely terrible one, the weight of the time and memories shared together makes you have a bit of empathy and concern for their general well-being even after you split.
It is, for me. I enter a relationship if I think it's going to last forever (or, more realistically, a very long time). Therefore whatever happens after we break up is something that doesn't concern me. But it concerns me that she hasn't been promiscuous before, because that says a lot about her character.
You'd simply not care about what happens to someone after a break-up at all? With someone you were otherwise prepared to spend your entire life with - given your anti-"promiscuity" position?
If you were prepared to just drop your ex-girlfriend and move on (and would rather have done so than meet the exact same person a few years and a few partners later) then this suggests not that you're against people having multiple partners ... but that you're against women having multiple sexual partners.
Sorry, I meant I don't care about her number of partners after we break up. Not about her as a person.
I am not against or for people having multiple partners. People can do whatever they want. I only care about the number of partners of women I am interested in.
Let's be honest about double standards here. People are absolutely losing their minds because they feel personally attacked because they are promiscuous.
I'm a woman who married her husband, and was extremely picky about marrying someone who wasn't promiscuous (low number of sexual partners).
I have two sons, and a daughter. As a mother you absolutely see the double standards in a couple ways.
Women on tiktok, instagram, and other social media constantly shame men for being under 6 feet. I'm Korean, and I see Asian men being shamed from being under 5'7 in Asian!
Any male preferences get demonized, while female preferences get revered.
It makes me worried for my kids. I don't want my daughter to grow up without a grasp on reality, and I don't want my sons being doormats.
> Any male preferences get demonized, while female preferences get revered.
Let's preface with the fact that I am a male.
What I have seen is the complete opposite. We males aren't "demonized" for being promiscuous, quite the opposite in fact. Females are outright called "sluts".
What you see on the internet is a drop in the bucket. Social media will default to exaggerated points of view, because they generate engagement. Kids will outgrow these fake trends at some point.
I don't think they were talking about a specific trait here. It's simply that any filters/preference women have at all are seen as giving power to women. If a male even has preference in race/religion it's seen as close minded. Political views are about the only "good filter", but you're just putting a huge target on your back anyway.
I still don’t get how some men are so keen to be perceived as victims here.
For centuries, the vast majority of women didn’t have the luxury of choosing. To this day, most men still discriminate on the basis on religion, race, or politics when looking for partners.
What are these men complaining about?
> Political views are about the only "good filter", but you're just putting a huge target on your back anyway.
Yes, most women wouldn’t fuck conservatives because they despise their ideals. Perhaps the issue here is the lack of self awareness among conservatives, then.
>I still don’t get how some men are so keen to be perceived as victims here.
I see it less about victims and more about empathy. You can understand the historical burden minorities and women have had and also still sympathize with modern dating scene, for men and women alike.
> Nowhere in the article says that women prefer "promiscuous" men, but men regarded as "attractive" by other women.
What do women do with the men they are attracted to, generally speaking? Is there anything women could use as a informal gauge as to how attractive other women find any particular man?
> It also does not justify the fact that women are regarded more negatively when they have had multiple sexual partners, compared to men.
Oh OK, so when 5 foot tall women should stop being creepy and preferring men taller than them right? Their preferences are unbalanced and unjustified correct?
> What do women do with the men they are attracted to, generally speaking? Is there anything women could use as a informal gauge as to how attractive other women find any particular man?
Have you even read the article you yourself posted?
> Oh OK, so when 5 foot tall women should stop being creepy and preferring men taller than them right? Their preferences are unbalanced and unjustified correct?
I honestly cannot believe I would have to explain this to a seemingly functional adult.
We are talking about the imbalance in how sexual activity is regarded depending on gender.
Preferring taller or shorter partners is not "creepy", same as in choosing between blondes or brunettes. No one, outside the constant noise that is social media, is going to chastise you for choosing one or another.
Asking about "body count" before dating someone is creepy, because our society regards this as a private matter. Even worse, as I said, men get a pass on this, and women do not.
It blows my mind that anyone would be trying to compare one to another, and even tried to spin it into "promiscuous men are more preferable among women anyway". What the hell?
If recounting one's sexual experiences to a stranger for the possibility of becoming their partner, is just "feelings land", then rejecting that person for having too many sexual partners is too, and so is to reject the person who asked how many.
I wonder if you yourself have started any date by saying "I have fucked this many people". After all, it seems only natural that you would lead by example. How has that worked for you so far?
You don't have to ask, I've never asked, behavior is a pretty good indicator and if you are in college or a smaller community word gets around.
Hey man, men rejecting women like that just leaves more for you right? Nobody is stopping you from having a former sex worker as a wife, it's just I and many people like me don't feel lifelong commitment with such a person is worthwhile or desirable.
This is a big thing in the islamic world, where men want their wives to be virgins. I think this is (perhaps subconsciously) caused by insecurity; "what if the previous guy had a bigger dick than me?".
Obviously when we talk about the number of sexual partners we mean in regards to the woman's age. It's not the same having had 10 partners at age 40 than at age 20.
I talk about women because I'm a man! Women also select men in other ways. Nothing wrong about it. Men and women are different and we have different things that makes us tick.
That's not true at all, I had multitude of friends that had 5-10+ sexual partners at age of 20, I also had friends with 3 sexual partners at age ~25-28. Number of sexual partners correlate with attractiveness and promiscuousness more than age.
How is that creepy? Or maybe in which part of the world is it creepy? in your cultural circle? Because in EU where I live nothing about it is creepy.
How is creepy to have own preference? I can't have it? It's not like I'm judging someone by their race that they can't change, I'm judging them by their own actions. They choose to behave in certain way, and it's ok, it's their choice to do what they want, but don't tell me I'm creepy because I have my own preferences, I can choose freely too.
why is it "weird, creepy shit"? I think it's gross when people sleep around a lot and it's a major turn off. I don't see it as being any worse than finding someone attractive or not based on any other characteristics. At least people can control how much they sleep around; how tall you are is largely out of your hands.
Why does her behavior before your relationship speak of her character, but her behavior during and after not speak of her character?
I presume the reason you want to date someone with fewer partners is because you are trying to weed out partners who are unlikely to stick around. So if she doesn't stick around anyway because she wants to play the field, that means your judgement was wrong.
If you don't actually care about breakups (which is the impression your comments are giving me), I'm not sure why any of it matters. Why avoid dating someone with a long history of break-ups if you don't actually care when or why your relationships end?
For what it's worth, when I was looking for a partner, I discounted men who had more than a couple short-term relationships like that. Even if they were completely serious about all of those relationships and it was their partners who left them for a more promiscuous lifestyle, a pattern of such relationships speaks poorly of their ability to identify compatibility in a partner. I was picky about men I would date, and so I was only interested in men who were similarly picky about women they would date.
>Why does her behavior before your relationship speak of her character, but her behavior during and after not speak of her character?
When I enter a relationship, I cannot reliably predict what her behaviour will be during or after the relationship. But I can extrapolate what her current and future behaviour will be from her previous behaviour. Of course, I can guess wrong, but at least I tried.
The number of partners must equal the number of breakups. I don't see the practical difference? I say I want a partner who's had few partners, which means I want a partner who's had few breakups. A woman who's had more partners than breakups has had one or several one-night stands, and those are automatically discarded - I do not even consider them.
Also when I said I want someone with few partners and I am only interested in long relationships I thought it was implied that I was more interested in women whose few relationships had been long.
>a pattern of such relationships speaks poorly of their ability to identify compatibility in a partner
Maybe. But that's not necessarily her fault. My soft skills are very poor so I can't ask for more :) Also she could have had very bad luck. Not a strong reason to discard someone in my book, although it's something to take into account.
Ok, I think I understand your position better now. However, I think maybe you misunderstood mine in my original comment:
>When I enter a relationship, I cannot reliably predict what her behaviour will be during or after the relationship. But I can extrapolate what her current and future behaviour will be from her previous behaviour.
This is the point I was trying to get at. Past behavior is the best predictor we have of future behavior, which is why it is valuable to date people who have a history of behavior for us to examine. It makes it easier to weed out bad matches from good matches. When people have no history of behavior (i.e., they are young and don't have a lot of life/dating experience), there is really no way to know what their future behavior will be.
My main thrust is that early-age marriage is not actually a good thing. It is better for people to marry after they are more experienced, even if that experience reveals that maybe some people shouldn't marry at all (i.e., it is better that they never marry at all than that they get married young and later realize they shouldn't have).
>The number of partners must equal the number of breakups.
Yes, they are the same (I guess outside of ongoing polyamorous relationships). I just used that wording to emphasize the breaking-up aspects of these previous relationships.
This is a straw man. The comment you're replying to never made a mention of divorce rates increasing over time. They only talked about divorce rates increasing with respect to number of previous partners.
If it was a formal debate sure, I'm more riffing on the original comment. I should have said something like "relatedly."
I would agree having dozens of short relationships and not being able to commit to something, even just a core set of friends, probably isn't great. So person I replied to is perhaps right there.
But idealizing a young marriage I think is stupid and should be criticized and is directly related to 1950's housewives not being able to leave their relationships.
And marriage rates are down significantly too [0] because... you don't have to?
I was born in the 80's and I grew up with nothing but cynicism and pessimism about relationships and marriage; even then it was something like "40% of marriages end in divorce", or that most relationships don't last and that the few that do and get glorified / romanticised is survivorship bias. It made me think "What is the point?". Add that with a load of repeated messages that men are shallow and horny pigs that objectify and abuse women, it really wasn't encouraging.
As soon as you remove our self-imposed social rules, we revert to our natural instincts, where a few males copulate, but rarely bond, with the majority of females. This leads to unhappy bonds where some of the less desirable males take care of females and offspring that is not theirs, while the rest of the males just get angry at the world and start fighting. A great way to build an army (e.g. Daesh) is to promise angry young involuntarily celibate males a bunch of virgins. You can also use their dissatisfaction to make a bunch of money, with the promise that they are becoming more desirable as they consoom more product (see Andrew Tate).
> We predict that imposing monogamous marriage reduces male reproductive competition and suppresses intra-sexual competition, which shrinks the size of the pool of low-status, risk-oriented, unmarried men. These effects result in (i) lower rates of crime, personal abuse, intra-household conflict and fertility, and (ii) greater parental investment (especially male), economic productivity (gross domestic product (GDP) per capita) and female equality.
You haven't known discontentment until you've seen an elderly couple like my in-laws who live in the same house while despising each other, yet refusing to divorce because it's against their religion. They don't do anything together, they don't speak beyond the absolute necessities, and they don't sleep in the same bedroom. The husband has been openly cheating on the wife for years (and she has evidence, because the husband of the woman he's cheating with tracked her down and mailed her photographic evidence). She calls my partner all the time lamenting how awful her life is and how she can't wait for him to die so she can be free.
Don't lecture us on the contentment of marriage without acknowledging what the other side of the coin is. This was the reality of marriage before divorce was normalized.
Voluntary commitment is self-coercion. All discipline is. The trick is, it's worth it. But some people are so allergic to external and internal control that they enter a never-ending self-destructive spiral of "personal freedom at any cost".
> some people are so allergic to external and internal control that they enter a never-ending self-destructive spiral of "personal freedom at any cost"
The sort of people you describe have no effect on the number of divorces, because they're not getting married in the first place.
Maybe, just maybe, man and wife till death do them part is a solution to a problem that has long been forgotten, and countless civilisations have fallen after adopting the attitude you project in your hypothesis.
Maybe we aren't supposed have peaceful, advanced societies. Maybe we are supposed to be swinging in trees and constantly at war with the neighbouring tribe.
Great reply :) but really, why people so often think "we're supposed to be" anything at all? Life seems totally random. We're not supposed to be anything, we just make it all up as we go. Money, happiness, love... we make it all up on top of our basic emotions (you could claim emotions guide what "we're supposed to be" in which case your reply is the conclusion we arrive at).
Think of the idea of a self reinforcing meme. If people think we are supposed to be, then we will be. "By force if necessary". Typically individuals that fall too far out of what society expects may be culled by one means or another leading to a cultural definition of 'supposed'.
Prenups are legal in all 50 states; use them and normalize them. As for child custody, men have even odds of being granted custody when they bother to contest it. However, they bother to contest it a depressingly low percentage of the time.
No offense, but think this honestly says a lot more about your own views and what your project on others than some kind of generalized statement.
I personally would view going through the wringer of life relationships as a good thing, and if I was 40+ and met someone who hadn't experienced that in this day and page it's probably more likely they had also had some social hang up that you just haven't learned about. This also isn't to endorse the opposite of dating a person on their 5th divorce who's out hooking up every week or something.
Anecdotally among those I know, whether someone had one vs. multiple partners had little bearing on the quality of their relationships. Those that had more, while they had their own issues related to that also had a more "realistic" view of sex and relationships IMO.
Some of them felt glad to "get it out of their system" so to speak. If anything, those with just one partner maybe you could argue experienced something different (you don't know what you don't know), but they are still not immune to relationship issues.
A higher number of sexual partners impairs pair bonding. And obviously if that number is around 23 partners, the odds are not great. I'm not a traditionalist myself, I'm merely stating there are real non-political non-moral reasons to view a high partner count as not conducive to long-term relationship satisfaction.
I've definitely had more than 23 and I love my current partner of 6 years far more than anyone I've loved before. If anything, all the other partners have made me appreciate how amazing of a partner I have. I absolutely could not say the same about the partner previous; or even the one previous to them. I've also heard the sentiment I've expressed many times over by people who have had many partners.
Anyways, I usually bond with people because of the unique things that each partner brings to the table; I've loved each one for very different fun and amazing reasons. Sometimes the bond is tighter because of those unique things, sometimes it's not.
I don't remotely understand why people with no experience in a given subject matter like to speak so authoritatively on it.
The fact that the answerer quotes John McIlhenny, noted Christian abstinence-only prominent, tells me more about that answerer than the questioner.
In my experience, the real answer is that The Pill means that women have more choice now and don't have to cleave themselves to the first man who colonizes them, and now that it's baked into society, women aren't going to put up with men who can't provide the social interaction reward that all people want. In my parents day, you just had to tough it out because you had kids (and you were probably terrible at it, lookin'at you mom and dad) but these days people can grow into functional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.
> these days people can grow into functional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.
Leaving the rest of the conversation aside, I find this perspective shocking. Becoming a "functional adult" cannot happen in late 30s, or we're all screwed.
> these days people can grow into functional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.
Some (many?) won't. Adult means taking responsibility for your own actions to me.
In "archaic" societies, girls become women at the onset of their period. Boys have to undergo painful rituals to become a man. No puberty problems or teenage suicides in sight because these young humans have their place in the tribe and are treated like the young adults they are.
No artificial age barriers (18/21). The brain is actually done at myelinizing at 25.
> Exactly, that's what leads to partner hopping until these multiple digits are reached most likely.
I oversaw the last two words, apologies. Without them the sentence would be logically wrong, the worst kind of wrong ;) They signal that it's up for debate, sorry. Logic pedant out.
I'm unconvinced that "talking through your emotions" makes sense or is wise.
Both "talking" and "emotions" developed in central nervous systems at times far removed from each other, and there's little reason to believe that those software systems are connected... or even compatible.
People without internal dialogues (I'm one myself), don't require "thinking out loud" at all.
Internal dialogues aren't even thinking... it's when this particular faculty of your mind, the "rehearsal simulator" is overactive. Functioning correctly, you can bounce questions off of a fictionalized version of someone and get back replies that can be a useful prediction of what they might say when confronted in reality.
Those whose rehearsal simulators malfunction end up simulating themselves, who then goes on to start jabbering constantly, like some documentary narrator on crack, until they can no longer think at all.
We (those of us who can actually think) have a pretty good idea how this faculty even works. The principle seems rather similar to the LLMs we've all been talking about... it just predicts the most likely word that comes next, with some pseudo-random seed to start it all off. People with the "internal dialogue" only seem able to "think" of things, once everyone has talked about it enough that it amounts to training their LLM with it. When people without internal dialogues try to explain a new idea to them, they tend to respond in ways that indicate their thinking is much like how the LLMs function. Irrational, confused, denialism.
I don't particularly trust self-reporting, but maybe MRIs can empirically measure whether someone has an internal dialogue or not? I would be curious to see the IQ differences between the two groups. It's probably a massive gap. The rehearsal simulator starves the rest of your brain of resources while active. If you ever learned to turn yours off, you'd probably never want it turned back on again.
For instance, someone who does the internal dialogue thing may not even be able to correctly report their emotions. They may not recognize them at all. Instead, that little LLM in their skull is just "hallucinating" for them, coming up with plausible sentences for how someone might feel, based on training data they've accumulated over the years, but having absolutely nothing to do with their emotional state. Anyone who accepts their self-reported emotional state as correct can be very confused by it... visibly, they're in one emotional state, but verbally they're reporting something completely different. There's no reason to suspect dishonest reporting, but also no real way to reconcile the contradictions.
I have been working the past 3 years to turn off my internal dialog because I was only using it to stroke my own ego in a way - imaginary conversations with my boss where I can always respond/counter/defend whatever he MIGHT have to say to me about something. These conversations never occurred in real life, so I realized how senseless it was to devote my attention and energy to something so detached from reality.
I am no worse off for not "thinking things through" in my mind, because I tend to get sudden imprints of what I need to do or say next which are not a serial monologue of thoughts that guide me to understanding. On the other hand, I have been working on categorizing and actually processing my emotions as they are occurring, rather than ignoring them entirely, and many times I do need to have an external, verbal monologue for my subconscious to piece together all of the things it knows implicitly in bulk, but not explicitly as a single coherent concept.
One thing that does come and go is some sort of background music in my head, which also doesn't limit my ability to think. Finally, cannabis CAN give me that "serial monologue in my head" kind of thinking, which I have come to consider a mild "brain vacation" - especially if I am overwhelmed with stress or anxiety.
Another thing is tune whistling/singing, when you think about it it is even more basic then language, just "predicting" the next note in a sequence of notes one already has stored in memory, so pointless, yet objectively satisfying for some reason. I often sing/whistle in the background, I've found it only reduces my ability to think when it gets in the way of what I perceive to be low value work, I think this is due to it being a very low energy, low value activity, whereas similarly low value work may be higher energy, and so it becomes unbearable to stay focused on the work without reverting to a lower energy activity, rather then the internal music overcoming the work. As I acquire further high value work, and surround myself with people who would rather not hear whistling/singing, this habit has decreased considerably. It may be the case that such internal monologues or LLM like activities are not as low energy straight thinking, but maybe they serve some kind of "idling" purpose, reinforcing pattern/logic/computation/memory pathways in the brain, for cheap.
Out of curiosity, have you ever been kept up awake at night by your thoughts, either before an important event or after some problem? If yes, and you have no internal monologue, how does this manifest? Do you simply not feel tired? Or do you feel tired but unable to sleep? Or otherwise?
