Good to see they have their priorities right: "I'd rather be watching YouTube videos and making money. Sex is not going to be something people ask you for on your résumé."
We watched an episode of Master of None last night, the plot of which, involving Aziz Ansari, was:
(a) He takes his cutesy, vaguely Zooey Deschanel-esque date on a weekend trip to Nashville
(b) They sleep together in a king-size bed in the hotel room, but never have sex. Instead, they have one cutesy sort-of cuddle nap and one night where they go to bed early and wear full-on fucking pajamas to sleep
(c) They have cute encounters together and a nice chaste-ish kiss to symbolize their budding romance. The romance is thrown off-kilter when he makes her late for the flight but at the end of the episode they promise to see one another again.
That's it! Not played for irony but as a serious kind of meet-cute story. I almost threw my drink at the TV like three times. For real, what the fuck is the fucking problem with these fucking young people. How do you take your fucking date on a weekend away trip -- to fucking Nashville of all places, you should have been doing "reds" and having an affair with a married woman -- and just cuddle PJs together. What the fuck was I even watching. what the fuck is happening to all these fucking people.
Why has everyone under 30 decided to act like they are cute little stuffed animals?
We have met the enemy and it is twee.
SPOILER: They have lots of sex later, and it's funny.
That's actually (sincerely) reassuring about the world, but it STILL doesn't make up for whatever the hell that was.
"It's not like I'm saving myself for anything; it's more like I've been busy."
Isn't the canonical response here "Nerrrrds!"? Seriously, how credulous is the author?
Though they didn't bring out the classic excuses. For instance, I didn't see one mention of a Canadian girlfriend in the article.
2: possibly this date is meant to be colored by their experience of the first episode of the series, which, as you may recall, begins with a condom-related mishap.
I'd watched the first episode months ago. Is that the same girl. STILL NO EXCUSE FOR PJ WEARING SNUGGLE DATE.
Nashville is probably excessively air-conditioned. You know Joe the South is.
I'd watched the first episode months ago. Is that the same girl.
Yes;
9: According to millennial standards of conduct, it's you that has no excuse for your lackadaisical tv-watching.
Kind of on topic, Caitlin Flanagan is wetting the bed again. No link because I'm on my phone.
See, this all seems very normal to me. A sense of transgression is one of the big drivers of sexual stuff and there's not nearly that much to transgress given the availability of all kinds of free porn, the increasing visibility and respectability of sex work* and the increased visibility of people who practice various fetishes. When you can take an intro BDSM class at the library or through community ed, it no longer has a transgressive frisson - it's just one more healthy thing that adults do after carefully researching how and buying the appropriate stuff.
I remember wondering about this back in the late nineties when the pornification of everything was becoming pretty obvious. My worry at the time was that there would be some kind of horrible ultraviolence, etc, once mere fetishes, furrydom and so on were no longer even remotely transgressive just because people would need something to spice up their sexual practices. I much prefer this trend toward noping out of the whole dreary healthy-consumption-of-porn-and-sex-toys thing myself.
*You know what's weird to me? I now have four friends who do sex work for either their entire income or a substantial percentage of it. All are in their late twenties/early thirties. Sex work as actual career path has been normalized a lot in certain circles, and sex work as a fallback has been normalized for young broke people from lower middle class and middle class backgrounds in a way that it really wasn't when I was younger. I'd expect that this will only continue and that, in fact, doing sex work to get through college will become a pretty standard option. (Friends are all post-college or late degree-seekers.) There, again, sex isn't transgressive - it's just work and you plan for it like any other contractor.
This thing on binge drinking and how it's all the parents' fault? Man, she's a weird one.
13: At least take a picture or something.
15: That's it. It's strange even for her.
I can't think of anything that's made me want to pour the kids a round of shots more.
"At Tulane University, in New Orleans, Wolff's high school classmate Claudia W., 19, feels like an odd duck in a sea of Tinder users... Claudia, who did not want her last name used because "I don't want all my professors reading about how I'm a virgin..."
I keep giggling at the expectation that she'll be lost in an ocean of 19-year old Claudia W's at Tulane University.
There's also something odd about illustrating a trend toward celibacy by interviewing someone who feels like an odd duck because of it.
Somebody needs to add the duck penis video. I'm still on my phone on a plane.
Binge drinking has been declining on college campuses since 1984* so it is insane to actually blame modern parenting for binge drinking on college campuses
* actual "to be sure" fact from article
But, apparently, in the 1990s, nobody binged on more than five drinks. Because of respect for public health definitions.
We watched an episode of Master of None last night, the plot of which, involving Aziz Ansari, was:
This is a much better story if the "we" is you and your children.
R Tigre "Kids! They should be boning!!! WHY ARENT THEY BONING!?!"
Why can't they be like we were, boning in everyday?
And, she was making a big deal about the distinction between parents who thought their kids weren't drinking at all, and those who thought they were teaching their kids to drink moderately, and then saying that it doesn't matter if you teach your kids to drink moderately, they're going to binge anyway? At that point, why focus on the parents at all? They can't affect the behavior or stop it, so what the hell?
This is probably a question that there is no answer to, because it's sort of "What's human nature in the absence of society?" But on the original post, you kind of wonder how much people want to have sex when there are no social obstacles: if no one's morally disapproving, how much sleeping around do most people want to do?
if no one's morally disapproving, how much sleeping around do most people want to do?
All of our cheering and encouragement killed LB's libido.
