People have been having less sex, even before COVID-19. Why?

Originally published at: People have been having less sex, even before COVID-19. Why? | Boing Boing

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What we see now in studies of thousands of randomly sampled college students is choking or strangling during sex. The behavior seems to be a majority behavior for college-age students.

:scream_cat: I guess porn is to blame, like when they started thinking facials were normal.

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Why? Women don’t want to be pregnant nine months and give birth and men don’t want to pay the bills or change diapers. Next question.

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With the rise of streaming services there’s always something good on TV.

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Don’t forget about sorting the recycling…that’s pretty important.

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Wait, so among the reasons people are having less sex is … sex? (And also apparently video games.)

Say, is this one of those studies where they don’t actually have a good definition of sex? Is it very heteronormative (and kind of boring?)

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Next breakthrough research discovery:
Europeans during WW2 also had less sex.

That’s certainly sounds true. But they have much fewer opportunities to have that frenzied, impending-doom sex, and also because the impending doom often actually dooms the participants.
          During the war, no one talks about the “WW2 baby boom”; they talk about the “post-war baby boom” after the war.

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10, actually.

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It seems rather simplistic to suggest that sex has been on the decline because people don’t want to have children all of a sudden, especially in societies where birth control is freely available. It’s not like procreation was the main reason people were having the amount of sex they were having before.

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So for 50+ years fertility has dropped massively and now we are also finding out that people are having less sex, it’s almost like fertility and sex drive are corelated or something…

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I don’t think that’s true. The threat of impending doom tends to make people live in the moment, and from what I’ve read of contemporary accounts, there was a lot of nookie going on whenever possible.

I submit my grandparents as exhibit A.

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Elon Musk?

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0_o Are you saying the fertility rate has dropped, or people are less fertile?

The fertility rate is largely by choice, or social-economic pressures.

I don’t believe the ability for people to procreate has changed much.

At either rate, I don’t think not having kids has impeded people from having sex. If anything it has increased the frequency, as you can largely do it consequence free.

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I have a 2-year-old in the house at the same time as aging parents, a global pandemic, and a stressful new job. And the Trump presidency felt like Covid even before Covid. It hasn’t been a very horny few years.

Everyone I know has some or another version of the same story. Our worlds have all shrunk to the size of a poppy seed, even for the 20-year-olds. Who’s got the time or will to fuck anymore?

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I dunno. The stuff mentioned in the OP seems pretty speculative. Blaming video games for less sex sounds like blaming video games or music for street violence. I am no longer “young”, but I can’t imagine young people aren’t hitting pause on games or social media long enough to do it. Or do they mean they are doing those things in lieu of finding someone to date? If their activities are more isolating and limits exposure to people, then it makes sense they would have less opportunties to date and have sex.

As for the increase in “rough sex” (i.e. kink), I can’t imgagine that has gotten mainstream enough and so prevelent that people aren’t dating to avoid it.

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Or Archer.

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Also, like women today don’t also make a living and pay the bills themselves, even with partners.

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I don’t know, it does seem to be pretty ubiquitous. I feel like I read stories like these every couple of months.

https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/trevor-bauer-assault-accusation/

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Or maybe it’s all those incest fantasies filling up porn sites. I don’t know who is driving the demand for that stuff but if I thought of sex as something that takes place primarily between young men and their stepmoms/stepsisters then I probably wouldn’t be interested either.

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