The fact that the answerer quotes John McIlhenny, noted Christian abstinence-only prominent, tells me more about that answerer than the questioner.
In my experience, the real answer is that The Pill means that women have more choice now and don't have to cleave themselves to the first man who colonizes them, and now that it's baked into society, women aren't going to put up with men who can't provide the social interaction reward that all people want. In my parents day, you just had to tough it out because you had kids (and you were probably terrible at it, lookin'at you mom and dad) but these days people can grow into finctional adults first, which might not happen until their late 30's.
Personally, my number of previous partners is pretty high, to the point where I can’t give you an actual number.
I have definitely noticed that it caused a significant decrease in my ability to connect with people and my tolerance for other people. It develops that “why don’t I just move on” mindset, instead of the “until death” mindset that the previous generations cultivated.
This statistic to me seems like one of the most obvious cases of correlation not equaling causation. How about this hypothesis:
People who aren't good at (or aren't interested in) long term partnerships will tend to have more partners. Therefore such people may be more likely to divorce if they were to marry. People who tend to form long term partnerships won't tend to have many partners, because they have been busy being in long term partnerships instead.
Therefore having a high number of partners doesn't predict "relationship failure" but "relationship failure" predicts a high number of partners.
All this to say - if you're looking for a long term relationship, there may be reason to be cautious about folks who have not had stable long term relationships before, and as result had many partners as they may not be right for you. But it isn't because having lots of sex broke their pair-bonding mechanism.
I've had sex with more people (via swinging with my wife) since getting married than before, and I love my wife incredibly deeply, more and more each year that passes. Having more partners doesn't make me value her less, it has made me value her even more.
for myself (and most) the thought of my wife having sex with anyone but me is horrifying, repugnant and fury-inducing.
So if your idea of a happy long term marriage where we love each other incredibly deeply includes sex outside the marriage (i.e. swinging and similar) I'm going to struggle to see your point that the pair-bonding mechanism hasn't been broken. A totally non-negotiable element of the pair in my book is complete exclusivity.
I'm not arguing the way we live our life is the way everyone should live theirs.
Just pointing out that this thread is echoing a false dichotomy of "many partners, no long term partnership" or "long term partnership, one partner". There is a third option, for people who want it.
Sure, I guess. In my view some are way too lax, others way too controlling. The fact the some fall into one extreme doesn't discount those that fall into the other.
Data sure does lie if you interpret data selectively. If the alternative to a divorce is an unhappy marriage, then divorce can produce better outcomes than staying together. Just because people are divorced doesn't mean they're unhappy, and optimizing for marriage rather than happiness would be foolish.
Furthermore, individuals getting divorced have a disproportionate effect on the marriage rate, because, obviously, they have strictly more marriages (and (one expects) more partners) than the people who haven't been divorced.
Not that I'm agreeing or disagreeing with you but I'm curious when you were together with the previous partner (lets say No. 22) did you also love them more than anyone else before (No. 21)?
Survivor bias is real. Kind of like some people can have unlimited access to gaming as a teenager and are fine, while others disappear from society for decades. Those that ‘survive’ have no qualms with gaming.
This is so true for me. I was with too many people before marrying my wife (a few weeks ago). The decision to get married was really difficult for me, I had to force myself, because I knew that I could sit around just dating different people forever. She has had 0 partners before me and it was the easiest decision in the world for her. If I could go back in time I would do it differently, I would pick a partner earlier and not worry so much about being with different people. I dated some amazing people that would have made incredible lifelong partners, but never married them because I "wasn't ready", when in fact it would have been nice going through major life stages and events with one partner to share in the ups and downs.
I definitely did notice that the more people I was with the less interested I was becoming in actually settling down.
Adding my similar experience to the mix. I don’t know my number, but I can tell for a fact that the girls who I deeply felt for are in the distant past, and the last dozens have all been some critical evaluation process of the person’s pros and cons in comparison to all the ones before. I hate it.
I am happily with someone way less experienced than me now, and I believe I can settle down with her now. I trust my ability to be done with the whole trying to one up on the last one now. If I had to only date people with similar pasts to mine, I most likely wouldn’t be able to trust them, however.
I agree. I was truly enamored with some of my high school-era paramours. After that, it really became a “is this person more of a benefit than a pain in the arse” calculation.
You’d be surprised how few people manage to come out on the positive end after you’ve known them for a few weeks.
Sure, I'll concede that something is going on, but I'll contend that it's less the number and more what led to the number. At the extremes it probably makes it more likely that smoke does indeed indicate fire. Ops post makes no indication that's what he was getting at and tries to pass off his opinions as some fact of human nature.
Having had a high number of partners means one thing: you have options. Might lead to a lower tolerance for bad relationships, which is a good thing IMO. If two people bond tightly depends on their willingness and emotional maturity i'd say. Fixating on a number seems redudutionist.
> In our sample, only 23 percent of the individuals who got married over the course of the study had had sex solely with the person they married. That minority of men and women reported higher marital quality than those who had had sex with other partners prior to marriage. We further found that the more sexual partners a woman had had before marriage, the less happy she reported her marriage to be. This association was not statistically significant for men.
> We investigated sex differences in shoulder to hip ratios (SHR) and waist to hip ratios (WHR), and their relationships to different features of sexual behavior. Males with high SHR and females with low WHR reported sexual intercourse at an earlier age, more sexual partners, more extra-pair copulations (EPC), and having engaged in more instances of intercourse with people who were involved in another relationship (i.e., having themselves been EPC partners). The predictive value of these morphological features was highly sex-specific.
> Past sexual promiscuity and sexual fantasies (Predictions 10 and 11). In both contexts, a partner’s concealed past sexual promiscuity (promiscuity) was rated as one of the more upsetting forms of deception (about 1 SD above the overall mean). Ratings did not differ by sex (ps > .05), failing to support Prediction 10. Prediction 11 was supported in the long term, with men’s ratings of a partner’s concealed sexual fantasies about others (sexual fantasy) relatively higher than women’s. There was no significant sex difference in the short term (p > .05). These results mirror those observed for sexual infidelity and flirtation and further suggest that the risk of cuckoldry constitutes a potent form of strategic interference for men in the long-term mating context.
A high number of previous sexual partners is a proxy for 'highly attractive' - people who are hot get partners more easily. It's likely that someone who is hot is going to be more willing to leave a relationship that they're unhappy in because they'll be confident they can find a new partner. Someone who is less attractive (or considers themselves less attractive) will stay in a bad relationship so long as it's better than being on their own.
I would argue that means the person who has had more sexual partners makes a better spouse. No one wants to be stuck in a relationship with someone who's unhappy but unwilling to let go. That's toxic af.
1. Conservative think-tank, there's a lot missing from their analysis - "women who married as virgins had the lowest divorce rates by far." - this could be explained by things like the coercive social situation they found themselves in.
People who have more relationship experience can recognize when a relationship isn't living up to what it could be, unexperienced people are just ignorant. It's hard for the grass to always be greener when you live in a windowless box.
Attractive people fuck, news at 11.
People get jealous/insecure when they feel like they're not living up to their partner's experiences/expectations. This is totally a HUGE problem, and also people should never eat any fancy or exotic food because then they'll be disappointed they can't afford to eat it all the time and affordable food has been ruined forever.
If you report being satisfied with your relationship to a third party because you think all relationships are like your current relationship and you don't see its dysfunctions, are you really more happy, or just more ignorant?
It's definitely not that black and white, because they're not directly measuring people's happiness, they're asking them to self-report their relationship satisfaction.
If I had a mediocre partner but I thought that was just how relationships were, I'd probably report being "satisfied" with them, even as I wished relationships weren't such frustrating things. If I thought marriage was an unbreakable bond I'd probably also avoid admitting I was dissatisfied with my partner to anyone (even myself!) as a coping mechanism as well.
The opposite could also be true, that people avoid admitting regret over their promiscuous past by convincing themselves that the "experience" makes them better judges of the quality of their relationships
Do you deny that there are widely accepted traits that are associated with attractiveness?
You joined a conversation about promiscuity, sex, and marriage, and calling anyone with a perspective you disagree with an incel is extremely childish and against our guidelines.
Sure, there are widely accepted traits that are associated with attractiveness. Where did I say that is not the case?
Where did I call anyone with a perspective I disagree with an incel?
I literally said that this reads like something that one would find in an incel forum, and compared the idea that specific measurements of the human body being deterministic of their behavior with debunked science of Phrenology.
I think you're reading too much into my perspective and what I agree, or disagree, with.
Unless you cite a study, this is just male fear psychology. You can absolutely find love no matter how many partners you’ve had so long as you both agree on what your relationship is and monogamy and things like that. Your fear is that if she’s had more partners than you then she’ll just leave you or is “unpairable” is sex shaming. The reasons you failed to state are non-tangible male-ego think.
Come on. You can't demand that the other person cite a study in support of their argument and then just blithely throw around a lot of bald assertions and accusations.
There's something basic and physical about this. Your first time involves levels of adrenaline and god-knows what other hormones that leave you shaking like you're having a fucking seizure. Your body does things it has never done before or since. When you're older, a sneeze is a bigger deal. This shit rewires your brain in serious ways.
Nobody disputes, that if they ship you off to 'Nam, and your body gears up into crazy levels of fight-or-flight, then when you get back you might just have a severe reaction whenever the fireworks go off on the Fourth of July.
Nobody disputes, that if you give birth to a child -- your child -- then you will be overcome with love, with emotion, with levels of oxytocin you have never experienced before in your life. Nobody disputes either that this is real, or that negative hangover effects like postpartum depression are also possible and serious.
I'm not saying this to be a prude. In fact, I think there's something bizarrely sterile and sexless about many things in our society.
But still, I think it is a mistake to trivialize things that are not trivial.
Modern (wo)man encounters human nature, finds it lacking, attempts to bend it to his or her will, fails miserably, makes everyone miserable in the process, and learns nothing from the experience.
Appeal to Tradition, classic fallacy. [1] Which ideals? Slavery has survived for thousands of years, does that make it better? Took thousands of years to develop the concept of capitalism, should we have skipped it?
What dialog? "It's been around for thousands of years, therefore it is the best way to do things" is hardly basis for a conversation.
These same people will shamelessly use modern birth control, despite not being used for thousands of years. That's why those ideals existed for so long.
>>What dialog? "It's been around for thousands of years, therefore it is the best way to do things" is hardly basis for a conversation.
Is everything traditional automatically wrong and everything modern automatically right?
>> These same people will shamelessly use modern birth control, despite not being used for thousands of years. That's why those ideals existed for so long.
You got all this from the poster you replied to? It sure seem you are doing a lot of projecting and straw man building.
> Is everything traditional automatically wrong and everything modern automatically right?
How did you get this? The point of a fallacy is that the conclusion does not follow, not that "the inverse is correct". Just because something is traditional does not mean it is right, though it can be. Just because something is not traditional does not mean it is wrong, though it can be. Capitalism wasn't traditional, turned out to be a good idea. Not-murdering-people is traditional, and a pretty good one to follow.
> You got all this from the poster you replied to? It sure seem you are doing a lot of projecting and straw man building.
Yes, most people use modern birth control (e.g., condoms). It is a reasonable assumption to make.
Pay attention to the deeper point being made: effective birth control has not been available for all those thousands of years of "tradition". Why do you think premarital sex has been taboo for so long? Because until recently, that was a really good way to create unstable, broken families.
The ones about marriage and the relationships between men and women than exist in nearly every civilization in the world for thousands of years.
I think the jury is out on the modern world, as many slaves in middle ages lived far better than the capitalist "slave" workers in the America, India, Philippines, today.
The reason why they had such similar ideals is because none of them had effective birth control. That was just developed in the 20th century. Pre-marital sex is no longer an issue, you no longer have to marry someone just because of your raging hormones.
Yes, unless you're a racist who restricts your definition of humans to white westerners... Most of the global human population still has values which are 'traditional' relative to the average white westerner, but white westerners often have a blind spot for that and reveal this blindspot when they say things like "the whole world" to mean western nations specifically, and "the rest of the world" to mean Europe but not America.
Yes that is true, but that is a scientific fact and is not an appropriate comparison when talking about human populations and their approach to pair bonding, which is driven mostly by culture.
So no, it’s not antiquated and your response requires looking at humanity through a very narrow and biased lens.
Westerners can still appreciate our values while being in the minority. I do.
Maybe it was right for a different world. That world doesn't exist anymore though, and it's never coming back no matter how much conservatives try to knee jerk us into the 19th century.
It seems like several different things are getting intertwined here and people are arguing past each other based on perceived "sides" and largely imagined positions being projected onto one another.
You can have gender equality and feminism without casual sex. Many young people today, both male and female, feel like the current system they're embedded in is frustrating and unfulfilling.
Everyone's personal preferences are equally valid. We should accept that people who express unease or unhappiness with the current dominant cultural norms pressed upon them have legitimate feelings, rather than attack and insult them by suggesting their desires belong in "the 19th century".
Insults on conservative viewpoints are par for course. This one was pretty mild as things go.
I think the insults themselves have lessened the effectiveness of the message that people are attempting to convey, effectively dulling their voice to an entire generation of people who are may have a different opinion.
Human sexuality is 100% culture dependent though. There are tribes where people are promiscuous, and tribes where men have multiple wives, and both of those traditions definitely predate rigid monogamy.
Human nature is people want to have sex, and will form lasting relationships for mutual benefit.
Cumulative STI risk is a real concern for individuals with many sexual partners.
In the US, 0.4% of adults have HIV [1]. With >20 sexual partners the cumulative exposure becomes meaningful. Naively, 20 repetitions of 0.4% gets 7.89% exposure risk.
However, this is likely an underestimate if you're willing to assume that people with lots of sexual partners tend to have sex with each other disproportionately often.
> In the US, 0.4% of adults have HIV [1]. With >20 sexual partners the cumulative exposure becomes meaningful. Naively, 20 repetitions of 0.4% gets 7.89% exposure risk.
Nope. The 0.4% is overwhelmingly concentrated in men who have sex with men. It's approximately an order of
magnitude lower in women.
Based on your envelope math, I should have a >90% chance of having HIV, but that's nowhere near the truth (and I don't).
> The 0.4% is overwhelmingly concentrated in men who have sex with men. It's approximately an order of magnitude lower in women.
I added a note to interpret with caution because many factors can significantly affect this figure. Some states have an order of magnitude difference from others, potentially offsetting the MSM factor you mention [1].
> Based on your envelope math, I should have a >90% chance of having HIV
The envelope math was exposure not contraction. If you used or condom, or even just received oral, it's quite possible you didn't get HIV even if your partner did.
> The 0.4% is overwhelmingly concentrated in men who have sex with men. It's approximately an order of magnitude lower in women.
True, but it's also true that male-to-female transmission is easier than female-to-male transmission, which makes the odds better for the man in any given encounter.
It's in some senses more of a concern with things like HPV + HSV, where there's not a lot of testing options and barrier contraception is of much more limited effectiveness. (that said, Gardasil vaccination helps).
For most other STIs - either get tested before every new partner or on a reasonably frequent basis, and demand the same from every new partner.
HIV prevalence + transmission likelihood is wildly skewed to gay/bi men who are active with men - and if you are one who's actively having new partners you probably ought to also talk with your doctor about PrEP.
The risk of transmitting HIV during unprotected penis-in-vagina sex is less than 1 in 1000. With protection it's even lower. And if the HIV-positive one is on meds it's also very protective.
> if I was 40+ and met someone who hadn't experienced that in this day and page it's probably more likely they had also had some social hang up that you just haven't learned about.
Can confirm. Am 35 and never dated and had MAJOR issues.
The part that sucks is it also basically means I can never date. I'm much healthier now and could probably be a decent partner (part of the reason I never dated before is I was aware that I wasn't in a space to be a good partner), but nobody is interested in a 35 year old woman with no experience so it's not going to happen.
We're in a situation where people should date even if they can't handle a relationship because if they don't, they'll be too old and locked out altogether.
While the statement reads this way, and should be rewritten - the OPs underlying point is that as time goes by it becomes progressively less likely that a 6 month/2 year/5 year/10 year relationship has a distinct meaning for your partner or you. From the folks who are 70+ in the dating pool - this trend has reached the point that they simply don't want to take the time on a relationship even if they are in good health (particularly as bad times are around the corner).
This is more about overall life experience than number of partners. I wouldn't be surprised if its just a reflection of people's understanding of their own mortality which emerges sometime around the mid-30s/40s.
I was curious about the other comment about divorce rates and pre-marital sex, so I looked it up. The results are from a government survey, so it's a pretty unbiased source. The reported outcomes could be scrutinized since I think the site I link is a bit of a traditional values kind of site.
More broadly though, all your deductive reasoning doesn't mean jack! We're talking about human behaviors over large scales, not to mention billions of people we aren't even measuring from other countries/cultures. I think trying to put labels on what these people think and go through from the comfort of your desk chair is presumptuous.
Well, yes and no. Nobody wants to be that guy marrying a girl who slept around when younger to compensate some issues, 'discover herself' or whatever was the justification, if there even was one. I can imagine it should be the same from the other side, but for some reason that's not always the case. Also from health perspective you play statistics game with plethora of bacteria, amoebes and viruses that can easily make you infertile or get a cancer few decades down the road.
The thing is, people don't change. They evolve, slowly, over long time as life brings whatever it brings. But bad people don't become good. A guy fucking everything that moves ain't gonna become that dream father of your kids that you can rely on anytime, especially through tough times (and they always come, one of few sure things in life).
There can be multiple good reasons why anybody in their late 30s had only 1 or two partners before and they would be a great partner for rest of life. I am struggling to find a single reason how opposite would be considered a good scenario and any kind of advantage, rather just massive warning signs.
Personally, I'd say 5-10 and not more. Whatever lesson you need to get from relationships, it will be covered. After that, unless people are not already emotionally dead inside, its just heading in that direction step by step. Everytime you fall in love and breakup, a bit of your heart is not coming back (which is not bad per se, scars tell our stories and should give us some valuable lessons, but those lessons should be learned from).
And fucking around for fucking around sake or chasing some numbers nobody cares about is plain immature and stupid. Identify what you are compensating for, fix the underlying problem, there is always one and its usually some unresolved crap from childhood, missing good father figure or similar. Its not great and glorified like some teen movies may make you believe, but pretty consistently a sad picture with all corresponding consequences.
You don't have to trust a random internet stranger, over time you will see plenty of this around you in some form as you grow older, just look for it.
I mean your experiences are your experiences. Yes, there are a lot of people in their late 30s who are nice people. The 40 year old virgin can be a great person or a terrible person, the guy or girl fucking everything in sight in their youth can be as well. The girl who slept around in her youth isn't doomed to be a bad mother. I'm not hand waving it away "both sides" or "it depends", but you are making huge sweeping generalizations. Even framing it as "bad" vs "good" person is weird to me in this context.
