Why are fewer men in their 20s having sex?
features.inside.comWhile I don’t specifically fall into this category, I’d like to broaden it to younger men starting families. The reason my partner and I haven’t moved toward doing so is primarily economic, we still can’t afford a house and rental laws here mean we could be kicked out at quite short notice. We don’t want to bring a child into an environment that we aren’t even able to keep stable for ourselves.
Others we know are in even more limited circumstances, who put off even dating due to how tight their finances are. Money just isn’t making it to the lower and middle classes any more in any real capacity.
To echo this statement, I wasn't financially stable until ~35. We still do not own a home/condo and I'm not sure it's going to happen at this point. My spouse and I may just move in with family to split costs and live cheap.
To be fair, I also didn't have any social pressure from my family to have children and since my gf, now wife, doesn't want to have any children either, it just worked out this way.
TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.
They balance their budget by skipping the expensive day care. There just isn't any way for a normal person to get day care for a family. It isn't even legal for a day care to have the same adult-to-kid ratio as a family can have, so you'd be paying multiple adults to do the job of one parent. If they get normal pay, then the parent must earn much more than normal pay.
The most strict ratio requirements I've seen for daycares is 4 kids to 1 adult (7 kids to 2 adults in Massachusetts) for toddlers and younger.
3.5 kids per adult then.
So for just 3.5 kids, you'd need to pay 100% of a salary plus all the extras of running a business. (insurance, legal, finance, advertising, sewage, electricity, food, toys, etc.)
Given the overhead, you'd expect daycare for 2 kids to consume the working parent's entire pay. For a low-paid parent, just 1 kid might consume the entire pay.
Obviously that isn't viable. I know a handyman in Massachusetts who had at least 11 kids. It's perfectly legal for his wife to care for 11 kids.
Were all 11 kids under the age of 3?
FYI, it takes differing amounts of attention and work to care for children at different ages.
I don’t know if you have ever cared for a baby, but I have with a ratio of 2 kids under 3 years old and 1 adult (myself), and I don’t even know how people at daycare do it with a 4 to 1 ratio.
I have 12 kids, with one more to be born this summer. The 4th and 5th were twins.
Babies are not difficult. Teenagers are difficult. I have experience with both.
I think it’s safe to say you are an outlier if you can handle more than 4 infants or toddlers at once, either in terms of skill or acceptance of lower standards in levels of care.
You’re missing the point. Daycare costs are extremely high. Why? Precisely because of what souprock says and you are actually agreeing with him. It’s not uncommon for it to cost the full pay of the mother for two kids, especially if they are infant/toddler as you say. But it is extremely uncommon for a family to have 4 kids toddler and under. Because kids grow up. So raising kids in a family instead of in a daycare is far more efficient, (ignoring for a moment all the other obvious benefits) and the cost is correspondingly lower.
Thus, balancing the budget in the context of having children often means skipping the absurd costs of daycare.
Obviously costs are lower in a situation where you don’t have to pay for labor compared to a situation where you have to pay for labor.
I inferred souprock’s initial comments as daycare costs being too high due to government regulations requiring excessive labor for childcare, and my comments are to show that the regulations are not excessive, or at least not anything out of the norm compared to parents who stayed home (I don’t know anyone who can handle 4 infants by themselves).
And balancing the budget also includes the present value of future income that can be earned by a parent that stays home during toddler years versus one that continues to work and pays for daycare. Clearly, many people are betting that even the high costs of daycare are worth paying in exchange for the (increased) security of future cash flow from working.
>TBH, at least in the U.S., I look at my relatives and how expensive day care, etc. is, I don't know how they balance their budget.
I imagine most people are not sufficiently saving for retirement, and/or don't have sufficient savings for emergency (medical/loss of income/disability/legal/etc) expenses either.
The scenario of not wanting to bring a child into an environment that isn't stable is exactly one of the points of the intro to the movie Idiocracy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sP2tUW0HDHA
I definitely understand 100%... I just thought it sounded extremely familiar. In my personal scenario, I had my first kid (unplanned) when I was 25. It definitely changed the trajectory of my life, and in a good way in my case. Once I knew I was having a kid I really started to take things more seriously and tried to set up as good of an environment as I could. That meant studying a lot, surrounding myself with good families, moving into a place with more exposure to nature, etc. We never owned a home, had retirement saved up, or a lot of the other things one would consider good "nest egg" scenarios. We just made it work when we had to, and have 2 awesome teenagers now.
