Sex on the decline around the world
Sex is a strong drive in human beings for a reason: the life of the species depends on it. But in this age of what might seem like no-holds-barred sex, sex has lost its luster for an enormous number of people.
The phenomenon is extremely widespread, and particularly common in Asia:
The Atlantic recently described a “sex recession” in the United States and most western countries, with fewer people dating and even those in relationships getting intimate less often than in the past, while fewer enjoy regular bonds of any kind. Even ogling seems out of fashion, as the decline of Hooters suggests. The family may have been stressed by the “sexual revolution,” but the “sex recession” could ultimately erode the very existence of familialism in our time.
The most extreme cases of libidinous decline are in Asia. In 2005, a third of Japanese single people ages 18 to 34 were virgins; by 2015 this expanded to 43 percent. A quarter of men over 50 never marry. This “sex recession” even impacts places like Hong Kong’s famous Wan Chai “red light” district, now being reinvented as an upscale hipster area as the sex trade plummets. China’s current generation of men are so socially disconnected that the Communist Party, and some private firms, now teach them how to date; similar attempts have been made, with apparently little effect, in Singapore.
The article goes on to explore many possible reasons; this seems to be one of those multiply-determined events. The ubiquity of online porn, the widespread availability of sex toys and robots, the imbalance between numbers of men and women in some countries (China, for example), the rise of social (virtual) media and concurrent fall in face-to-face social skills among young people, the higher cost-benefit ratio of raising children—they’re all part of the picture and discussed in the article.
But I want to add a few more:
(1) Feminism and leftism in general have played down the importance of family and procreation.
(2) There is a worldwide decline in testosterone, as well. Since testosterone (for both men and women) is the hormone fueling the sex drive, this must have some sort of dampening effect.
(3) Increasing obesity can reduce the sex drive as well—and I’m not talking about esthetics here, I’m talking about biological reasons.
(4) Men have become increasingly fearful of the increased risk of ruinous accusations from females as a result of sexual interactions that had appeared to the man to be consensual.
(5) When something like sex is forbidden or at least restricted, it can become more attractive: forbidden fruit. When all is allowed sexually, sex can seem to lose its value and appeal.
On that last point, I would like to recommend the closing chapter in Milan Kundera’s masterful The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. The story is entitled “The Border.” Here’s an excerpt that appears towards the end, set on a nude beach (“Jan” is a man, by the way; Kundera is a Czech author), describing what Jan is imagining and thinking as he lies on the sand, nude. The excerpt can’t convey more than a glimpse of what the story itself conveys, but here it is anyway:
Jan remembered Daphnis. He is lying down, spellbound by Chloe’s nakedness, aroused but with no knowledge of what that arousal is summoning him to, so that the arousal is endless and unappeasable, limited and interminable. A great yearning gripped Jan’s heart, a desire to go back again. Back to that boy. Back to man’s beginnings, to his own beginnings, to love’s beginnings. He desired desire. He desired the pounding of the heart. He desired to be lying beside Chloe unaware of fleshly love. Unaware of sexual climax. To transform himself into pure arousal, the mysterious, the incomprehensible and miraculous arousal of a man before a woman’s body. And he said out loud: “Daphnis!”
Jan’s friend and companion on the beach, a woman named Edwige, responds that “we need to go back to a time before Christianity crippled mankind. Is that what you mean?” This is a total misunderstanding of what Jan actually means, but he lets it slide. The story concludes:
…Edwige said [to a group of people on the beach]: “Jan was just saying that it’s Daphnis Island. I think he’s right.”
All of them were delighted by that stroke of inspiration, and a man with an extraordinary paunch developed the idea that Western civilization is going to perish and that humanity will finally be liberated from the enslaving burden of the Judeo-Christian tradition. These were phrases Jan had heard ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand times before, and those few meters of beach soon turned into a lecture hall. The man spoke, all the others listened with interest, and their bare genitals stared stupidly and sadly at the yellow sand.
That was published in 1978, over forty years ago.
Q: if there are so many lonely virgins out there why is it so difficult for a single person like me to find a companion?
A: You are ugly and still you reject every suitable candidate for being ugly.