Anyway, I agree more with your approach than the actual number. Learn whatever lesson you need to learn and fix it. Be honest about it with your new partner. We all adjust our risk to others based on said factors. Obviously, if you have red flags I'm going to either need more assurance or time, and everybody has the ability to say no for whatever reason. If you told me you stopped fucking everything in sight last week and wanted a monogamous relationship now I'd have my doubts. This isn't license to be stupid.
40 year old virgin is a huge red flag. That signifies either major mental health/interpersonal issues or living a massively cloistered/religious existence, both of which are undesirable.
I haven't dated before because I did have major issues. I'm much healthier now, but because I was respectful and opted not to date when I would have been a disaster, I am now an untouchable red flag.
Truthfully, this is one of those things you just need to not disclose/evade/lie about. You might be 100% better, but there are plenty of people who just get good at putting up a façade, but who revert to old behavior under stress. With a deep dating pool people won't risk it unless they're desperate, you are a huge winner in other ways, or they've gotten to know you pretty well already.
Honestly I'd just date women if I dated because lack of experience is way more normal in the gay community for obvious reasons. I just realized around 29-30 that the time had passed for anything having to do with men. (I'm female.)
But 'deep dating pool', the homosexual life is not.
ahh yes, setup a relationship on a lie and close the loop on major interpersonal issues. When in doubt, push the upcoming bursting bottle down to later you.
I think it's fair to avoid disclosing things that people would be unfairly prejudiced about. For example, Telling someone you're an ex con isn't communicating correctly when it was in your early 20s and you're in your 40s and literally a different person, but they won't be able to not think about it incorrectly.
I mean, it's not first date material (in general you're not giving your entire dark history on any first outing, romantic or not), but if you're years into your relationship and suddenly you get denied a credit check for a house or you get rejected for a background check in adopting... well, you just caused double tension from that rejection and that omission. You tell them that beforehand and you either see their true colors or you get to compromise and figure out future plans.
It should come up early on if you don't want to keep bottling that up. Better to cut your losses after a few dates than have a relationship explode later.
yeah this is a very bad incel kind of view by the GP. I want my sexual partners to have had as much experience as they wish, I dont have some weird virgin fetish.
I partially disagree with your viewpoint. There are many reasons to have had many sexual partners without being an unhealthy individual. Travel for work would be one such example(or even for leisure).
Unless you have an orgy each weekend, thousands migjt be a tad difficult to achieve. If you do so, well, I don't see why it would be a problem per se, no. Or we talk about sex workers, in which case again, I don't see why it should be a problem.
No idea where this fear of STDs is coming from, condoms do exist...
Having had many partners is bad if it indicates someone has neuroticisms around sex/relationships or has major interpersonal issues that cause relationships not to last. There are people who sleep around and have a lot of relationships who don't enjoy smothering interpersonal closeness just for the sake of it, however if they found the right person they'd make great partners.
> I've heard many long time married old men say that when they look at their partner, they still see the beauty glimmering through that they saw at 19.
Presumably people who think their partner is now ugly either have enough sense to stfu or dont have a partner anymore. This just seems an instance of survivorship bias.
Like who would stay with a partner that tells random strangers they are ugly.
As I get older, all the people I've remained friends with and kept in regular close contact with since we were all teenagers/early 20s together, don't look as old to me as other people our age. I still see parts of the teen/20s versions of them in their current faces.
But when I meet someone new our age, or even 5 years younger, I don't see that part of them because I never knew it, and they look older to me. It's weird to think that how old that person looks, that's how old we all must look, really.
(Unless by some weird coincidence, all my friends and I do just happen to look 10-15 years younger than 95% of other people our age. Which would be very comforting, but is so implausible that I can't bring myself to believe it, no matter what my brain tells me my eyes are seeing. Getting old is weird.)
Your comment is talking about age, but the person above you is talking about attractiveness. As I get older, the type of woman that I'm attracted to also gets older. Nowadays, a mature demeanor and strands of graying hair are sexy. I look back on photos of my college girlfriend and think about what awkward, immature children we were.
I don’t think many 80-year-olds are objectively good looking. It's not fair to judge the people who stay together for love and not for physical attraction past a certain age.
> that tells random strangers they are ugly
I don't go around telling people my lover's weaknesses, but that's how statistics are made.
Come on man, why do people say this? Do you actually think this? I understand there might be some disagreements or edge cases but it's really pretty close to objective
Nah. The most beautiful women I've ever had the pleasure of meeting were unremarkable in photos, but in-person radiated an ineffable energy that made it impossible to keep my eyes off of them. When a couple of octogenarians look at each other and describe each other as attractive, that energy is what they're talking about. Framing attractiveness as mostly objective belies inexperience.
That’s why I said “good looking” and “physical attraction” rather than generically “beautiful”. No doubt people can be “beautiful in person” but still “objectively ugly”
I mean, i think most people's definition of attractiveness is different from the societal orthodox view of what is attractive (e.g. your average movie star). That doesn't mean i dont know what people are talking about when they say these sorts of things.
Objective is probably a bad choice of words because in addition to not matching individual likes, the societal "orthodox" view varries by culture a lot.
OK, can you tell me, objectively, how attractive Tom Holland and Hailee Steinfeld are?
I can tell you objectively how tall they are, if one is taller than the other, and precisely how much. Height is an objective measurement.
What are the attractiveness measurements for Tom and Hailee? Which is more attractive, and by how much? What is the scale? What are the reference points? How are the instruments used to measure it calibrated?
If aliens showed up on earth, how would you explain this objective measurement to them? How would aliens rate on it? How would their native measure of objective attractiveness compare to ours? In comparison to how their measures of length, or time, or temperature, or mass, would.
> Which is more attractive, and by how much? What is the scale?
No scale, yet we have plenty of beauty contests, so I'd start there for an answer. Humans are regularly compared to others. We have different tastes but, socially, "beauty" is intended as an average.
Art studies could also point you in the direction of "objective beauty"
The point is that memories fade in with newer perceptions.
Beauty is subjective, but most would agree romantic relationships form on the basis of one seeing some beauty in the other, not ugliness, or not too much ugliness at least. What is felt past that is not the current perceptions, its those along with a history of feelings.
There is some survival basis here but since this is not true: looking at the partner I met at 40 I see the beauty that s/he was or could have 20 year earlier. It stands right to reach such conclusion: a 19y old is not a 40y old and impacts the chance of a lasting relationship. all other parameters being equal the 19y case is superior to lasting if beauty does matter.
Another interesting bit: we are likely to have a more positive perception of the ugly we know or believe used to be a beauty. We are gene selecting species like all others in the end
Partially yes, but it's also a sign of their standards. I've personally known many girls that aren't that hard to be with, but are being foolish constantly going after guys that clearly won't commit.
Do no let society tell you that you are being judgemental because you apply basic wisdom to the situation. Of course your bond won't be as strong if she already experienced the same exact bond and maybe a stronger bond with 20 other men in the past, and then chose to break it and move on.
Your only problem is that you are just as promiscuous so you stand on thin ice when you try to demand better from her.
This basic wisdom sounds like a child's view of human relationships and emotions. Like someone approximating what things should be like rather than what they actually are.
It honestly just reads like misogyny, like women who have many partners are emotionally incapable of love. Let me tell you a secret, any semi-attractive & social woman will have easily had 20 partners by age 25-30.
Theres no such thing as the "same exact" pair bond 20 times. Each one is different. And if something is of a certain strength, then how can it be weaker because it happened before? The only way what you're saying is true is if the person was jaded by the previous relationships and can no longer form deep connections.
Why would I listen to you on this topic when your demographic has a worse track record on this matter? Within my community people lead happy lifelong marriages. Why should I listen to your "wisdom" instead of theirs?
You can call me misogynistic, I don't care, but then so are all the women in my community. If we take a worldwide survey I would bet my views are more common than yours.
People who sleep around a lot are less capable of long term love. I believe that and it is backed by research on the matter as well. If you care you can read about sociosexuality.
That there is a relationship between attractivness and promiscuity amongst women is something I disagree with. But it would not make a difference either way.
Most breakups from a serious relationship do end up with the people being jaded.
Emotions are definitely notinfinite. Quite the opposite.
BTW to not mislead anyone I am an atheist and grew up as a mainstream Catholic from Germany.
> if she already experienced the same exact bond and maybe a stronger bond with 20 other men in the past
Says who? I don't know what's so hard to understand about this. How many friends have you had over the years? Should your current friends be wary of the fact that your "friend count" is so high? Seems like your bond with them is pretty weak if you had the same exact bond with hundreds of people in the past, and they should steer clear of you.
The idea that you should commit to the first friends you make is just as absurd for partners.
Hear hear. If someone happens to find a spouse on their first try, then good for them. Otherwise, keep looking. Clinging to your first relationship merely because they're your first is an indicator of personal insecurity and/or desperation, and you'll be a better partner once you learn to work past that.
Please explain: why are you "not that lucky" to be her 23rd partner?
> I've heard many long time married old men say that when they look at their partner, they still see the beauty glimmering through that they saw at 19. If I meet a partner at 40, when we start really getting old and annoyed, what am I going to hold on to?
Please explain: why does "19-year old beauty" need to "glimmer through" to sustain a relationship when one is "old and annoyed?"
I hope you'll stand by your words and explain them.
These are assumptions you're holding. In my opinion, they are _not_ conducive to a healthy relationship.
It is a huge challenge and every little aspect of both individuals will get dragged up and dealt with. Tools for maintaining intimacy and fending off resentment are crucial to any kind of longevity.
I don't think the author was "slut-shaming" but even if they were it would be more messed up to have hangups about a promiscuous partner and not reveal them until years into a relationship.
>> Have you been in an adult relationship?
It is a huge challenge
——————
It’s a challenge, but if it’s a huge challenge, that’s your cue that it’s not working. It could be that you need to work on yourself, or it could be that you need to walk away.
Because I don't want to feel like a fool for sticking with and supporting this woman from 40-70, when she was giving it up easily at 18-30.
Luckily I'm tall and decent looking and do fine for myself, but I still have a gut feeling for reality.
Regarding the beauty.. idk what to tell you. Same reason why some people hold onto their first car, or a car they bought new and love it. Or restore old cars. But if you buy an old beat up car, you use it while you can and move on when you feel like it. Nostalgia and memories are important to many people.
I don't understand why you would feel like a fool assuming you entered the relationship eyes-wide-open.
Regarding your second point, you switch from first person to saying what is important to many people. But: 1) why should I believe you on that count? 2) in the context of a _personal_ relationship, why does it matter what's important to others? (Minus, of course, _one_ other.)
Without trying trying to put too many words in your mouth, perhaps you are seeking a trophy more than a partner? Someone you can support and be proud of -- just like you might feel pride for an old car you restored. And who won't embarass you by her past conduct?
Have you considered approaching relationships from a different angle? For example, you might consider love to be an incredible gift that can only be given freely. Or you might consider a relationship as the ultimate trust-building-game, and a fun one too. Or that the unit of significance isn't the individual but the couple. To name some examples.
In my opinion, you are viewing a relationship in instrumental terms. That is, "what will it give _me_." But such a view is inherently incompatible with the project of love, I believe.
There's another way to look at this. When your partner has had many previous partners, it means that you are extra special, because even after all that prior experience, they choose you!
And about longevity, if you ask me, the most important factors for a solid relationship are:
1. Being completely comfortable around each other. No grudges. Being able to talk about anything, even if you don't always agree.
2. (related to #1) Having a mechanism for resolving conflict. Avoiding things like the silent treatment.
Knowing many women who had north of 50-100 partners, 'extra special' certainly isn't the case. Usually they are settling down because no one wants to stick with them and you are likely to be the next one who will abandon them. If this logic made sense, sex workers would be the most sought after partners.
This points to another worrying trend I've seen among teenagers and 20-something people. I've often seen them commenting how they have had absolutely ridiculous amounts of relationships, like a 24 year old saying she has had 11 boyfriends.
It's like casual sex has become to prevalent that they think that's what a stable relationship is. I can't really fathom the logic.
You are extrapolating way too much from your limited data — in fact, younger generations have less sex than those before, as per a study linked in this thread.
> When your partner has had many previous partners, it means that you are extra special, because even after all that prior experience, they choose you!
That's... really making a lot of assumptions. What do you mean by "get any of the others to commit"? That's saying the woman in question had to apply force, and that it was ultimately the other's fault they didn't settle.
I can go on, but, it sounds like you and many others in this subthread have some really weird and ingrained manosphere-sounding ideas about women and relationships.
Let's cut it 50/50, let's say she has broken up in 11 occasions. Does it really make sense for you to consider that she has a good eye for compatibility? To trust her judgement that she will stay with you?
A popular statistical advice is to meet N people (30..100), determine the level of “bestness” (ignoring extraordinary anomalies) and then to continue until you find something like that again. Calculating chances of being that last person is left as an exercise to the reader.
Ugh. Some people like casual sex. Some people don't. Neither of these are worse people. And the idea that sex is something that women "give up" to men is weird, gross, misogynistic nonsense.
women are the traditional gatekeepers for sex. All the "misogyny" handwaving in the world does not alter that fact. It's why the response numbers for men and women on dating apps are what they are
What he's saying is that women are generally at their hottest and get the most attention from 18-30. They have the position of power in attracting a mate. If they have 20+ partners they clearly took advantage of that.
If you're a 40yr old man who has worked his ass off to reach a position where you are an attractive mate, you probably now have the position of power instead of a women of the same age.
The usually unsaid part of this is that the woman in question wouldn't have given you the time of day when you were in your 20s. It's only when you are in the position of power they start to consider you as an option, at which point it makes less sense for you to consider them an option.
That is why this feels like a slap in the face for a man, and also why men go after younger women. When they were a young man, they had no power. When they get older, they have more power.
Literally incel meme material. Unfortunate that after the sexual revolution many people want to revert back to repression and self-shame for our sexual desires.
Repression and self-shame for our primitive desires is at the core of civilized society. Use your brain for a moment to think about how our world would look like if everyone blindly followed their instincts, including violent outbursts, sexual desires, and what have you.
You discard our achieved Christian stability at your own peril. You sure you want to go back to jungle rules? That's what will happen when all women mate with a select few men - what do you think the rest of the men are going to do? Be content dying alone, invisible, and unloved?
There are "base urges" that are beneficial to suppress, and others not; this is the criterion. You would not suppress the base urge to eat (ironically, fasting for no reason is another prominent feature of many religions) just for its sake, why would you do the same with sex?
I will not respond to the Christian stability claim because that would require more paragraphs than I care to write right now. Suffice to say a cursory look at worldwide religious demographics shows that many of the countries with a higher standard of living are the least religious, and many of the most religious countries are the poorest and most underdeveloped.
So, all non-Christian societes are unstable? They live in a primitive state?
What happens as soon as women have the power to decide about their bodies, their sex and love life so is that a certain sub-set of men all get wrapped into brezel shape over this outragious independence. There seems to be a huge overlap of those men and religious conviction. And seeimg themselves as victims of whom or whatever. And then they wonder why they don't get laid or find fulfilling relationships.
Please mention a stable non-Christian society you would like to migrate to.
The power to make decisions includes the power to make mistakes. Having more power doesn't automatically mean that every decision made with said power is for the better. Women aren't above criticism for their bad decisions.
Japan, would be one option. Singapore as well. Marocco maybe. I would never migrate to the US so, not that I would consider the US particularly stable so.
And no amount of wrong decisions of one person gives another person the right to decide for them. That's what laws, courts and a legal system is there for.
Edit: Other countries: Taiwan, Malaysia. The problem is less religion and stability, it is more that free democracies are somewhat far between globally. Add in somewhat economical stability as a requirement for me migrating, which was the question, and the list gets even shorter (it would also exclude the vast majority of Latin America by that measure alone, not that these countries are particularly stable despite being staunchly Christian).
> no amount of wrong decisions of one person gives another person the right to decide for them. That's what laws, courts and a legal system is there for.
You don't see the contradiction here? Laws, courts, and legal systems are other people deciding for those who have made a sufficient amount of wrong decisions.
(Thanks for the examples. I'm not familiar enough with Shinto et al to comment on what kind of stability such societies are founded upon.)
That's not clear at all, and the only reason you feel that way is that you disagree so strongly with their perspective that you are comfortable making assumptions without basis.
I'm 38. It's superficially easy to find a 28 year old, and would take a slight bit of effort to get with a 23 year old.
And all bets are off if someone is ok going to eastern Europe or Asia. "Lost your chance in life" is retarded.
> It's superficially easy to find a 28 year old, and would take a slight bit of effort to get with a 23 year old. And all bets are off if someone is ok going to eastern Europe or Asia.
Yeah, sure, buddy. If you think taking advantage of desperate woman from second/third world country with whom you have generational and culture gap so big that it’s like adopting a daughter for sex, who’s ready to leave with first foreigner, is the same as meeting your life’s partner at 18-20s and living and experiencing whole life with them - then good luck, you have all your chances, haha.
> "Lost your chance in life" is retarded.
Why did I even bother replying. Did you find your way from Reddit, Blind or 4chan?
I'm from Eastern Europe and speak the language. But beyond that, I didn't say THAT part would be easy, but it's doable, especially if you stay there instead of bringing them to the US. Personally I think it would be easier than keeping the average American 28 yr old happy.
That explains the attitude, fellow Eastern European.
The point still stands, cultural and generational gap. You were born when USSR was still there (or maybe in USSR, if you’re unlucky), for Christ’s sake. Do you seriously think you can find any meaningful relationship with girl raised on Instagram and TikTok? As other comment pointed out - you’re not looking for a relationship, you’re looking for a trophy wife. Which is completely fine, but you need to be honest with yourself.
Also, if you think 28 age old can’t have 23 previous partners - you’re in deep trouble.
23 year old indeed might be too much of a difference IMO + there is a big gap of maturity between 23 and 28 years old, but 28 year old is totally fine in relation to his age (unless he behave and feels like a 50-60 year old). I was with around 10 years younger gf, she was very attractive and had many relationships before but couldn't connect with anyone as good as she did with me.
the reason he might be dating someone younger is not just for trophy but for things such as:
- younger woman for him is more attractive (doesn't mean it's just for trophy)
- 38+ woman have biological clock so they might be more desperate to get someone commit and have a kid fast
- if he date someone younger and after half a year they found out they both are not compatible then there is no guilt as much as when dating 38+ woman that wanna have a kid and you "wasted her half a year of maybe just 2 years left to have a healthy biological kid)
- might be for him easier to date younger divorced woman with kid (because many guys don't want to date those for long term), but that's not necessarily bad relation because she has a lot of experience.
Because one of the meaningful, intimate, things someone can give you was given up 23 times in a row. You're not special and that has an effect on one's psyche. You can certainly enjoy a person's company but you will never be able to connect to them on anything more than a surface level. If a person puts themselves in a very vulnerable position with numerous people it speaks volumes about their ability to maintain relationships and assess risk. Even without getting into the spirtuality of it the person is likely damaged goods. This goes equally for both genders - by the way.