Alright unpopular opinion time: You could afford a house if you were willing to move to a more undesirable area.
With the rise of remote work in the past year, people (not necessarily you) have more options than ever before for housing, yet they continue to cluster in small, desirable, high-rent areas rather than living less glamorously in exurban or rural areas.
House prices in my neighborhood have broken the $500k mark (and much more in other places nearby), yet a quick zillow search shows housing in several areas less than an hour from my house available for below $100k with stagnant prices. If I were willing to live even further afield, I could get a mobile home for below $75k, and in the eastern half of the US I see hundreds (thousands?) of places available for below $50k.
If you want the prices to improve then stop paying high prices.
Poverty is usually associated with increased unwanted pregnancy (which must have come from sex) though.
The paper "Declines in Unintended Pregnancy in the United States, 2008-2011" [1] by Lawrence B Finer and Mia R Zolna is linked by the CDC on their page about Unintended Pregnancy, and is a notable source of data on unintended pregnancies. This paper clearly states how they determined whether a pregnancy was intended:
"Pregnancy intention was defined according to a respondent's answers to a series of retrospective survey questions about her desire to become pregnant right before each pregnancy occurred. If she reported that she did not want to become pregnant at the time the pregnancy occurred, but wanted to become pregnant in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as mistimed. If a respondent reported that she did not want to become pregnant then or at any time in the future, the pregnancy was categorized as unwanted. We classified a pregnancy as unintended if it was either mistimed or unwanted; an intended pregnancy was one that was desired at the time it occurred or sooner."
When others cite statistics from this paper, this definition of "unintended" is nearly impossible to de-tangle from poverty: a reasonable respondent may very well indicate that their pregnancy was mistimed because of well-founded concerns, such as that they were not in a financially secure environment at the time. The paper treats such a response as an "unintended" pregnancy.
Careful reading of the paper reveals that there is evidence that poverty (at the time of surveying and/or at the time of pregnancy) causes respondents to retroactively rate their pregnancies as "unintended". This is a far less radical result than one may glean from casual discussion of such statistics.
While I've been aware of this for some time, it just occurred to me that unwanted children would actually cause more poverty, and any effort to prevent mitigation of that actually distributes more suffering.
Fewer men are having sex with about an equal amount of women. So there are a few men who statistically have the most sex and then the rest barely gets any. Tinder and the like very heavily favor attractive men. Then there's a whole bunch (like in my compsci major) who don't even talk to women on a daily basis...
https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo graphs like this dont inspire hope either and serve to support my previous points
But women generally don't want to be part of harems. If they want something besides sex, they pretty much need to stop sharing a small group of attractive guys and start settling down with the less attractive guys.
Perhaps tinder is not the place to find a guy for settling down.
They might not know that they're part of a harem if they're struck by the man's good looks and there's asymmetric information.
Don't forget the other big chart OKCupid posted which was how few men are willing to have date even slightly older women.
There are more women in their 20s having sex with men in their 30s, than men in their 20s having sex with women in their 30s. In most states it's not legal to have sex with women under 18, so (assuming serial monogamy) at any given time there just aren't enough women that are younger than a 20-something male who aren't in a relationship with someone older than that 20-something male.
In most states the age of consent is 16, not 18.
(31 states vs. 13 states; the remaining six set their age of consent at 17.)
What's with this idea, that all women are constantly having sex with somebody? And that they all want to share their partner so easily...
The implication of the data used to generate the graph that the article is focused on is that young females are having more sex than young males.
"Americans overall are having less sex than they used to. Young people, in particular young men, appear to be driving this trend."
"As per the chart below, the percentage of young women who hadn't had sex in the previous year increased as well, though not nearly as much as it did for men."
That graph seems like an accurate reflection of how much effort people of each gender put into their appearance.
Don't be discouraged by that graph; Okcupid also described how looks matter much more to men than women when it comes to actually sending messages.
Because we have cheap entertainment that is a lot less annoying than dealing with the opposite sex?
I can't speak to the unrealistic demands from men, but, if you aren't from an area with a surplus of women, the dating demands of women who are effectively average are absurd. I seem to remember that there was some dating site analysis that basically backed that up--men mis-estimate average-ness some but most women are just way off.