I don't know if I believe this trend piece (the one in the OP) but it does remind me of the recent rise of the label "asexual". I mean, I guess those people have always been out there, at the low end of the bell curve of desire, but a rise in the number would help explain why there's now a word.
Also, assuming that there's an actual trend there... I would be suspicious of things like the large increase in antidepressant use, since there are lots of sexual side effects to those drugs.
28: The moral disapproval may have gone away, but the potential for humiliating rejection is still there. Surely that's enough to motivate people, right?
29: No, no, inconvenient though it may be under the circumstances, my libido is still ticking along quite actively, thank your very much.
how much
It's a collective action problem-- if nice people are sleeping around, then very much. If the people sleeping around are problems with hands and feet, then not much at all.
The post used to have a catty ladies segment of the paper, the Style section, which I think had its own horrible status-obsessed editors. I can't tell from the website's weird categories, which seem more like descriptive keywords than anything else, which editors decided this was cool.
On the histogram, I haven't read the fine print and will not, but is that seriously a comparison of life histories of people in their sixties with those of people in their thirties and noticing that the thirty year olds have not been busy for as many years???
32:
I disapprove! Definitely do not use 19-29 year olds for your physical pleasure.
32: even though nothing is forbidden, everything is permitted, and porn is cheap and plentiful?!
33: I wondered the same, but I think it said something about projected lifetime partners for the younger cohorts.
That seems like a weird projection to make, doesn't it?
36, 37: Someone get Nate Silver on the line!
A sense of transgression is one of the big drivers of sexual stuff
I don't understand this assertion (which I understand to be widespread; I'm not picking on Frowner). When I was young and Catholic, I was horny but repressed (and bad at dating). Once I got a GF, we fooled around as much as possible, not because it was transgressive, but because (spoiler alert) we were both horny and in love. Then we broke up, I was still horny, and I fooled around with any girl who was interested. Eventually I left religion, noticed that neither before nor after doing so had guilt or regret been a major (or even minor) factor, and continued to want to have sex. Mostly pretty normal cis-het sex at that. Now I'm married, and it all still holds, albeit with modest age-related decline in horniness.
But honestly, I can't think of a single sexual encounter in my life in which transgression* was a positive factor; I can think of a number in which it was inhibitive (complete stranger in a foreign country with no language in common? Too scary for sex!).
Am I really such an outlier? Sex is fun, more or less full stop. It is, indeed, its own reward.
*except of the very mildest sort, along the lines of semi-public locations or whatever, which I'd chalk up to at least as much variety as actual transgression.
Why is "number of partners" a good proxy for how much sex everyone is having? I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have had more sex in college if I'd hooked up willy-nilly with whoever was available rather than steadily dating a guy who was kind of a nympho for four years.
And this generation isn't interested in sex because sex in high school has declined? Wow. I'd say there's about a 15% chance this article is reflecting anything real. Frowner's story is the kind of thing I can readily believe without corroborating evidence, though.
My hunch is that one factor is the Internet has made it easier to scope out prospective partners at a safe distance, and so people spend less time in more committed, longer-term relationships and less time hooking up with whomever is available. The idea of a friend with benefits is the source of much moral panic, but it is an arrangement that implies some level of commitment and trust greater than hooking up with randos at bars or parties.
39: Well, for "transgression" substitute "naughtiness" if you like - I mean, the sense that having sex is dirty or whatever. Age peers have been known to describe fun sex as "dirty", for instance. Forbidden, a secret, something to get away with - not necessarily "I shouldn't have sex with this snot-covered derelict on a bed of broken glass and that just makes me want it more", of course.
It's not that I think transgression is the primary allure of sex - just that it's one of the fairly significant ones.
But I've always figured that the escalation in porn reflected the thrill of transgression - softcore was exciting when softcore was difficult to find; now softcore is just tumblr kitsch that straight girls post.
I suspect that sex is too much like work now - with the porn (wait - it's "pron" here, right?) and the sex toys and the blatant exchange process of sex work, sugar daddy arrangements, etc.
Also, it's not very hip in my social circles. Being asexual or demisexual or just not on the market is hip because it's a refusal of all that rah-rah I'm-sex-positive-look-at-my-dildo-collection stuff one gets in certain internet circles.
(Oh hey, another weird data point: I have some extremely hip young queer friends (I'm their elderly weirdo pal who can always provide a nutritious meal or a spare hat) and not that long ago the hipness ring-leader, who I know only second-hand, posted that she wanted nudes from her friends for her birthday. She was not kidding - she wanted nudes from her buddies, most of them provided them without a second thought and the only one who made a big production of it was someone only a few years younger than me. I asked a friend about it, and everyone pretty much thought it perfectly normal and not even all that sexual - more like pretending-to-make-porn than actual porn. Like porn in ironic quotes. I would argue that this suggests that there's a certain desexualizing of sex going on, at least in certain circles. )
desexualizing of sex
For me, the naked and the nude
(By lexicographers construed
As synonyms that should express
The same deficiency of dress
Or shelter) stand as wide apart
As love from lies, or truth from art.
Don't get distracted by trivialities. We need to know about hats.
When I got to the Russian bath here, whose main space is coeducational and clothing-optional, it's all very non-sexual, though I doubt it's actively desexualized. Just naked people, nakeding around, y'know? It's not sexual in large part because no one makes it sexual and anyone being a creepy sex person would be invited to leave.
I would argue that this is nothing remarkable.