Divorce rates correlate strongly with previous partner count. It's easy to find a meaningful relationship. It's hard to find a relationship where you're not going to be compared to 23 other men (or women). At 30+ you're also dealing with potential kids from the other person which in the case of fathers is a minefield should you stick around long enough to become "defacto" dad in the eye of the court.
And that's... fine? As in, if you're done with it, you can choose not to play. Stay single if it makes you happier. Just don't shift blame to others, they have their own life and choices that are completely out of your hands and concern.
he didn't say he is single or planning to stay single forever. He might as well dating someone younger. For woman its generally:
- harder to date someone younger
- it's harder to date when you are 35+ (smaller pool of single people) but even harder for woman (because guys take bigger importance into how someone look and because of woman biological clock)
- when someone is divorced with kid (even when young) is hard to date for anyone but for woman even more difficult
Never understood this “call them incel” movement. It neither earns you respect nor makes a point. Even if they are involuntarily celibate, what does that mean in this context? It’s involuntary. You being a jerk to a (figuratively) disabled person who complains that ramps only lead to places which have seen life.
Words change their meanings and it currently denotes a disgusting misogynistic group. The usage you refer to is only the dog whistle they run under, similarly to nazis.
This only makes it even more puzzling as the usage was yours. Having an opinion about whom you would marry and for which reasons isn’t mysogynistic, afaiu. If your main concern is wording “giving it up”, how could one rephrase it?
Look at all the comments in this thread of the HNer in question. They are free to have an opinion on who to marry, or even of people. Nonetheless, I can also freely have the opinion of someone being a shitty human based on his beliefs, especially when that belief is objectifying women.
Could you please point to a comment where he does objectify women? I skimmed through all of them but not sure which one you could read this way. Or, if this term also drifted, I’d like to know what it means now.
I’m starting to suspect that you may be involuntarily gaslighting me looking through the lens of your own perception.
If we're talking about some hypothetical woman with 23 partners, what is the issue with objectifying her a bit? She's obviously objectifying the men. Sees someone who looks nice, sleep with them, move on.
If neither side is in it for the long term relationship then they are in it for the hot body. That isn't being a "shitty human", it is just being realistic about the sort of relationship they are in.
You can't shame someone for the worldview that women "Give up sex" in the same sentence you shame them for not managing to get sex as a man. It doesn't make sense.
> Because I don't want to feel like a fool for sticking with and supporting this woman from 40-70, when she was giving it up easily at 18-30.
Misogyny shining though there. You feel you have to support someone rather than be equals. You resent that they may have slept with other people when they were younger (but presumably you did as well, as a tall, decent looking man). The very use of the phrase 'giving it up easily' implies you think it's a woman's role to not 'give it up'.
Your whole thread reeks of double standards. Did you never 'give it up' easily in your 20s? Or does that not apply to men?
Don't you think partners should support each other? Equally? I am a tall, decent looking man as well and I did not give it up easily, why do you think it's OK to assume that about the parent commenter — after he stated his values? If sex is valued (by someone) as one of the most intimate interactions / experiences someone can share with a partner, then yes, it's a role of potential partners (and that someone if they don't have double standards) not to "give it up". Otherwise they aren't as good partners for that someone and it is fine to have that preference.
If I somehow messed up in my judgement and "gave it up" to the wrong person, I'd totally be fine with someone else valuing me less or even not considering me as a potential partner. Even if they had double standards in that regard, that's fine, our values are just not aligned and we're not meant for each other romantically.
No, without your assumptions this thread does not reek of double standards. Your comment reeks of toxicity, gender-based. And I don't think that's what an average person you interact with (online) deserves, regardless of their gender or the discussed topic.
> I did not sleep with other people while younger, why do you think it's OK to assume that about the parent commenter
"I'm 38. I date in my age group. Which means both of us are dating people that have been sleeping with others for two decades"
>If I somehow messed up in my judgement and "gave it up" to the wrong person, I'd totally be fine with someone else valuing me less or even not considering me as a potential partner.
Wow, I would hate to be in your head, to have your own self-worth so bound up in the number of partners you have or haven't had.
> No, without your assumptions this thread does not reek of double standards.
It really, really does. The same poster is talking about dating college-aged girls until relatively recently, and tells us that he considers them promiscuous, clearly values women by the number of partners they have had, and views them as a financial drain to be put up with only if they're pure enough. It's pretty old-school, judging of women for who and how many they slept with, and placing the value of his relationship with them on that.
I do not read it as "giving it up _easily_" (clarified my comment, I realized my mistake in what I compared, and what I meant to say), but now I searched through his all comments and after seeing the comment about college girls being his favourite demographic, I do find that assumption more likely. I read that "both of us" quote as _not_ making difference in valuing people by the number of partners. If he really was a sugar daddy to multiple girls the way it appears to be, then he shouldn't feel like a fool supporting (and being supported by) someone as promiscuous as him.
Missing that one comment made me feel the same way as when I see others generalizing about the misogyny and judging the double standards (even without target or target's comments around, just a single one-sided claim) when my similar actions are totally not driven by it. I made a mistake and I apologize for sounding harsh while making it.
As for me, I'm monogamous because thinking about someone being intimate with my SO is not pleasant. And no, it's not about an insecurity like "does he have a bigger stick?". Sex and intimacy is an "old-school" way to show ultimate sign of love, merit and commitment. If it wasn't that way, there would not be much point in exclusivity and I would have been fine with her having safe sex while I'm out of town or something.
Are you in open relationship, then? Do you see significant difference between your SO sleeping with some girl when you can't, depending on the time it happened (whether it's before or after you two romantically connected)?
There are many dimensions on which one can value a person or a relationship. Not valuing sex the same way is just one dimension of worth, bound up in the numbers of people who have received that "sign". If someone (me included) is sleeping around, that doesn't mean they aren't great as a person, but by that dimension of worth differentiating a friend and a romantic partner they are valued less.
> As for me, I'm monogamous because thinking about someone being intimate with my SO is not pleasant.
I'm also monogamous, and I'd suggest if you don't enjoy picturing that, then you shouldn't picture it :)
I don't spend much time thinking about my partner of 7 years having sex with other people. That doesn't sound like much fun. Unless that's your thing, some people love that stuff. It's not for me though!
> it's not about an insecurity
It feels very much like it to me. Maybe not about silly things like penis size, but you fundamentally wouldn't trust that someone loves you unless they hadn't slept with anyone else in the past before they'd even met you? I find that odd.
> Do you see significant difference between your SO sleeping with some girl when you can't, depending on the time it happened (whether it's before or after you two romantically connected)?
Absolutely. Things that happened before we got together are things that happened before we formed a trusting, loving relationship. Going outside of that now would be a very different proposition. Women or men she may have slept with before are no business of mine nor of particular interest. And this goes both ways. At our ages (mid 40s) it would be weird to expect a clean slate, and frankly I'd be very suspicious of anyone that had one. It probably helps our levels of trust that we knew each other as friends for a long time before we got together.
Look, if you value your notion of sexual purity, OK, you do you. But apply it to yourself as well. The misogyny in the other poster's comments comes through when he says "we both did this thing, it devalues her as a person but it's fine for me".
> If someone (me included) is sleeping around, that doesn't mean they aren't great as a person, but by that dimension of worth differentiating a friend and a romantic partner they are valued less.
To you maybe, this is not universal. But if you judge them as worth less while you were doing the same damn thing, and whining about how they don't want to support someone who 'gave it up' when they were younger, even though you were doing it too ... that's hypocritical and where the misogyny comes in.
FYI, the convention with `>`-prefixed lines is to use them for other people's words you're responding to, not for your response.
In case you're quoting several levels of responses you can nest the `>`s
e.g.
> > This is why I think we should get rid of minimum wage
> Sure, have fun in your libertarian, mad max fantasy world
To be fair, that does sound kind of fun
The prefixed lines are from katodna_cijev’s post above, unless I’ve messed up the formatting somewhere.
(Edit, I’m rate limited so can’t reply below, but yes, the ‘>’ are for stuff I’m responding to, the quoted stuff is from the poster we are both talking about and forms my response)
"I'm 38. I date in my age group. Which means both of us are dating people that have been sleeping with others for two decades"
Which was a quote from heattemp99 above, so by the convention I was describing, that would be prefixed by a `> `
But
> I did not sleep with other people while younger, why do you think it's OK to assume that about the parent commenter
I now realize was a quote from the poster above you, who must have edited it afterwards which is why it didn't show up when I searched for it, trying to follow the thread
Can I ask you something? Assuming you didn't just radomly stumble over HN, and this submission, ehy do you use a newly created account for this discussion?
The way I read it (which may or may not be what GP meant) was person A speaking from their PoV about feeding supportive energy in a relationship with person B, with person B being less inclined or able to do so, especially when rough spots come up, and number of past person B relationships that failed possibly hinting at that (that, or person B had an unlucky streak of being with bad relationships they had to bail out of, which happens), when person A would expect the relationship to be symmetrical in commitment (especially through tough times, where the relationship is truly tested)
Men that desire long term balanced relationships do exist, and that does not mean they necessarily want to coerce women into a specific role borne out of patriarchy, as long as they expect to be held to the same standards themselves by their SO. I'll readily admit that sadly many men don't, but that does not mean we should blanket assume that of all people, and I hope we can all be a bit more careful not to project our own prejudices both ways, otherwise it's going to be a losing game for everyone.
I think in the context of "both of us are dating people that have been sleeping with others for two decades", but then followed up with "how special should I feel that I'm her 23rd", and then in another comment specifically calling out women who were 'giving it up' in their 20s even though it appears he was doing much the same...
It reads to me a lot more like a double standard and some old school misogyny than it does anything about supportive energy.
To go to your analogy, person A and B have had about the same number of failed past relationships. Taking that in isolation there's no reason to think that either of them is going to be less inclined than the other to offer support or help work through rough patches in the relationship, even if we allow for the notion that having more partners is a negative there.
But Person A has just decided that Person B is worth less to him than someone who hadn't had previous partners, and judged them for their behaviour when they were younger, even though they did the same themselves.
> To go to your analogy, person A and B have had about the same number of failed past relationships. Taking that in isolation there's no reason to think that either of them is going to be less inclined than the other to offer support or help work through rough patches in the relationship
Agreed. One of the critical bits in my comment was:
> as long as they expect to be held to the same standards themselves by their SO
Which I cannot stress enough.
> "how special should I feel that I'm her 23rd"
That, to me, could equally read as a failing to realise one's value comes from oneself (intrinsic), not others (neither in comparison to other men nor because someone else values you) (extrinsic). If anything, if after a streak of failed relationships, when someone commits to spending the rest of their life with you, then clearly it means that you are special to them in a way that all the others before weren't, but it takes time to make that jump, and some never even make it because they keep getting caught in man-man comparisons that have nothing to do with (and therefore no judgement of) the woman involved.
It also could possibly mean that they're buying into the myth that there's a "special one" that is meant to be just the right for you (and conversely, that you are the special one for the other), which is highly destructive and self-devaluating when you're not finding it however hard you try.
Since the poster has too suffered from failed relationships, it may very well be that they've been hurt repeatedly, and thus now have a hard time building trust, and lacking confidence in themselves, so they (mistakenly) look for extrinsic validation as a form of criteria to artificially bolster that confidence and trust when it should be intrinsic.
So under these hypotheses, the whole picture would be not that they devalue women (a.k.a misogyny) but that they devalue themselves and have an idealised view of women, which purported feminine partners fail to match (which is only normal because they are just human)
> even if we allow for the notion that having more partners is a negative there.
Agreed, that notion of it being negative per se is absurd as it's highly contextual in ways a simple number cannot carry any of that information.
And that's the thing here, we HN commenters don't know the first thing about all the contexts at play. Therefore my personal stance is to consider that there may be many things at play here, and not ascribe a value to "I'm a straight man and I'm stuck in a conundrum with my relationships with women" too soon because it appeared to be in conflict with my values from a superficial reading as "things said sound odd, and a straight man said them, therefore this is a misogynistic statement", which would be projecting my own prejudice upon someone else, in total contrast with the values I would be trying to uphold.
> for sticking with and supporting this woman from 40-70, when she was giving it up easily at 18-30
Rephrased the way I understood it to mean:
"I'd like to be in a relationship where we can be supportive of each other, and the other person's track record of bailing out in face of hardship would hint at the latter phase of life would be me being supportive but not the other way around"
Which felt to me as reflecting pain and fear and projecting anxiety in the future, not hate and disdain and projecting judgement on the other (which is what misogyny is). It struck me as such because at no point it is said that they would not be held in the same regard.
This seems corroborated by GP's desire to be:
> Can I find someone that doesn't just say "wtf am I doing here" if times get tough for health or financial or just plain old age? I'm not sure.
Which is questioning I think could be answered with: people are met once, relationships are built, continuously, endlessly; if there's a fear, a doubt, an issue, talk about it openly together; if it's not possible to talk openly then talk about why it appears to not be possible to talk openly; and if either person refuses to talk and work it out then that person is not open to building the relationship anymore (and they are completely entitled to that at any point in time, nothing is binding anyone irrevocably forever as described in fairy tales), so it's game over, and you can't do shit about that, you can only try your best that it does not reach that point. But if you do it early and practice it regularly for both the easy things and the hard things, so that you can see where there's agreement and where there's disagreement, and find common ground and balance, then the odds of that happening are low. But they're non-nil so you gotta trust that it works out, and trust is built, but it's also a leap of faith (otherwise it's not trust, it's guarantees).
All of that to say, if I may, that the elicited "wow this is a gross and misogynistic statement" reaction would IMHO be better approached as "careful, your statement X sounded judgemental in this or that way (and if so, it kinda hurt) and some may receive it as misogynistic, but I may have misunderstood, would you care to elaborate with more context?"
But your rephrasing doesn’t match the original. He says he would feel like a fool supporting a woman from 40-70 who was “giving it up easily” in her earlier years.
Can I ask if English is your first language? I don’t wish to be rude, but the idiomatic phrasing “Giving it up easily” does not mean walking away from relationships frivolously. It means she was having sex, giving up her virtue (or vagina, pick a v word). It is a phrase which presupposes that it is a woman’s job not to give ‘it’ up and that she is easy or a slut if she does. It means that when men came to her seeking sex, she did not turn them away as she should have (ignore the men though, that’s just natural and not to be judged).
It’s not about criticising someone for walking away from relationships, it’s shaming a woman, and specifically a woman, for having had sex.
This is classic misogynist rhetoric, casting a woman’s value as proportional to her sexual past, making it her role to limit access to sex.
And yes, this probably does come from insecurity, that doesn’t make it ok.
He also talks about the promiscuity of college-age girls, and how he is having trouble finding meaning in dating women his own age, and how he wants his partners to have had few sexual partners, where he himself talks about having been sexually active for two decades.
I think it’s fair to say there’s a lot going on here, but some of his comments reveal quite weird attitudes towards women. Wherever those come from, they manifest as misogyny and double standards.
> Can I ask if English is your first language? I don’t wish to be rude,
Sure, no offense taken, and you are correct, I am not a native English speaker indeed, and while I know my share of idioms I was completely unaware
that “Giving it up easily” was an idiom specifically referring to getting laid frequently, leaving no room for ambiguity. Thanks for the astute guess and subsequent clarification, happy to stand corrected!
100% on board here, whoever wants to have fun and explore their sexuality in whatever way or frequency they see fit is a perfectly normal thing to do, and it by and far does not mean that person would be unable to commit in a relationship on mutual agreement of exclusivity later on. So the double standard and badmouthing is not acceptable by any means in any way, shape, or form.
I don't even compute how person A would "look like a fool" being in mutual commitment with person B if person B had their share of fun and experimentation in a previous period of their life. If anything, person B now knows exactly who they want to be with and what they like, so they're more likely to keep their commitment since they chose to commit armed with that knowledge!
This feels like it only makes much sense if you had an unsatisfying youth yourself or truly never wanted to do any of that exploring (you'd have turned it down even if the opportunity presented itself).
It takes two to play. I had some fun in my teens + 20s, I learned some things about myself and relationships, mostly pleasantly but occasionally not. I don't begrudge others for spending their youth exploring and learning the same sorts of things.
I'm not supporting someone I'm dating financially - they've usually got a decent career going, they don't need and aren't asking for my wallet.
> Please explain: why does "19-year old beauty" need to "glimmer through" to sustain a relationship when one is "old and annoyed?"
They've been so long they know each other's faults and are willing to live with them. You've been with someone that at every major crossroad of their life. That's not something you get when you start dating in 38th.
Speaking from my own experience, it doesn’t necessarily matter. All that matters is what you each bring to the relationship every day. It can be a blessing to meet later in life, after both of you have worked on your issues.
> Edit: for those that think this is just some personal issue, you should look up divorce stats by number of previous sexual partners. There is a clear rise in divorce rate per increase in partners, and at about 7 it's 50%+.
You say this like it's obviously a bad thing. People who stay married might just do so because they're afraid of being alone, and so suffer in silence for the rest of their lives. People who have been through many relationships maybe know they'll be ok if they split, it's not the end of the world, and there's no point prolonging the suffering.
You can spin it many different, perfectly valid ways. Most people will probably post-rationalize their choice as "good" anyway, because that's what people do. Those who say married for a long time will say it was the best decision they could have made despite the challenges, and those who split will do the same.
> People who stay married might just do so because they're afraid of being alone, and so suffer in silence for the rest of their lives. People who have been through many relationships maybe know they'll be ok if they split
I used to think that, esp after seeing the unhappy but still together couples in my parent's generation. But the main issue is that now as I'm older and have a bunch of friends the second category now, and the unhappy couples in my parent's generation are (relatively) happily co-grandparenting together. Whereas this late-30s divorced/never-settled couples are equally (if not more) miserable as some of those unhappy couples were in my parent's generation.
I don't know what will happen to my divorced/never-settled friends when they reach the grandpa generations without grandkids, but most likely they will find similar people like each other to give each other company. I do trust them that they will do something to be happy.
> Whereas this late-30s divorced/never-settled couples are equally (if not more) miserable as some of those unhappy couples were in my parent's generation.
People make their own misery though. The cultural pressures to pair up are strong, so if you focus on things you don't have and think you want because of cultural pressures, of course you'll be miserable. Studies have shown that single people in midlife become significantly happier, I'd argue because a lot of the pressure is then off, and you're free to pursue your real happiness.
> Edit: for those that think this is just some personal issue, you should look up divorce stats by number of previous sexual partners. There is a clear rise in divorce rate per increase in partners, and at about 7 it's 50%+.
You should look up divorce stats by age of marriage. This article calls marriages between 20 year olds "starter marriages" because they rarely last[1]. Your parents are an outlier.
That's quite a difficult chart to read and I think you need a bit more context in your quote. The "starter marriage" is for women between 15 and 20.
The image appears to show the best age for women to marry to be early to late twenties and both article and image say late marriages are more likely to end in divorce.
