The story is behind a WaPo paywall.
1. It is not a story about sexual frequency. It is about the incidence of people who have not had sex with a partner in the past year. Call these folks abstainers. Sorry, Tyler, but I disagree with Christopher Ingraham that it is amazing that there are more abstainers in the 18-30 age bracket than among fifty-somethings. My guess is that the proportion of married people is quite a bit higher among 50-somethings, and if you’re looking for abstainers, you are more likely to find them among people who are not married. To be blunt, the survey does not say that older folks are having more sex. It just says that fewer of them are abstaining for a year.
2. Robin Hanson also could not resist commenting.
it won’t at all do to point to effects that are constant in time, such as people not always telling the truth in polls, or men having lower standards for sex partners. It also won’t do to point to changes over this time period that effected [sic] all ages and genders similarly, such as obesity, porn, video games, social media, dating apps, and wariness re harassment claims. They might be part of an answer, but can’t explain all by themselves. To explain an unusual burst over the last decade, it is also problematic to point to factors (e.g., computing power) that changed over the last decade, but changed just as much over prior decades.
3. Here’s a way to simplify the data in one of the graphs on Robin’s post, which looks at people in the 18-30 age bracket. Suppose we had 100 heterosexual men and 100 heterosexual women. Ten years ago, there were 10 abstainers of each gender. Among the more recent cohort,there are 28 male abstainers and 18 female abstainers.
4. Here’s a way to think about this. Ten years ago, there were 10 female abstainers, each with a “partner” who abstained also. In the more recent cohort, the number of abstainer “partnerships” increased by 8. Some of that could be a decrease in marriage rate, but how much could the marriage rate of have fallen in the last decade?
5. Another interesting development is that there are now 10 male abstainers who don’t have a “partner.” To put it another way, there are now 82 women who did not abstain and only 72 men who did not abstain. (Of course, ten years ago, there were 90 non-abstainers of each gender, so definitely don’t think of this as women getting friskier.) Who did these extra ten women find? Older men? Men who already had non-abstained with someone else?
6. Robin writes,
it seems that. . .the latest age cohort has switched to a new sex culture wherein the less desirable half of young men are now seen as even less desirable by young women than previous cohorts would have seen them. And within this culture it is seen as more acceptable for young women to share the more desirable half of young men
I agree that this is likely the basic story, but I would not overstate it. It could be that we should be talking about the less desirable quarter of the male population. And the number of women who are ok with sharing desirable men may still be very small. My arithmetic exercise suggests that the proportion of women who are sharing (in the sense that they have a partner who in the past year has had additional partners) is 10 percent, and a lot of that may not be sharing by choice.
Not sure that abstainers are less desirable. They could be smarter.
STD rates have decreased since the 70s and 80s. Maybe the risk of AIDs has been a contributing factor?
https://www.cdc.gov/std/stats17/tables/1.htm
The federal Office of Child Support Enforcement reported a decline in the year over year amount of child support payments collected for 2017 over 2016 in its preliminary 2017 annual report (most recent data available). https://www.acf.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/programs/css/fy_2017_preliminary_data_report.pdf?nocache=1529610354
Women initiate 66% of divorce proceedings. Women are more likely to initiate a divorce if they are economically independent. A Kingston Univeristy covering 20 years found that women on average are significantly more content than usual for up to five years after divorce. Smart men may have entirely rational reasons to decline what is on offer in the marriage contract market.
Casual sex is not casual anymore. Younger men who have been exposed to university culture are most likely only too aware that a woman can retroactively decide that a sexual encounter was rape and ruin the man’s life. Regardless if it actually happens all that frequently, or even at all, the risk is there and a rational man may have smart reasons for foregoing a few moments of pleasure. The reality today is that many men perceive that many women are likely to view men as an enemy.
The elimination of traditional sex roles in society means that there really are no boilerplate assumptions in the marriage agreement. You can’t just initial off where the agent tell you to but instead have to read and negotiate every line.
Not that any of this is bad. In Japan, which is a much better country than the US, a survey found that almost 70 percent of unmarried men and 60 percent of unmarried women between the ages of 18 and 34 are not in a relationship, and, 42 percent of the men and 44.2 percent of the women admitted they were virgins. The USA can gradually achieve those high standards. The answer may be for US schools to adopt more manga textbooks and anime educational films, create more archery, karaoke, and ikebana extracurricular clubs, and just let the kids do gaming. Gaming seems to fill all the intimate relationship needs of people anyway. Plus gaming is an economic activity that shows up in GDP.