Ding: Thanks to adflux for finding the OKCupid data: https://m.imgur.com/L9Vu4Zo
You clearly don't know what the inside of a gym even looks like, but you want me to have six pack abs? Your degree barely qualifies you for Amazon warehouse worker, but you want me to be pulling six figures? Oh, and I also have to be over 6 foot tall.
Uh, yeah, I think I've got lots to do until someone a little more grounded in reality comes along.
The data in that article only goes up to 2018. It will be interesting to see if that 27% figure is now higher.
It's pretty clear what is happening: Online dating has become the main way romantic partners meet online [1] and the average man finds it far more difficult to find a partner than, say, in a bar or the workplace [2]
[1] https://news.stanford.edu/2019/08/21/online-dating-popular-w...
[2] https://qz.com/1051462/these-statistics-show-why-its-so-hard...
I am in my late 20s and a senior engineer at FAANG. I am conventionally attractive and have been asked out by numerous women over the years, even when I did not have my FAANG salary. However, I have had very few sexual partners.
The article has four ideas on why men like me have fewer partners. That men lack the money for partners, that the top 10% of men outcompete the bottom 90% on social media apps, that at least some of these men are homosexuals, that men prefer pornography over the actual act.
The answer for me (maybe not you) is the fourth one, "Rise of the tube sites." It is easy to fit a tube site into my schedule. It is hard to fit another human in to my schedule. After going on a tube site, I have no incentive to go to parties, go on tinder or to otherwise meet women. If I did not have tube sites, I likely would have gotten married in college when my future earnings potential became obvious.
It's definitely a combination of all the things you've mentioned. Also men don't meet women if all they do is play games. I am a gamer myself and see this happening all around me.
I'm curious why a relationship with another person isn't something you'd want to prioritize. What fills your hours, and moreover, what fills your mental needs to such an extent that it can override biological imperatives?
I mostly just fill my time with work and hobbies. The rest of the time I spend alone with myself.
Doesn't fill the mental needs, but you just get better at suppressing them over the years.
Would be nice to meet someone who shared my interests and take on life, but the only ones I've found don't find me particularly attractive or already got snatched up. And what's the point of starting a relationship with someone who doesn't share your interests and take on life? Fear of dying alone? That doesn't seem to me to be a good enough reason.
Eh, well, dying alone doesn't seem too bad in an era where you can literally pursue any fascinating hobby you want with relatively low startup costs (FPV drones, dirt bikes, rock climbing, backpacking around the world, you name it).
I feel you. Something to consider though, regarding shared interests: I have found it more pleasing to learn about somebody else's interests rather than simply affirming my own. Eventually it tends towards each side learning to like the others interests, or at least be familiar with them.
The problem I see is the lack of genuine interest in many. I don't really think that (in general) "video games" or "the office" or "anime" are interests, unless it becomes either uncomfortably obsessive (negative) or creation (positive). Same can go for things like hiking, board games, partying... these are activities, not really interests. People seem afraid to expose what truly interests them even long into a relationship.
Your point about interests is interesting.
What would you consider an interest that would catch your attention?
If hiking is an activity, then would the interest be 'getting outdoors.'
Is there a biological imperative for a male other than orgasming, which ostensibly, content from a website can accomplish?
My understanding is some asexual people can experience romance but not obtain any pleasure from sex.
This suggests there are parts of the brains of (some, perhaps most men) looking for something which you can't get from orgasming.
Probably because it’s a lot of work.
Yes, but why would you want to replace a partner with a tube site?
Because it can be more convenient. You could ask this about a lot of things. Why replace a powerful desktop with a laptop? Why replace vinyls/CDs with MP3s? Why drink Soylent instead of eating a meal? It's a trade-off that some people choose.
You can certainly ask that about a lot of things, in the context of commodities. Human companionship is hardly one of them.
That's just like your opinion, man. Not everyone values sexual relationships the same way you seem to. Aside from the example of the comment parent, Japan has an interesting cultural phenomenon of "herbivore men" characterized by a general indifference to marriage and committed relationships.
You're talking about something different then. The existence of tube sites should have no effect on people that already didn't care about sex and relationships. The point I responded to said that these sites are a main reason why certain men aren't pursuing sex.