This seems to really be two different but related issues I think.
First, there is less sex but then the bigger issue is less reproduction. They are both extremely complex but the latter is the really important one. Societies with declining birth rates don’t survive long term and it leads to doing very damaging things like inviting a bunch of immigrants that have no interest in assimilating because you needs bodies.
This is one of the biggest issues for industrialized countries going forward.
Personally I think the biggest reasons are less religion and also greater survival rates of children means you don’t have to have seven children in order for three to reach adulthood. Or start having children at sixteen instead of 35 when conceiving is much more difficult. This also partly explains the helicopter parenting problem as when you only have one or two of something you tend to be hyper protective of it.
Re Japan, this is interesting:
Maybe the situation there is not so much a lack of sexual desire, as it is taking intimacy, marriage, and family quite seriously.
The advent of effective contraception, then, the increasingly easy availability of abortions, the unequal and punitive legal and financial treatment of men in divorce proceedings and decisions, and, now, the recent rise of the metoo movement, and growth of denigration and demonizing of men have all had major impacts.
First it became increasingly free sex (without marriage, or real responsibility), now, for men, it is sex at your peril.
In addition though, in terms of religion and it’s impact on the family and, ultimately, on sex, it seems like we might have, to coin a phrase, “thrown the baby out with the bathwater.”
It seems to me that, when you start to back away from Christianity–to believe less and less in it–you also believe less in, you start to slowly discard a whole number of models and expectations that go along with Christianity, and the culture, expectations, and behaviors it creates.
One of those models is marriage, the family, and children. The family unit was just an assumed part of Christianity–Baptisms, Confirmations, going to church each Sunday, Sunday school lessons, church functions.
Take away Christianity, and those expectations that made marrying and having a family the normal thing to do, that made doing so more attractive, and those rituals that made, as well, for at least some form of family solidarity started to lose some of that inevitability–it was no longer inevitably what was expected of you, something to be desired–and it became less attractive to marry and have a family.
Added to the other major factors I listed first, I think that this backing away from Christianity may be one contributing factor for the decline of sex.
Divorce and the mistreatment of men by the legal system has has a serious effect on men’s willingness to marry.
Francis Bacon wrote:
He that hath wife and children hath given hostages to fortune, for they are impediments to great enterprises, either of virtue or mischief. Certainly the best works and of greatest merit for the public have proceeded from the unmarried or childless men, which both in affection and means have married and endowed the public.
I have been divorced twice and have remarried my second wife, after 25 years. I was treated fairly well but I had money and was fortunate with the lawyer I used. The lawyer for my wife in the second divorce was an SOB and stirred up considerable anger on her part to increase his fees.
The book by Helen Smith has considerable merit as a commentary on young men.
There are almost 500 comments on it, which are interesting, I wrote one back before my second wife and I got back together,.
Q: If sex is on the decline around the world, why are they having so many problems with that guy in Virginia?
Aesop, power is the ultimate aphrodesiac, or so Henry says,
The Atlantic can speak for the East Coast Elite. There is no sex recession in Nebraska!
Cornhead: colder winters in Nebraska, and maybe slower wi-fi?
The world’s population nearly doubled from 4 billion to almost 8 billion in the last 45 years, but “sex” is on the decline. I wonder how that works.
It seems likely that, in absolute terms, i.e., number of sex acts per unit time on the planet, there is more sex than there has ever been.
tomson:
Actually, birth rates and the number of sex acts are not as related as you might think, although they are obviously related. The use of birth control for potentially fertile people means that there can be a lot of sex without conception. In addition, population growth involves a lot more than sex, including (for example) better prenatal care, better health care (and therefore survival) of infants and children, and better nutrition (fewer famines).
Also, we’re talking about quite recent trends in sexual activity figures, the last ten years or maybe fifteen at most in countries where the trend began.
In addition, “around the world” doesn’t mean “in every single part of the world.” It’s shorthand for “in many places that are not just concentrated in one geographic area.” It’s based on surveys mostly.
Although declining birth rates are not the same as declining sex and sexual interest rates, if you are interested in some of the details of where birth rates are falling and where they are still quite high, see this. They’re still quite high in much of Africa, for example,
Neo,
“The use of birth control for potentially fertile people means that there can be a lot of sex without conception.”