So I think the general point of the comment you are replying to stands and is supported by the article.
Yeah I googled earlier and there seem to be a few studies that pretty much all reckon young (early/mid 20s to 30ish) as the marriage-success-predictor optimum.
Unfortunately those studies seem to be being misrepresented in much of the press which seems to want to accentuate the wait-a-little but are rather more quiet on the but-not-too-long message, presumably for reasons of being more appealing to the demographics they are "summarising" for.
Much like the “children do better in a stable home” studies though, could this not be somewhat tautological?
I.E. marriages among people who choose to marry at those ages may well last the best. Does that mean they someone who would have married earlier or later should change their behaviour if they want a long marriage? Or is it some other quality of couples who do already make that choice that precipitates the outcome?
I’m older and long married. I married at about your age, by which time I had many, many sexual relationships/interactions.
Of course I miss being in my 20s and 30s and the women I spent time with naked. Sometimes that nostalgia is very strong, believe me.
But I also remember that none of those experiences were fulfilling. It blows my mind to recall periods of my life when I had numerous numbers I could dial that would land me in bed - but at the time I was nonplussed and unsatisfied by it all.
By the time I was 38 I was looking for a partner, and when I met my wife all of my dating criteria went out the window. The whole game had changed.
I have thoughts on whether monogamistic fundamentalism is good for marriage, but that’s a whole other discussion. In a society where you have to choose between promiscuity and commitment, the latter holds much more promise even though there are no guarantees.
You had a very different experience in your 20’s and 30’s than I did! Maybe you could tell me your secret. Right now I’m single again- and, look, I’m thin and athletic, no crows feet, no grey hair, no hair thinning, and I can still get it up like when I was 18, Im not ugly or funny looking, conventionally fairly good looking, I’m a software developer so I make good money- and nobody’s interested. I don’t honestly know why. Probably, it’s because I’m neurodivergent and I’m sending signals that I’m not aware of. But, it was the same in my 20’s. I got laid a couple times but nothing remotely like what you describe.
I’m not sad or upset about it. It’s a fact of life. It’s always been like this for me. I have plenty of other stuff going on in my life and I have friends and I’m ok. I just have always wondered what it was about some guys that was so magically attractive? From the outside, it looks like it’s the guys who tick the boxes of being very, should I say, normal. The ones who hew closely to whatever popular culture says a real man should act like and dress like.
I'm no great looker but I think there's a bit of opposite-sex-amicability that's like athleticism - some have more than others and it's gone before you realize it's special.
In all honesty I was a bit lonely in my 20s. I had very bad anxiety through college and didn't forge as many strong friendships in college as might be normal. Maybe it was a touch of desperation but I just went to NYC bars and shows and talked to people.
Maybe 90% of what a woman is trying to establish is that you're not a creep or an asshat and I was pretty good at passing that test. I would not like to have to run that gauntlet today.
Don't bother with advice from here, get a coach to review video of you interacting with women, or go on group dates with someone who knows what they're doing and observe you and give you pointers.
People don't use logic, though, they use emotion: look how long folks stay in less-than-ideal jobs, even if there's little keeping them there besides routine.
>look how long folks stay in less-than-ideal jobs, even if there's little keeping them there besides routine.
Logically, if it was as easy to get promoted or move to a new job as shaking a hand and talking over the bar, people would move around more often.
But because current job ads above minimum wage ones are looking for degrees and multiple calls spread over a few weeks and certain skills/portfolio/hisory, it's a big barrier even before talking about studying the interview specific skills
> Just playing Devil's Advocate: you can't miss out on what you don't know exists.
You don’t need to experience something to know it exists. And even if this were true that ends up being a shitty justification for abusive relationships.
Are we going to deny there was less promiscuity in the past? Just a few years ago the lifetime average partners was 7. Even that was screwed high due to recent trends.
Now most women I know have 7 by the time they leave college.
Men's promiscuity peaked in the generation born around 1930 and has been declining since.
Women's promiscuity peaked in the generation born in the 1950s and hasn't changed much since then (at 5-6 lifetime partners, a fair degree shy of your "7 by the time they leave college").
If you doubt that girls are sleeping around in college a lot, idk what to tell you. I guess when the stats come out in a decade or two you'll believe me.
That's not what the data shows. You can't compare lifetime partners of people who lived their full lives to teenagers. If you compare number of partners in the last year (prior to survey) then promiscuity had been steadily increasing since it began to be measured.
Maybe, but if this is what the OP is claiming... he should say so, instead of snarkily replying with rhetorical questions about the existence of trends and averages.
So they are giving up themselves easily, yet you have a favorite demographic? Quite clearly the reason why you can’t find someone is that you are not a person people want to be together with — maybe look for the problem in yourself first, before projecting that out to whole “demographics”.
And that is a problem why exactly? And it is not just women, also men. Also you, it seems, preferred those morally doubtful college women. Tells more about you than anyone else.
Nah man but it's his gut feeling that all women are "sluts" with 37 partners by the time they enter college, we gotta respect that /s
I've no patience for this talk. Repressing your natural sexual feelings and inculcating shame and guilt about your body is disastrous. Condoms and medical progress got us safe sex, and women's lib got us proper consent: the two only requirements to go ahead and have a good time.
He has his preferences. That's okay! But he should make peace with his views instead of trying to shame 20 year olds for (gasp!) fucking each other.
Umm, yes, pre effective treatments lots of people died of syphilis which of course wasn’t well understood and had lots of false cures. It still kills hundreds of thousands of people today!
It’s important that this was an average, there were people at each end of the bell curve.. and there still will be in future statistics.
I would expect that a substantial part of subsequent change in the average is caused by shift in population to cities, where there is far more opportunity to “rack up numbers”.
It’s not uncommon to come into contact with people in their late 20’s or early thirties that are still virgins (both genders).
I place a bet that for a non-insignificant number of people that don’t engage in intimate relationships, it’s due to body issues caused by the very media the linked article reference.
Honestly, why are you so obsessed with the number of intimiate partners your intimate partners (or potetial partners) had before you? How many did you have? You know, because this knife cuts both ways.
Also, sex is fun. People can have as much, in any form, of it consentially as they please and like.
It can matter a lot. The arrival of HIV in 80's changed suddenly how people interact with sex forever. Specially one night stands and casual sex. I can do some damage control about who enters in my partners list, I don't have any control about who were in yours so yes, sometimes it matters.
If you're a man who has sex exclusively with women who are not prostitutes and do not use IV drugs, your odds of contracting HIV are vanishingly small.
Why are women so obsessed with this "feminism" thing? We've built them an objectively better world than women of the past had.
Unfortunately you can't change people's feelings with logic. They don't necessarily make sense, however frustrating that might be. Men tend to be more logical, but when it comes to sex men's feelings come to the forefront. One could perhaps offer theories to explain them based on reproductive success and evolution, but does it actually matter? A shelf might be straight according to a spirit level but if it looks wonky, it's wonky.
Seeing the last decades of female rights, which were hard fought for by feminists, as something us men built for women is minimizing the effoer women put into that fight while also minimizing women's ability to achieve hard things on their own. Quite some level of misogeny, tried to pass as actually caring about women and the society they live in.
It is days like this, which arw becoming more and more frqeuent since Covid, that make me really consider to leave HN... There was a time this site actually felt different.
You're missing the point completely. The "better world" was referring to things like washing machines, hair dryers and bras. It was also supposed to be ironic and you were supposed to continue reading.
Sure, we just have to take into account the elevated likelihood that, for instance, you are just playing out a caricature of opinions as a strawman for your main account to knock down.
But being wary of such head games all the time gets tiring. So maybe better to not interact with very fresh accounts.
> Are we going to deny there was less promiscuity in the past?
You're confusing the fact that its more socially acceptable to have many partners now and be honest about it.
Women and men have always been who they are. You put lots of people together and they will start sleeping around, 10, 50, 100, 500 years ago. Its just human nature.
But conservative keep tellong me it is because testerone and sperm counts are down and modern men are so weak? /s
Seriously so, there is so much more to a relationship than reproduction. And no person has less "value" than another just because they cannot have kids. You want kids but can't have them? Adopt, there are far too many kids out there without parents, tgat are in dire need of a loving family.
Well, what’s clear is that a number of bad outcomes are associated with paternal age. Men, too, should not waste their most fertile years.[0]
much more to a relationship than reproduction
But, in fact, women say they want children, material conditions should be better than ever, and yet they increasingly fail at that. There’s a massive societal tragedy brewing as the number of the involuntarily childless grows.
And in the global West, populations are shrinking quickly, which has a number of consequences, many undesirable. Yes, I’m aware of migration and its consequences, here and there. It is not a replacement for societal reproduction, it produces a different kind of society.
Similarly, adoption cannot just replace natural reproduction, it is a different kind of thing.
As soon as societies become wealthy, couples have less children. Also, I hate to break it to you, biology prevents women from failing on their own to gat children.
But maybe the Incels can set up self help groups with the involutary childless, sounds like a match made in heaven...
Yeah, that’s the thing about the current arrangement: all this material wealth and “progress” and yet we’re observing increasing numbers of the unhappy, depressed and aggrieved.
Men and women blaming each other for conditions that—not necessarily individually but as groups—are beyond their control.
As soon as societies become wealthy, couples have less children.
There’s one wealthy country that (for the time being at least) seems to reproduce: Israel. Yes, even the secular (though barely so). We’ll see how that develops.
The elites/ruling class/owners of that society should then pay entirely for all medical care and raising children then, if they are that concerned. And also provide decent housing condition. Children can only make one who is not of the elite/ruling class/owners economically worse in modern societies.
But most do in fact want children and do not really know the risk. Modern Western societies are structured to encourage people to use their most fertile years to further their careers and to keep “searching” and “experiencing”.
We’re running a global, uncontrolled open air study on whether affluent societies with birth control, divorce, feminism etc. can exist long term. Given resulting reproduction rates, it’s not looking good.
I agree that declining birth rates and later child bearing is a problem, but I heavily disagree with the alternative you seem to promote: depending on what you mean by birth control, we definitely don’t want everyone having 10 children, which was not uncommon without it; divorce is an essential freedom we absolutely should have; and feminism is a very important movement and attacking it is just vile.
>But most do in fact want children and do not really know the risk.
Given so many here complaining abuot meeting a person to begin with: Beggars can't be choosers. Figure out who you'd want to have a family with first and then get around to the whole child part.
There's also adoption, but it'd admittedly be hard to be approved as a single parent.
That instantiation of 'now' is gone, but you have more to come. If missing that one is the proximate cause for future beneficial actions, isn't that better than having it be the source of more guilt and angst?
> If I meet a partner at 40, when we start really getting old and annoyed, what am I going to hold on to?
> How lucky I am to be her 23rd partner?
You're raising a few different things here and it's hard to see what you're really concerned about, because I don't think it's the matter of divorce rates vs number of sexual partners.
If you're worried you can't find a long-term partner in your late-30s, then don't be - it's possible and tbh from personal experience dating in my 30s has been much more relaxed and chilled out than in my 20s. When you find someone will you have memories of being together stretching way back 'til your teens? Nope, but that's not necessary for happiness at all, it's one aspect of some people's relationships and not all relationships need to look alike. You'll have a different story that's unique and interesting in its own way.
If you're upset about the idea of being with someone who has been with 20+ men or women before you, then you need to work on your insecurities. How promiscuous either of you were at any time before you met will have no bearing on that whatsoever, if you are committed to each other.
It sounds a bit like you regret or resent not already being married or in a long-term relationship already if I'm honest, and are reflecting and looking around for some answers or some justifications. If that's the case then I'd suggest trying not to do that, you'll not help your own situation and you could end up going down a dark path, making yourself feel worse or being less likely to find someone.
>How promiscuous either of you were at any time before you met will have no bearing on that whatsoever, if you are committed to each other.
The problem is in the fact that commitment doesn't naturally happen from sympathy, or sexual attraction. As fitting two lives is hard, it's a choice which for most people stems from cultural alignments, or hard necessity. If someone's learned behavior is to fly as a butterfly over multiple flowers you can bet with a high probability that culture won't be helpful here. And necessity to stick together for survival is unlikely to exist for modern middle class.
> The problem is in the fact that commitment doesn't naturally happen from sympathy, or sexual attraction
Wait why is that the problem? I don't think anyone believes that being sympathetic or hot is sufficient to sustain a relationship.
> And necessity to stick together for survival is unlikely to exist for a modern middle class.
One of the points (a worryingly small number of) people are making here is that this is good. You don't need to just stay married just for survival - so if you're unloved, unfulfilled, abused or simply unhappy you can part ways without sacrificing your health, livelihood, social status or wellbeing.
>I don't think anyone believes being sympathetic or hot is sufficient to sustain a relationship.
I didn't claim you do. The point made is about "How promiscuous either of you were [...] before you met will have no bearing [...]" Which doesn't stay particularly well exacty because of the thing on which we both agree.
>you can part ways without sacrificing your health, livelihood, social status or wellbeing
Whay's "good" is obviously subjective to your life goals. But both parting ways, and being alone is well-known to incur costs on one's health, livelihood, social status, and well-being. It also negatively impacts kids if there are any. There's a limited number of cases where staying together is just too bad, but it doesn't mean that high divorce rate is nothing to care about (societally), or one's particular divorce is fine (personally).
> Which doesn't stay particularly well exacty because of the thing on which we both agree.
No idea what this means.
> But both parting ways, and being alone is well-known to incur costs
Alright I'm gonna stop you right here. It should be very clear that I meant you are free to divorce your partner and not end up financially ruined or socially stigmatised or outcast like you would in the past. The implication that divorce just means sadness and loneliness forever is really blinkered.
> high divorce rate is nothing to care about (societally)
You've used an interesting adjective here. How are you deciding that the current amount is "high"? How much is "normal" and how have you reached that conclusion? And what's the plan to reduce it to the normal amount once you figure out these numbers - stopping no-fault divorces so guys like Steven Crowder (who seems pretty pissed about the idea that his wife was allowed to leave him) can continue to abuse their spouses?
I think it's pretty clear what it means if you start reading from your own comment. You claimed that a history of promiscuity means nothing (and even blamed it on the parent commenter's insecurities, remember?) My response was that it signals higher possibility of ruined relationship in future. Which you somehow misread. That's it.
>you are free to divorce your partner and not end up financially ruined or
Maybe my writing is too unclear, or yours, but I'm not sure what are you trying to say. My claim: separation is not free, and loneness is not free. Which is in response to you writing that we should appreciate the ease with which pairs falling apart.
>How much is "normal"
If you have a phenomenon creating economical, mental burdens, strongly correlating with children life failures, how much of it you'd like to see? I guess as low as there are cases of real danger, marital fraud, or people lost to addictions. Which I suppose would be a single digit percent.
> for those that think this is just some personal issue, you should look up divorce stats by number of previous sexual partners. There is a clear rise in divorce rate per increase in partners, and at about 7 it's 50%+.
Having read a lot of the attempts to gather stats on this, this is untrue. The results are mixed, with some showing an up-down relationship with a first peak high divorce rate at 1-2 prior sexual partners, then a drop, then another rise that passes the first peak at somewhere between 8-10 partners.
Also, most of the stats on that are weak because they are uncontrolled for other known correlates of divorce rates, including number of prior marriages.
A while back I noticed the "redpill" community on Reddit. Of course... ugh... some of those people have issues.
Nonetheless, the fact is that there are people out there with issues. There are people desperate to find love, desperate to get out of their miserable lonely lives. Many in their thirties or even forties.
If you strip away the superficial surface misogyny, at least some of the community has a valid point to make, and often scientifically backed: the way we live, how we're set up as a society, and how we find partners is not how the human species evolved. Modern lifestyles are ridiculously distorted compared to how our hunter-gatherer ancestors... no wait... that gives the wrong impression. Our lifestyles are ridiculously distorted compared to how the species did things for millions of years right up until a mere hundred years ago. A handful of generations! Just go read a Jane Austen book, for crying out loud! People used to get married in their teens, and being single in your early twenties was considered shameful.
What's especially bizarre to me is that the science that the redpill community managed to scrape together is not a lot and of low quality. There just isn't much research on "how to find a good partner" or "how to make yourself more attractive to the opposite sex".
I can go to arXiv right now and find a stack of papers on how to optimise a neural net, but I doubt I would find even one paper on how to optimise one's chances of finding a spouse and starting a family.
More importantly, it's not only not researched, it's also not taught, not talked about, and even outright taboo. I studied algebra, but not marriage. That's just not a "subject" that exists in the education system.
If you can ignore the minority of crazies, the redpill people have some good, actionable advice. It's the singular source of information on the topic that the mainstream scientific and educational systems have refused to even acknowledge as worthy of discourse, let alone study.
It's still hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we teach people to multiply matrices with pencil and paper[1], but not how to find a life partner and start a family. We just assume that they magically know how to do that well. You know, based on their experience... from their past lives... or something? Meanwhile we've turned on "hard mode", but you'll be fine son!
[1] What percentage of the human race has ever needed to multiply together two matrices? What percentage needed to find a partner? Yeah...
>It's still hard for me to wrap my head around the fact that we teach people to multiply matrices with pencil and paper[1], but not how to find a life partner and start a family.
Algebra 100 years ago was nearly the exact same. Maybe we teach it differently but the concepts are the same.
As you mention, what people want and find okay in a relationship varies quickly and is individualistic as well as societal. 100 years ago most of the world didn't care if you married your first cousin, how well would that advice age in the 2000's? You may even find that advice that your parents used that got them married is completely useless for you, advice as recent as a generational gap.
There isn't a good way for a school system to teach these things. Just the basic health aspects such as sex as a mechanic and healthy living (food, hygiene, exercise, disease, etc). Everything else is up to you.
> what people want and find okay in a relationship varies quickly and is individualistic
All evidence says the opposite of this. You’re just making unscientific guesses.
Human biology, sexuality, instincts and desires have not changed. We’re the same hairless apes we were a hundred years ago or even ten thousand years ago. In fact, very little has changed for a hundred thousand or more years!
> Everything else is up to you.
This is the problem! We just assume young adults will figure it out without any education or experience to guide them.
Worse still, society has changed so radically that pair bonding difficulty has been dialed up to “ultra hardcore mode” and as a species we’ve collectively shrugged our shoulders and told people that it’s their own fault for not compensating.
It’s not what people want in a spouse that has changed. It’s the society around them that has diverged from millions of years of established norms.
you're using macro biology to predict micro behaviors. the latter can't be predicted with science. "Science" also says that homosexuality makes no sense, but we know how that ends.
You're not going to meet 3.5 billion women in your life to play the scientific odds with, round robin style. You need to understand your own country and customs and work in that system, or move to an environment whose dating scene agrees with you. No one can do that legwork for you as an anonymous handle on the internet.
>We just assume young adults will figure it out without any education or experience to guide them.
