Mike Bloomberg: “Technology is the opposite of sex. Even when it’s great, it’s terrible.”
Why do most American young men now think otherwise?
IM Doc sent this report recently:
One thing that gets little air time – but may have everything to do with the fertility rates.
I do not mean to be forward. But this is a serious issue.
Twice today.
Constantly all the time.
Men – 20s and 30s – lots of them – have no clue how to engage women in intercourse. It literally blows me away. We are talking the basic mechanics of pleasing a woman. They are so inept that they have tried a time or two – been total disasters – and never want to again. And then become neurotic because of it.
I have been doing this career for 35 years – and this has never happened before to this level the last 5 years or so. I mean it is absolutely overwhelming.
Like, whatever happened to high school – and all the experimentation, locker room talk, 1st base, home run, parked cars in the forest, etc. I had more experience in one month than these guys have had in their life by age 29. There are literally days I feel like a sex therapist. But most important – WHERE ARE THEIR FATHERS?
IM Doc is 100% correct in saying that there is a broader societal pattern of young men not being very keen about sex. But the root causes are more pervasive than bad encounters. And fresh UN study found that the reason for the worldwide decline in fertility, as in baby-making, is the cost of raising offspring.1 So male sexual reticence is not a significant driver.
From a January 2025 New York Post story, Americans are saying no to sex like never before — with young men leading the depressing trend:
Rates of sexlessness are climbing from coast to coast among adults ages 22 to 34, statistics plucked from the newly unsheathed National Survey of Family Growth showed — with 10 percent of young males and 7 percent of their female counterparts saying they’re still virgins.
A whopping 24% of males 22-34 had not had sex in 2022-2023 — up from 9% in 2013-15. For females, the number was 13%, up from 8%.
And when asked if they’d had sex in the last three months, 35% of men said no — another big jump from 20%. Women didn’t fare much better, with 31% concurring this time around, up from 21%.
Narrowing the focus to discover when these trends began, the experts said that much of the jump occurred between 2019 and 2022 — the same time as the pandemic.
The article argued that not being married had a big role in these men not getting much whoopie, since marriage rates are down. Single people have sex less often than their married peers. Perhaps my anecdata from New York City is biased, but this appears to be a post-HIV era pattern. I heard from therapist friends and others with decent sized samples that it was common for married couples to have little sex, on the order of once a month or even every other month. My assumption was it was the female partner withholding, consciously or not, as a result of resentment engendered by accumulated insensitivities.
So among the possible contributing factors are greater use of porn during the pandemic, making it harder to be aroused by real world partners, getting badly out of practice with flirting and other seduction communication, which would feed into anxiety and poor communication about sex, and antidepressants.
IM Doc may disagree vehemently when he sees this, but this pattern strikes me at least in part a libido issue. To put it bluntly, in my youth, the average man was hornier than the average woman. Weirdly, that no longer seems to be the case.
My sample from female friends and working in male-dominated workplaces confirms the stereotype. So did my “too much information” gay men friends. One went (this in the early 2000s) on about the trouble he was having with a new lover who wanted sex three times a day when all he wanted was three times a week. He still quipped, “if they [straights] knew how much sex we are getting, they’d kill us all.” His gay bathhouse-frequenting friends took it upon themselves to inform that this fellow was lust-deficient by their standards, having had only about 600 partners by his early 40s.
I have known some high libido older men and oddly a few women too. They absolutely had to get laid very often or they would engage in destructive behavior like drinking way too much.
So this level of men giving up on or reticent about sex with live partners suggests that lower prevailing sex drives compared to the old normal is at least a part of the picture. Otherwise, the very strong itch of their horniness would compel them to keep trying. Or alternatively, they find porn to be more consistently satisfying.
Tom Greene, in Why Young Men Lost Interest in Having Sex, lends some support to this thesis:
If the 1960’s ushered in the sexual revolution, the 2020’s are ushering in the asexual revolution. In fact, there’s an entirely new sexual identification known as “Ace”. It’s for people who find all forms of sex repulsive.
So, what’s causing this asexual revolution? Could it be that young men ages 18-29 are simply struggling to find a mate? Unfortunately it’s not that simple. 57% of single adults aren’t even looking for a relationship-or even casual dates. Only 13% are in a committed relationship.
There is simply a lack of interest in pursuing an intimate relationship today. A recent survey suggests the sexual activity of Americans stands at a 30 year low. The number of adults age 18-30 having sex each year is worse. About 28% report having no sex in the prior year…
For women, the dating apps are overwhelming. There is an oversupply of very available and very odd men….
The simple truth is that dating apps are littered with naked guys. Most are carefully posing in cringe-worthy positions. As if somehow presenting your “tools” for examination makes you more desirable for that 30-minute Starbucks meetup. It’s enough to make you want to give up on the future of the human race….
Debby Herbenick is a professor at the Indiana University School of Public Health–Bloomington, She studies human sexuality. She recently completed a study examining the decline in all forms of sexual activities. There is no easy answer to why this trend is occurring. It’s likely a myriad of causes. She opines that sex looks very different today than it did in the 1960’s.
Sex for some has become, well, weird. As a likely result of the rapid increase in on-line pornography, many women report an increase in rough sex. That is, sex that involves some form of intentional pain or abuse. One study found that 58% of women college students had been choked or partially asphyxiated during sex. And you thought the world couldn’t get any weirder than a shirtless guy on Tinder carrying a long- handle axe. But it can. Hold my beer….
Today’s porn normalizes a variety of very risky behaviors and fantasies that are completely unrealistic and often violent. Because, sure, it’s totally normal for these two to show up at your door in bikinis to fix your cable. That’s a typical pornography story line.
Greene’s theory is porn has made sex with real people not very stimulating:
By the time young men are sexually active, they’ve spent years watching professionals engage in outlandish sex acts in high-definition, on-demand Porn. As a result, young men have lost all curiosity. Sex is no longer mysterious. When they finally engage in a sexual relationship it pales in comparison to the porn version. It’s the equivalent of the Daytona 500 at 35 mph with turn signals for lane changes. It’s, frankly, very boring to them.
In addition, 26% of men under 40 have erectile disfunction, which is not, contra Victorians, the result of all that masturbating. Work from home is likely contributing. McKinsey in its heyday was rampant with intra-office shaggging and quite a few marriages, and not all that much partners with secretaries but among the consultants.
Oddly, while web searches show that endocrine disruptors can reduce libido, the studies find that the effect is more pronounced in women. And it now appears that overall, young women are more randy than young men. So this issue does not appear to have all that much explanatory power.
I wonder if there are deeper causes. Yours truly has pointed out that women’s expectations for relationships in the brave new world of reproductive control and much better access to highly-paid work had moved well ahead of men’s. For instance, they expected men to shoulder more of the burden of house and child care when at least in the US, the traditional home duties did not change much.
In addition, starting in the 1980s, women were urged to become sex positive, as in embrace their urges and enjoy sex. That means “expect to enjoy sex.” In the old normal, the deal was that women provided sex to men in return for economic security. One of my women friends (who is very, erm, experienced) is totally serious in her insistence that women should always be paid to have sex, reflecting how often “sex” is defined as the man gets his orgasm, whether you get yours is subject to question.
So if datable young women now expect to be pleasured well, men face much more pressure than before, not just getting and keeping an erection, but also servicing his partner well. Is this just too intimidating? Girl locker room talk confirms that men who prove to be excellent lovers often have trouble performing on their first time together. How many men admit to each other that that is far from uncommon?
And I have to take issue with the tacit assumption in IM Doc’s opener, that men are a good source of information about how to gratify women. They are the only source of information that men typically have, and no doubt seasoned men can give clues on clitorises, G-spots, and perhaps even tongue techniques. But the best source for how to pleasure a woman is a particular woman about her particular appetites. Admittedly, good dancers can have a leg up here (pun not intended) because they have to keep focused on their partner and absorb non-verbal signals. But a personal proof of the primacy of communication with your partner: I have found first time sex with gay men2 on average to be markedly better than with straight men. Why? Aside from (per above), the typical gay man has had a lot more sex than his straight counterpart, they know they don’t know much about what women want physically. They ask and take guidance, something I found rare with heterosexual men.
_____
1 Fron BBC
UNFPA surveyed 14,000 people in 14 countries about their fertility intentions. One in five said they haven’t had or expect they won’t have their desired number of children.
The countries surveyed – South Korea, Thailand, Italy, Hungary, Germany, Sweden, Brazil, Mexico, US, India, Indonesia, Morocco, South Africa, and Nigeria – account for a third of the global population.
They are a mix of low, middle and high-income countries and those with low and high fertility. UNFPA surveyed young adults and those past their reproductive years.
“The world has begun an unprecedented decline in fertility rates,” says Dr Natalia Kanem, head of UNFPA.
“Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis,” she says…
In all countries, 39% of people said financial limitations prevented them from having a child.
The highest response was in Korea (58%), the lowest in Sweden (19%).In total, only 12% of people cited infertility – or difficulty conceiving – as a reason for not having the number of children they wanted to. But that figure was higher in countries including Thailand (19%), the US (16%), South Africa (15%), Nigeria (14%) and India (13%).
The article also argued that an overreaction to earlier messaging about overpopulation was in play. I know young couples who have serious reservations about having children, both due to environmental concerns and doubts whether they will have satisfying lives.
Even when I was young, long before concerns about planetary degradation and resource limits became common, I thought having children was one of the cruelest things that people do. Every major world religion has as a major purpose reconciling believers to the inevitability of suffering. If there is such a thing as reincarnation, there must be planes of existence under better management.
2 Needless to say, sex with gay men is usually a one-off.
This is ultimately another piece of a larger puzzle – we are forgetting how to connect as humans.
As we become more solitary and self-centered (I mean this as it is stated, we are constantly being told ourselves is the most important thing), this is bound to happen.
Positive sex takes empathy and communication. Sure you can “have sex” easy enough, but satisfying, or even gratifying, sex does take effort when you first jump in bed with someone.
My wife is considering going back to school to get a masters and become a sex therapist, maybe I should tell her there is a high demand 😂
I’m sure she’s going to run into the fact that all the SSRIs and other drugs are lowering sex drive.
Yes, we are forgetting how to connect as humans. Very much so. Social media is just accelerating this trend.
I also think our physical and emotional health, diet particularly, has a lot to do with it. Our levels of consumption nutritionally are declining, year-on-year – mainly because the nutritional levels of the foods are declining because of newer agricultural methods and increasing use of chemicals in the food chain. There is plenty of data showing reductions in male sperm count.
Add this to overall higher levels of stress as people struggle to survive on less, and there is far less ‘space’ for libido to flourish.
Everything I ever see from an academic standpoint focuses on the men and what we are doing or not doing. I never see anything addressing the drastic changes in expectations from women in dating, particularly in the early stages. Many men openly say that pursuing women simply isn’t worth the effort anymore.
Please note this started with IM Doc discussing men who had gotten women in bed and had bad encounters.
So the issue at hand is past the dating phase. This is men who got women in bed and something happened that made them recoil.
Did the COVID make everyone gay?
I did not refer to this article, since it’s a very non-random sample. The author, with great difficulty, found ~30 men who were willing to discuss their sex lives and appetites. Note that this is already off point for the topic at hand, since these men ARE getting laid regularly while the post is about men who aren’t, and it also included a fair number of gay respondents, where the matter at hand is men having bad or no experiences with women. March 2025, The truth about young men and sex: ‘We go along with things we’re uncomfortable with’, in the Guardian:
Intimate subject so not using my usual handle. Looking at those percentages in the post, I can’t help but conjecture that it’s something environmental. That said, we hang out with some straight couples in their 20’s and they are all into watching “amateur” (and sometimes gay male) porn together, something that my spouse finds particularly off putting and ugly. The porn scenarios haven’t really changed since the days of VHS – it’s nearly always the same sequence of events, and I would think that a woman would have to be familiar with it (and give guidance) for a young man to visualize that he was hitting the obligatory steps correctly or otherwise get very discouraged. Especially since the foreplay 90% of the time revolves around the woman exciting herself by pleasuring the man.