You realize, I hope, that this argues my point, not yours. There are, potentially, vast quantities of sex for each birth. I couldn’t agree more. Just because birth rates have slowed does not mean sex is “less frequent”, whatever that means.
I assumed that “Sex is on the decline around the world” meant what it said, that sex is on the decline “around the world” not just “here and there.”
Data that are cherry-picked from surveys are notoriously unreliable. And a 10 or 15 year “trend” is often used to justify all manner of assertions. Global warming and Peak Oil come to mind.
A part of this, at least, is the idea that homo sapiens are a scrounge on the splendor of dear mother earth. Check out John Barnes ‘day break’ series. The anti human eco warriors are a scrounge upon our species. They should all slit their throats in order to save her. Otherwise, you are just private jet elitists preaching global whatever. And the horse they rode in on.
Here is a cool video of human population growth through time.
They obviously are not counting aboriginal inhabitants of the Americas and Africa and Australia (or maybe the numbers are below the legend thresh-holds), and it’s slightly left of center in intent, but no overt propagandizing.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PUwmA3Q0_OE
tomson:
You realize, of course, that it does not argue your point.
If someone uses birth control—as most people in developed countries do these days—the birthrate tells you less about the rate at which people are having sex. For example, at one extreme, couples could be having almost no sex except when they want to have a child. So a couple could have very little sex and yet manage to rouse themselves in order to have a child.
Or–a couple could be having lots and lots of sex with birth control, and never have a child or have very few children. There’s no real way to tell which it is, or whether the situation lies somewhere in-between. You cannot really depend on one of them to tell you all that much about the other.
In other words, the birth rate and the rate of having sex become relatively de-linked with birth control. Whereas, if people in a culture mostly don’t use birth control, the two (birth rate and sex rate) are quite closely linked.
Even then, though, they are not necessarily all that linked, because fertility rates can vary, and it is fertility rates that determine how many sexual acts on average it takes to conceive. When fertility is high, it doesn’t take many. It’s the opposite when fertility is low. If women in a country are very malnourished, for example, it is more difficult for them to conceive.
In addition, in your original comment at 9:36 PM (the one to which I was responding), you weren’t talking about fertility rates or birth rates, you were talking about population growth, which introduces even more variables, as I mentioned in my response to you at 10:21 PM. For example, better prenatal care for pregnant women, better health care for babies and children, fewer diseases generally, and better nutrition for babies and children, all mean that a higher percentage of children that are born will survive. Years ago, population growth was held in check in a lot of third-world countries (and even earlier, in Western countries) by those factors (although women may have had a lot of children back then) because infant and child mortality was high. If you want to see just how high child mortality was, read this and take a look at some of the charts there.
The only well documented fact is the decline of testosterone level in all developed nations. This explains everything else, but in itself eludes explanation. Such trends in hormones levels in human populations are well known (see acceleration, or shift in beginning of puberty to earlier age in 1960-s), but their explanation is still absent. Modern men can not don medieval coats of arms: they were obviously made for much shorter men. Again, nobody knows why such shift toward taller people occur.
Again, nobody knows why such shift toward taller people occur.
Some of this is a matter of means and averages. Better nutrition and public health have increased average height. There have been taller individuals all through history, often the rulers who had better nutrition. Also, women tended to be chronically anemic until meat was more available to peasants and the poor in Medieval times.
We have among our proximate relations three young men born between 1978 and 1989. One is approaching 40 and the other two are past 30. Between the three of them, they’ve sired one child. Two are divorced and one is separated from his wife. Two of these women stepped out on their husbands a propos of nothing very important. (One ran off with bf. The other was supposedly ‘really depressed’). The third closed the books the second time he’d discovered his wife was having trysts with other men; interestingly, though, she was the plaintiff in the eventual divorce suit.
One currently lives alone. One is renting a room from friends. One has moved in with a woman he met at work, and plans to marry her in a couple of months.