Yes, just like how we don't have specific lessons on how not to insult people or about curse words. Part of your learning will be environmental, and it shouldn't be something a government mandates. You'll get micro guidances from teachers but there's no textbook out there on these ettiquite.
>society has changed so radically that pair bonding difficulty has been dialed up to “ultra hardcore mode” and as a species we’ve collectively shrugged our shoulders and told people that it’s their own fault for not compensating.
Probably because most people are fine. There's no epidemic where no one can get dates to the prom, nor where child birth rates have fallen off a cliff (They have decreased, but not becasue people aren't dating).
Similar to how unemployment rates are never 0%, there are always some people who fall through the cracks socially. It may have different causes, but the result isn't a new phenomenon. There is no one magical scientific trick to solve this problem. But if you want to play the odds
- Be attractive. If you're not, work on it. This is not limited to looks, but that is the easiest aspect to play to.
- Be financially stable
- Make an effort to find people interested in dating. This gets harder after school ends, but there are still avenues.
You don't think attractiveness plays a role at all? Like, doesn't even make your list? Your list is the kind of thing an attractive (or at least, not hideously unattractive) person would say while being completely oblivious to the issues a good chunk of the population face.
My wife told me straight out, she wasn't attracted to me when we first met, but after spending some time with me, she became attracted to me on an emotional level and the physical attraction apparently followed, I can say the same for her, she was definitely classically attractive, but the more time I spent with her, the more attractive she became.
Before I met my wife I knew a different woman while we were in college, she wasn't classically attractive, and wasn't attractive to me, but we spent lots of time in the same social circles, and over time grew emotionally close, she apparently had been attracted to me the whole time, but I only started to see her as beautiful after over a year, we didn't end up exploring any of that for other reasons (and bullet dodged apparently because she started to go down a very damaging ideological path) but I could have seen that relationship blossoming into something much closer and it involved two people who most wouldn't consider attractive. beauty is definitely in the eyes of the beholder and claiming there is objective beauty is setting yourself up for failure.
Above all else, if you really want to live a better life, stop spending all day obsessing over people who have a bunch of physical attributes that society is telling you are desirable. Especially, if you rarely see people like that in real life. This includes, movies, tiktok, insta, and obviously, though possibly the hardest to cut, porn. All those give you a warped sense of what normal is and give you expectations that you will never actualize.
Attractiveness is a) subjective and b) nothing one can influence (unless you talk about hardcore surgery). My points are those people have a lot more agency over.
Sure, those points people have agency over. But the error in reasoning happens when you say those points add up to “Finding a partner isn't actually that hard”. You’re forgetting that there are things people have no agency over, which makes finding a partner very hard indeed.
No, it actually is not. It really isn't. If you aim for either Margot Robbie or Ryan Gossling you are making it harder yourself.
Most Incels so maybe celibate, but it is, considering how they see and treat women to how they see the world and society, totally voluntarily and self inflicted.
Also, whining about how hard your life is, how you are not able to achieve your goals because of things outside of your control is a huge turn off, regardless of how your face or body looks like.
Just because something isn't difficult for you doesn't mean it isn't extraordinarily difficult for others. If someone's neurodivergent, was raised in a sheltered environment, or just isn't good at social interaction, then that can often be a nearly insurmountable barrier.
Easy isn't the same thing as not hard. Not being an ass shouldn't be that hard, finding a fulfilling relationship so is not easy.
And no, it is not easy for me neither, if it wasn't for my now wife when we first met, we wouldn't be together now, forst steps and all that crap. The we didn't beak up so, well, that is on both of us.
People tend to over complicate the first step thing so. Just be reepsectful and nice, accept a no, and a date will ultimately follow. Because the opposite sex wants a date, maybe not with you but still, as well. Just don't spray and pray, that approach doesn't work with job applications, it worls even less with dating.
A - Sure, there's no totally objective truth. There's societies on the planet where being as heavy as possible is/was thought to be attractive, or being covered in facial tattoos, or whatever else.
However, the basics of what is physically attractive within the society you live are likely straightforward enough that if your likeness is posed to 100 others, you'd get a pretty closely clustered set of ratings.
If your interests trend towards a particular subgroup/subculture you may wish to further optimize for what's generally more attractive to that group.
B - That seems obviously wrong? Physique, grooming, clothing, etc - virtually no one is at the upper bounds of what they can do in these kinds of areas and they have a massive effect on how physically attractive someone is viewed to be.
Sure, that doesn't mean that everyone can become the most attractive person on the planet that way....but they absolutely have the agency to influence how attractive they are to others, significantly.
I put it under "accept yourself". If you don't find yourself attractive, that will impact your ability to find attractiveness in others. Be it due to insecurity or bitterness.
I think one aspect is that we mix charisma with attractiveness. They correlate, but looking like a movie star is not the only way to have charisma. Simply the easiest. Yes, the easiest, compared to being funny, having interesting life stories, or being wildly successful. You can dedicate 2 years to looking attractive with consistent results. You can't dedicate 2 years and guarantee you make tons of money or that you can tell some good jokes.
Either way, if you don't accept yourself, change yourself to a way where you can. As RuPaul says:
>If you can't love yourself, how in the hell are you gonna love somebody else?
Calculus isn't that hard, you just find the slope of the tangent. If that doesn't come naturally then business of attaching meaning to the words and training yourself to do the thing is really hard though.
Also this list of points is probably wrong. Particularly "Accept yourself as you are and others as they are" is mutually contradictory to things like "Be polite, accept a no as an answer" for many people. jiggawatts is pointing out that if people want to improve themselves useful advice is hard to find. Telling someone who knows that they need to change that they are an ass, need to stop that but simultaneously that they need to accept themselves is unhelpful.
In fact, finding the balance between what parts of yourself to accept and what parts need to change (and why) is a complex challenge that is beyond the abilities of most people. The average human just keeps doing what they do unless something traumatic happens.
If you have trouble squaring being ypurself and accepting others with being polite, well, then I agree you have a problem. One that makes relationships of any kind, not just the romantic variety, almost impossible.
And no, us humans are not victims of our biology. Since one the few things in the bible I actually agree with, is the whole "god gave humans free will" bit, as intelligent, self-aware animals we can control our actions to an extent. Failing to so actually is a problem, I agree. But that is an individual problem, not a universal one.
> If you have trouble squaring being ypurself and accepting others with being polite, well, then I agree you have a problem. One that makes relationships of any kind, not just the romantic variety, almost impossible.
Call me crazy I suppose, but wouldn't it be a good idea to give people with problems good advice about how to solve their problems? Maybe some sort of community they could go for for good, actionable advice?
Because if you walk through what you've just said slowly, it was (1) identified that finding a partner is easy for people who don't have problems finding a partner, and (2) anyone who is having problems is on their own, no need to help them.
The thrust of the thinking there lacks a certain empathy. Plan B is being a bit gentler and explaining what they are doing wrong to them using clearer advice than "don't be an ass". That doesn't mean anything concrete and it isn't actionable. It also isn't true, lots of asses have no trouble holding down a partner (usually figuratively, occasionally literally to the general horror of us all if it gets uncovered).
I tried to give some advice, for what it is worth coming from me, in some other posts.
And yes, I insist, not being an ass is a great basis. Which requires knowing what makes someone an ass, true. If people fail at knowing that, well, issues at dating are more of a sympthom and not the root cause.
Also, yes, at the end there is only so much others can do for you and help you with. Being able to be self-reliant, and being able to ask for, and accept, help are actually rather attractive traits. As is taking responsibility, first for yourself and then for others.
None of these are helpful at all. Maybe they're requirements, but none are sufficient, alone or all together, to help anyone who is looking and not finding a mate.
What most adults discover, after college, is that there are few places to find a mate. The only place they will visit with any regularity is work... and even if we ignore the good advice of "don't shit where you eat", work is often a poor environment in which to search for potential mates (maybe especially true at the ages that most are concerned about doing that).
In previous eras, where mates were found more quickly, high school and then college were always the best places. High concentrations of other unmarried people your own age or close enough. But that's discouraged today and often impossible anyway given economic reality. It's definitely unwise according to popular opinion.
Church might have been another place, but not really for generations at this point. Most aren't religious, and becoming religious isn't easy even if you can somehow set aside any philosophical objections to the dogma or worries at the quality of mates available there. A young man or woman who joins a church for the purpose of finding a mate will often be looked at with disdain and suspicion... anyone eligible at those places probably already has candidates in mind. Courtships tend to be a quick thing, so even if you go there and find a woman or man the right age not yet married, someone else already had them in mind and they were probably less than 12 months away from marriage anyway. You showing up and interfering isn't going to win you any friends.
In the 1980s, this might have been solved with bar-hopping. But the AIDS crisis and the end of the sexual revolution hammered the nails into that coffin. It was never a good strategy anyway.
And all of this is just one issue that makes it difficult. There are others.
Our society isn't currently arranged in a way that is conducive to pairing people up for the long term. And likely, societies that are bad at this don't get to remain societies forever. I suspect rather strongly that they die.
Didn't this whole threat start with claiming female promiscuirity being a problem? Since, apparently, women don't have issues finding partners, there have to be places. Also for people above college age.
Regarding bar hopping, going out still is a thing, isn't it? Just one thing so, if bar hopping is only done to pick up women, it might a good thing you stopped doing it, not because of AIDS, but for everyone else going out.
Edit: What weird kind of creep goes to church to pick up women? And why do some people think that all social interaction with the opposite sex (gays and lesbians seem not to have that problem) has to be aimed at some kind of sexual / romantic end game? That can happen, as can a real friendship or nothing at all. Approaching it with the goal of sex / dating in mind might actually be part of the problem...
Are you posting from a bizarre alternate reality or what? No, there are no places. No, going out is not still a thing.
If "don't be an ass" is all the advice you needed in order to find love, you are unspeakably lucky. I hope you make your wife breakfast every morning and thank your God every night. Please don't offer dating advice to CS grads ever again.
Women may not have trouble finding sexual partners... but sometimes I lurk on r/twoxchromosomes and they seem to have anything but success when it comes to finding mates that any sane person would consider. I do not think they have significantly more success in these matters.
And, given the rough 1:1 ratio of men to women, and the relative 1:1 ratio between gays and lesbians, any significantly large group of male incels seems to indicate a similarly sized group of women.
Women likely don't have any advantages here. There are some social norms that have been upended, where it's somewhat possibly safer for them to make the first approach, but that only helps if they're in the presence of a suitable candidate.
> What weird kind of creep goes to church to pick up women?
Why would that make them a creep? If there are women there, women who very likely want to marry, given what we know of religious people, then there doesnt' seem to be anything creepy at all about it.
While the church leaders and the congregants would likely tell you that the church exists for many other things besides, included in their list would most likely be one item something like "to find and meet like-minded people, and to help those searching to settle down and live the sort of life they are advocating (marriage, family, etc)".
We were, after all, talking about long-term relationships (and in particular marriage) and not Tindr hookups.
> And why do some people think that all social interaction with the opposite sex has to be aimed at some kind of sexual / romantic end game?
Why would anyone think otherwise, would be a better question. Some people who hold a somewhat "progressive" view of the world insists that men and women are perfectly substitutable, and that they exists for reasons other than the biological imperative. For such people, men and women fraternizing should only happen so that they can be friends, and if there is some "romantic spark", then this is at best an unfortunate side effect that should never be sought or hoped for.
It's really anti-human.
> Approaching it with the goal of sex / dating
We weren't talking about that. We were talking about long term relationships, and not Tindr hookups. While it's true that there was a historical era where dating existing primarily towards that end, by the 1980s that certainly wasn't true. That change correlates loosely with the decline of the use of the term "courtship", and with the ascent of the term "dating" (but not perfectly).
> Approaching it with the goal of sex / dating in mind might actually be part of the problem...
The opposite is true. Approaching it as if there is some other reason confuses many people, causes them to hesitate and postpone, and just generally interferes in men and women pairing up. Even when people in those circumstances find someone else, the other person tends to be non-committing, and they wait around hoping that will change... wasting time they probably don't have on poor candidates.
Have you ever heard someone talk about how they've been engaged to their boyfriend for 9 years? Or, how they're even reluctant to call them boyfriend/girlfriend anymore, tend to use the word "partner" alot?
There's some extreme dysfunction going on, and modern instincts are to double down on that dysfunction in the bizarre hope that somehow things will improve.
> And, given the rough 1:1 ratio of men to women, and the relative 1:1 ratio between gays and lesbians, any significantly large group of male incels seems to indicate a similarly sized group of women.
This logic doesn't follow at all: people can have more than one partner.
Not the types of partners we're talking about, not in this part of the world. I suppose if some Yemenese or Saudi has 4 wives, it's technically that many fewer you could potentially have...
The logic works out "close enough". You don't really live near any FLDS compounds anyway.
Legal marriage isn't the only form of polygynous relationships. Polycules and ENM communities often have more women than men. Or just a man having a mistress or otherwise having more than one partner not necessarily even joining a specific subculture.
You don't need to live near a FLDS compound to find people engaging in non-monogamous relationships.
The irony is that you've just said more-or-less the opposite of what is actually the case.
This is the equivalent of not teaching chemistry, and then someone who's dabbled in alchemy piping up and saying: "Why bother with all that, it's not that hard, just combine earth and water!"
The reality is that the "assholes" get the hottest women. I put that in quotes because that's the superficial impression, not a nuanced statement. It's valid though. There are women who get married to murderers on death row. These are sexy, beautiful women. Meanwhile "nice guys" are single into their thirties and complaining about it on Reddit.
Even a casual perusal of either anthropology or evolutionary biology should dissuade you from any such silly Disney(tm) approved notions.
Women maximise their reproductive success by partnering with killers. Hunters that are capable of bringing home the bacon, but just short of being psychopaths and killing her and her children. A little bit of violence is acceptable.
Being "nice" and "polite" doesn't work. As a random set of examples, people here on HN will generally acknowledge either Trump and/or Elon as being unmitigated asses, right? They've both had multiple wives and a bunch of kids.
What does that tell you?
Are you going to do chemistry, or alchemy? Magic, or science? Are you getting dating advice from Women's Weekly, or Nature?
> The reality is that the "assholes" get the hottest women. I put that in quotes because that's the superficial impression, not a nuanced statement. It's valid though. There are women who get married to murderers on death row. These are sexy, beautiful women. Meanwhile "nice guys" are single into their thirties and complaining about it on Reddit.
I don’t find that to be the reality. Most likely, the “nice guy” has a number of qualities that are off-putting to potential partners and the “asshole” is only perceived as such by the “nice guy”. I don’t mean to say assholes don’t find partners, they do, but the general perception of “the asshole always gets the girl” seems more like a sophomoric projection of jealously than reality.
> Being "nice" and "polite" doesn't work. As a random set of examples, people here on HN will generally acknowledge either Trump and/or Elon as being unmitigated asses, right? They've both had multiple wives and a bunch of kids.
> What does that tell you?
Not much… I mean it’s not news that rich and powerful men have an easy time finding people. But tbh, all walks of life have partners. Tons of nice, polite people have partners, yet you ignore those examples for some reason and claim that “doesn’t work”. I suspect the root issue is a jealously/confusion/frustration that an ass like Trump can find women but you have yet to have the same luck. The reality is that it’s possible for pretty much anyone to find a partner and it doesn’t mean much. Being a likable person will give you the best chance, regardless of how many assholes happen to find people. Perhaps the only useful lesson from observing assholes having success is that assholes tend to have confidence and don’t care what others think, making them more likely to put themselves in a position to find a partner without fear of rejection.
Just take it to Reddit. Man, this discussion turn into a cess pit of frustrated, insecure males venting... No wonder those persons have trouble finding partners...
No, why? You have two choices so. Either you try to be a better person, try to build that confidence. Or continue pretending to be a victim and whine about your lot in life.
And no, a stelar career, shit ton of money, fame and drop dead looks are not what I meam by that.
Confidence and social competence aren't a switch that someone can flip just by trying harder. There's tons of men who have spent years trying to become a better person (therapy, self help, communications courses, education, constructive hobbies, etc.) and have nothing to show for it.
Coming back to my original post, and adding some more details.
Point was not being an ass. That means basically two things: Not actively treating people like shit (that can be pretended, something all those pick up artists scum bags do and sell) and unintentionally doing it. The latter is the harder bit, as it involves actually caring and listening to other people. When in company, making it all about yourself is not necessarily being an ass (it can be so), but rather egoistical and unpleasant for the other person.
Having years of therapy (!), and nothing to show for, hints, IMHO, at the second issue. No amount of therapy and course work can make you care about someone else as much as you do about yourself, IMHO, because therapy is for you.
Ad my grandmother aslways said: every pot has its cover (very bad translation). And she was right. The trick is to not force it, be open, let stuff happen and just not be an ass. Or a self-victimizing whiner, as that can be kind of the opposite end of toxic masculinity and is equally unsexy. But even then, there is someone special out there.
As soon as you make a relationship as much about the other person as you do about yourself, are sincere about that, well, a lot of surprising things can happen.
Also, you are never done becoming a better human being. Especially since for ech step forward, you will take a couple back at times.
Something did happen about 100 years ago. The rise of eugenics. Society (especially the progressive part of it) collectively decided that there was this large fraction of the population we definitely didn't want having a family.
Sure, if they paired up and just fornicated, that might be ok. Certainly if it helps keep them tame.
But once involuntary sterilization wasn't an option any longer, another mechanism had to be developed.
This is a theory, but test it against reality. If you could (without judgement) sort people into "the eugenicists" and the "people who eugenicists didn't want procreating"... which of those groups has the higher fertility rates? The ruling class, the billionaires and millionaires, and so forth, don't they tend to have a few kids and that their kids have prospects of having kids of their own? Meanwhile, those clinging onto the very lowest level of the middle class, or below it but wanting to be there... those are the ones who have no children. Those are the ones who are told that adoption is important to lower their carbon footprint, and that it's in every way a perfect substitution for biological children. Supposing they can ever afford the $100,000 price tag to buy a child.
Dying alone after a happy life is one thing, dying after decades of hell with a bad partner is another, and yet another to pay someone you hate until you die, like many men in California do.
Presumably it's a reference to California not having a statutory limitation on the time horizon for alimony payments (and also allowing for courts to reopen alimony decisions years later) after a marriage of more than 10 years is dissolved.
I think he meant a large number of divorced males in California although relatively speaking, California has one of the lower rates of divorce among all states, with the highest in the South.
I really agree with what you said here, and I think this is an important message – so thank you for putting it so well.
This is something I had no appreciation for when I was younger. I thought romantic love was just that – you find someone you like looking at and like being around, and if that changes then you move on.
But now I've been with my partner for more than a decade I've realised how shallow this view was. Realistically the connection I have with her I'll likely never be able to replace. When things get tough she understands me almost as well as I understand myself and I know she isn't just going to walk out of a 10+ relationship because I'm going through a few rough months. And obviously I feel the same about her... I want to be there for her for more than just thinking she looks nice and is fun to hang out with. The love we have is so much deeper at this point I don't know where I'd be without her, and I think she feels the same about me.