It is more of an effort for a man, however, to find a date. It can take hours of searching, multiple nights going to bars/events, maybe asking several out for the extroverted or even days, for the introverted, to get up the courage to. There is a lot of thought and energy that overwhelms at times. Women are more like “fate” will come to me. If for some reason the encounter doesn’t live up, it could be sexual or not, it lessens the amount of time one wants to spend as they go. It is nothing new granted but meeting new people is much more difficult today.
y’all know about my current lack of female companionship, i assume, since i refer to it so often.
so i read this and immediately thought:”well, all you randy ladies(!!!), i’m here to help…cometh the hour, cometh the man, and all…”.
and similarly to that repeated assertion in this article(that its really women thinking about sex all the time), my future daughter in law keeps insisting that single females outnumber single males in this place by about 10 to 1…and every time she says that, i’m like, “well, where the hell are they?”
they’re in the bars, of course.
hence my own disadvantages come calling…crippled, bad teeth, poor as dirt… and apparently, Widower is now a negative thing(DIL insists that in my case, its that my late wife was a local saint…so bumpin uglies with her weird widower is somehow sacrilege…i am unsure about all that,lol)
i am also 55 and a lifelong outsider…cant make small talk to save my life.
and this is not the first article that talks about how the rules have changed…i never really learned the rules of courtship in my youth, and just went with being my weird self, with a heavy dose of sincere chivalry tossed in.
rarely worked, unless i had a Les Paul strapped to me.
and my inclination, these days is the same…i am a lovable weirdo, and not gonna hide it, but i am also kind and forthright and almost insanely loyal(see: wife’s cancer adventure).
i speak of these things with DIL…she feels sorry for me, i think, and has tried to set me up.
but like you said, it can be more difficult for men…
cousin the manwhore says” just tell em to get nekkid and into the pool”…which “works”, after a fashion, for him(married 4 times, etc)…but that aint me.
i suspect, too, that poverty is a definite factor.
…and i have no idea what to do about that.
so, feeling like a stalker, i attempt to be crossing the road to check for eggs every weekday around 11:30, so that that cute ups driver has an opportunity to stop and talk.
I coach and referee youth basketball, mostly middle school and also live very close to a large middle/high school that I occasionally volunteer at for events. Im in the age range of most of the parents and many of them say their sons openly talk about how theyll never pursue a committed relationship because they find most of their female counterparts obnoxious and combative. Most cite the negativity against men and boys they see on social media, negative experiences in school and what they feel are impossibly high standards largely tied to money and looks. I personally do not spend much time on apps but some of the clips I have been shown are seriously disturbing, anti-hetero male rhetoric that I cant even understand what the source is. Presumably none of these boys are sexually active or ever have been so I would find it hard to believe a bad kiss or something would spark all of this. IMO social media and late stage capitalism are having the biggest negative effects, it simply costs too much for most young men to pay for the types of dates that have been traditionally expected. And with social media you have people of all ages interacting in ways they never did in the past, youve got men and boys of all ages essentially comparing notes and drawing the conclusion that a relationship with the average woman is a juice not worth the squeeze.
“it simply costs too much for most young men to pay for the types of dates that have been traditionally expected”
this is what obtains in my stunted efforts, fer sho.
takes money to go hang around a bar…and sitting there alone, well…the cheap draft beer keeps flowing…and then yer talkin about organic ag, or the large structure of the universe, or something, and then they kick you out.
(i do avoid politics and religion)
a man alone is just not likely to engage with a woman in a bar, unless he’s buying drinks and flashing a bunch of cash…..and even then, its likely to be shallow(which i do not object to, at this point,lol).
i met my late wife at a frelling nursing home, ffs.
totally accidental.
long before meetoo, so i could flirt rather unrestrictedly…and then she accidentally on purpose fell on my lap.
so i asked her out…colluded with mom and stepdad to have a xmas party so i could take her somewheres.
and she kinda just never left,lol.
how does one engineer something like that, these days?
Going anonymous for this. I am one of these, and it started long ago for me so it’s not a new thing, although I can see a number of reasons why it might be more prevalent now.
In my case, my first sexual relationship set the pattern. My girlfriend at the time combined a strong sex drive with a number of quite conflicted feelings about the act due to strong religious views. So she would be very interested for a while, then revert to lectures on how awful it was and how we shouldn’t be doing it, and then we’d go through the cycle all over again. (The lectures and mixed feelings never seemed to diminish her sex drive in later cycles, and in fact almost seemed to fuel it at times). She also had a lot of nerves and tension, which meant the act was physically painful for her and she would stop me before we got going. She never stopped wanting to try, but it never got any better – eventually she was unconsciously tensing up so much that she was physically preventing me even as she encouraged me to continue. We found other ways, but it would always begin this way and I ended up dreading the whole experience, with predictable consequences for my mood.
At this stage the rest of the relationship wasn’t really working any better than the sex was, and because it was my first it took me way longer than I should have to work up the nerve to break it off. I also felt obligated to continue and didn’t really feel able to say: this is not working for me, we need to stop. (Most people get lots of things wrong in their first relationship).
My next relationship worked better initially, but after the initial excitement wore off, my previous bad experience resurfaced in the form of occasional performance problems. My new girlfriend did not take it well at all, assumed it meant I was ambivalent about the relationship and not telling her, and ended up quoting it as a reason to break up with me soon afterward.
By this point the pattern was set, and although I did subsequently have better/more supportive relationships, I was never able to see the act as anything other than a perilous obstacle course to be negotiated. Even when it was successful, my dominant emotion afterward was relief. Because it was always something I had to force myself to do, eventually I just… stopped doing it. There is nothing physically wrong with me, but by now the act has become so bound up with unpleasant emotions and negative experiences that it’s impossible to untangle them.
All of this happened without any malicious intent on anybody’s part, just people not knowing what they were doing, getting some things wrong, and the cumulative effects from that. I can only imagine how much worse things are today, with everybody primed with a whole lot of wrong or outright harmful expectations from porn.
At least on the issue of men being clueless about how to please women, there’s a useful resource: https://www.omgyes.com/join
What’s the difference between a golf ball and the G-spot?
Most men will actually LOOK for the golf ball.
Then octopuses should do the trick since men don’t have fotoreceptors on their fingertips…
I found that the answer was right at my fingertips. Visualize using that familiar Come Here motion while also engaging the thumb and other digits at whim.
Then again, I came of age decades ago so picking up on non-verbal cues was natural. Some Gestalt!
Did you know Hokusai, the Japanese woodblock artist, most famously known for “The Great Wave Off Kanagawa” was also a perverted artist who helped popularize what we would call “tentacle porn” today? Seriously. Another popular woodblock of Hokusai is “The Dream of the Fisherman’s Wife,” which depicts a young woman deriving sexual pleasure from an octopus. Avert your eyes. In the next three paragraphs, I discuss my sexual and pornographic preferences.
I am using my standard handle, and I hope a brief discussion of how complex my sexuality is appropriate fare for NC. Hokusai knew a thing or two about human sexuality. Tentacle porn does not turn me on, but I do understand the appeal because I (a man) hate seeing or being reminded of male sexuality in porn. It took me years to realize that I dislike 99.5% of porn and spending the time to find the remaining 0.5% is a waste of time.
In my (probably unfair) opinion, I dislike encountering women in real life and actresses in porn who essentially say, “Look at me! I am an attractive woman. The whole world loves attractive women. I am so special because I look sexy, and I need to frequently share this with the world.” To me, there is something seriously unsexy about a porn actress (or a celebrity) who looks the way she does because of hair stylists, makeup artists, camera technicians et al. Isn’t beauty supposed to be endowed by nature or [your favorite celestial deity] for only a select few and enjoyed by, say, a hundred people? But that’s not how things work today because there is intense social pressure to become attractive for the whole world to see.
With all that said, I hate being reminded of male sexuality and the “proper” way men are supposed to act in sexual and romantic situations. I also hate “that porn look” which I associate with superficial women. So, of all the amounts of porn I have looked at (and now deleted because I recognized my former addiction to porn), what kind of porn did I actually keep around? Pretty vanilla hentai. All images, never videos. I find it far more acceptable that an artist, perhaps even a man, drew some erotic art that was intended to arouse me and conveniently doesn’t have real men or superficial women that might turn me off.
Lower status males are supposed to have low libido. Ask a primatologist
Is telling men generally that they engage in “toxic masculinity” lowering their status? That would seem to be the intent. Probably does not work on the intended targets but might affect the rest to some degree.
Trashtalking differentiates men efficiently – quite contrary to the literal or public intent indeed, but informatively for the mating purpose (?!)
I think this is the sweet spot!
1) Socioeconomically men are being reduced/marginalized because they were the top wage earners 30 years ago. In our, now, Neoliberal order anyone making “top” wages who are not part of the chosen elite class are making too much money.
2) The “Liberal” paradigm is that “toxic masculinity” is everywhere and has broken men and men should be ashamed of themselves and should just go away if they can’t fix themselves.
Should we be surprised young men who have no control over #1 and are just broadly painted by #2 don’t start to internalize a “Low Status” and “Low Libido” reality.
And to IM Doc, these same men are so defeated and lost before they even get into bed with a partner it should be no surprise that some freak out. And I mean this from the perspective of how polarizing the world has become. #1 has been an ever-wrenching issues since at least the 1980’s, but #2 has become so intense.
A friend of mine’s wife has a running joke which seem fitting in most liberal circles… when she see’s a man with a “jacked-up”, mudded-up truck she wants to ask the guy, “how small is “it” really?”
You nailed it right here, Yves.
I think we need to get to the elephant in the room. Past generations were probably lying about how much sex they had, especially the guys, of course. But, women, too.
Guys wanting to protect their pride, women wanting to seem like dutiful wives/partners.
I think current generations have gotten more comfortable being honest about themselves.
I’ll throw in another couple of ideas. Parenting expectations are much higher these days, which means more stressed out parents, and less horny-ness.
Also, alcohol consumption is down. Marijuana and other drugs are much more prevalent, pretty much all of them squash arousal. Obviously, alcohol famously boosts desire while decreasing performance. So, perhaps there’s less of the bad, drunken sex going on?
Cannabis squashes arousal? I think you’re putting the wrong stuff in your pipe!
Agreed, lol.
Living in the era of the ten second buzz (read “distraction”) is likely to be contributing to reduced libido. N=1, this man is less likely to become aroused or maintain arousal if anxious, stressed, and depressed.
That men are not responding to nature’s number one instinctual marching order is a worrying signal.
Disconnection, living unembodied, seems to me to be a key.
I will tell you my high libido roomies were getting laid pretty much every night (nearly always with different men) and the few nights they didn’t, they drank, one to the point of being shitfaced, the other consuming a full bottle of wine, which she was able to handle.
Many New Age groups had as a significant draw the readily available sex among the members (est, Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh). So if you wanted to have a lot of sex, there were organizations willing to accommodate.
I have to agree, sex is the top thing people lie about. Very few men will say “It took three drunken attempts to even achieve penetration with my first girl, after couple of repeats we broke off (she never had orgasm), the second girl I married, but she didn’t seem to enjoy sex either, so after few years and at 25 I had sex 2/3 times per year with her, which means I technically check the box in this questionnaire, but if back then I could instead masturbate to infinite number of videos of hot women, I definitely would.”
Not enough sex please, we’re British.