Merely being unclothed is not an inherently sexy state, as we know from such phenomena as locker rooms and saunas and whatnot anyway (a German friend's now probably nonexistent German hiking blog had an entry long ago about a trip she'd gone on in California (I knew her from grad school) in which she noted that there was a hot tub in the cabin the hikers were staying at, and da sie alle europaïsch waren, gingen sie darin natürlich nackt, ain't no thang, and they, unlike my fellow bath-goers, were all acquaintances or friends, even).
"Were it not for naughtiness a man would be as happy in arms of a chambermaid as of a duchess."
Is that when you'll finally meet a duchess whose mom didn't take Thalidomide?
Millenarian celibates have never experienced chiliasm.
52: no, it's when I'm going to see Powder Her Face. I note that dq has yet to locate a young lady to accompany me.
I note that dq has yet to locate a young lady to accompany me.
I recall a superior in an early employer saying, at one time, "We'll kidnap, but we won't pimp."
I am not at all certain what the relevance of this recollection could possibly be.
33, 36/37
I wondered too about how they came up with that projection. It would seem like a better method to compare number of partners by age 30 in each group, but what do I know.
That Flannigan piece was scattered even for her.
For anecdata I started drinking at home, first red wine, then beer, then white wine, and then much later mixed drinks and hard liquor. If I'd come home drunk on Mike's Hard Lemonade or whipped cream flavored vodka, my mother would have been upset at my shitty taste in liquor rather than my being drunk. To this day I wouldn't drink anything sweeter than a G&T or a Manhattan in the company of my family, and I find the sweet teenage sugar alcohol tastes too sweet for me. I didn't drink a lot in college because warm orange juice and cheap vodka served in a plastic bucket was pretty unappealing, so I guess my mother did her job well. I did get pretty drunk WITH my mom in my late teens and 20s, usually on red wine or strong beer.
My family took the same approach with coffee: start at 17 with black coffee, learn to like the bitter flavor. Once you're ok with black coffee, a bit of milk to cut the acid is fine, but my mother would seriously judge me if I were to drink sugary coffee drinks on a regular basis.
60
One hopes, but the imposter syndrome is strong these days.
If memory serves, 65 is literally the plot of the original Emmanuelle.
Well, for "transgression" substitute "naughtiness" if you like
Dipping in for a moment, I'm willing to concede that, for very weak definitions of "transgressive", it's probably pretty widespread. I'm just not sure that, once you weaken "transgressive" enough, it's something you expunge. That is, giving head used to be transgressive for most people*; it was reserved for people who weren't proper or respectable or whatever. Almost no one thinks that anymore, but head hasn't gone away. Meanwhile, a hand job in a movie theater is still pretty naughty, and will likely continue to be in any foreseeable world.
I don't want to be churlish, I just feel as if there's a bit of the two-step of terrific triviality going on: either horniness depends on genuine, society-threatening boundary-crossing, or else it's inflamed by the kind of naughtiness that will always be available. People have been predicting since literally before I was born that sex would become so commonplace that no one would care anymore, but AFAICT, people still do.
There are probably eating-related analogies that it's best that I skip over.
*or so I'm given to understand
once you weaken "transgressive" enough, it's something you expunge
With any good detergent, you shouldn't have to go through all that.
This article made a ton of sense to me. Online dating means you turn people down unless they are perfect? Sounds right. Porn means you have no need to put stress or effort into finding sex? Sounds right. Lack of privacy means people are afraid to do things that will not be kept secret? Sounds right.
Porn means you have no need to put stress or effort into finding sex? Sounds right.
You know, even if Diogenes could have satisfied his hunger by rubbing his belly, I bet he'd still have wanted to break bread with others.
The solution to all the problems in 69 (heh) is alcohol.
Damn you. This is friggin' perfect.
Porn means you have no need to put stress or effort into finding sex? Sounds right.
You know, even if Diogenes could have satisfied his hunger by rubbing his belly, I bet he'd still have wanted to break bread with others.
43: You would be surprised. I wish I could make a funny about it, but I am still sad that I lent my nice secondhand black watch cashmere to a friend who did not return it and has moved on to bigger and better social circles.
67: But - if we give the article any credit at all - people actually are having less sex. Maybe that's incorrect, of course. On the level of anecdote, I do feel that while there's plenty of foolish hook-ups amongst people of my acquaintance, there's also a surprisingly large group of people who don't date or have sex. That is, a larger percentage of milllenial annoying trendy lefties than was the case among my generation of annoying trendy lefties. And, as pointed out upthread, there's a lot more social space to be asexual or demisexual, and those two terms themselves provide a lot of social cover for people who are ordinary-sexual but just not that into it. More frisson to watching porn and making money, I guess.
And, out of order, 48: But the point is that as recently as the last of my own youth, one would not request or send nudes in a desexualized way or send out a broadcast call for naked pictures to one's platonic friends. I would argue that requesting a naked picture of someone - specifically a naked picture, not just any old picture and someone sends a naked one - is pretty different from going to a mixed-gender bath of the kind you describe.
I mean, obviously most people still have sex in amounts and ways similar to those of recent generations, but I think the increase in non-participants is interesting. And reassuring, really, since the relentless nineties-feminist narrative of "if you don't want to be hooking up with lots of people, that's because you are Broken By The Patriarchy" was very depressing and did not, in fact, lead to especially good times.