No I'm talking about the same thing. Herbivore men don't care about marriage and committed relationships, that is different from not caring about their basic sexual needs which they do. As asexuality is not very common, they still need to satisfy basic biological impulses. Tube sites can replace sex as the primary way to satisfy sexual needs in the same way laptops replace desktops as the primary way to satisfy computing needs, or the way Soylent replaces cooked food as the primary way to satisfy hunger. Tube sites allow men who don't care about marriage and committed relationships to avoid pursuing sex through courtship & relationships the way their biology compels them to.
If your primary or sole motivation to get married would have been to secure a sexual partner, it probably saved a lot of trouble to have filled that space with porn.
It would be really interesting to see how 2020 and 2021 affected the number of people for every age group who reported no sex in the past year. I'm in my 30s and due to the pandemic I'm currently in the longest voluntary period of abstinence that I've ever had.
I was in my 20s 8-18 years ago and despite any sort of stability or decent employment I was still sexually active with female partners. I had a smartphone before most people knew that was a possibility, and essentially unlimited porn. I don't get it. Birth control and condoms have been widely available for one billion years at this point. Doesn't anybody want personal contact, a relationship, etc.? Are people really just holding out on experiencing life in the hope that either someone richer or richer times might suddenly appear? Because that would be monumentally stupid.
>Are people really just holding out on experiencing life in the hope that either someone richer or richer times might suddenly appear? Because that would be monumentally stupid.
It seems reasonable to me to not have children if you do not feel secure about your housing prospects and overall cash flow projections.
> Birth control and condoms have been widely available for one billion years at this point.
Many, many women prefer not to use birth control (for a variety of reasons), and many men find that the decreased sensation from condoms doesn't make the experience worth all of the effort.
As a result, after going through a few pregnancy scares, sex may just not be worth the trouble. Especially if you're not past a threshold of attractiveness and have to put in a ton of effort to be able to have that sex in the first place.
If sex is going to wind up being only a marginally-pleasurable activity that requires an enormous amount of effort to secure and is accompanied by regular pregnancy scares, then why bother?
Fuck the species. Why not just smoke some week, sip a beer, and play videogames with your buddies (guys or gals)? Sounds like a much better way to spend an evening to me!
what about smaller dating pool due to obesity
I don't think it's changed that much since a few decades ago when I was in my 20's, perhaps men are more truthful with online surveys.
Seeing the dip in the graphs, there seems to have been a lot of bonking going on in 2008. Wonder why that is.
I'm betting on dating sites and the internet in general. Our evolutionary biology is for the women to only get pregnant by the fittest available male in the "tribe" because it's such an investment in time and resources (also why men are inclined to go around with whoever they can, it's all benefit and no cost to "dine and dash"), and now the "tribe" we percieve is artifically extended with the fittest possible specimens constantly on display. Where a woman of the species might have been content settling for someone in their small town 100 years ago, the part of their brain that evolved to discern mates screams at them that they can do better because of the men on dating sites with perfect bodies these days, and the rest of the men are just left to simmer in discontent, probably a reason for a lot of social unrest.
I don't know what we could do to fix this but completely ban dating apps, which is impractical. Optimally in the far future we'd be able to rewrite the human genome to update our standards of attraction from the stone age - beefy muscles, tall height, other such signals are generally irrelevant to life today yet they're still such strong factors for men to be able to break into dating.
You have some odd ideas there.
You might want to read The Moral Animal by Robert Wright for a more nuanced view of human nature by an evolutionary psychologist. (A field which is controversial at the best of times- but if you're going to believe something controversial but possibly true you can do a lot better than what you posted here)
If I wasn't on my phone i'd type more, but in brief you have a weird idea of what fitness means for a woman looking for a mate. It doesn't necessarily mean "big muscles" but could mean something like a guy who loves her and will raise the kids with her. Because that's optimal for passing on genes.
Furthermore fitness for a male in search of a woman might mean a guy who is monogomous and caring (because faking those traits to manipulate a woman might be too difficult) because he can convince a woman to mate with him because he will help her with the kids.
The original statement isn't about women in general but the dynamics on dating apps for people under 30. I think we can agree that Tinder and others are more focused on physical attributes than the ability to finance and support the raising of children
Believe it or not, I don't agree.
There's a lot more to a Tinder photo than physical attributes. A picture, as they say, is worth a thousand words. A photo can convey a lot about your personality. What you're doing in the photo is a big clue. So is your emotional state. Just choosing a photo that's well composed and makes you look your best means a lot.