Please be gentle, it’s my first time…attempting a youtube ‘clip’, fumbling in the dark:
https://www.youtube.com/clip/Ugkx0IUJH28Iykja6Kih5Op6xXQZn-9Y5chC
If, as I suspect, I fail to ‘rise to the occasion’ please use the link below, from 04:25 :
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ctEo1WPxCqc&ab_channel=JohnnyCassettes
The inimitable John Betjeman with a lesson for most of us. On the other hand, Warhol declared: “The most exciting thing is not doing it. If you fall in love with someone and never do it it’s much more exciting.” Further, if “virtue” still means NOT doing it: “Woman’s virtue is man’s greatest invention” may still apply and go a long way explaining why the men keep their pants on? Confusing. Or perhaps the naked men consider ‘virtual woman to be man’s greatest invention’? More confusing. And so the women still “walk by, dressed up for each other”. Sigh. What is true is neither Incubus nor Succubus will grant you any grandchildren.
I notice that you use the word “flirt.” USonians know how to flirt? When does it happen? Is it one of those once-in-a-seven-year phenomena like the time that Mr. Spock went into pon farr, irresistible Vulcan estrus?
With regard to the phenomenon of the low wattage of U.S. relationships and the many, many tensions, I like to watch Shoe0nHead. I consider her to be the lefty Joe Rogan that liberals would never want to acknowledge.
An episode on the problems with men that has garnered millions of views:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rQv8VuLpKN4
Thanks for the link. I can’t say I disagree with very much of what Shoe0nHead said.
My biggest quibble, and this isn’t unique to Shoe0nHead, is that she and a lot of the commenter posts she presents frequently use the word Left. We really don’t have a Left in the US. We have Liberals, but very few actual Leftists. And as she describes, most of the issues facing young men are really only solvable by a Leftist agenda. American Liberals have no interest in a real Leftist agenda because they would negatively impact their donor/patron class.
In defense of the average American Liberal… they don’t even understand that there is a difference between being a Liberal and a Leftist and they’ve been coned into supporting the Liberal agenda over a Leftist agenda.
thanks for this comment Adam1 — I remember having a similar response to this video when it was shared with me last year. This video and MANY OTHER articles / videos / tv shows / etc. who always seem to feel some need to pre-defend themselves against being seen as “leftist” — just for advocating the things that the actual left has actually worked and/or advocated for over the past 100+ years. Similar experiences in person with younger friends during Occupy, some women self-defined radicals, who often qualified feminist statements with, “I mean I hate feminists…” while short-handing for “white liberal feminists” and we would sometimes quibble over these qualifiers. Having come up in the 80s/90s it saddens me that political resistance movements have slipped and fractured to such a point that the very people pushing movement issues forward feel the need to socially distance themselves from being “seen” as part of the centrist/right conception of ‘the movement’.
To be honest I never really understood the difference until about 6 or 8 years ago. It was one of our English contributors here who explained the evolution of being a Liberal in the UK. It all made sense after that. I think it was Rev Kev, but it was so long ago I could be mistaken.
From his post it became clear that as the British Empire grew and (absconded) wealth came pouring into England there were all these newly and extremely wealthy people who were not of the traditional landed peer class. That didn’t mean these people of NEW wealth didn’t feel that they should be denied the power and status that they thought they should have been given with their “new” wealth. Those in Parliament who supported such views were called Liberals. America was founded as a Liberal democracy and therefore such peerage and noble titles are not constitutionally recognized.
So even today, elite American Liberals are typically those who espouse equality and equal treatment… so long as we do not discuss disrupting the existing power and wealth structure that are in place, outside of minor tweaks (major tweaks accepted if it avoids a full-blown revolution and/or the guillotine).
Your average Liberal/Liberal leaning American voter doesn’t even realize there is a different paradigm option that says, “screw the elite, lets build the country the 99% need”. Politically, that option is never offered nor allowed to be offered.
Yet, in 2016 Donald Trump won almost every county in NYS that Bernie Sanders won in the “Democratic” Primary and NY is a closed primary state, so it wasn’t Republicans voting for Bernie.
Once I internalized the difference, I made a point of not calling myself a liberal!
I am ALL for everyone being treated fairly and with respect and with dignity, but how is it OK for wealth and economic rents to accrue to such a small circle of people which tangentially impacts all of those people who are not rich?
I want to add one caveat here as an American historian: while many Consensus scholars in the 1950s asserted that the US was “born” a liberal society with the arrival of the Mayflower, by the late 1960s and late 1970s, this was no longer widely accepted — instead, scholars focused on what came to be called the (small ‘r’) republican synthesis, explicated by historians like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund Morgan, who emphasized the communitarian, commonwealth thought of the colonists, descending from both the Italian Renaissance and the Whig tradition in Britain and Ireland (and prior to the Consensus historians, there were the original Progressive historians, like Charles and Mary Beard, who — gasp! — though to talk about things like the economic factors influencing the US Constitution, etc.)
This debate doesn’t really end in American historiography; there are still broadly more “liberal” or “republican” historians (ditto “progressive”).
One downside of the (I think teleological) view of guys like Louis Hartz that we were liberal ab initio, is that this caused people to ignore the genuinely pre-modern, quasi-medieval aspects of 17th c. America (e.g. the Puritans thought there were mermaids in Casco Bay, and unicorns in the Hudson Valley. Alchemy was still a thing. Swords and pikes were probably more militarily important in Native-English warfare than guns.)
I do think this has practical import. We shouldn’t concede too much to liberalism. The Puritans weren’t liberals. They just weren’t. They forbade excessive profits by law. The Founders were obsessed with the common good, res publicae. We only get liberalism after the Civil War.
Also, on the subject at hand — dating is expensive. Extremely so. With rents as they are, privacy is low. Meals, bars, etc., are very dear, even compared to 20 years ago.
And dating sites, like most social media, are hellscapes.
And then, if you do have kids — raising children in the US is extremely expensive.
I think material factors are important here.
I should add, any frustration — for which I certainly do apologize –that appears in my Puritan paragraph (last one) is directed at other interlocutors not present on this blog.
One person’s flirting stateside is another’s stalking ick, followed by the inevitable HR struggle session or termination. Guys in office environments over the past few decades have said they provide the following advice: never be alone in an office with a gal, never hug even if offered, only shake hands when offered.
One sign of hope: maybe all the video meetings like zoom et al with absence of in-person human contact could make the heart grow fonder. Humans have been doing it since time immemorial.
I’m thankful to have been a teen in the ‘70s and 20s in the ‘80s.
You said it, Rip!
I feel I was born too late, I think about 10 years earlier would have been crazy good, being a teen in the late 60s and boning my way through the 70s and 80s.
The only problem I see porn today causing (aside from the violent BS that Max Hardcore started) is the fact they are all so fake/plastic, shaved and child-like. I’ll take the Golden Age any day – real women with real bodies and natural hair.
My wife (Millennial, Russian) and I (Gen-X, American) had a long conversation about this. We know so many young people around the world who are not having sex, both men and women. Two potential causes not discussed above:
– Millennials have a lot of social signaling requirements, indicating what they believe and who they are for and against. I think this invades relationships more than in the past, and it’s exhausting. Walking on eggshells while constantly feeling judged is not conducive to feelings of lust.
– Millennials have to work harder just to survive. No matter where you live, the rent is too damn high. In the US add student loans and medical insurance. My wife thinks young people are just too tired at the end of the day to focus much energy on sex. Easier to veg on your phone and then go to sleep.
Agree this is part of it. Gen X (me) and Boomers also didn’t have as many options for vegging out in the simulacrum. We got bored and went out to find stuff to do and that involved getting together with others. And getting it on with others.
I think you’re on to something here. Back in my salad days, people would go out to bars and chat up other people, which sometimes led to intimacy. That doesn’t seem to happen as much today, but I may be wrong since I’ve been out of the dating pool for a couple decades. But today, it seems to me at least that people do not go out and talk to strangers as much, and if you try to, you might get labeled as a stalker or predator. The chit chat happens via app online where all the likes/dislikes and worldviews are discussed before the actual meeting.
And during those salad days, we all worked blue collar jobs, could afford to live in a downtown urban environment with lots of entertainment nearby, and I at least chose to spend the majority of my income on said entertainment. I could make all I needed for the month’s rent and bills in a week or ten days – the rest was gravy. Not so anymore.
As a child growing up during the sexual revolution, it seemed everything was oriented towards sex, and why weren’t you getting any, young man?
Movies, TV shows & commercials and print media pushed making whoopie so hard on us-I couldn’t wait to be all grown up, but just as I hit my 20’s AIDS showed up and it was game so over.
To watch porn before the internet, one had to go to a seedy joint where you inserted 2 bits into the machine ensconced in a dank booth. To be seen by somebody you knew going into such an establishment, word might get around.
Now porn is a click away, the ‘textual revolution’ of here and now.
Sexual revolution meets hustle economy.
Maybe libido is a victim of our habit of looking at everything as a transaction.
Wow. Today’s world sounds different from the 70s and 80s. I’m about 60 yrs old, male, have had 2 children (who are 25 to 33 one male one female). I feel open to “bi” sexuality personally but have been married since the children arrived (in an exclusive hetero relationship for 35 years). At some point maybe 10 or 15 years ago my partner and I started having sex once a week. I wouldn’t mind more often but i guess i should consider myself fortunate.
I’ve lived in a variety of settings. I’ve gotta run and will come back later.
I’d say the key is not being socially isolated.
““Most people surveyed want two or more children. Fertility rates are falling in large part because many feel unable to create the families they want. And that is the real crisis,” she says…”
Unfortunately the capitalist society is all about isolation alienation
There is more information about sex available to young people than it ever was. Even the standard unrealistic pron is more informative than what your peers, who themselves most probably didn’t know anything about it and were just inventing things, could tell you. Not to mention all the how-to videos specifically filmed to show how more realistic sex should be done. So it’s really about what any one man chooses to watch and learn.
And while it’s hard to know how the real sex was two hundredths years ago, I would bet today’s average young man is better at it, at least from the how-to-pleasure-woman angle. Of course women’s expectations went up too, so what would make you Casanova in 1800, may be just meh today.
I have not seen contemporary porn, but the porn of my youth did not show men bothering to pleasure women. They got orgasms merely from vaginal intercourse. In the real world, studies suggest only 18% to 25% of women will orgasm from vaginal sex alone.
Porn is about male gratification, so why would it have useful information about how to arouse women? As the babes in bikinis picture above indicates, the default porn plot is of super hot, already very horny women eager to get laid.
Having done some, ahem, extensive research here I would judge contemporary pron to be boring. There is no fun, no joy, no laughter, a definite streak of trying to humiliate the woman and the sex acts are for the benefit of the cameras and not the people. If this is what you grow up with, then it is seriously going to mess with how you think sex should go down (no pun intended) and at the end of the day there is little male gratification to be had which could make the whole idea of sex as no big deal and having sex itself as the equivalent of having a dump.
Yves made a point about good communication (with partner) leading to good outcomes. I fully agree. I also find it stimulating. But learning from a video requires less courage and less effort so becomes the easier path.
Where are you going now my love
Where will you be tomorrow
Will you bring me happiness
Will you bring me sorrow
The questions of a thousand dreams
What you do and what you see
Lover, can you talk
To me
Carry On, CSN&Y
I guess it’s then matter of personal experiences. As far as I can remember, the locker room stories weren’t much different from pron plots. Which makes sense, because when cameras and videos became more available, the guys who started making pron weren’t inventing totally new fantasies and selling them to virgins. They just made into movies the stories everyone was already telling.
Even male geared pron usually has the women orgasm, there may be some cunnilingus, you are shown what to stick where exactly (at first attempt and without prior knowledge women can be confusing down there), etc. I’m not arguing standard pron makes anyone super lover, just that relative to not ever seeing intercourse and just relying on what older cousin boasted about after having one beer, watching pron on balance adds more information than misinformation.
And more importantly, there is tons of information on how to pleasure woman, even in the pron format, one just has to look. Of course if man doesn’t bother to look for it he probably doesn’t care, but then he wouldn’t care fifty or hundreds years ago either.
As I said, my porn sampling is now >30 years stale. However, I saw anal sex, regularly one man with more than one woman, and not a single instance I can recall of cunnilingus.