In the bigger picture, Hanson may be on to something related to evolutionary drift toward a eusocial society. What we are seeing is just the mammal equivalent of the evolution of ants, termites, bees, etc. Insects have females that can lay many eggs, mammals do not, but given the right circumstances, mammals can specialize in the distribution of sperm in the manner in which insects specialize the distribution of eggs. The economics of specialization would suggest that having fewer inseminators in a social mammal species that lives in dense concentrations would be advantageous to the group as a whole. The gains from rival males competing may be overshadowed by the efficiency gains from having a single, or at least many fewer males in procreative roles. Assume females in a distinct population in a colony (like a city or town), are capable of identifying the individual male in that population with the most desirable genes, and further assume that the desireablity is correlated with the colony’s survival chances, it would make sense that single women, being at no competitive disadvantage to married women due to social supports, would breed exclusively with the desireable male.
We see this happening not just socially, but physically as well. As increased specialization is rewarded in the economy and society, humans have been physically adapting accordingly with skull sizes shrinking. https://www.jstor.org/stable/41464021?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents A smaller brain is much more likely capable of doing a specialized job for a lifetime than would a larger, more inefficient brain, better adapted to generalization.
The increase in the percentage of the population in non-reproductive roles can thus be seen in evolutionary terms as a harbinger of the human evolution into a truly euscocial species.
Estrogen, especially, in the environment. Making less masculine men.
Culture support for gay men, so they are out of the hetero-sex market.
And obesity is, for most folks, NOT sexy. Obesity way up.
More women college educated, fewer men with degrees — women less willing to have less educated lovers.
Yes, the bottom quarter in sex has a lot of overlap with the bottom quarter in attractiveness. But even fat ugly women can get laid, if they want. In bars, late:
at 1:30 am, there are NO ugly women in bars (CA closes bars at 2).
The number of women willing to sleep with a famous / high status guy, “sharing” him, remains both high and resulting in a good amount of casual sex. Cause lots of high status guys don’t mind sharing themselves with groupies or fans, not just B. Clinton, Trump, & JFK, and so many rock & movie stars . While the number lovely female models who share themselves casually, despite plenty of male offers, few women do this.
The hypergamy of women (wanting higher status) is combined with a lower level of promiscuity. A few high status, very active guys can, and do, have sex with lots of women.
It’s actually a good thing to have reduced promiscuous sex — but society is stronger with a replacement level birthrate. There should probably be further tax reductions for being married and having children.
“A few high status, very active guys can, and do, have sex with lots of women.”
There’s a feedback loop as women get rejected by the other, less active men. So the very active guys become more active than ever. That’s how they become the high status, very active guys.
Imagine a young woman who chases after some guy and never gets anywhere with him. It’s humiliating for her, but she’ll keep trying for a year or two because she has her sights set on this one guy who doesn’t pay a lot of attention to her. She has better luck with other guys, mixed in with some more humiliating experiences with guys that she’s into a lot, until she eventually swears off all these normal, middling status, not particularly active guys.
It’s the very active guys she ends up preferring because they don’t string her along or play games or leave her unsure of herself. And that, paradoxically, is how a guy becomes the high status, very active guy. He wasn’t anyone’s first choice but he’s everyone’s second choice.
I mentioned this on Tyler’s blog, but I’ll say it again: young women today can make themselves more attractive than in the past. They watch YouTube videos on how to apply make-up. They work out more. They are even more likely to have cosmetic surgery. No longer does a plain girl have to settle for some schlub. Instead, she can make herself less plain.
But all those YouTube vids work for hot women too. So the ratio of hot to not remains the same. As for working out, yea that gets closer to being an equalizer. There’s only so much “more fit” you can get.
“Only so much ‘more fit'” only applies to a small and decreasing fraction of women, and makes one of the two strongest counterarguments to the general point that the change can be attributed to a sudden increase in the ability of women to make themselves more attractive via control of appearance.
YouTube probably helps, but women have had cheap and easy access to adequate information about maintaining their figures and effective use of fashion, grooming, and affordable makeup – and tended to conform to social norms and learn from friends and family about what to do – for generations. If you search for “prom pictures” and put in dates going back to the 50s or ever earlier, you can see there is no big recent change. Based on looking at a few pictures, I’d say the big shift to the current American equilibrium in the regard was sometime in the 1920’s, nearly a century ago.
