The sexual revolution and my Christian schadenfreude (today's non-political thread)

[guacamole]

Pardon the click-baity title. I want to suggest for you guys a listen to a brief NPR piece here:

https://www.npr.org/2018/11/14/66769...-from-intimacy

It's about seven minutes long and talks about how the sex rate is declining amongst Millenials--who have had less sexual partners than Gen x or even Boomers. Go ahead and listen, I'll wait:

The researcher blames two things: porn and dating apps. Her argument is that porn leads to either masturbation or attempting to replicate things people have seen with partners who just aren't into it. I don't think that's a big surprise. We Christians have long thought that porn can have a deleterious effect on a healthy sex life.

The part that I thought was mildly funny was how dating apps like tindr are actually leading to fewer hook ups because people are a.) being more choosy, and b.) over shooting their own attractiveness and trying to match with would-be-partners who in turn are rejecting them and likewise, that next group of more attractive people are over shooting their own attractiveness, and so own, until you have a chain of people who can find partners.

They cite that the average person who uses a dating app uses it for and hour and a half a day! That leads to an obvious understanding of these apps: they are fundamentally social media apps, the function of which is to get you to use the app, not to actually facilitate one's "romantic" life.

fwiw,
guacamole

[Cow Poke]

Interesting.

[One Bad Pig]

IMO, smartphones in general are a contributing factor. When the default reaction to spare time is look at the phone, there's less chance for face to face interaction with others. Personal relationships take work, and undivided attention.

[Mountain Man]

We Christians have long thought that porn can have a deleterious effect on a healthy sex life.

I'm pretty sure that's more than just a "Christian thought" and has been definitively proven through multiple studies.

[Christianbookworm]

Smart phone= birth control/STI prevention? Because perople are too busy playing on the eloctronic pacifier to bother mating!

[Starlight]

As a millennial myself I'm not particularly surprised by the observation that number of sexual partners is lower among millennials in general than previous generations - that matches my anecdotal observations from acquaintances in my own life.

It always makes me grin with amusement when some old foggy does a rant about morality declining etc etc. When actually, sexual immorality of the traditional kind is much lower now than it used to be.

As to the causes... causes are always complex and I'm not sure I back the researcher's claims. I would point to things like life being much more stressful now than it used to be: Millennials are growing up very economically insecure compared to previous generations, and the pressure on them to get a good education and a good job is so much higher than previously. So they are leaving relationships until later in life, until after they have made it through study and into the workforce. Then they can settle down, find a partner, have children etc.

In the modern world, there are also much more alternative opportunities for leisure activities than there used to be. Sex is just one among a much longer list of many enjoyable things a person can do with their time, so many 20 year-olds will instead spend time playing computer games rather than pursuing relationships. And other things:



I also roll my eyes at MM's priggish "porn is evil" view. Yeah whatever. Does it prove a problem for some people? Sure. So do lots of things. Some people get addicted to food too, but it doesn't make food inherently bad.

I haven't made much use of dating apps, so I can't speak strongly to that. But my suspicion is that a lot of people use them to chat on. So it's similar in that regard to taking a person to a restaurant and having a chat over a meal. So if previously the conversation would have lasted an hour at the restaurant, it now last an hour on the dating app. I don't see that as being important.

The "people aim too high" theory doesn't seem useful, unless you spell out why this has changed: Won't people always have aimed high? The OP provides no theory as to why people are now aiming higher than they used to. Perhaps women used to be forced by economic and social necessity to "settle", and now they aren't? IIRC the only data analysis I've seen on this subject with dating app data suggested that men graded both themselves and the female population in a bell-curve overall for attractiveness, as you might expect, while women very much did not and instead graded the vast majority of men as unattractive and a very small number as highly attractive and tended to highly overrate their own attractiveness... perhaps that stems evolutionarily from a polygamous practice where the vast majority of men were sent off to die in battle and the few men at the top of the social pecking order got all the women for themselves?