And women orgasming as the result (only) of vaginal sex = proof of the power of the instrument, the modern version of all of those statues with ginormous erect members. Hence the porn movie fondness for seriously overendowed men.
For more on this school of thought (I have to give Tom Cruise credit for not bursting out laughing in this role):
There are some highly educational vids out there, particularly female ejaculation (or ‘squirting’) videos, which provide significant detail. Learning methods can be a quite involved process but once learnt, becomes the rule rather than the exception.
There is a generally immaturity that is not accounted for. The young people that I encountered in the 2000’s were checking off the normal development boxes in High School. The High schoolers I encounter now are years behind in maturity.
The lack of face to face interactions is keeping them back. All of the steps that parents take to “protect” them.is sheltering them from growing up.
I have a pet theory Netflix Kids is a problem with maturity. Even network TV became quite a bit edgier at 9 and then 10. With no free range children, they don’t interact with older kids.
I remember waiting for my older sister in the high school parking lot as an elementary school student with my classmate. It was great. We learned so much.
In the neighborhood, I was the youngest among the boys. I was allowed among them because I could read. Again, I learned so much. Most notably, I didn’t have to read or watch age appropriate nonsense.
We are social creatures. The young need to have more of these informal interactions in order to learn and make mistakes.
The work from home trend has made a significant difference in how people socialize where I work: there’s a lot less socializing now.
At the same time, comparing my time working in HR in the mid-1980s versus being subject to HR in the 2020s, there’s a lot more focus now on the risk of workplace relationships. The effect is probably not negligible.
And I think the experience of women and men on dating apps are very different, with women being overwhelmed with attention, at the same time being asked to choose who to talk to based on some pretty superficial profiles. This is a recipe for frustration for both men and women.
Back in the good old days of the 1980s and 1990s there were lots of workplace romances as I recall. More recently, that has changed significantly for a variety of reasons. When you consider the hours spent in the office it would seem natural to find mates there, rather than elsewhere. But that is discouraged these days. So, what to do? Nothing it seems.
I think the fact that most courtship these days happens via text and social media has a lot to do with this. IMO, comfort and chemistry leading up to the initial act have a lot more to do with it being satisfying than performance of the act itself. Often brief outbursts of passion following extended flirtation and anticipation are what lead, after a brief respite, to the more lengthy, intimate, and exploratory interactions that set really good sex apart from self-stimulation. These experiences foster anticipation for the next event.
Pursuing a woman via text and/or social media is nothing like this. It’s more like homework – homework where you are probably not going to even get credit for the assignment 9 out of 10 times (a rate that most young men would envy, discouraging as it still is). The culmination is more like a final exam required for promotion to the next level than an explosive outburst of energy built up through mutual flirtation and anticipation. Not to mention that it’s an exam the outcome of which is likely to be widely shared both online and offline.
Add to this the fact that young women, while they might be as horny as ever, have very little incentive to put in any effort into flirtation/seduction at all beyond taking some cute pictures (and there are no shortage of pictures online that men can access with no effort whatsoever), and maybe dressing up a bit for a date. This dynamic continues even if you do get a date where many young women see nothing wrong with pulling out their phone and ignoring you if you stop being entertaining for 30 seconds or so, or just disengaging from conversation and acting bored.
Add to this the fact that among the younger generation, approaching a woman offline, with even the most respectful and mild flirtation, is incredibly socially and even professionally risky. Any unwanted advance comes with a not small likelihood of being labeled as creepy, disrespectful, ignorant, and even predatory. So it’s back to the internet to curate your profile and carefully compose chats and texts only to be ignored or, if you’re lucky, receive one-word, often passive-aggressive responses which you are expected to repeatedly overcome to prove your fitness as a mate.
Furthermore, your prior interactions with girls and women have been so sterilized and a source of such anxiety that you have absolutely no experience hitting on or flirting with the opposite sex so even with the best efforts, you’re likely to come of with all the charm of an anxious middle-schooler, because that’s the amount of experience you actually have.
So then, having been given little to no opportunity to stimulate a woman in the way that I’ve found is the only one that really works – with a significant build up of flirtation and mutual anticipation, followed by foreplay that both parties are already very excited for – the young man is expected to outperform a vibrator on his first go.
I’d encourage women out there to reverse the roles and imagine whether they would be motivated to participate in this charade or find it more enticing than a few minutes of self-stimulation.
Yes, this is the situation.
And if you’re an average looking guy on one of these apps, you’re cooked. Prior to the Pandemic, when I had friends, my top 10% guy friends had their phones blowing up. Me, not so much. You have to see it to believe it; it’s surreal.
For other guys, apps are just a wasteland of rejection. Why bother?
And as you said, meatspace is often a no-no as well. So you’re left with zero options.
It’s a bleak world.
aye, funemployed….i’ve sworn to never have a “text affair”, again.
with no vocal cues, body language, facial expression, etc, etc…you just never know whats actually going on.
ive been burned up pretty badly in this way, twice, now.
and the rest of what you say…yep.
i prefer the direct in person approach…but there is a lot of risk.
even in this redneck place, the #metoo thing had its effects.
and given that i am by nature a social isolate/back of the house kinda guy, the awkwardness is set to 11,lol.
this last part has only gotten worse since Tam died…i rarely leave the farm…mostly because i cant afford to go anywhere.
and when i can, i loathe going to social places by myself.
i mean, should i bring a book?
I’ve no hard data to back this up but my intuition says that
1) Readily available porn
2) The ease at which one can be entertained easily by smartphones, video games and the internet even excluding porn
are huge factors.
I’m so glad I was a teenager in the pre-internet age.
Porn was relatively hard to get your hands on. That meant that girls were a huge mystery (going to an all-boys school didn’t help) to me that I was very determined to get to know.
Entertainment options were limited so to avoid lonely boredom I had to get out of the house and talk to people. I was very shy at the time so it wasn’t easy and I didn’t often succeed but I did try and eventually I got better at connecting with people because the other option would have been painful solitude. There was only so much TV to watch and computer games weren’t that engaging then.
But it is very hard to be bored these days, so I imagine the incentive to actually put yourself outside of your comfort zone is so much less for teenage boys. They may not be getting fulfilled but they are getting dopamine hits and so probably don’t feel the need to go out learn the essential skills of connecting with others, which naturally means they don’t learn how to connect with girls.
The lack of boredom also probably has a negative effect on creativity, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish.
All true, but there is also a physical, deadening effect from improper masturbation that leads to an inability to ejaculate from vaginal intercourse. Nobody warns young men about becoming reliant on the feel of their trusty right hand. I remember reading about this in a porn magazine, or perhaps “Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex,” and I experienced it myself. If it takes more than two minutes to masturbate (without undue friction), you are doing it wrong. Just stop.
If 26% of men under 40 have erectile disfunction it probably means, again from my own experience, that they don’t anticipate any pleasure from the proposed activity. Not being able to ejaculate would account for it, and this problem applies to fellatio as well.
Not to mention the modern subculture of gooning/edging, where guys masturbate to porn for literally hours on end before ejaculating. These people are ruined for real sex.
Agree with this so much. We need to bring boredom back. That’s where all the creative juice of Gen X came from: hours to kill and find something to do and something make (and people to make it with).
Patrick Boyle had a video a few months back looking at the research on declining fertility, and came to the conclusion that rising cost of raising children is not the main cause – this because fertility is declining even in low-income countries. Rather, it is the proliferation of cell phones and the consequent decline in offline socialization.
The big UN survey disagrees. Raising kids is too costly in countries like Thailand and India.
For instance, just to go to public school here, families have to pay for 4 different uniforms, shoes for each, and books. That means many poor kids can’t attend. There are local charities here that raise money to help but they fall way short of need. And Thailand is considered middle income..
I only skimmed that UN survey, but it seemed to me to be a classic example of a study with predetermined outcomes, and data shoved in to justify those outcomes.
There are any number of examples through history of when people were put under enormous economic (and other stresses), but marriage and fertility rates stayed constant, or even rose. The cost of childcare – and the idea that children were always ‘producers’ in poorer societies is something of a myth – children have for the most part been an expensive luxury beyond the first 2 or 3 – is a justification for people maintaining relatively small families. But this isn’t the pattern demographers are seeing – family sizes are remaining fairly constant – its marriage and pairing off that is reducing dramatically, and this is happening in many different countries with different cultures and economic conditions.
Again, right here, a charity started (pre Covid) started because poor parents were turning children over to orphanages. They could not afford to feed all the children they had. The founder sold her house in Australia and used the proceeds to get started. She’s been able to raise money now for over a decade for food to keep families together.
If they are barely able to eat, they probably can’t afford birth control. Plus Thailand makes the pill and abortions hard to get.
Maybe the difference is that now the masses actually can make conscious choice with more widespread availability of birth control.
There’s a difference of social structure here–even while very poor, in feudal and semi-feudal societies, children represent essential labor for the farmer. Sons in particular have dowries to look forward to. Feudal societies therefore have inherent incentives for reproduction and, of course, that material reality gives rise to cultures that encourage and facilitate reproduction, making it easier (and necessary for social reasons; people would give you the side eye if you didn’t have any kids) to have children.
It takes a long time for fundamental culture to change. It lags material transformation, but I’d say capitalism has finally completely eaten away the West’s old feudal foundations. In America today, for instance, no one cares if you are having children. No one gives you the side eye if you’re child free. In fact, when my mother admits when chatting with strangers to raising four children, they’re always amazed! “What a big family!” they say. “I could never have more than one or two.”
When it comes to raising children, American culture is now one of benign neglect. You’re on your own. No trusting neighbors to watch your kid or trusting the community to help you parent (by, say, correcting your child when they’re acting up but the parent is busy or away). Increasingly few public spaces are safe and welcoming for children.
This process is, of course, ongoing in today’s semi-feudal societies. Birth rates are declining in countries where big families are still to be had, as more and more peasants and semi-peasants are absorbed into capitalist social relations.
Capitalism has undermined the social foundations that benefit it. It prefers an expanding pool of humans to extract surplus value from–or otherwise growth will stall–but capitalist social relations do not incentivize reproduction at the feudal rate, which is what’s required to keep global capital accumulation going.
If not reproduction, the only choice the capitalist has is to intensify labor exploitation, squeeze more surplus value from a shrinking labor pool. This, of course, increases tensions (“heightening the contradictions”) and makes social unrest, perhaps even revolt, likely.
“This, of course, increases tensions (“heightening the contradictions”) and makes social unrest, perhaps even revolt, likely.”
From the available sociological studies and demographic statistics it seems that, on the contrary, this leads to despondency and inward violence, i.e. addiction and suicides (aka “deaths of despair”).
You’re, of course, correct. But I think that once the “Party”–as in a genuinely revolutionary party–appears, you’ll have the “steam engine” (organized revolutionary politics) to capture all that “steam” (despair). Without the engine, you end up only with the decadence and morbidity we observe today.
It’s not inevitable that the Party appears at all, but I think the likelihood in the near term is increasing. You could make the case that the Party is already on the scene, having survived among Maoists in India (the Naxalites seem to be on the ropes, however) and the Philippines.
There have alao been some big collspses in fertility where no one came up with a “good” explanations–like France in earlt 19th century…
I don´t think this is a US phenomenon. I live in Germany and have three kids in their late teens and early adulthood and as we have an open house we know many of their friends. It boggles the minds of me and my wife how little interaction this generation has with the opposite sex. When our generation was the same age most of us would have had girl- or boyfriends by the time we were 20 and had had all kinds of – more often than not fumbling – experiences.
Furthermore – and this is also striking about this generation – they are staying home much longer and don´t have the urge to strike out that we had. And this is not connected to material want. This is a very affluent area and the parents are either well paid professionals or highly specialised factory workers.
Both, the staying home and the sexlessness are connected and the connection is smartphone or generally internet addiction. The girls compare each other all the time to influencers and find themselves wanting and the boys consume totally unrealistic porn. Their world has become virtual but intimacy can´t be virtual.