If I'd come home drunk on Mike's Hard Lemonade or whipped cream flavored vodka, my mother would have been upset at my shitty taste in liquor rather than my being drunk.
Yeah, I know. Believe you me, I know.
I had a bunch of hard-drinking uncles who taught me how to "rally!" You puke your guts out after mixing beer and white wine and red, and then you refuse to slink off to bed; you show up, you rally!, feeling queasy and disoriented but still game, and you sing "Danny Boy" with your drunken uncles in your parents' living room. You're, somewhat bizarrely, a "good girl" if you can do that.
Teenage sex? it never even occurred to me to transgress that border, the price was too high. Teenage underage drinking? A minor infraction, that nobody really took seriously.
JRoth, I could be completely wrong about this but it seems to me that the average vanilla straight guy is less likely to engage in sex acts that push physical boundaries in his body than just about any other demographic (though trust me, I know individuals differ) and maybe that's part of why transgression and related experiences don't feel so relevant.
In middle age, we risk heart attacks.
I suspect some people strongly associate sex with transgression and others don't, and this has always been the case. The relative numbers may well be changing over time.
Let's not forget the warning/example left by Nelson Rockefeller.
Philip Larkin would be totally lost in the modern world.
Thorn, I suspect "vanilla" is doing a bunch of work there.
To the larger point, I don't think the transgressive aspects of sex make all teenagers more likely to have sex. I am pretty confident , however that some teenagers (especially young ones) who already want to be transgressive may have a lot of sex, often in places or ways that are equally frowned upon.
81 is fair! I wouldn't say I do anything that I identify as transgressive, but mostly because "transgressive" has a really '90s-postmodernist-jargon feel in this context.
Also, transgression is said in many ways, not all of which involve pushing the physical boundaries of one's body in any sense (my first thought was actually strenuous cardiovascular activity or elaborate positions requiring a lot of strength, which probably wasn't what was intended but who knows).
Just for LB I have figured out how to change "vanilla" to its proper form: `vanilla' (on iOS). Hopefully that will earn forgiveness for any pseud related trauma.
Soup, I'm not sure how many people consider the TeX conventions for quotation marks to be the proper ones in this medium, but I appreciate it, anyway.
85: Whike writing my initial comment, I definitely thought that would be a reasonable response, and the heart-attack crowd supports you. I'm not going to make any particular effort to defend my statement, I think.
84: fair. I suspect avoidance of '90s-postmodernist-jargon was less of a constraining influence , pre 90s.
87 is true. On a phone keyboard they very much are not `In my fingers', as once they were on a regular keyboard.
They never really got into my fingers since emacs always takes care of it for me.
Anyhoo, I was going to post this in the thread that's more explicitly about online dating, but whatever. I had the weirdest introduction to Tinder a couple of weeks ago through a divorced couple I know: she was encouraging him to choose mates as he flipped through, and then she demonstrated how quickly she makes her choices. O tempora o mores! I've never done the online dating thing, but I'd imagine that even they who have might find that a bit odd. Not transgressive, but odd.
Speaking of Tinder, the people who recommended it to me were totally right. I've had more dates in the past two weeks than I had in the previous two years.
Okay, Flip. Have you seen primitive technology guy?
That article felt to me like an awful lot of other omg-the-yoofs moral panic articles recently have, which is that they feel a lot like someone (1) doing the normal anecdote-means-huge-social-change nonsense and (2) someone ignoring really really really hard the idea that economic outlook and what a college degree means (and costs) have changed, somewhat recently (meaning: "this generation) and a lot. (And also wildly exaggerating what looks like, given their numbers, actually a really small change and one well within the historical norms. In fact it mostly looks like "they aren't sleeping around like we did when we were young earlier generations did!"
An awful lot of what the anecdotes and slightly-more-general-but-still anecdotes seem to me to describe is what you'd get from a pervasive sense of insecurity/anxiety about the future (in economic terms, mostly) among a bunch of people. Young people aren't wildly hooking up all the time? I'm sure that would have nothing to do with feeling* like they're in a really precarious position and could absolutely ruin their lives if they didn't (1) have an amazing resume; (2) get really good grades; (3) manage to avoid any problems that would knock them off track for a year or two or leave them unable to get or keep the right kind of job; (4) manage to maintain an income that would keep them from missing student loan payments; etc. That would be crazy! No it's probably helicopter parenting and online pornography.
*Sort of accurately for a bunch of them too!
I haven't read the OP article and don't intend to, but 95 strikes me as accurate for basically all articles of this type.
These days when I hear “transgression” I just think of Putin in Crimea.
95 is right. It reminds me of our discussion about "What's the deal with rock stars nowadays? Why are they all polite wimps instead of doing drugs and throwing octopuses at groupies and smashing hotel rooms?" Because there are about 15 people under 40 who make a living as a rock star and everyone else has a day job.
As a concrete example of the pervasiveness of economic insecurity among young people, in the past week I have seen two of my friends from grad school post on FB about finally getting their first jobs in the field we went to school for, four or five years after graduating with a professional Master's.
Claudia, who did not want her last name used because "I don't want all my professors reading about how I'm a virgin..."
This is hilariously nineteen-year-old too. I mean, her friends sure no big deal, and if her classmates see it, well you know, that's not the end of the world either - people understand about that kind of thing. But what would Dr Jeffries who teaches Calc 2 think of me if he found out!?
I just managed to match someone on Tinder. No idea if it's worth pursuing.
I wonder if abstinence-only sex ed might be in play here. Millenials caught that full force, didn't they?