Tinder photos aren't mug shots for identification. You're not just comparing a person's physical features. Even the simple expedient of smiling will do you a lot of good. You'd be stunned at how many people (of both sexes) will choose a random grainy photo and slap it up there.
There's more to success on Tinder than a photo, but it's not the simple box-ticking of attractiveness that people make it out to be. A good photo gets you to the point where you can talk with somebody. Then your personality matters.
How do you convey that via 6 pictures and ~100 words. Also “convince a woman to mate with him because he will help her with the kids”...
You don't need to find people online, do you? You can meet people other ways.
But the book does suggest, If I recall, that the best way to convince a woman you will stick around and raise kids with her is for your genes to make you very much in love with her and make you want to raise kids with her.
Some men supposedly have genes that make them fake being in love, but the book suggests women have genes that will try to sort out these fakers through natural lie detection, with varying result.
Of course, you could choose to take what I just stated with a grain of salt.
Are you asking(for a friend) how to date?
No it was a mocking rhetorical question for the op.
I haven't read the book (it was written before I was born lol) but Tinder isn't about finding a partner to have kids with.
It's not necessary to suppose that humans date like a prehistoric caricature; it's far more likely that people are making decisions based on the kind of information easily available to them, and their intuition about how likely that signal is to be accurate.
It's a discovery problem: people on today's mainstream dating sites select first on looks, then on profile substance, then on digital communication style and/or availability, and then on in-person compatibility. People filtered out from someone's potential matches at earlier stages in the process do not make it to later stages.
People in real life choose dates using the same criteria, but the order of filtering stages is more flexible to the circumstances. In real life, it's also more likely to benefit from a trusted third party who introduces you to a match.
I find women to be too shallow.
But I don't feel anger towards women or feel upset about it, rather I devote my life to the things I enjoy doing.
You should probably meet more/different women then. Or at the very least you should know that there are many women who are not shallow.
The funny thing is that there are both:
- communities of men who think women are shallow (they spend all their time on instagram, they only care about their looks and about how wealthy and good looking their partner is);
- communities of women who think men are shallow (they only want to fuck, they don't care about you at all, they spend more time on their cars than on their girlfriends).
Both communities are wrong.
It's certainly not the case that women think all men are shallow, but any woman who has been on any dating app will tell you that she has met a lot of creeps. Men who open the conversation with "DTF?" are a daily occurrence.
There's a certain survivorship bias there: such men don't get removed from the market. Men genuinely seeking long term commitments, or even medium term ones, will often find them and leave.
> It's certainly not the case that women think all men are shallow
Some women do do. That was the one and only point of my comment: to show that there are both men and women who fall prey to the exact same inductive fallacy.
I don't use any social network besides linkedin, reddit and hn if the last one counts as a social network, spending an average of 45 minutes on all of them each week.
But you're right not all of them is, but the majority I have meet country wide are from all the professions one can think of and all the life backgrounds you can imagine.
> communities of women who think men are shallow (they only want to fuck, they don't care about you at all, they spend more time on their cars than on their girlfriends).
Because most of them are ignoring nice guys, at least while the women are in their 20-s. The book "Land of the Losers" nailed it.
I kinda understand you. Most women don't interest me as well. It takes more than a hot body and a pretty face. It takes a hot mind and/or a warm heart for me. Contrast this with most of my friends. They're all easily satisfied. If the girl is dumb and hot, they're game.
What makes you think that's what most women want? By that logic wouldn't most men want something as superficial? Also there are a lot of smart women out there...what is your reasoning for not being with those types?
I won’t paint with that broad of a brush, but I will say I find most people in general on dating apps to be boring and formulaic.
Not to say that they necessarily are, and to be fair, almost all dating app advice I’ve seen comes down to building a copy/paste format. I’ve seen a a few apps that seem entirely populated by people a certain “archetype” in my area.
Yea there's a prevailing notion being pushed nowadays that women are the exact same as men but magically better.
Add in the moral panic surrounding consent and sex, and you get a chilling effect on courtship and socializing.
What incentive do men have to interact with women, when the social climate makes it a tight-rope walk where even the slightest false impression of impropriety will forever destroy your reputation?
Especially when you can get off to porn? Sorry, it's obvious why things are the way they are and only politically invested types would care to argue otherwise.