For my Boomer generation, the driver’s license was the ticket to ride–technology as a boon to pairing off and sexual exploration and learning. It would seem that social media and the smart phone are the opposite, a saltpeter for the 21st century. I’m not so sure that this effect is a bug rather than a feature either.
Interestingly, early social media wasn’t like that. Well, I’d say AOL IM and IRC (and ICQ?) were surprising opportunities for people in their teens in the 1990s to met people and have things happen.
But this was the early days, before everyone had (dial up) Internet, and definitely before widespread broadband, when getting ISDN lines (64k/128k) was a big deal. There was no Facebook. Google was brand new. And there were no photos. If you wanted a pic, you had to have a non-digital photo scanned on a flatbed scanner somehow.
Yes 100%. I have heard that kids in high school have no interest in getting their driver’s license – starting from millennials to whatever it is now, Gen Z. The parents, well usually the moms, take them everywhere. Taxi service by parents was much less (I’m a boomer) in my teens. The kids who had cars picked you up or you walked. Maybe hitch a ride with dad if he was going your way. I see the parental pressure and maybe irrational fear of some kind of crime to your child, to know where your kid is at every moment (cell phones yes but also the norms have changed) stifles independence. Most boomers would agree that there were long stretches of time their parents had no idea where they were. Kids used to figure stuff out – lot of the time badly but eventually it worked out. No Google of course. We literally had the library to take out books at the age when you want to know where babies come from. And another thing, this whole pharma induced panic (IMO) about HPV and you’ve got to get a vaccine from age 11 or whatever. Good grief. 75% of the pop has it and most bodies flush it out normally. Anyway, no sex for young boys for the various reasons cited in this article and by commenters, leads to violence sometimes. The little boys who feel like shooting up the school they used to go to. Honestly, I think a lot of that is the loner thing so often mentioned but I think it has a lot to do with extreme awkwardness with girls.
This is something that seems to be worldwide – its been a noted phenomenon for years in Japan and Korea, and it seems to be matched by a quite dramatic fall in marriages (which you might consider to be an indicator of lower desire) and, seemingly, sex. There does seem to be a correlation with the growth in social media, so while I’ve no doubt that porn is part of this, I think it may be a broader break from what we might consider normal human interaction to a facsimile.
One thing worth considering is that from the mid-20th century we’ve been soaking out bodies with female hormones. It’s in plastics, micro contamination of food (dioxins, pcb’s, etc), water (often from the contraceptive pill via sewage) and so on. It’s been noted for decades that girls are menstruating much earlier, and this seems universal – it’s usually attributed to better nutrition, but it may not be the only factor. I would not rule out that several generations of micro exposure is literally feminizing both men and women, with potentially far more destructive impacts on men.
That dramatic fall in marriages may also be a side effect of Neoliberal culture where more and more people have little leisure and relaxation time but are constantly scrambling and hustling just to keep their heads above water. And this applies to both young men and women. When mice finally get a chance to get off the treadmill, they are likely to only grab a quick bit to eat and then crash & burn. If Neoliberals wanted you to have a life-long partner, they would have issued you with one.
I’m beginning to suspect a large part of it is living in cities, regardless of political or economic system. Perhaps we just aren’t very good at dealing with it.
On my second visit to NYC I wanted to do the “off the beaten trail stuff”. It may have been the Museum of Sex, I don’t honestly remember if today’s one is the one I visited, but I, my PhD in med stats/health econometrics under my belt, was fascinated by certain survey results in the “fetish/kink section”. One in particular sticks in my mind to this day (and my “merely statistical” understanding is, I gather, backed up by neuro and psych research). The kink of rubber masks probably started soon after the first moulded rubber garment was produced. However, leaving aside the usual caveats of reporting bias, yadda yadda yadda, what I found fascinating is that there was one cohort of Brits who had an EXCEPTIONALLY high rate of this kink, and to a lesser extent with rubber more generally.
These people had been young adolescents or younger during WW2 when having to put the gas mask on was traumatic (given that gas was widely expected to be used after WW1).
Anyway, I wonder if since late Gen X, the huge increasingly stressful traumatic emphasis on academic progress from an early age at the expense of social relationships (coupled with tech allowing modern standards of pron that are totally unachievable and likely to promote body self-image issues) have all contributed to a “downgrading” of libido in favour of a sort of fetishisation of being a modern capitalist worker and the increasing failure to achieve this (seeing it first in Japan for instance) could leave younger people with essentially nothing to value in life: they learnt a pathological fear of lack of status and jobs, and the resulting “sort of fetishisation of these” being unachieved contributed to a problem. Relationships and sex desire couldn’t fill the void, having had lower priority given to the former and early exposure to every type of pron that the “fumbling, exciting normal sex of the pre-broadband days” that was correlated with higher rates of coupling/marriage never happened. Just random thoughts….
One word: SSRIs. Just kidding, but how many of the uninterested young males are on a drug for some supposed neuropsychological condition that could be more accurately described as inability to adjust to an increasingly hostile and difficult to navigate society?
Abstention from sex obviously leads to the abandonment of procreation. This is what is happening: the birth rate is decreasing almost everywhere in the world and the world population is entering a phase of senility. This trend must be analyzed from a social and biological perspective, but above all it must be understood from the psychocultural perspective of sensitivity. -Franco Berardi
https://francoberardi.substack.com/p/sordido-terminale
I remember having read that some Amazonian tribes, once caught up in “civilization”, let themselves die out — not just through self-destructive habits such as alcoholism, but also by ceasing to have children. Those native populations, deprived from their land, redundant in the modern economy, their traditions and skills useless in a modern world, seemed to have chosen extinction, as for them there was no longer any meaning to life.
I also remember one of the readings we had in high school about experiments carried out in nazi concentration camps. German scientists enticed inmates to have sexual relationships (subsequently they would have undergone vivisection to study the early phase of human embryonic development, but of course they were not informed about that part of the experiment). They were well-fed, placed in pleasant surroundings, played appropriate music — to no avail: once in hell, the drive to have intercourse had disappeared.
Neoliberalism is achieving similar results on a worldwide scope.
The influence of pornography is multifaceted. In the first place it distorts expectations and understanding of what sex is, both from an actual “this is what sex is like” perspective and as a sort of temporal developmental phenomenon – that is, the process by which youth going through puberty develop a relationship to their sexuality is irretrievably knocked out of wack by access to pornography before they’ve gone beyond playing house. Along with that distortion is its disproportionate availability; it simply takes effort, it takes an ability and a subtlety of social functioning to have sex with a human being, and this is true even within the bounds of an existing romantic relationship. The men IM Doc is describing might be in relationships because as it turns out men actually do have emotional needs which pornography is incapable of fulfilling – but they’ve never developed nor had any incentive to develop a process for sexual engagement. Absent the, uh, target rich environment that is internet pornography, that incentive is 100% automatic and people will simply figure it out.
The comments above me about a fundamental failure of people to connect with one another – for my money this is more significant, and my tendency is to attribute the problem to technology and to the dissolving of anything resembling a coherent code of conduct between the sexes. I belong to the generation IM Doc is describing, and I can’t even begin to imagine what dating without the artifice of digital contact is like. Above, funemployed calls it “homework” and hits the nail dead on – there is an absolutely miserable tedium to courtship-via-phone, but at the same time and generally speaking there is no alternative (apologies to maggie) in reality. Beyond the oppressive screens, the young men I know – and perhaps more critically the young men I knew, when we were all at ages where in quiet moments we could more readily discuss these things, rather than as alleged adults who’re doing our best to perform normalcy – have since the ages of physiological relevance drowned in doubt as to how to approach a woman or how to proceed with a relationship once so approached. Teen movies from generations past felt to us as though they belong to an antique age, and there isn’t really any replacement as aesthetic guide for behavior for anyone under 40. For reasons encompassing even the political, a vast contingent of men my age are afraid of women, and I don’t believe this is irrational.
Finally, regarding erectile dysfunction – this one at least is fairly simple; I’m convinced the majority of ED is either from an SSRI or fundamentally poor metabolic health, the latter of which has such thorough morbidity in the American population it’s almost impossible to remove from the equation.
“For reasons encompassing even the political, a vast contingent of men my age are afraid of women, and I don’t believe this is irrational.”
Other commenters have already hinted that the problem is more general than just relationships between men and women, and how to engage in sexual encounters. So let me rephrase your remark as follows:
For reasons encompassing even the political, a vast contingent of men my age are afraid of
womenother human beings, and I don’t believe this is irrational.Women are the gatekeepers of sex. If less men are having sex, but the decrease in women is smaller. Then it just means a few guys are getting all the girls.
This is what happens in casual dating. Women have high standards and all want the top % of men. And then complain that men are cheaters and don’t want to settle.
So I don’t think men are not having sex by choice. Rather it’s a rationalisation after the fact, to protect their precious ego and self image.
Also, I’d never trust studies about sex and dating. They operate by asking questions to people. People’s (and especially women’s) actions are hugely different than their words when it comes to dating and sex.
The top% of men construction isn’t useless but I think it’s misleading and doesn’t exactly pass the sniff test. The younger men I know in committed and significantly fecund relationships wouldn’t nearly be your first pick for ubermenschen. I prefer to think of it in these terms – the number of men who pass the test of sexual socialization has cratered, because young people more generally are poorly socialized to a mortifying degree. Given that as you say women are the gatekeepers of sex, the consequences of this poor socialization fall disproportionately on men – but I’m not at all convinced that women collectively have higher standards than they did in generations past, there’s just a profound misalignment between almost subconscious expectations and capacity.
That said I quite agree with you as to distrusting studies about sex and dating. Nobody tells the truth on those surveys, really in either direction.
class asymmetry is a fact. Men will date a less-credentialed woman. Women are far less likely to date less-credentialed men.
From my non-scientific pov, I know a lot of never married, over-35 female MDs and other women with very impressive credentials. whereas their male counterparts overwheingly are married with children.
Among men, off the top of my head, only my brother married a “credential peer”…. he lived next door to his wife in college.
I ” married down” if you live/die by US News World Report college rankings, lol
death by 1000 cuts.
one of which….the human body is like schrodinger’s cat, simultaneously amazing (in multiple ways) and disgusting.
if one’s post-puberty life is screen-centric, not a shocker. then throw in that Covid turned everyone into stuff-phobes, like me lol. i always carry around isopropyhl alco and wet wipes
Every reason given in the comments makes sense, but to some degree I distill it down to, Who Needs Males?
They’re increasingly not needed for work, or reproduction, so it stands to reason that there would be psycho-social-physio consequences.
Michael Fiorillo,
The Ukrainian saga is teaching the females who run EU and, perhaps, female “leaders” in the US of A, why society needs males. You need a fairly extraordinary female to hump full-weight infantry kit on a forced march, not to mention going kinetic on arrival.
Man am I glad I am a Boomer, born 1953. I got married at 22 and have been married for 49 years. We have four children, in their 30s and 40s now, and six grandchildren. I was 20 when I met my future husband and it seemed like we had sex all the time! Then we got married, went back to church, and had the kids, none of whom we could afford, but we didn’t care. I stayed home with them. We lived in a rental house that was small by Mainland standards, I guess, but typical in Hawai’i, about 1000 square feet. When we wanted to be alone and have sex, if it was on a weekend day, we would tell the kids we had to “go talk about Santa Claus.” They left us alone! Now after almost 50 years I look back on it and regret nothing. I feel really sorry for young people nowadays. Life is so incredibly difficult for them. My oldest grandson is 21 and my oldest granddaughter, his younger sister, is 19 and they both have boyfriends or girlfriends. I have no idea what the answer is, I just think life has become very hard.
My husband asked me once why did I marry him and I told him he was the most exciting person I had met. And he still is.
Who would have thought that Naked Capitalism would resort to clickbait? Donald Trump is ordering the military to attack our own citizens and parading around like a tin-pot dictator and this is what’s sucking all the air out of Comments?