I dunno. My sex ed was definitely not abstinence-only, and in a state that was still fairly conservative at that point (though it's less so now). Also, doesn't abstinence-only tend to lead to more teen sex rather than less?
100 Reminds me that rule 34 dictates that there must be Donald Trump porn, and if it's nearly as ubiquitous as he is it could be that which is killing a generation's libido.
Or maybe that was more teen pregnancy from the same amount of teen sex.
Anyway, the point is that abstinence-only sex ed doesn't actually work.
Pron hasn't made it less likely for me to seek partners. Pron has made me focus like a laser on what partners can give me that pron can't and what aspects of partners I don't want to deal with. Or maybe that's just age and experience.
I find most of the theories not plausible, and in fact the trend is extremely minor and not well-documented, but if there is one theory that does seem semi-plausible, it's that many young women have finally realized that many young men are less worth the hassle, either being jerks or clueless.
many young women have finally realized that many young men are less worth the hassle, either being jerks or clueless
Yeah, this does seem plausible, though not particularly conducive to clickbait moral panic headlines.
101: when you phrase it that way it reads as "I want my professors to presume I'm sexually available."
softcore is just tumblr kitsch that straight girls post.
Yeah, the future turned out pretty okay.
I'm not sure "virgin" really equates to "unavailable," especially in that context.
Yeah, fair. "Experienced" is more accurate and probably does sufficient work for my goal of making that sound more awful than it was probably intended as.
there must be Donald Trump porn
Not if you make Donald Trump president of these United States, my friends.
As if we needed another reason not to do that.
It does seem like a good wedge issue to use to split the racist-asshole vote, though.
Probably something to 95 but I think it missed the biggest sex killing aspect of all that financial insecurity, which is that loads of millenials have to live with their parents.
107.2 is a jolly hypothesis and I will hold to it buckle and thong. D'you suppose guy behavior will eventually change?
107.2 does raise the question of "why didn't the women notice that before?" Maybe environmental lead was making them all too dopey to realise?
Anyway, the article makes bold claims that need to be tested. Everyone go and try to sleep with an American and report back.
I'm really hoping the guy who says he wonders what sex will be like "on a physical level, like I'm curious about how a new sandwich would taste" will end up using that in his dating profile.
That might be hott to a hipster.
In a manner of speaking, all sex is artisanal.
I can think of few things less hot than the sentence quoted in 120.
Pajama snuggles reviled by RT are hotter.
Everything is hotter, on Arrakis.
119.last will need a control group. Half of you go and try to sleep with a Canadian and report back.
I heard you need an adapter for that.
119. Given the modal age of this commentariat, I'm not sure they should be encouraged to try to sleep with millennials.
So this data disproves the controversial "Women want to have sex just like men do" theory, and we're back to "Women agree to have sex to placate men"?
Women agree to cuddle while wearing pajamas to placate men?
Frotteurism began
in two-thousand one three
(which was rather soon for me)
between the end of network TV
and Girls season three.
I guess that by rhyming "three" with "three", I prove that I don't have what it takes to be Philip Larkin.
128: No, we need a balanced sample. Everyone reports back the age of the American they tried to sleep with, and whether or not they succeeded. Then we can look for generational cohort effects.
129: Aren't the men in this hypothesis also not seeking out sex? I mean, the story isn't Lysistrata, it's "all the millennials are staying home."
(Speculating darkly, I might buy "Men either don't want to or haven't figured out how to seek out sex without being awful." Leading to men who don't want to be awful, because they're enlightened enough to figure out they shouldn't be, and women who don't want to have sex with awful men, both staying home. But I probably have a somewhat situationally determined grim outlook at this point, so don't listen to me.)
133: Americans are notorious for lying about their ages. You can't just ask. You have to make a cross-section and count the rings.
Maybe they're staying home so they can Netflix and chill.
Maybe they're staying home so they can Netflix Pornhub and chill
Leading to men who don't want to be awful, because they're enlightened enough to figure out they shouldn't be, and women who don't want to have sex with awful men, both staying home.
Leading to a future in which only awful people have kids.
95 and 116 are right. For the first two-thirds of the thread I thought I had taken crazy pills, or just missed a joke everyone else was in on. Being economically precarious means dating less and waiting longer to start families. Living with your parents means quieter, more vanilla sex, or none at all.
103: As I remember, the studies showed that it had little impact on the rate teens had sex (maybe slight decrease, maybe slight increase, maybe no change at all, don't remember and wouldn't be surprised either way), but it resulted in more teen pregnancy and STDs, because when they were having sex they weren't doing it safely. Can't be bothered to do the research on this now, of course.
Maybe, crossing the threads with the winogirl post above, millennials are all having sex like anything, but the women are all too drunk to remember it happening and the men are all too embarrassed.
I sure haven't figured out how to seek out sex without being awful, so if any laydeez want to give me tips, I'm all ears, except for those parts that are conspicuously not ears … laydeez.
This is empty reassurance, of course, but I'm sure you're not awful. You don't sound awful over the internet, at least.
Aww, I was going to say that of course he's awful but so is everyone else. They amount to the same thing, I'm sure!
I'm sure I thank you kindly, but I'm not sure that you are well positioned to make that particular reassurance. Truly, it is the lot of the human thus to sway between uncertainty and certainty.
129: Aren't the men in this hypothesis also not seeking out sex? I mean, the story isn't Lysistrata, it's "all the millennials are staying home."