On the other hand, a dramatic and recent shift in general appearance and attractiveness is weight and body proportions, which is under a person’s control but which more and more people are deciding not to manage to make themselves more attractive (which belies the ‘increased range of options’ explanation). And even if one restricts oneself to the the age range of young adult women, (uually 18-24 or 20-29 in the statistics), the recent explosion in the proportion of young people who are overweight or obese is both quite dramatic, and, due to its relative recency, seems overlooked for its explanatory power for big new changes in intersexual dynamics.
Consider: In 1968, the median young woman’s waist circumference was 26.3 inches. Even correcting for racial matters, fifty years later, it is about 33.3 – 7 inches or 25% greater, which is huge (as it were). Things are so bad that the mean is now significantly larger than the median because the distribution is skewed by the relatively sudden appearance of a large number of extremely obese young individuals (which of course goes along with young-onset diabetes and all sorts of other health issues).
What was once average in terms of body proportion appearance is now borderline ‘elite’ (in the general population) – that is, nearly the top decile nowadays.
The trouble is that it’s not “all relative” and the sexual aesthetic response reactions to body proportions is not graded on a curve (as it were), which is what one would expect for instincts and impulses so closely related to prime evolutionary functions like reproduction. While somewhat maleable and influenced by culture, there are important thresholds and hard limits that can’t be overcome via psychological manipulation by social pressures. So a large number of young people from both sexes but women especially (since the male reaction is more visually-based) are disqualifying themselves from most of the sexual marketplace by deciding to not manage their weight.
Worse, what really helps people do hard things like discipline the temptation to indolence and overeating is the terrifying prospect of being an outlier and suffering from social judgment and ostracism – which is especially strong for women who tend to be more sensitive to such social pressures and judgments and have stronger conformity instincts.
But as more and more young women become overweight, the brain’s Social Calculus Module picks up that it’s ‘normal’ and ‘not a big deal’, and that one has strength in numbers and is just one of the crowd. This gives rise to a maladaptive impulse that one’s undesirable life circumstances are not due to their own choices and condition (which is reality), but must derive from some other issue or general situation.
This is just one tropical depression combining with others into the perfect storm of the slow-motion disaster of the general cultural and social breakdown. Naturally virtuous and intelligent elites with means will, as always, make out ok as they discover a new social equilibrium heavily seasoned by large doses of hypocrisy as they signal tolerance of vice, but the rest of the population is going to continue to degenerate.
In the second season of Atlanta there’s a cardboard cutout of Drake at a party and young women at this party line up to get a selfie with the cardboard cutout of Drake.
So the point is not to be in a relationship with Drake. Sharing Drake isn’t it, either. The goal is not to have sex with Drake. The point is to post a photo on Instagram or Facebook that might suggest, by implication, the possibility of sex with Drake. And that’s the point. An image of an image is just as effective as an image that includes the man himself. All that matters is how it looks online.
Your followers or “friends” or people you went to high school with are your audience. And the images you post can’t include any images of actual sex. So actually having sex is a waste of time because you can’t post a photo of that for a general audience. But then again, having said that, women in their 20s will take their phones out at work and play you a video of themselves having sex. So it isn’t a complete waste of time to have sex if you have the video on your phone and can show it to people when you choose to. But the point is to create a video or a photograph. What matters is the image.
A culture of photographs is a culture of lying, and what Facebook and Instagram have done is they’ve trained a generation to lie constantly, without hesitation. Lying on social media is like breathing in real life, and then you lie more in real life, too. But you don’t have to lie to the polling companies. You lie about how much fun you’re always having, and how much you love your work, and this is something else that women in their 20s keep doing. Talk to a woman in her 20s and at some point she will inevitably tell you, “I love my work.” But that’s the effect of social media. Young women insist that they all love their jobs.
Young women aren’t nearly so enthusiastic when they talk about young men. These are people they put up with. They have so many complaints about them. He’s deficient one way or another, and there are photos for proof.
Broadly agree as to the overall story, I think Hanson is wrong to dismiss all those changes as affecting ages and genders similarly though, particularly dating apps. Here’s one possible story:
Anecdotally people I know in their 20s to younger 30s who are single-and-looking rely more or less entirely on apps to meet people these days. This has probably kind of displaced a bunch of the ways younger people used to meet – at work, parties, school if you’re still in college, just hanging out with people you know, etc. This makes it more likely that young people date strangers rather than someone from their social circle.
Let’s assume on average men are more interested in promiscuity than women. If you’re a guy and you’re dating someone from your social circle, even casually, and you start going after other women, it’s pretty likely people will have something to say. She’ll find out, maybe dump you, your reputation will take a hit in the group. If you’re dating strangers, you don’t have to worry about this – even if your friends know the details of your love life (which is less likely, since it’s being set up on your phone, rather than in person) they probably don’t care much, they don’t even know the people you are seeing.