Young men asking “What Do Women Want?” is a meme older than the Intersewer. They’ll be asking this question until the extinction of the human race. I’m a straight man in my late sixties and have been pursuing (and been pursued by) women for decades and I have to admit that I still don’t truly know the answer. I think that it’s because they don’t either…
In case you missed it, there is a political side to this. The drop in fertility is being attributed by conservatives to the loss of traditional gender roles, as in women need to be put back in their place.
Blessed Day!
There’s a post dedicated to that issue and I hope to see your insightful comments there…
Me too! They’re currently in Moderation…
I feel very fortunate to have come of age during a golden age of sexual license: after birth control and before AIDS. That as a callow youth strongly drawn to women but being shy of them, I was again fortunate in joining a politically radical urban commune in Berkeley where I was well educated by women who knew what they liked. If I may offer just a bit of advice: assuming you can get past the conversation phase, learn the art of massage, and invite suggestions from your partner.
Sexlessness is not uniquely American issue, at least based on my observations of Europe. Being one of those guys who has more female than male friends, what the ladies tell me is that men by and large seem to have lost basic flirting and communication skills. Then again, having a string of relationships with periods of singlehood over the past 5 years, I can say that for most women on dating apps and in real life as well. Eventually I got tired of the low quality of the dating pool on the dating apps and quit them. Amusingly, the result is that I get offered more sex than ever before in the most surprising place – Twitter.
For myself I’ve definitely noticed that I am less interested in random sex, particularly when offered by women that have some issues and behaviors I find off-putting. Likely it’s the potential after-sex issues with such women that I simply don’t want to deal with. Within my recent relationships I’ve had girlfriends who’ve had higher or lower sex drive than me, but two things I can say for certain:
1. Sex after 40 is simply superior, eveb with the inevitable anxiety of the first time with a new partner;
2. Communication accounts for at least some of that added quality – my recent partners haven’t been at all shy about what they want and how they want it in order to get them off and that results in more and better orgasms for all.
OIFVet,
re: “Likely it’s the potential after-sex issues with such women that I simply don’t want to deal with.”
Algren’s rules: “Never play cards with a man called Doc. Never eat at a place called Mom’s. Never sleep with a woman whose troubles are worse than your own.”
If men and women with “troubles” never slept with each other or indeed married and had children, the human race would have ceased to exist countless years ago. I think the inability to form deep connections is the greater problem these days. Sex truly worth having is about more than hookups, after all.
I reject the idea that life is so difficult today that people can’t find each other or make a relationship work. Veterans of WWI and WWII knew trauma well, yet they got married and had children. The Baby Boom following WWll is proof of that. Survivors of the Nazi death camps often married and had children soon after the war, even when the women had stopped menstruating for months or years due to near starvation. Does it get any more traumatic than that?
A beautiful testament to the power of love overcoming “troubles” can be found in the classic post WWII movie “The Best Years of Our Lives”. Just watch Wilma help her boyfriend Homer, who has lost both his arms in the war, as he prepares for sleep after removing his prosthetic limbs. Corny? I don’t think so but then I am a hopeless romantic.
Lena,
I was simply quoting Nelson Algren. His bio is well worth reading. He did have his share of troubles;Simone de Beauvoir was among his many lovers, I agree with you that, if only those without troubles could pair up and procreate, the human race would collapse. OTOH, there is some wisdom in avoiding partners with a whole lot of extra baggage; I have seen too many failed relationships wherein the supporting partner collapsed under the weight. I am reminded of a saying by the father of Steve Goodman: “Why buy somebody else’s troubles?”. You might know that Goodman wrote a song with that name, and also gave the name to his folk club.
May the force be with you.
I do know the Goodman song. It’s not one I particularly care for, so I think I’ll listen to Townes Van Zandt’s “If I Needed You” tonight instead. His life was certainly a deeply troubled one, yet he left us with that classic song about true love and devotion.
May the force be with you as well, Retired Carpenter. Take care.
Past a certain age I believe that most of us have acquired enough experience and emotional intelligence to make fairly accurate judgements about which battles are worth fighting and which aren’t. Some behaviors and cues simply scream “Keep Away!” and so I do.
Indeed. My acquired experience and emotional intelligence long ago told me “Never get on Twitter or join a dating app!” and I never have. My partner and I have been together for years. We first met in real life.
Your sarcasm doesn’t disprove my point. Good for you that you are in a long-term committed relationship, but dating in one’s 40’s is not like dating in one’s teens and 20’s.
I was not being sarcastic about avoiding Twitter and dating apps. The few men I know who use dating apps (I don’t know any women who do) are sad and/or mad about their experiences with them. I think that is a sign that other approaches to finding relationships are needed.
As for Twitter, I never joined it because the platform always seemed toxic to me. I feel the same way about social media in general.
I wish you the best, OIFVet. If I came across as sarcastic, I apologize.
I apologize, Lena. I may have been overly sensitive due to recent overexposure to very judge-y people in real life.
(bold mine)
We know COVID does this.
And medications of various sorts. How many young men in western societies are prescription medicated now? Low libido and emotional flattening (making one less interested in a partner’s needs) are side effects of a number of prescription meds. Not saying that men’s perceptions of their place in society (relative to women, especially) is not also having an effect, but legally dispensed drugs are way bigger now than 30 or 40 years ago.
Other factor: how many young men are out of shape physically to the point that sex requires more exertion than they can handle without losing their enjoyment of it? I’m sure this is not the majority of the cases mentioned, but maybe some portion of it can be attributed to that.
and, not necessarily an issue for the “young men” mostly under discussion…but pain, due to wear and tear from working has the same effect….ie: “Lost Wood”.
my global arthritis sure as hell does.
Tam used to say that she wished she’d had me when i was younger,lol.
because i used to be really good in the sack.
but when theres a knife in yer spine or hip, it kinda takes the rigor out of things.
thank the Goddess for the blue pill, i guess.
This column made me recall Teri Garr’s tirade in Tootsie, which has her screaming “I’m responsible for my own orgasms” (at 2:42). But that was 43 years ago, and the times have change.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c0pUtIIwGHo
Regarding erectile dysfunction in young men, I believe that porn and alcohol are big factors (also drugs, probably depends on the drug, I don’t know). While masturbation per se doesn’t appear to be clearly associated with ED, careless use of porn does. Here’s one study that came up on a quick search (can’t speak for its quality though): https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8569536/
Speaking from personal experience, I can say that if I watch too much porn too close to when I’m going to have sex (within 2-3 days before, this has increased with age), even if I don’t masturbate it very significantly reduces my libido and thus my erectile function for the real thing. Thankfully I can plan for this and avoid it for a few days beforehand.
I feel that the wide and easy availability of porn online is also a significant factor in the reduction of dating for young people. You can access high-quality porn of anything and anyone you can imagine for free, anytime, anywhere. Think about it: if you feel the urge to have sexual pleasure you have the choice to put in the work and spend the money (money is a factor too) to go dating, or have immediate satisfaction for free right where you are and as you are right now. Why go through the trouble and expenditure? I think this goes a long way to explain why young people are dating less and having less sex, and particularly men.
Obviously I’m not anti-porn, but clearly recognize that it can be problematic in a lot of ways and should be handled with care. This should be a part of sex education for young people, where available.
I had a conversation with my primary care physician recently regarding high blood pressure ( a general conversation as my blood pressure is deemed to be “normal”). She told me that the majority of her male patients in my age range have been prescribed medicine to control their blood pressure, and that she is seeing increasing numbers of men in their 30s with high blood pressure. Blood pressure meds can certainly put a damper on sex. Porn can be implicated, but general poor health is also a factor in reduced sexual activity among young people.
Went in for a physical the other day and my blood pressure was 121/79, frighteningly normal.
My nurse mentioned she sees many patients with numbers more like 180/100. Felt very much an outlier not being part of the club.
Oh, I can definitely understand that blood pressure is also a factor. It’s unfortunate that young people are now dealing with this.
Weren’t there concerns that estrogen mimicking ingredients in plastics would cause lower libido, lower sperm count and other reproductive problems in men?
Somebody’s f’in…
Down the block from me are two homes operating as day care centers – across the street from one another.
They young men and women I work with are having marriages and children.
I have to get to sleep before midnight or I won’t be able to with the neighbors’ baby crying.
Speaking for myself at least (male), I would suggest the #MeToo movement has done a lot to damage sexual relationships and relationships in general. Most of the media and personal discussions coming out of women over the last decade or so have been to the effect that men are terrible, they have no consideration for women, and the fewer men that women have to deal with or be around the better. I have heard comments about how terrible men are even when I am sitting right there! There is of course no upside to trying to dispute these remarks since you just end up sounding like you’re defending rapists and Harvey Weinstein.
The upshot for me has been perpetual uncertainty about talking to women, asking them out, or doing much of anything for fear of crossing some hidden line, which can lead not only to ostracism but also HR interventions and even firing. I’ve occupied various supervisory roles at work, and now strongly prefer to only have men in my group for everyone’s peace of mind.
I have exactly zero history of any actual problems with women in the workplace or anywhere else; it’s all strictly in my head. But nevertheless, it’s still a thing, and I now see women as a source of unpleasantness and even danger. We have mandatory annual trainings where we are warned against doing a large variety of things that could be misinterpreted as harassment or worse.
I very much doubt that this is the entire explanation for the things talked about in this post, but it is something that has changed in many societies recently. The more one goes on and on about the opposite gender being a danger and an unwelcome presence, the more that gender will seek peace of mind by keeping a safe distance. I’m certainly not saying that women should put up with abusers for the sake of better relationships, but such relationships do require welcoming openness and the expectation of a good outcome in order to happen.
Hopefully we’re just going through a transitional stage and this aspect of male female relationships will chill out in the next generation or two.
Yep; At an F500 company you need to be very, very careful. From the trainings it is clear that anything can be construed as unwanted attention, and the subject of that attention is always correct. You intent is never relevant in this, and keeping a job and a clean record is far more important. And HR is there solely to protection the corporation.
yeah…when the metoo thing was at its peak, wife and i talked about it a lot.
and i always ended up talking about high school(and then, well, let us consider all the people in this town,lol)…and how the prettiest girls always seemd to prefer the total a$$hole guys.
turns out, after thinking about it, she agreed that it was a thing…and moreso, it was a thing among a lot of the adults we knew.
nice, considerate guys like me couldnt get a word in…unless, like i said above, i had a Les Paul strapped on…then, it didnt matter how strange i was, nor how filthy,lol.
I’m a straight male outside the age range of the sexless men being discussed, but I can say older folks aren’t getting much either, and for similar reasons. I have been on countless dates arranged through the major dating apps. In the vast majority of first “dates” nothing happens. No spark, no flirting. The women seem to have no clue how to flirt or how to respond to attempts at flirting. And conversation is often stilted, with one sentence replies given which puts a damper on having stimulating conversation that might move things along. When all is said and done the date truly feels like some kind of job interview that you would rather not have a second go at. It seems to me that many Americans have lost the ability to feel joy, happiness, and just live in the moment. There is a lot of PTSD out there these days.
Yes, that was mostly my experience with meeting anyone online, and I’ve probably been on ~ 100 first meetings throughout the years. If either person isn’t interested, it is immediately awkward and pointless.
A handful went really well, and that’s the only reason I continued to subject myself to it. But Pandemic. Ran out of time.
There’s always some other lifetime, I guess.
Eric Kaz, “Blowin’ Away,” (covered by Bonnie Raitt, her dad, John, and the Boston Pops)
Maybe the lyrics need to be updated to replace “Earth” and “seas” with dating apps?
Two homes doubling as daycare centers down the street from where I live.
Plenty of the young co-workers (in relationships too) announcing the birth of children.
I have to get to sleep before midnight before the neighbors’ baby’s crying kicks in.
As someone who was married for a long time and back on the market, I have thoughts.