The only thing I'd disagree with you about is how relevant the number of partners is. Both me and my partner had quite a few relationships before we found each other, and I actually think that helped us since we knew we worked well. The difference is that the relationships we had before each other we really just 6-12 months things and when we met we were still quite young.
I think where you are correct is if you've been dating around for years and have some baggage (failed marriage, kids, etc) then when you try to settle down with someone else I'd imagine it would be difficult to develop the same depth of commitment to that person. One, because it just takes time, but two because it's now more complicated sine you have kids with another partner and therefore have other commitments outside your relationship that need to be managed and perhaps even prioritised.
I do believe the way we sell love and relationships today is wrong. I think the sexual aspect is obviously important, but it shouldn't be as much the focus. The thing that provides the most value long-term really is the depth of the emotional connection two people can develop over very long periods of time together. I'm not saying people should stick with their partners no matter what, but I think valuing commitment even when things are not perfect is something we don't do enough of anymore. If anything young people (including myself some years ago) seem to actually have a negative view of long-term commitment. I think that's sad and I feel very grateful I somehow stumbled on the path I'm on today.
It's also probable that women who have no previous history don't know what their options are and will put up with abuse instead of opting for divorce. If you've already been able to escape abuse once, then it makes sense that you know you can separate successfully and won't tolerate partners who hurt you.
And as there is no test for non-physical abuse, it also becomes a great excuse to avoid all responsibility and commitment. Women end most marriages, especially if educated. Most men cannot possibly be abusive, so there's something else at play here.
My wife and myself have slept around and had previous longer relations as well; I see it as a positive. How do I know what I like from a relation or sex if I didn't shop around? I had extremely bad and incompatible partners/sex and now I know that would never work. When I see people on reddit/twitter talk about their relations, I sometimes wonder if people married or living together actually ever talk; it's so incredibly dysfunctional and broken. And then they wonder why people take off, cheat etc etc as they have 0 bond after being 'highschool sweathearts' for way too long and growing apart for all that time. Few kids 'to save the relationship' of course.
People have less sex than ever before. I think this is largely because of a decline in marriage and committed relationships because it's hard to have high frequency sex outside of those relationships.
Of course there’s a correlation between number of divorces and number of partners. If you stay married you are less likely to have more partners lol. It’s the reverse of the cause you’re implying.
Eh, I wouldn't overemphasize the role of multiple partners in this sort of behavior. I think rather the determining factor is that the West and the USA in particular has gradually adopted a more and more radically atomistic individualism over the past few decades, which, no surprise, has the ultimate effect of making the average citizen a selfish person that isn't very into the idea of commitment in the face of challenges.
My advice to myself and many of my friends have exactly based on that type of reasoning. Avoid women in Western Hemisphere like plague (and perhaps if you are a woman the other way around is also true). There are many parts in the world where monogamy is not only a tradition, it’s a requirement. Only in the Western Hemisphere, monogamy is looked down upon with “lack of experience”.
Not sure what part of my original comment implies that. In fact, I explicitly said it applied to both genders.
In many parts of the world (China, Thailand, Vietnam etc just to name a few), chastity, monogamy etc are considered desired attribute in a partner. Only in Western Hemisphere (influenced by American Pie type of subculture) you see monogamy and chastity equalized with “lack of experience” or even “loser” characterization. The campus frat party culture obviously make it necessary to tie every kid of age 18-23 how “desired” they are with how many partners they had sex with.
You didn’t mention any specific cultures, but those “attributes” are only required for women, and breaking the rules makes them unfit for marriage. Meanwhile, men can be as promiscuous as they want. This applies particularly to the middle east and majority muslim countries, but also true in softer form in south america (where I grew up) and probably asia.
I loathe the frat-boy culture, but it feels odd to celebrate alternatives that are even more oppressing for women.
> If I meet a partner at 40, when we start really getting old and annoyed, what am I going to hold on to? How lucky I am to be her 23rd partner?
Why would you jump straight to that conclusion?
At 40, it is entirely possible for a prospective wife to have had at most ~3-5 partners in her lifetime. She would have been in long-term relationships for most of her adult life. Anyone with a history of long-term relationships is a pretty good bet that when trouble hits, they'll be there for it.
23 partners behind anybody is a red flag, but these days a bigger red flag would be any kind of vague abuse story surfacing early on (same goes for prospective friends or employees). Anyone who starts new relationships with strangers by defaming the previous one is going to be trouble (never hire a whistleblower). You will also forever be kept in check through fear of inadvertent "triggering" of vague traumas from past vague abuses you'll never fully understand, and when they leave they'll shake you down while telling the next partner how abusive you were to them. I'd say this is a gen-z thing but the worst two cases I've seen were perpetrated by the 38-50 age group, and /r/divorce has no shortage of these sorts of histrionic scam artists.
For the same reason, I would also recommend coming to terms early on vis-a-vis porn. This was by far the single most cringeworthy post I've ever seen on Reddit (the OP deleted it, but the comments retain context):
The OP comes in claiming she caught her husband taking upskirt videos of strangers at a music festival 8 years ago. Except what she describes isn't an upskirt video by any interpretation, yet she continues to use all sorts of lurid language to frame him as a liar, a criminal, a porn-addicted sex addict, a sexual predator, and a voyeur-- and she was quick to change the story (then it became "he secretly filmed me during sex") and insult anyone who challenged her narrative. If it applies to you, settle the porn question early on so you don't have someone later trying to publicly humiliate you by litigating what you do on the toilet. (And for fuck's sake never claim to be a sex addict to explain away porn use, much less document that by agreeing to go to counseling for it. Just own it then and there-- divorcing over porn makes her look petty, but divorcing because you're a documented sex addict who bailed on therapy makes you look like a monster.)
I won't comment on some moral thing, having 23 partners can be entirely fine, but I think it depends on the intentionality..
Like, having 23 partners because, excuse my french "Elle voulait simplement baiser à tout va" is just fine (tm), they did what they want, and that tells nothing else about them that the fact they did what they enjoyed doing.
On the other hand, if they were looking for the one true love and thought they'd find it in 23 different people, it may reveal something else about them..
That they prefer a type of partner which does not align with their goal.
Or that they are a terrible judge of character.
Or that they are easily manipulated in general.
Those may be red flags in their own right, if those traits are undesirable to you.
But you're making assumptions about the intent already. What if they just enjoy casual sex? You seem to correlate that having sex or short relationships is already an attempt at finding a lifelong partner, which is... really a personal opinion.
People go out, have short relationships / flings, one night stands without any intent other than have fun. It's fine. Let people have things.
I'm curious as to how you were able to get that idea from what I wrote.
I'm making no assumptions _about_ intent.
I'm saying whether it's a "red flag" depends _on_ intent (which is then assumed to be known, at least internally by said person(s)).
I'm making no correlation between having causal sex and the attempt to establish a long-term relationship, I don't know how I could more explicitly define those as two different goals.
Maybe if I write it in a more simplistic (albeit, less precise) way:
* Many relationships may likely a red flag in a person who's seeking long-term relationships (ie, they're trying and failing very much, they're probably not a very good partner, or has very good judgement).
* Many relationships are not a red flag in a person who's not seeking long-term relationships (they're doing their thing, and all is good, as long as you're aligned with that).
For the same reason you don't want to deal with a client who's churned through 23 other contractors before you either, or an employee who's held 23 other jobs.
They're either high-conflict, non-committal, fishing for something and not finding it, using sex as a coping mechanism/don't take the act itself seriously (won't be the last time you hear them tell you sex with strangers "means nothing;" just wait until your first big fight). There's also disease risk (mainly herpes).
Nothing about a body count that high signals stability or commitment. I'm sure plenty of people can and do change and can commit and be stable; we could be friends but they are not people I would bet the rest of my life on. The only three people (two males, one female) I know with body counts that high all got caught soliciting or banging children decades later, so my experience with this is admittedly subjective.
Because men are predisposed to prefer women who have had fewer partners when it comes to long-term relationships. (when it comes to one night stands, they don't care.) One might argue that this preference is negative, or unfair, or something else. However, this preference is both durable over time and cross-cultural.
Something existing for a long time doesn't make it fair, or even right. There are countless examples of people believing unfair and outright wrong things for centuries.
Yep, and that’s why I mentioned that the effect is “durable” rather than “morally correct.” My point is that I don’t think you’re going to get away from this preference. I’m not really addressing the moral value of it at all.
Ah I see, well I don't think we should be resigned to it. We've had male dominated societies for thousands of years, so it's going to take time. Our ability to think and move on from these primitive ideals is one of the more endearing facets of humanity.
I just worry that this is a bit similar to saying “women should no longer have a preference for taller men. We’ve evolved past the point where a man’s physical prowess matters, and women should learn to be attracted to a shorter man just as much as a taller man.” It certainly might be _nice_ for the man if his height didn’t matter, but I don’t think you’re going to really budge women’s preferences here in a meaningful way, no matter what social programs you adopt.
Depends on the origins, as far as I can tell a lot of recent occurrence the "must be 6ft tall" is socially driven by dating app use (which enables more nuanced selectivity).
For much of history (pre-industrialization) men weren't often as tall due to begin with, due to more prevalent nutrient deficits. Additionally, rather than trawling a site with thousands of men you were largely limited by your location for potential suitors, so you simply couldn't be as picky (if you had a choice at all, as women often didn't).
I generally find that people need to be much more careful when discussing these kinds of topics. People are very quick to attribute certain attributes of desirability to biology, and there are no doubt common threads amongst humanity, but there have also been enormous swings in social trends that have ignored these factors.
It's pretty clear we disagree a bit here, but I just wanted to thank you for being thoughtful and respectful in your posts. It's something I'm not always perfect about myself, and it's part of what makes HN a better community.
This strikes me as incredibly unlikely from an evolutionary psychology perspective. Or even from a perspective that acknowledges the relative complexity between whatever system you are envisioning and the simple (mostly) monogamous couple.
As I get older (nearing 60 now) I think more and more along those lines.
Simpler really is better. The hamster wheel includes career and money, but it also includes family-- sacrificing upward mobility for simplicity and longevity may often be the right choice.
I actually think OP has a very valid point and the opposition/criticisms have it too. However, I think both sides may be saying the same thing, but express it differently:
Question: "How many partners have you had?"
A- The OP side asks the "question" -> doesn't like the answer -> breakup.
B- The counterOP never bothers to ask the "question" -> doesn't like the relationship -> breakup
Meaningfully, both parties are doing the same thing. The only meaningful difference is that (A) is making Type I errors, while (B) is making Type II errors.
IMHO: The difficulty - as with most things - is in the questions and in the perspective which forms them. A healthy relationship is not about 19 year old beauty or being lucky to fuck them. It's not about objectifying them as bonuses in my life.
It is about seeing them for who they are - completely independently of me - and caring for that person, whether or not they suit me at that particular time - richer or poorer, sickness and health, etc. We need to have that compassion for others; we need others to care for us in that way; we love other people. Lovemaking is, to varying degrees at different times, an outgrowth of that - IMHO lovemaking won't last otherwise.
> Can I find someone that doesn't just say "wtf am I doing here" if times get tough for health or financial or just plain old age? I'm not sure.
IME, the answer depends on me more than on them. When Sinead O'Connor died, I listened to some songs and (while the singing is impressive) I thought the perspective is immature: The narrator makes it all about what the other person is doing; someone with experience in healty relationships realizes it's about what they themself does and perceives and feels. We get what we give.
> I think it's human nature
I wish I could ban these stylishly defeatist comments. Human nature is to hunt and gather food, be illiterate and ignorant, and die at (30?) - if you survive past childhood. Human nature really is to learn and chose your own behavior and fate.
how do people successfully get together when they're old?
Do they just become bf/gf? until they get bored or some crisis exceeds a threshold?
are people who are single later in life broken? or just in a bad situation? do they have decent maturity, with the ability to have a much more decent relationship than young people do?
You seem to be basing "luck" on sexual partners. Consider a different framing: she has had 23 or more attempts at finding a partner (and presumably you have as well). But none of those worked out. You succeeding means you're better than those 22 men before (likely also including in bed). On the other hand, your parents have no realistic partners to compare to, and their success required more luck and meant that they are less independent. You on the other hand have had the time to find yourself, your passions, and been able to find someone who independently found themselves and passions. You didn't fall for that person because you happened to go to the same high school and had a childhood crush. You fell for that person because you love who they are and what they made of themselves.
In this context, I think you are lucky. You definitely had an opportunity that your parents didn't. It's impossible to say which is better. And if we're being honest, 40 years with a person is still a significant amount of time. If you meet your partner at 40, you have another 35 to 50 years with that person. Either way that's more time than your working memory (unless you really remember a lot of your early childhood). I know the grass always seems greener on the other side, but that just shows us how we are able to frame things however we want. Choice is yours.
>But none of those worked out. You succeeding means you're better than those 22 men before (likely also including in bed).
That's a premature conclusion. You have no idea why they have 22 partners or whether the person in question will be the last, but you're basing the entirety of your argument/context off of assumptions that the 23th is 'the chosen one'.
They’re just movies… All morbid Disney fantasies of what relationships and sex are supposed to be - “luck” being the most toxic part of on-screen love. Relationships are built, not found. And as we age, and see older partners, if the right amount of work is put in, that maturity and experience translates to a better life together and better sex regardless if we’ve been together as teenagers or not.
I still don't understand why anyone cares "what number partner" they are... this reeks of old world "unclean woman" stigma. Unless someone is being dangerous and not using protection this is a non-issue, it doesn't physically matter how many partners someone has. Personally I find it more of an indication of how insecure many men are.
I am no beauty, and my wife is adding pounds. We have lots of aches and pains. But let me tell you, even 30 years later, she is beautiful, and more than anything, we make each other laugh all the time. I don't care about her body, I care about HER.
> Edit: for those that think this is just some personal issue, you should look up divorce stats by number of previous sexual partners. There is a clear rise in divorce rate per increase in partners, and at about 7 it's 50%+.
That's a small essay from a place of questionable bias making some assumptions based on partial statistics and partial statements with no stated backing.
I might have missed it but i also can't see any kind of review (peer or otherwise).
Good old times nostalgia is human nature. But less acceptable when it is for times you yourself haven't lived in. That's just "I was born too late" which is quite pathetic imho. But what does this have to do with the article? You're just talking about your love life anxieties, which I guess we all have, but it's out of place here.
I think this is unpopular because there are so many heartbreaking stories of couples that are unhappy but stay because of social pressure.
One possibility that is in line with your thoughts is that the advanced age of marriage has improved average marriage happiness, while reducing the tails of the distribution (both good and bad).
It's tiring how frequently people write off their own views or even flaws as "human nature". When the universal defining characteristic of humans is our refusal to be constrained by our natures.
Accept this view as your own or change it for yourself. Don't lay it at the feet of the rest of us.
I have a feeling not wanting the love of your life to have had sex with many others is pretty engrained in most people. Everyone? No. But I consider what is most common to be close to human nature.
I don’t understand why someone would even think about that. They are here with you now, so what if they’ve screwed around before? How does that even affect you (other than some added experience you may even profit from)
To be fair, it isn't always profit from. I've been with some higher body count partners, between the good sides, they also often have negatives, people who have broken their boundaries, triggers formed because someone did something they might not have wanted and so on. And then it happens that they may not want to do something with you because it reminds them of some asshole from the past and so on. In a casual relationship, this is fine, but its tough being in a serious relationship with such elements.
This isn’t universal to having multiple partners though as sexual abuse can occur with only a single relationship and very obviously also outside of a relationship.
>> This isn’t universal to having multiple partners though as sexual abuse can occur with only a single relationship and very obviously also outside of a relationship.
statistically, it is proven that those unfortunate people go on to be very promiscuous in life
That's a bit different, the issues with trauma from sexual abuse can lead to sexual promiscuity but it doesn't follow that having multiple sexual partners means you are suffering trauma from sexual abuse. And neither imply what an individual would be comfortable doing in a sexual relationship.
Yup! In particular judging someone on a single axis and using that to come to conclusions about what sex acts they'll do or won't do with you is a very jaundiced, objectifying way to look at another human.
Personally, I'd prefer a partner who has not been overly promiscuous, because I myself have not.
It affects me in multiple ways, for one, I'm looking for long-term stability, and while I don't think there's anything morally wrong with having many partners, it suggests there is something about that person that does not align with that.
I don't believe people change very much, I believe people think they change very much.
The most chaotic people I know are the ones who "have finally gotten to the right place in their life" all the fucking time.. They're the people who will buy a sweater and declare with a relaxed breath how now their life is finally complete and they wish for nothing further.
From that perspective, I don't believe a person with a large amount of previous partners have "finally found the right one", because, that's what they said the last N times.
Again, absolutely nothing wrong with having many partners, but it's my belief that the many-partner-people are more well suited for other many-partner-people than with me personally.
> it suggests there is something about that person that does not align with that.
I think this is insufficiently nuanced (assuming you wouldn't reject someone for going on a lot of dates and being picky). Many people have come to the conclusion that sexual chemistry is really important to a good relationship and thus try to test that as early as possible. This is quite different from sleeping around "for fun".
I've only ever been interested in long-term committed relationships and racked up a high-ish body count this way. One to two dates, clear it's not going to work out, keep looking. I've now been in a long term relationship for over a decade and imagine I'll be in it till I die, many of my friends are in similar positions.
You should read some evolutionary psychology. Taking some ideology you hold, which is very modern, and then claiming to not understand why anyone would think otherwise shows a pretty severe lack of ability to understand how others might think.
Maybe I should. However, I'm not sure how trustworthy perspectives on history are that claim humans have had a different approach to dating in the past, considering how historians have a history of manipulation when it comes to promiscuity.
Of course I can understand how people feel different about this, but it doesn't strike me any less irrational and petty: They don't seem to realise those problems come from their own insecurities, not their partners or their previous romantic encounters.
I really doubt this thing that experience with multiple people makes you better at sex. The physical aspects of sex are dead simple, and not that exciting.
Everyone but the exceptionally oblivious, will know their own body better than any partner could hope to. Better sex (beyond a low point) comes not from some esoteric physical technique, but from what goes on in people's heads, "horniness" in the article's terminology.
More likely you get worse at it as you age, and all the clever things "experience" can come up with to make things spicier in the brain-part of sex, only partially makes up for not being (as) young and not exploring the map for the first time.
The love of my life is not my property. Her or his decision entirely, I ak jot entitled to any specific behavior from any other person if that person really doesn't want to.
Hobestly, Incels are better of on Reddit. So, please, just go there.
It's not the point. You might also not want the love of your life to say, do gross things in front of you, because it puts you off on a biological level. Of course, it's her choice to do it if she wishes to, but it's also your prerogative to be put off by it.