They haven’t been picky about women. One married a woman with a child she’d conceived in high school, a youngster who was decidedly unimpressed with how his mother treated his step-father. He later had a rather imprudent assignation with an old high-school chumette, who (it’s a reasonable wager) paternity trapped him. Oh, well, he says, we’ll try to make it work, you and me and our baby and that other kid you have. She moved out last year. One married a childless divorcee. Licking his wounds, he’s now busying himself learning to play a new instrument and taking online courses. One married his college gf; his sister was rather dubious about her from the start (“high maintenance”).
These are all skilled and capable young men with engaging personalities. All good earners. None of them are heavy drinkers, none of them use street drugs, &c. I wouldn’t put it past one of them to finagle you, but I’d vouch for the other two. I doubt any of these women are going to locate anyone better down the road.
This sort of thing generates risk-aversion.
Mike K.: People who could afford a suit of armor certainly could afford enough food even in childhood. They all belonged to hereditary nobility. I belong to boomer generation in Russia, which all had serious malnutrition problem in early childhood, but it did not result in low height, only in rickets.
The trend we are discussing can be seen as one of the the results of the fracture of the traditional order under the hammer blows of Gramsci’s long march through the institutions/culture, which took as it’s main targets all of the fundamental building blocks of that traditional order–Religion–the Family–Education, the Law and Government, etc.–and all of the expectations, structures, and interpersonal relations they created.
The institution of the Family, it seems to me, was one of the chief targets, to include male-female relationships, family roles and dynamics, child bearing and raising, sexual identity, etc.
The object of the Gramscian attack the creation of disruption, discord, subversion, and dissatisfaction, and, boy, have they been successful.
Someone hurting, dissatisfied, unmoored from formerly satisfying and stabilizing cultural and social structures, much more likely to be receptive to the Siren song of Communist solutions.
They all belonged to hereditary nobility.
Knights are not nobles.
I belong to boomer generation in Russia, which all had serious malnutrition problem in early childhood, but it did not result in low height, only in rickets.
I was referring to averages.
Here is the data. Make of it what you will.
In a pioneering study of Japanese immigrants to Hawaii published in 1939, Harry Shapiro found there to be a significant difference between the heights of Hawaiian-born Japanese and the Japanese immigrant population.6 Shapiro concluded that environmental factors, particularly diet and healthcare, play a significant role in determining height and other physical characteristics. The underlying idea here is that migration from poor countries to rich ones may lead to dramatic changes between generations. In a similar study, Marcus Goldstein (1943) found there to be differences in the heights and other characteristics of the children of Mexican immigrants and their parents, as well as with native born Mexican children.7
ArtDeco: Mostly they were. During the High Middle Ages, knighthood was considered a class of lower nobility. Often, a knight was a vassal who served as an elite fighter, a bodyguard or a mercenary for a lord, with payment in the form of land holdings. (Wiki).
Kundera’s quotation rings true.
I work with a lot of 20-30 y/o men (I’m 52). They are almost all into porn. They are very “matter of fact” and casual about porn and what it leads to.
I tell them about my first girlfriend and about being truly clueless about sex (without being graphic). Most of them can’t imagine what I’m telling them,….I see them trying to imagine being sexually innocent. They feel sorry for the “young me”. I tell them that I wouldn’t change it for the world.
I feel sorrier for them.
Neo, thank you for this timely reminder. I am willing to join in a common pledge to do our share to climb up out of this recession. At the least, I promise to do my part.
Estrogen.
Estrogen pollution.
Estrogen and the neo-estrogen which is chemically used for the Pill, which women have been increasingly using all over the world.
Fish have lower sperm count.
It’s not even PC to talk about, much less study. I understand estrogen is NOT metabolized or changed by the body, it just gets out of the body with urine and into the environment. The EPA should be treating estrogen as a negative pollutant, but in a country where infanticide/abortion is cheered, the idea of any restrictions on estrogen is politically ludicrous. Regardless of the truth about it.
I believe it is estrogen causing the low fish sperm count, and the lower testosterone of men. I expect to continue believing this until there is a better chemical / hormonal explanation, with “scientific” papers showing other factors.
There should still be legal, administrative, and social changes to encourage more men to be married, and for men and women to stay faithful and married.