So before apps, high-status guys would face a pressure to get off-the-market that’s missing now. They’re still on the apps, with them still on the market, they soak up the attention of women who would previously have gone for lower-status guys.
When I used to get dates online, I encountered a lot of women that were cheating on dudes. It seemed to me this was a feature of the format as you describe. If the women were acting this way, the men were as bad.
One problem with social circle dating is that if it’s a tight enough circle for people to really know each other, then it’s a tight enough circle that you can’t really take too many shots. If a guy gets rejected too many times in a social circle he’s done in that social circle. Similarly, it seems like people will forgive one relationship within the social circle falling through but any more than that and its a stigma. Almost everyone in my religious group ended up marrying someone else in it, but those left behind are definitely like the person at the end of a musical chairs game left standing. And ours was a very run of the mill Catholic group, not like the some orthodox faith or anything.
Sports leagues and other yuppie things in the city appear to be ways of meeting a new social group (on top of whatever enjoyment you get from the sport). However, the interest is so broad that there isn’t much to make it so that the people who attend have much in common. Religious groups seem to be much more solid in this area, if only because people attending a religious event are almost always serious about forming a family.
Ultimately, I met my wife in person because we had a mutual friend we were handing out with (not a set up, coincidence). She wasn’t in my social circle, but she knew one in mine who was also part of hers. This provided a degree of social proof through the mutual friend but we also had separate social circles.
I’ll add that when I dated online it wasn’t Tinder or one of those dating apps meant for hookups. It was the ones that theoretically are people looking for relationships. My recommendation is that people avoid them.
That’s an important point. Dating – and especially marriage, or what’s left of it – is not just much more assortative than it used to be, it’s much less constrained by close proximity or existing in-person social groups. It might warrant an amendment to Kling’s Big Forces. So a lot of the long-term relationship connections are more SES-based or class-based than they used to be.
Now, doing some Kling-perspective synthesis, this also has some two-way feedbacks with the fact that many remaining social groups are “Narrower, Deeper, Older” per his description, and are therefore decreasingly useful as venues for young single people to make mating market matches.
There is the important exception of the co-ed workplace, which is the brick house left standing after the big bad wolf of late-modernity has blown over the other socializing groups to the ground, and part of why you see more and more similar-career or met-at-work couples these days.
The old joke that women went to college to get their “MRS degree”, and of course one of the big hopes for parents pulling out all the stops to help get their kid into the “best” colleges is that they will therefore join a more elite social network which provides better, more elite opportunities to socialize, and match with other people in that scene, both romantically and professionally.
But an interesting thing happened on the way, which is that the age of first marriage and first child-birth, especially for elites, went so far up (for various reasons hard to discuss), that few of them are actually to make their long-term romantic match while in their undergraduate years anymore. The few parents I’ve talked to who seem aware of the issue now expect that the romantic matching will happen later, either in graduate-level school, or otherwise rely on the professional matching that still happens in college as older singles circulate among their colleagues and professional counterparties.
Of course it goes without saying that society is in a bit of a tight spot if long-term romantic matching for elites relies increasingly on meeting during professional contexts, while at the same time making the attempt to transition from a professional encounter to propose a romantic connection more legally fraught than ever.
As Hanson says, it’s reasonable to conclude from the statistics and the evolution in the sexual marketplace that there is more “shraring” (hows that for a euphemism?) going on, and more guys at the bottom are getting shut out, while more guys at the top are cleaning up, so to speak.
As a young man myself who knows a lot of young men and women, maybe I can illustrate one of your points. Can attractive young men with high earnings/high earning potential sleep with lots of different attractive women? They most definitely can, and they do. For example, one good friend of mine broke off with his long-term girlfriend about a year and a half ago. He’s a hospital pharmacist in Minneapolis, and he managed to sleep with about ~10 good-looking women in a half-a-year before finding his current girlfriend. Another good friend of mine is a medical school student and works out a lot. He sleeps around quite a bit. It seems to me it’s never been easier for guys like him–the market has become more “winner-takes-all”, and he’s one of the winners. Look at the numbers for Tinder. I can’t find where I read this at the moment, but the top men on Tinder account for the vast majority of matches on that app. I also want to point out what Spotted Toad posted: https://spottedtoad.wordpress.com/2019/04/05/low-income-women-were-most-likely-to-be-celibate-in-2018/. Low-income women were most likely to be celibate in 2018.