Right! I was responding to 107/108. If "many young women have finally realized that many young men are less worth the hassle", then maybe an equal number of young men have decided the same thing.
148 sound like a good Onion headline: "Millennials suddenly realize en mass that people suck."
There are alternatives to men if you find they're not worth the hassle, but a fair number of young women do seem to have noticed.
BELIEVE ME I KNOW
Here are some millennials talking sense on this topic, and some more speculating wildly.
153: I don't really pay attention to these things, but does millennial really include 33 and 19 year olds? Because those seem like wildly different phases of adulthood.
154: 36, even! I am for sure not a part of this trend.
I thought millennials were originally supposed to be people who came of age around the millennium. Which means that it's probably time to come up with another stupid label for people who were toddlers at the time. Suggestions welcome.
I just turned 20 at the end of the last century. There is no word for people my age.
The men who have enough self-awareness to worry about being awful are not usually the most awful. If they all stay home because they're worried about being awful, then only the truly awful will ever get laid.
I think we're exploring the possibility that that's exactly what's happening out there.
This is one of those times when I'm really glad to have included that Chrome extension that replaces the word "Millenial" with "Snake People." (doesn't work on Unfogged for some reason). Many Snake People ARE having sex.
"The increase in sexual inactivity was far more notable among women than men, and was only significant for those without a college education, the paper said. The phenomenon was not observed among survey participants who had attended college."
This takes care of the Lysistrata angle.
Wait, it only seems to work for my own comments. Millenial Millenial millenial millenial.
This seems like the sort of article that should be connected to whatever the hell is happening in Japan, where every year or so I read an article saying no one has sex anymore.
I wonder how much of the decrease in sexual activity among young people now isn't because Snake People are less likely to be married at 18 or whatever than people who came of age in 1960 were.
The Japan thing is where I got my theory in the first place, since most of the articles interview young women who say some variant of "it's not worth the hassle dealing with these dudes".
Also, the increasing awareness that my fellow white men are pretty awful as a group. Voting 62% for Romney. Stop giving me a bad name.
171: Doesn't it make people like you and nosflow look better by comparison?
168: I've seen it suggested that deep (perceived, at least) economic insecurity causes their low birthrate, along with chronic stagnation. Don't have any knowledge though.
So, we're back to the fundamental question I have faced my entire life: How to get a woman to lower her standards.
NO ONE READS THE CLASSICS ANYMORE.
John Forbes Nash might also be relevant here.
172
I hope so. But you have to get past that initial revulsion for them to find out.
The turtle lives in a candy shop
Whose owners do not stock a drop
I find it clever of the turtle
In such a fix to be so fertile.
The men who have enough self-awareness to worry about being awful are not usually the most awful. If they all stay home because they're worried about being awful, then only the truly awful will ever get laid.
I think this is always the situation if there aren't extremely clear cultural rules around courting. There is an expectation that we can read the minds of the people we are romantically interested in. But actually it's more like there are some men who always think women are interested, and there are some men who never think women are interested, and sometimes they happen to guess right.
You can tell how much a woman is interested in you by how long she touches you when she pats your butt.
Or, in more sophisticated circles, how they hold their fan.
154, 156: I continue to think that generations in general are a stupid concept. Baby Boomers, at least that corresponds to the post-WWII baby boom, a measurable phenomenon with a clear start and end and a clear relation to lots of societal trends. But there's nothing like that for most other generations in pop sociology. Some people say Generation X is a subset of Baby Boomers, some say they overlap, some say they abut, I'm sure someone out there says there's a gap in between them. Same for Gen Y, millenials, and whatever other label people are using..
It's kind of amazing because now I have no idea whether anyone is writing millenial or snake person or millenials or snake people. It's like a beautiful haze of snakes. I've managed to make a crappy generation work for me.
extremely clear cultural rules around courting
This is making me wonder if there's something going on where a set of cultural rules have developed where people's expectations of the norms of how you go about meeting people to have sex with are clear, broadly shared, but something that most people don't want to do.
I literally have no idea at all what I'm talking about, given that I haven't met anyone for dating purposes since 1994. But is it possible not exactly that men are awful, or that people are awful (although both of those things are true in general) but that there's something about what dating/meeting people norms has evolved into lately that's unpleasant enough for most people (compared to how things were done in the 90s and earlier) that they're opting out?
a clear relation to lots of societal trends
The generation that grew up with the internet is going to be distinct, as is the generation that grows up with ubiquitous mobile internet.
I see great potential for trolling conspiracy theorists here.
184.last: Although hasn't the consensus, at least among adults (I'll arbitrarily define "adult" as 25+ for our purposes), pretty much always been that dating is pretty awful? Not that that rules out the possibility that dating has somehow become even more awful, of course.
The whole concept sounds like something a serial killer thought up to provide a pond in which to fish.
Not that that rules out the possibility that dating has somehow become even more awful, of course.
This is, in fact, what I'm speculating about.
The question to start with is, "Why aren't women meeting men in bars in order to steal their kidney?" Whatever stops that is what keeps dating plausible.
It's funny, because the biggest notable change since the 90s has been the normalization of online dating sites, and at least in theory, those are supposed to reduce awfulness by screening out obvious no go's in advance.
One of my pet theories to explain the aimlessness of current generations (which also applies to dating) is "let's make the perfect the enemy of the good" or "follow your dreams" or "there is a perfect job/person for you".