The hypergamy of women, looking for higher status/ alpha men for better orgasms, is a related issue, and too little talked about in colleges. The desire of men for more sex, especially for sex with younger women, is better talked about altho its implications and how these desires interact with social norms is also underdiscussed.
Speaking about pollutants, over the last few years I have run across a few articles that–just as an aside–mention that paper money has high levels of narcotic contaminants on it and, as well, that the rivers in major cities also have high levels of narcotics contaminating them–London and the Thames were, I believe, one of the examples cited.
I wonder just how effective water treatment plants are in filtering all of these narcotic contaminants out of sources that are often used to supply city water systems?
Does anyone imagine that all these narcotic contaminants are doing any part of the ecology–primate or otherwise–any good?
Looking for scientific, that is, materialistic explanation of this phenomenon is, in my view, a fool’s errand. I would bet on some supernatural factor there, a stealth, hidden interference of Almighty in human affairs. Of course, one can only believe in such things. They are comletely beyond any rational understanding.
Sex without borders, shifted responsibility, warlock trials, and Pro-Choice/selective/cannibalized-child are clear and progressives causes for a forward-looking cynicism. Momma, don’t let your babies grow up to be monotonically divergent.
It may have something to do with the decline in civilizational self-confidence.
In Arthur Koestler’s neglected 1950 novel, The Age of Longing, the female protagonist is unable to be attracted to European or American men, but falls hard for a committed Russian communist, Fedya. In this passage, he explains to her the roots of her attraction:
“You think I am brutal and ridiculous and uncultured. Then why did you like making love with me? I will tell you why and you will understand…”
I am not a tall and handsome man…There are no tall and handsome men who come from the Black Town in Baku, because there were few vitamins in the food around the oilfields. So it was not for this that you liked to make love with me…It was because I believe in the future and am not afraid of it, and because to know what he lives for makes a man strong…Of course many ugly things are happening in my country. Do you think I do not know about them?…And what difference will it make in a hundred years that there is a little ugliness now? It always existed. In a hundred years there will be no ugliness–only a classless world state of free people. There will be no more wars and no more children born in Black Towns with big bellies and flies crawling in their eyes. And also no more children of the bourgeoisie with crippled characters because they grew up in a decadent society…I am not handsome, but you have felt attracted to me because you know that we will win and that we are only at the beginning–and that you will lose because you are at the end.”
https://chicagoboyz.net/archives/11799.html
Ya mean those so-called prudes, social conservatives or whatever ya call ’em were sorta kinda almost had a point. Nah. Naaahhhh.
I frequent Reddit, and although I generally subscribe to subreddits with meaningful or intellectual content (e.g., /r/conservative is pretty interesting, and often has some good discussion), conversations sometimes devolve into the banal.
About 5 years ago, I noticed a definite obsession among guys with lesbians and the idea of multiple partners at once. Lately, lately the obsession seems to be largely driven by, for lack of a better term on a family site, “butt stuff”. While I don’t dwell on these conversations, and definitely don’t subscribe to anything that normally talks about this kind of stuff, it crops up, and it’s pretty gross. It’s really weird to me, how even talk about sex is more and more removed from actual sex.
It’s hard to know what’s going on in people’s minds, but I think we are becoming more and more divorced from the basics of family and marriage and even biology. Needless to say, this is not a good thing.
Meanwhile, I have a very happy marriage going on 26 years, and my wife and I have 4 kids (we were trying for another, but I think the Good Lord decided we had our hands full, and if so, He was right). People say that initial infatuation dies, but it never really did in my case. I’m still absolutely fascinated with her, and cherish every moment we spend together. (Yes, we do normal things like get irritated with each other and even occasionally argue, but more often than not it’s from me being thickheaded and stubborn.)
I have three sons and one daughter, and while my daughter swears she never wants kids, I think my sons would all like to have families some day. I think it will be much harder for them to find good prospective mates among the general populace than it was in my day, although I’ve met a number of young ladies at various Church social activities who I think would be very attractive potential mates (I’m not talking about physically attractive, although obviously that’s important, and these young women definitely have that, but attractive in terms of values, personality and interests, so that gives me hope.)