1. Obesity and related problems play a big role. People find themselves less attractive, and often wait to date until they lose weight, which often does not happen.
2. There is now a stark contrast between people who exercise regularly and those who don’t in their average amount of energy to put into a relationship. This was not as prominent 20 years ago.
3. Ability to have actual conversations has declined. Lots of suspects why: work from home, avoiding political battles, having fewer friends and relatives to practice with (Putnam, Bowling Alone).
4. Across many countries, politics and priorities have diverged. There are charts showing how the liberal women to conservative men gap has increased. People tend to mate assortatatively, and bigger gender differences get in the way.
5. There is a lack of a clear path to a happy marriage with kids. Much of this is housing cost, but also medical and education. Some of it is fewer people with clear marriage goals. Discussion groups are overrun with complaints about prime marriage age people who don’t know what they want.
Diet a likely contributor to problems from obesity to general malaise. All the processed foods can’t help. At the other end of the spectrum, how are carnivore or keto diet people who work out doing in the horizontal rumba world?
Actually, why have a relationship at all? What is the urgency or necessity? Maybe that’s the premise that needs to be examined here.
Touched upon, but not as much as many of the other factors: family court.
Yes, AIDS will kill you, but child support can cripple you and set you back financially for the rest of your life– one mistake or getting “trapped” is all it takes, and don’t think that many young men do not realize this.
Another to mention is how so many relationships feel superficial, transactional, with no real commitment involved, and social media, porn, certainly play a role in this.
Personally, I value my independence and peace of mind too much to get involved on a sexually-intimate level with anyone else, especially nowadays.
I have known only two people who have died of AIDS. A homosexual and a needle drugs addict. Putting chemicals made by gangsters (do you think they are big on quality control?) directly into your bloodstream on a daily basis will damage your immune system. Having anal sex with hundreds of strangers in a year, getting numerous STDs, along with copious recreational drugs will too. Also the too toxic for chemotherapy AZT did kill other people who just happened to test positive for alleged antibodies to HIV. A positive test does correlate with people that are unhealthy and need to change their lifestyle. How many people with a normal sex life who were not needle addicts do you know who died from AIDs?
Most men (boys) have had sex alone thinking about women at least 1,000 times before ever being with one. That goes back eons. So to say the real thing all of a sudden is a disappointment is bogus. Whether it is closed-eyes imagined or porn based, the two, fantasy and real, are different. I don’t think that’s where the answer lies. More likely it is availability (including meeting obstacles), affordability and maybe even biological with the abundance of electronics and possibly even plastics affecting the sex drive.
aye! i was a teen in the 80’s, in rural texas.
pron was scarce.
twin guys from across the highway stole some of their dad’s mags, and we kept them in the woods near the railroad tracks…had a red hankie to hang on the trees(“occupied”,lol).
my own sex ed was the deluxe edition of encyclopaedia britannica…esp the macropaedia offering on “sexual deviancy”.
learned all i needed to know, lol.
but since i grew up as that weird kid, i also developed the chivalric drive to satisfy whatever woman deigned to get nekkid with me.
there was a bunch of stuff in britannica about female anatomy, too.
and the whole earth catalog had a few books that i secretly ordered(checked the mail in secret for a week,lol)
regarding g-spots and such.
i agree that porn too early….and too weird too early…can have a deleterious effect on expectations…but i dont think thats the real driver of the phenomena under glass, atm.
the social media and metoo and manhating madness of late, as well as the whole bowling alone on pcp thing we’ve been doing, i think are likely much bigger factors.
wife and i got off to porn together, after my hip died and “thrusting” was no longer an option…and when she couldnt really do “cowgirl” anymore.
I have to say that this article on NC has brought out lots of great and thoughtful comments from the readers. Someone commented that they thought the article was clickbait and a waste of space considering all the terrible things Trump is doing. I disagree and I think the comments to the post demonstrate the interest people have in the subject matter. It’s important and I thank Yves for this post.
It’s very important to maintain and protect a sense of oneself as well as the awareness of what’s terrible in the world.
i agree.
i admit that its a subject i care a great deal about,lol….for not just lustful reasons.
its a mere part of the broader loneliness problem…which is also something i am acutely aware of(i can go for days without hearing a human voice)
Guilty! I’m one of those men. 36 years old, no suspicious initial delays in my socio-sexual development. First gf at age 17 (apps weren’t a thing yet), relationship lasted three years. Not an unpleasant experience. I can understand why people want that in their lives. But after it was over, I kind of understood that there just wasn’t enough “organic” motivation for this in me. It absolutely dominated my teen years, but in hindsight most of this was mimetic: what made a relationship so desireable was that all the other kids desired one. There is always the initial mania (with decreasing regularity), but it decays so quickly and after it’s over all who’s left is just a woman I might still like – but not enough to make me want to share a life with her/ see her more than once a week. And after having experienced this cyclical rush often enough, I find it really hard to take serious anymore (come to think of it: hasn’t happened in years).
Regarding sex: same kind of story tbh. Fun activity. Even managed to have a couple of hook ups in my early twenties. Pretty hot. But once I had experienced it, the appeal started to fade somewhat. Yes, it’s nice, but not exactly great enough to deserve being the roational axis of your life. I could probably have it again (after, I managed to do so earlier). But life is finite and the amount of activities I would like to dedicate time to is large. Some, I will simply not be able to pursue anyway. And the thing about having casual sex is: a man spends a lot of time not getting laid for each “success”. Just not worth it, overall.
I carry no grudges, I don’t feel wronged by the universe. If this lifestyle has any adverse health effects for me, then I couldn’t point those out. And although I can see the societal ramifications of people like me getting more common, I also don’t know what could be collectively done about it. On the individual level, I feel just fine. There is no problem a physician or psychologist could fix here.
thanks for providing this perspective…however alien it may be for me,lol.
one of the two text affairs i spoke of up there^^^ asked me once if i could ever fall in love again…or if i wanted to…after my wife of 26 years died…and i told her, i dont know…the last one was rather intense.
but then i sobered up(she always texted when we were both drunk), and thought about it…and said, Yes…because that kind of love is important.
Tam died 3 years ago, tomorrow, at 13:12 Lima.
so all of this…sex included…is very much in the front of my mind.
to merge with someone like that….in every possible way….is indescribable.
from an aging old hippie yeoman farmer guy in the wilderness, you should give love a chance.
as painful as her absence is, i am richer for having her in my life.
https://www.uhhospitals.org/blog/articles/2021/01/how-having-covid-19-may-affect-mens-sexual-health
Anecdotal but yep! ED per se not such an issue, but years on an MAOI antidepressant during my raging libido years and only occasional need for sildenafil may have somehow helped.
However, I can date the loss of libido and the other mentioned symptoms with certainty: 6 weeks after my first (and most serious) COVID infection right back in Feb 2020 (when the barber also noticed the 50p piece sized weird patch of alopecia on my scalp). My libido has been totally AWOL ever since. Just another part of the Long COVID I assumed.
This missing libido might be a good thing in my case because it was *ahem* rather high before 2020 and I think I’ve had more than my fair share of fun over preceding years and I don’t need yet another bout of COVID the way things are now. And since procreation was never going to be on the agenda anyway….
https://www.health.harvard.edu/womens-health/when-an-ssri-medication-impacts-your-sex-life
Sexual side effects of SSRIs: Why it happens and what to do
Coping with this common side effect from antidepressants.
The young are just not connecting as people did before screens. Too many distractions preventing them from developing human interaction comfort/habits/skills from early ages. They’re not natural anymore. Kids don’t play outside anymore with friends like they did. Young people don’t go to parties like they did. Sex and socialization go hand-in-hand, one before the other.
Amazing to see my teenage kids in social settings. So depressing. The bodies are there, but the minds are just stunted, and that’s with great efforts to keep THEM away from screens.
Add that to the fact that our societies and social structures are crumbling. Nature itself withdraws. We are embodiments, and need a healthy environment to grow into. It’s not all about the kids themselves. It’s all of us and everything. They are the result.
when our boys inevitably obtained smart fones…we kept them on the wifi data only.
that way, i could “go check on the birds”, and walk by the router thing outside, and unplug a wire…and then plead ignorance:”well, the internet must be down”.
thus, i limited their usage, for a time.
my younger son, now 19, is more fone addicted than my older, now 23.
i did the same thing with the cable.
and sometimes, the electricity…and we’d have candle light monopoly or chess, etc.
they both know about all such manipulations by me in their youth…socratic method, and just on and on,lol.
and generally approve, in retrospect.
they agree…mostly…that it was a good thing, and made them better people.
This is a particularly interesting subject to me. Anecdotally, I’m a man in his early 30s in a major West Coast city, and have seen abstention from sex skyrocket in my social circles (which are very mixed in sexuality/gender expression) in the last 5 years, for a myriad of reasons. Bad relationships, mental illness/trauma, pelvic floor dysfunction, asexual self-identification, the gamut. I’ve even encountered people in otherwise functional romantic relationships engage in polyamory because one of the partners was incapable or just uninterested in sex.
Personally, I see it as a “polycrisis” of social relations. Many causes have been listed in the comments already, but the biggest factors I rate are: material conditions that make basically all activity we associate with “adulthood” (home ownership, raising a family, but also like, nightlife!) out of reach, as well as general insanity generated by the smartphone/internet. People are generally very immature because of the suspended adolescence caused by economic conditions, and then are fed a constant drip feed of crazy-making stuff on their phones 24/7. I don’t really rate the change in gender relations as the underlying cause, young men would lack confidence even if #MeToo never happened.
The one thing that is underrated is the addition of asexuality to the spectrum of LGBT+. I have serious misgivings about this, as it seems to obfuscate serious dysfunction by categorizing it as a sexual identity. Everyone has the right to conduct themselves how they want, but I do think many are fooling themselves into thinking their celibacy is natural and okay.
Probably a bit tangential, and this I think is more relevant to the NC readership than something that would do any work at all explaining what’s happening with the general public, but atop these longer-term trends it’s additionally pretty tough going if you’re trying to find other SARS-2 cautious/aware people to connect with romantically or (only) sexually.
Others above have mentioned a number of times that HIV put a real damper on sexual freedom, but in my opinion you’re taking risks that really are much more like (NB: I’m not claiming “identical to”) chancing HIV than say chlamydia or herpes infection simply being around other people without adequate protections. It’s wild to me that you arguably need something like the level of trust you would have with an exclusive sexual partner–or in any event someone you trusted enough to have unprotected sex with–just to take off your masks together to have a cup of coffee. Maybe even more trust is necessary, in fact, insofar as the contexts in which HIV transmission can occur are so much more avoidable than for an airborne disease you can get literally almost anywhere, in the most basic contexts, say just having a quick chat with a parent or old friend.
Obviously that is not the way that the general public is thinking of SARS-2 at this point, but if you were actually viewing it in terms of the evidence, it seems like a reasonable perspective.
My 17 year old niece (who was adopted as an infant from Asia) has no interest in boys. She is not gay, and she has some friends who are boys her age, a couple of whom who would sacrifice anything in order to marry her and take care of her for life, but that’s not her interest. She and my sister in law are focused on their horse, on trying to afford their horse (not easy), their two little dogs, my SIL’s job, their guinea pigs, and a couple of elderly relatives who need their help. Maybe it is because of the antidepressants she’s been on since her dad (my brother) died, or maybe not. When I was growing up pretty much all young ladies were very interested in boys, so this is surprising to me. My SIL is simply relieved; it is one less stressor; it is enough to teach the kid how to drive.
Some anti-depressants cause lower libido. It depends on the drug being used.
See: https://www.everydayhealth.com/depression/sexual-side-effects-of-antidepressants-why-they-happen-and-how-to-cope/
Good luck with this. You have enough things to worry about as it is.
Stay safe.