All post-Boomer generations have been told over and over again to "follow your dreams", but the problem is that a) most people don't even know what their dreams are and b) even if they do, reality will always fall short of them. This leaves them confused, discouraged, aimless, and depressed, as they try to follow an ideal that they can't imagine, and doesn't exist anyway. This applies equally well to spouse selection as it does to career pathway.
Maybe it's just the Paradox of Choice. Too many options and people freeze up.
men who don't want to be awful
Alright, so confession time (nothing too alarming): a fellow member of the nonprofit board I'm on of lives somewhere adjacent to my neighborhood, and is on a similar enough schedule that I frequently pass her in mornings while I'm walking the dog or whatever.
And she ignores me. To the extent that, for awhile, I just figured it was someone else who looked similar. But it finally became clear that it was absolutely her, and she was absolutely pretending not to know me after dozens of meetings. And all I could figure was that, years ago, she caught me looking at her chest in board meetings. Like, I never thought I'd been caught, and I don't think I was leering, but I can't deny that I looked*, and I can't imagine any other reason she'd ignore me so fiercely: she thinks I'm a creep.
So anyway, that's been my operating theory for awhile now, but one that could never be confirmed, so whatever. But yesterday I got about as firm a nonverbal confirmation as you could get: I was biking, and as I was scanning for traffic and such, I noticed a person jerk her umbrella forward to obscure her face. It was sort of peripheral vision, but I'm fairly certain it was her, and that she so much didn't want to be seen by me that she hid her face.
I feel like absolute shit, but I don't think I can do anything about it. I feel as if actually confronting it and apologizing wouldn't make her feel better, just even more uncomfortable, but maybe that's a way to weasel out of doing it.
Ugh.
*it was probably limited to my first few meetings, ~5 years ago; I certainly don't look at her at all now, except when she's speaking
I'd also note that this is not just due to the idealism of the Boomer generation, but also to the fact that living standards have increased to the point where we are allowed to consider whether a good outcome is good enough.
The moral of the story is never, ever serve on a nonprofit board.
194: I'd be happy to hear more! I know I was just extolling the virtues of downward mobility in jobs and housing, but (particularly because of my own history) I'm pretty nervous about how much I'm willing to settle in a relationship. I'm not looking for perfect, but non-abusive is not a high enough bar. (And okay, I did just keep dating someone for six+ months after it was pretty clear I was only ever going to be meh about it. We've been doing pretty well as just friends and it's certainly easier on me to keep doing exactly what I was doing anyway without having to wish I were getting anything from her that I won't.)
194 works pretty well as a theory for why millennials put off marriage, but doesn't really explain their alleged aversion to sex.
Surely not just sex bit also romantic relationships are in decline
Capitalism and neoliberalism eats everything
The commodification of affect in communicative capitalism
What happened to previous "private" or "social"moments of reproduction (of the system) as capitalism grew?
Home cooking (and social eating) has become an affective or status pursuit a luxury good among the petty and haute bourgeois, and utterly commodified, desocialized, and almost industrial in the working class (including white and pink, maybe 80%).
Affective labour has become commodified in a internalized sense. We are entrepreneurs with our affects, seeking their most profitable application with no longer any social or traditional constraints or rewards. We used to in a sense, give affective labour away, thereby giving capitalism free labour and profits.
Are we withholding affective labour, or using it with same gender or politically compatible friends where the return is higher, applying it in work environments for pecuniary and some emotional gains?
As I have said, I never saw sex, or food and alcohol, as worth the investment or the very high risks. This used to be considered very selfish, but under late capitalism the personal rewards and social profitability of expending those emotional energies in places apart from private relationships has become valued for all, not just men. This is a most excellent, but also a terrifying trend.
Work and love? Work not love.
194 works pretty well as a theory for why millennials put off marriage, but doesn't really explain their alleged aversion to sex.
196: I feel about 75% confident that she's forgotten about that incident entirely if she ever noticed it in the first place.
I think it has to do with choice. It used to be that you were dependent on the small circles of people around you. Co-workers, friends of friends, maybe the bars you went to.
With dating apps you have everyone in a 100 mile radius (or more). Too many choices make each particular choice less appealing.
I can't imagine any other reason she'd ignore me so fiercely:
Yeah, this seems to me to reflect a poverty of imagination. You have an eerie resemblance to the man who ran over her dog? Malicious neighbors have convinced her that you poured weedkiller on her vegetable garden? Most of her family was killed in a building collapse and she blames architects generally? You took a strong position on something at the nonprofit, and while she didn't openly state an opposing position, yours really pissed her off?
There's a million reasons, reasonable and un, to develop an antipathy to someone, and you'll never know what this one is unless she tells you for some reason, which seems unlikely.
Roth:
You should definitely stop her in the street and ask her while not making eye contact.
Compared to on the internet, it's harder to make really bad puns in actual conversation, but I do so every chance I get. Which I assume is the root cause of most people who try to ignore me.
Obviously she's madly in love with jroth, and was sure from his staring that he was building up his courage to ask her out, and then she found out he was married and she's never forgiven him.
Probably you gave her brother/mom/gal pal's restaurant a bad review, dude.
One example of how to look at it is domestic labour.
In the 70s the goal was to get pay for domestic and caring labour for all women.
What actually happened, because it was better for profits, was the one class of women got educations, good jobs and higher pay, and outsourced their domestic labour. Another lower class found the work in maid service and nannies.