Plus, I’ve met plenty of really lovely, fun, intelligent, conservative ladies on Facebook with whom I share a lot of interests (of course, these are usually married, and naturally I’m not looking for a relationship other than friendship and sharing of interests), so you can’t ignore that social media can be a huge force for good in this regard, at least until you meet the love of your life and she lives 12,000 miles away…
Edit: I must be bored to write this much…
There is a brutally ironic and comical aspect to this, if indeed birth control pill pollution, and probably social[ist] welfare state control, are responsible in any significant measure for this phenomenon.
For whatever reason or reasons, a portion of the human race is either emotionally or intellectually or morally incapable of exercising any continence or self-restraint during what is now said to be a relatively narrow window of fertility.
And as we are now all officially our “brother’s” keepers, or underwriters or enablers …
Therefore: So that sexual congress may be indulged in at will, [well “at-will” is not exactly right, since the whole point was to evade the development of the control of the will, and go with the unconscious flow instead] a pill was promoted to inhibit female fertility so that sexual activity might be enjoyed with abandon.
Howsomeever amigo, the pill’s side effect is an environmental toxicity, which pill, while reducing births through its proximate effect, also dampens the sex drive it was supposed to give free reign to in the first place. Hardy har har.
And, my guess is, and it is just a guess, that social welfare burdens have, while making the “greatest number” more comfortable on balance, have, like increasing marginal taxation, also made [re-]production for the trapped young male cog in the all enveloping fairness machine, a relatively less attractive proposition.
What’s one of these young guys who’s been socialized not to fight back but to always cooperate, got to personally gain when mated to a shallow, neurotic, selfie-obsessed female content in that all-encompassing welfare state; itself like-wise neurotically obsessed with redistributing life energies more “equitably”?
What’s he win by cooperating? The “good boy’s” modern choice is to become a slave for the sake of an orgasm, or to drop out.
The already wealthy, or the economically fortunate, or those rude and willful boys who say to hell with the rules – and work around them – will still manage.
But they, are a different matter.
ConceptJunkie:
You and your wife are blessed.
I have three sons and one daughter, and while my daughter swears she never wants kids, I think my sons would all like to have families some day.
I have five kids, three daughters. My grandchildren are all my sons' (5). My middle daughter, who said for years she did not want kids, is now PG, as we used to say, at 38.
I have read that in some (many?) species, when its population in a given area grows to some level of density, it begins to diminish. E.g., rabbits begin to abort (or suffer miscarriages? The word I read was “abort”) spontaneously. I believe I’ve read this about fish as well, but I won’t swear to it.
The claim is that the population is more than the area’s ecosystem can support.
I’ve always wondered (assuming this is true) why this happens. Is it a lack of nutrients available? Or, this particular discussion prompts me to wonder, could there be enough estrogen floating around (literally, if it’s in the water) to cause hormonal problems with either the females or the males?
I do assume it’s something more mysterious than the animals’ becoming physically weaker (poor nutrition again? Disease more frequent?), or being more strongly preyed upon. –But why would increased predation cause spontaneous “abortion,” if that’s what it really is, as opposed to miscarriages, which I suppose could be the result of stressed (frightened or malnourished) individuals; as happens in humans, or so I understand.
.
The article to which Neo gives a link is short, but offers four factors influencing declining birth rates.
.
I always thought China instituted the one-child policy because at the time one of the popular scares was of global population growth, and that Chinese birth-rates were a veritable poster child for this looming disaster.
Can anyone confirm or refute this?
In fact it seems to me that even in America we were being advised to have smaller families.
.
P.S. Someone above said (I think) that there is a “relatively narrow window of fertility.” Relative to what? You mean it’s getting smaller?
Julie near Chicago:
I do vaguely remember hearing something of the sort about animals. Rats, I think.
As for the Chinese policy:
The Chinese discovered the problems with “planning” that sort of thing—and I’m not just talking about the restraint on liberty, I’m talking demographics. Be careful what you wish for:
Neo said:
> You and your wife are blessed.
Thanks. We are. We’ve had some real struggles, but I recall my wife pointing out a couple years ago that we’ve grown closer because of the difficulties we’ve faced, whereas in a lot of cases, that pulls people apart. I think that was a really good insight on her part and it hadn’t occurred to me. So, yes, the Good Lord has given us great blessings in each other, indeed.