I do not believe for a single second that you don’t feel any sort of obligation towards your spouse nor expect them to feel any obligation to you. It’s also absurd to think people don’t have expectations for their partners before they actually get married, which include behaviors.
This kind of thinking (totally detached from reality, tone policing of others) is more incel than the guy you’re replying to who I think might be a literal incel
Obligation? Sure, of course I do. It does stop so at turning myself into someone I am not, nor do I expect that from my spouse. It is a voluntary partnership, one that requires work, that is uphold as long as both parties want to. It is not a prison, and will never make my spouse feel being obliged to stay with me. The 50s are over.
I stopped smoking cigarettes because a girl said she wouldn’t date me unless I cleaned up my act. Probably saved my health and who knows, maybe my life. At the time it felt like an undue burden - even though I knew I shouldn’t smoke, stopping was painful. I did stop though, and only briefly restarted when we eventually broke up.
My point is people expecting their spouse to change for them is not exclusively masculine behavior, not always toxic, and not particularly uncommon. I don’t get why “having few to no sexual partners” is regarded as so heinous. It doesn’t mean they are some MRA wacko.
Maybe you are so passionate about sexual freedom, you should stop poo-poo’ing strangers on the internet for their sexual preferences
Some things about our nature we have to accept, we cannot change. Other things we can change a bit, but make allowances for, and some things we can change a lot. There's a cost of time and effort to change things about ourselves and our lives, and everyone has different abilities to change.
heattemp99 says >"I'm 38. I date in my age group. Which means both of us are dating people that have been sleeping with others for two decades. Each of us has been overseas with countless friends and exs. Many women have been engaged, some married, and we've all had our hearts broken. We've all gained a few lbs. My hair is starting to grey."<
You've omitted an important fact: most of you have suffered with (and possibly still do) many social diseases, a burden that will likely shorten your life and possibly do the same to all your future sex partners.
Got any "safe sex" tools for mpox yet? How about herpes, HPV or HIV? Have you even got something that can relieve the pain of an initial heavy herpes outbreak, not to mention the burning, oozing blisters in your crotch that will be there for 3 weeks?
Oh sure, you can take a vaccine for HPV, you can take antibiotics for most forms of syphilis and gonorrhea and you can take variants of acyclovir for the rest of your life for herpes, and for HIV you can take a pill for the rest of your life and hope it continues to work.
But you'll always have HPV and herpes and you'll always be able to spread it to others including any children. And herpes is always there and is associated with Alzheimer's so you can be even stupider earlier.
There's nothing prudish about accepting that there are good reasons to minimize the number of sexual partners one has - one will likely live longer. All the safe sex in the world goes out the window when the rubber breaks.
It seems unlikely that a 38 year old discussing their past sexual circles would have encountered a disease that has only recently emerged.
That said;
Anyone can get mpox. It spreads from contact with infected persons, through touch, kissing, and from infected animals, when hunting, skinning, or cooking them.
So ... yeah, look out, you might get mpox any day now.
This sort of lifestyle is one that is selfish, self-indulgent, and exploitative. Consent does not change that, and people can also be mutually exploitative, even by consent. Consent alone does not bless an act.
To love another person is to will the objective good of the other. It is sacrificial. When two people marry, they promise to love each other until death. It seems many do not take this vow seriously, as if it were just a nice, but empty thing to say, nothing more than a sentiment. Liars and frauds.
Marriage teaches people not to be selfish, it teaches people what it means to love, because if you actually do keep your vows unconditionally, as you promised, you will be forced to learn, you will need to learn, you will have no other option than to grow if you want to live a full life. In the vast majority of cases, divorce is a failure to love, it is selfish, it is childish, it is weak sauce and pathetic (divorce motivated by abuse or whatever are the statistical exception). Lost people looking for excitement or thrill or some promise of happiness they can never find like the Samaritan women at the well. There's a reason divorcees are more likely to divorce again. They do not understand or honor commitment. They don't even care about their own objective good, only some selfish, subjective imperative or impulse.
Love is sacrificial. It is a cross to bear. For most of human history, marriage was arranged or contracted out of convenience. Romance was not a precondition. If it was there, fine. If not, fine, too. (Romance can also develop, on more solid grounds, as you come to know the person, instead of being fed by wishful thinking and fantasy.) Romance is not the purpose of marriage, only typically a nudge toward it. In some cultures, the non-romantic view is still the case. I do not suggest we return to arranged marriages. However, our ancestors can provide lessons for us regardless. If we remove the relentless, selfish demand for romance, the burdening of another with the demand to make us happy, if we de-center the emotional dimension that we seem to greatly overemphasize in our culture, and come to understand the objective good that marriage is, and the objective reality of married life, we will be better positioned to receive it for what it is. It will mean something, and we will become greater because of it.
> In the early 2000s, there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural, almost accidental. Skinny celebrities confessed their love of burgers and fries in magazines; models undergoing profile interviews engaged in public consumption of pasta; leading ladies joked about how little they exercised and how much they hated it. It was all bullshit: no one looks like that without calorie restriction
No, no. That's false. I can tell you from first hand experience there are women (and presumably men too, but I've never lived with a man) who actually are thin without trying. In fact, of all the women I've dated, the only ones who even remotely cared about diets, calories, exercise etc. were the fat ones.
The difference is now fashion has changed towards that super-lean, "ripped", goes to gym look. Now actors (of both sexes) work out just before the camera goes on, get pumped and make sure they are dehydrated. It's just the Instagram fake reality on the big screen.
If you look at beautiful actors from the beginning of cinema through to the 90s they were just naturally beautiful people with a healthy amount of body fat.
My personal opinion is that there is a far higher rate of neurosis in almost all people now. There is clear evidence from when I grew up in the 90s and early 2000s that there were simply more times where people "bummed about", even very successful people. People drank more and they worried less.
IMO, Pandora's box has been opened. Now humans are hyper-aware about the possibilities to optimise their life. They know they could be working out, they could be calorie counting, they could be learning a new language, they could be sorting out their investments. But, it's impossible to forget this. Once you are infected and connected, you can't return to not taking care of things. Once you have been made aware of the problem, your excuse of ignorance is gone, and you are forever going to be making the explicit decision to not solve your problems.
Naturally, this increased neurosis, and lack of ability to let go, is a huge stop on the kind of letting go required for sex. Basically all people now prefer to be alone or in a comfortable space, sorting out their own problems in life.
> IMO, Pandora's box has been opened. Now humans are hyper-aware about the possibilities to optimise their life
Funnily enough, if you read Tocqueville's "Democracy in America", his impression of Americans back then (around 1830) was that they're very serious and solemn, because they're aware of how much of their fate is in their hands, and want to work as hard at it as they can. Actually, his point was that people in the US overestimated their agency, as given how many people were working really hard, there were realitvely few who made it into riches that everyone was after.
Why should nudity be connected to sexuality ? Have you seen grecoroman statues? Surely they have noticed the tinypenis
The movies are probably responding to the shifts of the audience. The keyword of our culture is safety. Sex is slowly becoming equated with physical abuse, and the solution to horniness is placed behind the screen.
> Over and over again, she reiterates the point that McMansions are not built to be homes; they’re built to be short-term investments.
This is more interesting, and in this movies reflect reality. Expensive new houses nowadays are wholly architecturally uninteresting. Literally none of them is memorable, and all of them can be mistaken for one another. It's really sad that this period of sky high real estate prices does not coincide with a rennaissance of architecture but with the opposite
I too have noticed how support actors and extras have all become incredibly beautiful and generic.
I’ve brushed it off more as a question of availability and less of a directional decision.
On the other hand I have lamented the loss of the ugly funny character. Even the lead in scrubs, who is supposed to be scrawny and uncool has a physique to die for. And when shown off in the show it is still the bud of a joke.
I’ve always seen that more of a “the actor wants to look good, not for the show, but for everything regarding their career outside the show”.
Probably with social media the funnel is wider than ever. Being good looking and fit and putting in lots of effort to that pays decently for thousands of people. So probably all side actors are social mediaing and doing sponsored content on the side. Or more likely the acting / being on reality tv is the side gig
This is what perfect physical+psychological health&developedness is. It's Ok to be physically imperfect but being fit is healthier if you can, also having no deficit of sex with equally fit (which means as attractive as you might dream of) partners and no serious psychological trauma unhealed - you only feel easiy containable healthy sexual desire which is more like wanting to listen to good music or tasting a great wine than like urge or need. I have been lucky to achieve this and wish everyone the same luck but luck mostly works when you do you part of the job (i.e. eat healthy, go to a gym, to a therapist and meditate right). That's the lack of the above which makes people so sexually frustrated that they experience disharmonious uncontainable sexuality which can disturbe theirs and others' comfort and cloud their reason.
> did anyone else think it odd how Inception enters the deepest level of a rich man’s subconscious and finds not a psychosexual Oedipal nightmare of staggering depravity, but… a ski patrol?
I don't think the author actually watched Inception lol
> ...there was a brief period where actresses pretended that their thinness was natural...no one looks like that without calorie restriction.
I've known three women who were naturally thin because of their metabolism. They actually had to work at maintaining bulk. I think all three spent some time as models. You can improve a homely face with makeup, but you can't fake a figure (in person).
1. The modern American media landscape reflects a changed zeitgeist, one where new (ever more impractical) heights of physical fitness are presented.
2. BUT it comes with a DECREASE of old emphasis on using it to woo sexual partners, or for hedonistic enjoyment of physical activities.
3. It is instead rooted in a kind of cultural anxiety that one must be able to fight an unspecified enemy, or else as a kind of platonic health-investment.
There is a certain aesthetic in public sculpture wherein the human body is unclothed and yet quite asexual. It can be seen in public statuary in certain areas in certain eras.
I think that this phenom is not unrelated to the subject of the article. It is a kind of glorification of "health" or "physical well-being" - but the nudity speaks to something that is far, far away from sexuality.
Platonism, the worship of ideal forms. Its also associated with 1930s fascism. It is unsurprising that the rise of modern fascism has arrived complete with its iconography.
If anyone hasn't read The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom, I'd highly recommend it. There are a few thoughtful chapters on relationships, love, marriage, sex, etc. that are worth reading.
To state the obvious, everything that's in a movie is a deliberate choice by the director. Hitchcock spoke about "playing the viewer like an organ", i.e. manipulating the audience by what is shown, what is not, what is revealed, the order of information being shared with the viewer. Sex scenes can certainly be in a movie for character development, but often are just there to make the audience horny & increase the fun factor and therefore positive experience of the movie. Calling out Nolan for his sterility in movies misses that point; his movies are ideas with stories attached, vs say Bay or Bruckheimer, whose movies are more deliberately products designed for the mass market.
Oppenheimer was horny at least. The sex scenes weren’t tremendous (except maybe for Sanskrit fetishists), but at least Nolan made an effort to show how his wandering eye translated into action.
Interesting enough, I think Oppenheimer needed slightly more sex. There's a part of the movie where he's called a womanizer, yet the movie shows him having two relations (both of them serious) plus an implied flirt with a third woman.
According to the biography the movie is based on [1] Oppenheimer "once had half a dozen lovers on the go". That is definitely not the impression I got from the movie.
People in real life not being horny is bad but frankly I really enjoy people in cinema not being horny anymore. It's so boring to watch. Watching two people bone in a movie is no more engaging than watching someone browse pornhub.
Sure, but don't make me watch one in order to get the other. Imagine if every romance movie had to have someone with superpowers in it, and then when they stopped including the pointless superpowers someone wrote a whiny article about how kids these days should want more power fantasies in their romance movies.
Modern action films show glorious HD violence on screen too, and the victims are usually men. With detailed shots of the gore for us and camera cut-aways or knock-outs for women.
I always get some semblance of body count when watching stuff like that. Even with ones like John Wick III that were modern enough to have a couple female "henchmen", or movies that have a female lead action hero or villain, still overwhelmingly gory male deaths.
I know _why_ it's done; any violent against women on screen is deemed misogyny porn. But why is it okay for us to see a man's brains blasted out on screen? Or the "shock value" castration or nut shot (which is still apparently hilarious to audiences btw, but maybe not so much the other way around).
I'm not calling for more violence against women on screen per se, but I am intrigued by their exclusion even in an environment where we're really starting to embrace strong female characters in media, but the protectionism still runs strong. It mirrors reality, I suppose.
Imo the root problem to most if not all the issues that he’s citing is time. There’s usually not enough screen time to show the minute details like that. This is why TV is so much better than the movies now. None of his criticisms would apply to TV. Stuff like The Boys is already out there.
The other big issue is sales. PG and PG13 tend to have much larger sales due to larger audiences than R rated movies
Interesting article with some good points. Unfortunately some factual mistakes ruin it a bit. Stark and Pepper Potts did have sexual chemistry shown in their dance and balcony scene in the very first movie. The fact that BMI standards changed does not at all change the fact that average waistlines and weight have been steadily climbing for over 50 years and show no signs of stopping.
Noticed this for a while and I think it makes the worlds of movies feel extremely strange and a whole dimension of peoples interactions is missing.
80s movies with the actual violence, actual stakes and actual sexuality feel like watching something in color while a modern blockbuster marvel/disneyslop movie feels like black and white. The corners have all been sanded off.
I just assumed the labido waned. After experiencing trauma, both myself and partner haven't really been into that. Add the pandemic, and it's a downer. I now have a tumour in the nethers, and that's kind of killed all opportunity. Appreciate it while you have it.
But one thing that annoys me is the thin line between perversion and respectability. And it swings drastically all over the place.
It's normal for people to want sex, fantasize etc. And quite healthy. But express that in the wrong company and you can be castigated.
As for films I barely ever see any kind of believable relationship. Better call Saul and breaking bad did well. And there are few dramas that make the right nods.
Single people make the effort, those in long term relationships not so much. I remember my partner saying something along the lines of, will you still love me when I am old and fat? I hope so. Then I got old and lost my teeth and partner looks at me and sighs. We still love each other.
> And I defy you to find a mainstream film with a moment as horny and gay as the Sexy Saxophone Solo from The Lost Boys.
It was that, but strangely Tim Cappello is not gay.
FWIW, I don't care much about screen chemistry. But friend of mine and her husband are both huge film buffs. The last one which really got her worked up watching was Watchmen in 2009. The author seems to have a point.
On the other hand, my wife likes a good love story on screen where sex is not the focus, but emotions. She's a big fan of K-Dramas, and feels like the stories would be impaired by introducing sex (which inevitably would be part of it in American drama).
The scope of this complaint seems to mainly be blockbuster films, I suppose.
I think it's an unavoidable outcome of optimization. Like when you sacrifice Cha for Str and Dex in RPGs. In games you have limited attribute points, but in real life you also have limited resources. Assign them to competing with people and you won't have them for connecting to people. There is now way around it. If I want to focus on my workouts I can't spend time trying to catch her eye contact at the gym. And she doesn't have time for that either, between actually working out and recording that for Instagram.
Outlander (Starz) is a good counterpoint, or perhaps an outlier, with rather long scenes of tender love-making. There are also scenes of sadistic torture and rape, though.
While it makes some good points, I think a lot of it depends on what content you are consuming.
I feel like there used to be a lot of family oriented shows in the past. There may have been some innuendo for the adults, but nothing really sexual, no vulgar language, etc. It seems incredibly rare to find a show like that today. Think Brady Bunch vs Modern Family.
There are plenty of shows available today that are highly sexual, but most of them have moved out of the mainstream because you can cater to the niche more than if it were for a general audience. Sex Life, Spartacus, etc has lots of sexual content. I'm not sure if Game of Thrones fits with the author's take or mine, but there are likely examples of each depending on the scene. We don't really need this content in blockbuster movies when we can get even more graphic content through these shows.
Beauty is good. Sex is good. Sexual pleasure per se is good. However, sleeping around is not. Lust is not.
Why is beauty good? Because beauty is convertible with the good. What is beautiful is good and vice versa. In this case, a physical beauty is good as it is nearer physical perfection. There are different kinds of beauty, but this is the one currently under discussion.
Why is sex good? Because it the actualization of human nature as procreative being. No one has a right to sex, of course, but the dimensions of procreation not directly involving intercourse may be realized otherwise, though also not something you can impose (procreation isn't just sex that successfully realizes its intrinsic end of new human life, but the raising of the children afterward, and we can be mother and father figures in purely spiritual ways, through adoption, or in relations with younger generations; it's why Catholic priests are called fathers, and the heads of convents mothers, for example). The unitive end (which includes bonding) of sex, which can only be understood through the lens of the complementary procreative potentials and the procreative raison d'etre of the sexes and their manifestation in human nature, is also a good of sex, and hence pleasurable.
Why is sexual pleasure good per se? Because as noted above, sex is good per se. Good things are pleasurable. Of course, this does means we can suffer from deficiencies, excesses, and disorders in this regard. We can become insensate and inert to goodness in a way that we derive little or no proportionate pleasure from the good. Depressed people are an example. We can experience excess pleasure disproportionate with the good in question. Having an orgasm eating a slice of pizza is an obvious example. We can also experience disordered pleasures, taking pleasure in acts that are depraved and evil. Rape or non-procreative sex or sadism and masochism are examples. But given the objective good of sex, it is normal for it to be pleasurable.
Why is sleeping around evil? Because it is opposed to the intrinsic "structure" and end of sex. It is intrinsically exploitative, reducing people to objects to be used for pleasure, and this destroys one's ability to respect human life and love human beings and relate to members of the opposite sex. It destroys the person doing it. Note that you don't need to sleep around to achieve the same effect. People who indulge in pornography are actually worse. At least the person sleeping around is sleeping around with people. The porn user lives in a fantasy land, locked within himself, reducing people to fleeting phantasms of sexual gratification, never relating in anyway to a human person. As disordered as sleeping around is, porn users are worse. Abstain if you can't marry. You'll live.
Why is lust evil? Lust is essentially sexual desire divorced from and opposed to reason, which is to say, human nature as rationally knowable. Human nature determines our objective good. It is our duty to recognize it and subjectivize it so that it reflects and is aligned with objective reality. Indulging a subjective that is at odds with the objective is evil. Appropriate strong sexual attraction or desire toward a spouse is not what I have in mind, only disproportionate or disordered sexual desire. One of the effects of lust is that it blinds the mind. The object of sexual desire is reduced to an object of selfish sexual gratification, and nothing besides that object is perceived. It dulls the wits. When we speak of chastity, we mean sexual restraint and purity of intention. It is a matter of discipline and self-control. It is only through chastity that sexuality can be expressed in a healthy and morally licit manner.
Love is the willing of the good of someone. Thus, to love yourself is to will your own objective good. To love another is to will their objective good. Since we are social animals, it is bad for us to harm or exploit or will evil on another person. Doing evil destroys the evil doer.
Our age is an age obsessed with sex, and yet also an age that is full of sexual disorder and impotence and pornography and loneliness and selfishness. This is not an accident. Sexual immorality destroys a society, making a man a slave of his passions and incidentally someone who is easy to control.