Similarly, for a long time in Japan, the tending of male egos was outsourced to office ladies and hostess bars, so that men would associate the workplace with emotional pleasure, and so that housewives could concentrate on child management and have some needed privacy. Or time for community work.
Sex work, to the extent it is needed, is being outsourced from the home and interpersonal time. This isn't even all that new, but the diffusion to lower classes is.
209:
A friend was recently ranting about a similar thing on FB. For a couple of weeks, she had been talking/emailing/flirting with this guy who was part of a large group work project. She finally FB stalked him only to discover his betrayal of being married.
She said that although he had resisted her mild attempts to meet, he had never disclosed that he was married. All of her friends who posted agreed that he was horrible.
I imagined that the poor guy was home with his wife complaining about this woman who kept trying to flirt with him.*
*yea, yea, yea, clearly he was low key trying to get in her pants.
You people are just trying to convince me I'm not a creep. Well, it won't work.
196: The toothbrush mustache isn't working out. I should have said something.
You should definitely stop her in the street and ask her while not making eye contact.
"Wow, nice rack. Oh hey, don't I know you from somewhere?"
"I was biking SHIRTLESS, and as I was scanning for traffic and such, I noticed a person jerk her umbrella forward to obscure her face. It was sort of peripheral vision, but I'm fairly certain it was her, and that she so much didn't want to be seen by me that she hid her face."
fixed
185
The generation that grew up with the internet is going to be distinct, as is the generation that grows up with ubiquitous mobile internet.
I think this example proves my point pretty well.
I'd actually agree that the Internet is going to make a generation distinct. But I wouldn't assume without evidence that the Internet generation is going to be distinct from the ubiquitous mobile Internet. (Yeah, probably, but who knows? How big a difference does it really make to have a computer at home with an Internet connection, and a cell phone, but it's not a smartphone?) And the Internet but not ubiquitous mobile Internet generation is going to be small, probably 10 years or less depending on what counts. And ignoring all that for a minute, we have no idea in what ways they will be distinct, because the oldest of them is currently 18. (Assuming ex recto that the Internet generation was born in 1998.)
And that's when we can agree on what makes a generation distinct. Gen X, gen Y, Millenials? LOLKTHXBYE.
167: That's because you're spelling it wrong.
Does anybody have an extension that replaces "Millennial" with "Snake Plissken"?
Surely the Internet generation is everyone who doesn't remember ubiquitous Internet, so everyone who was born in 1990 or later? 2000 was when 50% of people were using the Internet, and I'm using 10 for the age at which people become aware of it.
A look at a graph of births per year shows a clear baby boom (1947-1964), a clear baby bust (1964-1981) and a clear echo boom (1981-2000). After that it's not so clear.
Or if you want to look trough to trough specifically, there's one from 1900-1935, one from 1935-1974, and one from 1974 to the present. Resources are always tightest for those born at a peak (1920, 1960, 1990), and easiest for those born in a trough (1934, 1974).
219: Millennials 1980-1985 are Solid Snake people, 1985-1993 Liquid Snake people, 1993+ Old Snake people. </millennial_cultural_references>
222: I'm a solid snake and have no idea what that means.
The joke is a Ouroboros, not actually funny, and I'm far too sleep-deprived to be commenting at quality.
220: This came up fairly recently. I think that, for demographic reasons, the 1981 starting point makes sense. From there, you get half a generation that remembers the pre-internet age*, and half a generation that really doesn't. I've read a number of (tech-oriented) millennials draw this very distinction.
As Megan notes, the rise of mobile is another inflection point, but that comes a good decade later: Iris, born in '04, doesn't remember a time when I didn't have an iPhone (even though I wasn't actually an early adopter on that), and so has never experienced a world without omnipresent camera and connectivity and information. A kid ten years older has, even if they don't remember, say, the pre-download era, or relying on encyclopedias and the like for reference info.
But yeah, at some point you have to stop talking about Millennials, because a "generation", however you want to define it, can't last 35 years. But the post-millennials haven't reached college/the job market yet, so their identity is murky.
*for children, 1995 is probably a decent dividing line: only a handful of kids would have had serious internet (as we know it) exposure prior to then. And if you want to say there's a Gen Y, the pre-internet, post-'70s cohort would be it. But that's a small slice.
Kind of on topic, the guy next to me is complaining that a woman on an online dating site reported him for asking her if she had a tight pussy. The bartender rolled her eyes.
(Note: I'm not at my usual bar or anywhere in Squirrel Hill.)
Also, racism and homophobia. But those aren't on topic.
On the bright side, he got banned from OK Cupid.
And is complaining about millennials.
the biggest notable change since the 90s has been the normalization of online dating sites, and at least in theory, those are supposed to reduce awfulness
And Moby refutes the theory thus:
the guy next to me is complaining that a woman on an online dating site reported him for asking her if she had a tight pussy
Before I left, he started on Clinton's email server.
I guess anything is possible but my god if I shunned every guy who ogled my breasts that would be let's just say impractical. Presumably discreet ogling in a meeting five years ago? I think you need to look elsewhere for your offense.
You were going to see him about buying his Plymouth Horizon.
Harsh. Nosflow's life doesn't suck quite at Plymouth-Horizon-driving levels. Yet.
These threads make me wonder if I should try Bumble. For the tall blondes.
I am also tempted to try Bumble, but held back by the suspicion that it has an extremely small user base here.
Nah, judging from Tinder there seem to be surprisingly many tall women here.