Thanks, that’s a better summary than some that are considered (by the “proper” doctors) to be the ultimate guide. My second PhD student studied preferences and acceptable trade-offs between side effects and efficacy etc among mild to moderately depressed adults. Of course my clinical co-supervisor gave the most input on certain things but I had plenty of personal experience to bring to the table. The discrete choice experiment (my area) was the main part of her research.
Surprise surprise (not), pronounced difference by gender as to acceptability of certain side effects. The hypothetical drug which most closely matched mirtazapine was more acceptable to men; women generally hated it because of the weight gain issue. I’ve been on it and since efficacy was too low and I gained 20+ pounds (44+ kg) enough was enough. The drugs with higher rates of ED or libido effects were much more hated by the men. We quantified the acceptable trade-offs.
The article you linked to (amazingly) refers to the MAOIs. Going back to the issue raised above about hypertension in younger people these days not helping things, it is useful to know that tranylcypromine is not only the “mother of all antidepressants” but is a powerful antihypertensive too. I kill two birds with one stone using it. However, my usual important caveat: if they don’t trust you to have a stable enough life (like being watchful about potential for interactions) then they would not (should not) give it to you.
If anything happens to the sister in law I am in big trouble since there is no-one else for this kid, other than two elderly and frail grandmothers and an aunt in Georgia who is extremely mentally unstable. What a thought; I’ve spent my whole life trying to avoid responsibility.
It is a combination of numerous factors. The biggest being that women are now much more confident than men and they also have better economic futures. Men know most women are not interested in them and they do not have the same level of confidence of past men who felt they were destined to rule the world. Combine this with the age of internet dating and porn and you get an extremely toxic brew. Women are having sex much more often than in the past and even with multiple guys on one night as they have been educated by porn as well. They pursue the same men online and most men are shut out of the dating market because they do not know how to approach women and are afraid to do so. Women rely on the online players for dates which they consider much more attractive.
So in the end, men are largely being dismissed by women, feel sexually inadequate due to a lack of sex and are also not interested in pursuing young women that are considered “used up.”
It is a hard world for young men these days.
I believe the situation is far worse than what the surveys are picking up. Due to the poor job environment, I’ve recently returned to school at the ripe age of 37 at a Midwest college you’ve almost certainly heard of. My first university experience was a mess, I ended up dropping out and going into the Air Force. But I graduated high school in 2005, and so I remember seeing teenage romance, as clumsy as it was, right before Facebook went big and destroyed the internet forever. I didn’t get to participate in teenage love due to overbearing parents, but I remember seeing it, without knowing I was from the last generation to do so.
I don’t pretend to be hip and with it, I never was, but by and large the STEM students I take classes with will generally warm up in conversation even though I’m twice their age. I’ve had a couple of heart-to-heart conversations with men who appreciate advice from a older stranger. Most of the student body comes from well-to-do middle class or higher families (I am white, grew up in the ghetto, raised mostly by a single mother and occasional drive-by parenting from a weak father. Not a recipe for success, but I do what I can). Of the men I talk with well enough to be nodding acquaintances, most are not in any kind of relationship, and do not expect any romantic success. These are outer-frat-bro types, not fully invested in the top tier fraternities, but some are involved in the second tier frats, the ones that don’t have physical property on or around campus. They’re fit, smart or smart-ish, good-looking (as a straight man, I’d say these are 7.5-9.0s in most cases), and dress well. About 60% of the male student are “looksmaxxing”, as the lingo goes. I’m 6’2″, and I’m shocked at how many men tower above me. I don’t know if it is the food, the water, or the vaccines, but they are putting something in the Zoomers that made them giants. Compared to my high school days, the men are light years beyond how my peers acted and dressed. Throw these gents in a time machine back to the year 2000 and they would slay on any campus. But they are unfortunate enough to have been born just in time to mature into one of the most hostile environments for romance on Earth.
The women? Good lord almighty. I struggle for words that do not immediately spiral into variations of prostitute. The girls are MEAN, all of the time. Resting bitch face does not even begin to encompass it. They are mean to the 5s, they are mean to the 8s, they are mean to the 9s. Maybe the 9.5s are cleaning up on social media and tinder-type apps, but there are damn few real-life interactions. I was here for a good 3 months before I observed a single display of public affection (a couple hugging on a bench between classes. It was a freshmen GE class, I think they may have been high school sweethearts). I have overheard one flirtation at the library. The campus is dead otherwise. Most of the campus are well-to-do. Most are fit. The women are dressed scandalously whenever the weather is above 70F. But they’re always mean and cold. “Frigid sluts” is the phrase that comes to mind, as paradoxical as that may sound. The women are begging to be approached, but are simultaneously threatening to end the life of any sub-10 male that dares speak in her presence. It is horrid to witness. I am terrified of being accused of stare rape by one of these thong-flaunting women, and I can’t be the only one.
Of the men, I can affirm there is no locker room banter of any kind anymore. Probably online, but never in person. Everyone is carrying a smartphone, and every person is a Stasi informant. As a wild-ass, anecdotal guess, I would estimate less than 30% of the undergraduate men are getting laid in their entire 4 year stay. I wouldn’t be surprised if the real numbers are even worse. Most of the women have had dozens of partners, but they are all shamelessly sharing the same top-tier men. It is a feast-or-famine situation. If you are an athlete with a pretty face and a nice car, the world is your oyster. Literal harems. Otherwise, nothing. Poor men, average-faced men, guy-next-door, need not apply.
What’s also striking to me is just how few of the men are found out and around the college town after class hours, and how effectively none of the women are to be seen at all. The parks are ghost towns, the bike trails are barely utilized, the restaurants are only occupied by the 50+ crowd. I don’t drink myself, so perhaps the bars and clubs are well-packed, but I never overhear conversations about parties or what-we-did-last-weekend, so I think they too must be dead. I do hear conversations about prescription drug use. I’d say at least 60% of the students are taking at least one prescription drug (adderal, antidepressents, are the most common). I had a bout with suicidal ideation 5 years ago (long story), but I chose therapy over drug use. I suspect I might be the only sober student in some of my classes.
Its an utterly alien environment. I was never a social butterfly, but I feel like a barbarian time traveler from another millennium. Zoomers are terrified of going against the social consensus. The Panopticon has finally been built, and perfected, all in a single generation.
This is a blue college town island in a red state, so you should expect a decent mix of political attitudes, but there is no protest movement of any kind. Everything is the same sterile Corporate Democrat vote-blue-no-matter-who type. DEI and rainbow flags everywhere. I’ve seen a few tepid Free Palestine graffitis in bathrooms, but nothing significant. My god it is sterile. I try to flex a little here and there on my papers, hitting from a pro-labor rights angle, but very little interaction from the students or professors. I know better than to try anything even tepidly right-of-center, but there isn’t even any variation in left-wing positions. The only acceptable position is the Hillary Clinton/Gavin Newsome-esque corporate consensus.
As for the fixation on men’s looks, with relative income equality (at least early in careers), women’s calculus has changed, with a man’s earning potential much less important. Also, a successful woman can raise her own kids with the assistance of nannies. Whereas maybe it was ~ 50% status/earning potential v. 50% looks in the 1980s, now it is probably 80% looks and 20% status/earning potential.
Also, social media will result in everyone seeing her significant other, so this also makes looks more important.
I have 19yo nephew/niece twins both of which are in fairly long term relationships. Longer than both their divorced parents. Had lunch with another 18yo young man I mentored in Big Brother program and he’s totally disinterested in dating because of the cost (he’s cheap or frugal?). I told him being cheap when I was young served me well later in life.
Tech produced a drop in socialization (but this should be gender neutral?), while neoliberalism produced an increase in materialistic/transactional perspectives, coinciding, ironically, with a marked drop in spending power, and the most overlooked: a dramatic fall in empathy. Misandry, parading as (though distinct from) feminism, is also deeply intertwined with neoliberalism, contributing to the drop in empathy.
The US has also experienced pretty dramatic cultural/sexual upheavals throughout the years. eg. That ‘sensitive man’ trend from the 80s, or the idea that men and women are the same , versus merely having achieved economic and political parity, a gay man on every sitcom, etc. A lot has changed of the social structure, in a historical blink of the eye; so it’s no wonder we are apprehensive about intimacy, generally.
One thing I didn’t see noted here was that, among many societal reasons, including those same 10% of guys dating a big chunk of the available dating pool, the number of single parents materially increased from the 70s thru the 2000s before plateauing in 2010. After you reach a certain age it’s much harder than it used to be to find someone that doesn’t already have kids, and not everyone is cut out to be a step-parent.
I am a male 50-something Buddhist practitioner who has worked consciously—and successfully—to be less lustful. And my experience teaches me that horniness really is all in the mind.
For most of my life I was very horny, having sex (or masturbating, when a partner was not available) at least once per day. Like most people, I considered this a big plus. It was a sign of vitality. It was a source of pleasure. It could even lead to love! This is what our culture teaches us to an extreme degree, though most but not human societies encourage it to some degree or another, within specified bounds.
I was initially horrified and repulsed by the suggestion that it was in my interest to curb or eliminate this urge. It was not only a good thing, in my opinion, but I experienced it as a bodily necessity—not a fabrication of my own mind, something I was actively (if unconsciously) creating.
Some further background about myself: I meditate an hour a day in the Thai Forest tradition (a similar but more of an active approach than Vipassana, which many people will be familiar with). I am not a particularly advanced meditator, or particularly good at it, though I have been able to do things that surprise most people, like foregoing anesthesia at the dentist when I had to have one of my teeth drilled all the way past he enamel and dentin and into the “pulp” where the nerve sits (which is actually much easier than most people think). The link between the physical nerve sensation, in the case of tooth drilling, and the suffering that one fabricates around it in one’s own mind is relatively simple, straightforward, and therefore easy to sever.
Quelling my own obsession with female bodies proved far more complicated, because it was not simple or straightforward, but the result of a lifetime of very complex thoughts and memories. Unraveling these to the extent that my horniness was reduced by >90% took about six months. It was a gradual, but not in any way painful, process. I will not go into the details, because I am 100% certain that no one reading this would have any interest in pursuing such a path! I offer it here only for the anecdotal support it provides for what I take to be the underlying thesis of Yves’ post—namely, that libido is indeed the result of mental processes not biology.
That the most powerful sexual organ is between the ears is an adage I had long heard, especially from women, but never really believed. Even after actually going through the process of untangling the mental habit of high-end horniness, I did not fully believe it. I was astonished by my own success and initially inclined to dismiss it. The most plausible explanation, it seemed to me, was that my testosterone levels must have dropped around the same time as I took up this program, or more likely still, had already begun to drop before undertaking it and that it was actually this hormonal drop that had given me the idea in the first place. I am in my mid-50s, after all, so this would be expected. However plausible, this turned out not to be the case. I live in a European social democracy with good public health care, which means I’d been having annual urology exams and testosterone tests of the previous five years. And guess what? There’d been no hormonal changes whatsoever. My testosterone remains in the upper quintile for men my age (and somewhere in mid-range for a 20-something man).
p.s. The 10% lustfulness I’ve allowed to remain is just as intense as ever (when activated) and perhaps even more so, but focused entirely on my wife. This is very convenient! Feeling titillated by the sight of other women’s bodies all the time—at the gym, on the beach, on the sidewalk in summer—had always struck me as a good thing, but I had no contrast case to compare it with. Now that I’ve experienced a different possibility, constant horniness seems to me about as appealing as wearing a hair shirt.
p.p.s. I completely share what I take to be Yves’ position in this post, i.e. the fact that young men are losing their interest in sex is a deeply disturbing and unhealthy development. What has happened to them (and to women as a result) is tragic and very painful to contemplate. There is something very wrong with our society. The fact that their lack of interest in actual sex with real live women is all the more disturbing, because it seems to be due not to diminished horniness at all, but on the contrary to a heightened obsession with pornographic images. I can well imagine this would lead to, at best, deeply ambivalent feelings towards women, and more likely to a simmering misogyny.