I said that: and I meant that although the human female’s sexual receptivity is month long, recent research purports to confirm that the same is not true with regard to the chances of pregnancy.
First site I came across just now:
So my argument was that : The pill which may be poisoning our environment, was meant (at least by its most ardent proponents) to provide the opportunity for all, to heedlessly copulate without the trauma or unwelcome introduction of intellectual reservation or calculation. Whatever the pill’s original designer thought, this was considered a primary feature and social benefit among the sexual revolutionaries of the mid century. “Forget yourself, give in to desire anytime, and if it feels good just do it.”
And then the very means by which this stance is supposedly allowed, turns out to be killing the desire which that means is meant to fulfill.
You take this pill and you can have as much sex as you want without thought, doubt or planning. Only trouble is that once the chemical gets into the water supply, you won’t want it … or not enough to trouble yourself with real human relations.
Or so it would seem if the pill poisoning theory is to be granted.
An interesting study noted on Insty today suggests that women on the pill have altered recognition of emotion.
“We know a lot about the physical side effects [of birth control pills], but very little about the psychological side effects,” said Alexander Lischke, a psychology researcher with the University of Greifswald in Germany.
So, Lischke and his lab decided to look into how taking the pill might change someone’s ability to process emotion. Their research, published today (Feb. 11) in the journal Frontiers in Neuroscience, found that women on the pill mislabeled the emotion on someone’s face 10 percent more often than participants who weren’t on the pill
Sexual consent anyone ?
DNW:
When the pill was invented and first came into widespread use, it’s not as though prior to that most people were using the rhythm method. I’m doing this from memory, but I believe that condoms and diaphragms were very popular back then. Now, they certainly weren’t quite as effective as the pill, nor were they as simple. However, they had already made it possible to have sex whenever a person wanted, without much risk of pregnancy. All one had to do was use them every time.
Sexual consent anyone ?
BOOM!
Thanks for the clarification, DNW. I wondered if you meant that the number of a woman’s years of fertility were, on average, diminishing. Now I understand.
Julie near Chicago:
In one sense they are diminishing, although not biologically. If women (or men) don’t get married or into a stable relationship till their 30s or so, and/or postpone having kids even if in a relationship, the window of opportunity will shrink once they do decide to have kids. Particularly for women, who have a much smaller window than men to begin with.
Ok, yeah sure, but that is not what I was saying or implying.
Re the pill, and its spill-over effects relating to a general lessening in libido, I started by acknowledging that the pill was not invented for the sake of hedonistic indulgence.
I then noted that among the sexual revolutionaries of the 60’s it was however touted as the solution to the “problem” of worry, interference with spontaneity, and the obnoxious intrusion of consequences into the equation. This was obvious to any high school kid in the early 1970’s with a subscription to Psychology Today.
” … without much risk of pregnancy. … “All one had to do was use them every time.”
And therein lay (no pun intended) the rub (ditto) according to the proponents: “not much risk” as opposed to supposedly none; and the conscious and possibly buzz-killing intentional act of deliberately preparing to place the nagging conscience aside (for those with such a conscience) as opposed to just fuggedaboutit.
Again, the point I am emphasizing is that there was a kind of ideology behind the promotion and use, if not the original development of birth control pills, which if the estrogen environmental poisoning theory is true, is ironically redounding in the most logically exquisite manner.
If rubbers made “sporting” men impotent we might have a parallel to what I am remarking on. But they apparently don’t.
Neo, thanks for your information on China’s one-child policy. So for once my memory wasn’t so far off.
Oddly enough, today I’ve run across comments on various sites that mention cycles of increasing and decreasing population in several species. On Samizdata, for one; and at Watts Up With That, for another.
Mike K on February 11, 2019 at 6:02 pm at 6:02 pm said:
An interesting study noted on Insty today suggests that women on the pill have altered recognition of emotion.
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Sexual consent anyone ?
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A lot of caveats on that study, but it might be worth some more intense scrutiny.
From what I’ve read, birth-control pills are a very small % of the estrogen in the water supply. Most of it is from agricultural runoff.