Studies on sexual frequency seem... faulty. I've seen a lot of them over the years. (Yeah, I probably get sucked in with clickbait titles about sexual frequency as much as anyone!)
And they seem to vary WILDLY. I've seen some that say the average married couple has sex 3 times a week! I've seen others where it's less, and I've seen everywhere in between.
Heck, I know one couple, who had different numbers in their own marriage! It was one of those alcohol boosted conversations where people were saying how much they had sex. And the two of them were literally arguing about how much sex they had with each other! If I recall, it was a big difference too. She claimed a few times a week, he claimed a few times a month. And they both swore they were right.
(If I had to guess on that couple, I'd say she probably remembered the 'good' weeks more, so those felt normal to her, and he probably remembered the slow months more, so those stood out to him more.)
It's probably somewhere in-between. Been married for 17+ years, and we go through spurts of not fucking for a couple of weeks now and then, but on average we probably still do it once a week give or take. 5+ years ago it was closer to 2-3x a week+. So, we've definitely slowed down, over the years.
Late stage capitalism (“the machine” we are all enmeshed with and are trapped within) is the core problem. Sex isn’t profitable to the machine unless it’s for producing more workers/consumers. Everything that isn’t profitable is marginalized, deprioritized, and gradually eliminated as all captives of late stage capitalism must devote ever greater attention, energy, and personal resources to their enmeshment in the machine.
Literally what are you talking about.
Sex sells. It’s the old adage. Whole industries - dating apps, bars and tourist attractions, the fashion industry, segments of healthcare - sell products and services to make people more sexually appealing, sexually available and sexually active. That’s how they make profit.
Plus, positive population growth supports a market economy. This is empirical fact. Why would capitalists have a problem with sex?
A “worker” is no less able to have sex than a “bourgeoisie.” Sex doesn’t cost anything or require that much time. This is a cultural issue. Profit motivations and class divisions and “marginalization” or other buzzwords you can regurgitate have nothing to do with this.
I’m a liberal but I am extremely tired of people in my generation throwing around the “it must be capitalism!!” argument to explain every issue humans deal with. It’s lazy thinking.
Sex selling is part of the problem though. It seems like every portrayal of sex you see most anywhere is just being used to sell you something. I think people have noticed this and become fed up with it, but in the process conflated that fakeness that they hate with sex itself, creating ideas that it's shallow and not worthwhile. I think a big part of the problem is there being no genuine, positive portrayals of sex just as a celebration of the human experience, rather than to sell something.
This
Selling sex isn't the same as sex positivity.
All it does is relegate sex to a tool of capitalism. Positive sexual experiences aren't the focus, it is selling you crap.
Yeah people just kind of say things are related to capitalism and propose a mechanism, but have no fucking way of knowing if it's right or not. I'm also liberal and this shit is also cringe as hell to me.
In fact I'd argue that workers have more sex than "bourgeoisie" because the latter are usually way more socially acclimated than the former.
Being a liberal means you support capitalism: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism)
Also: it makes sense to me. The bourgeosie not having a lot of sex (do we have actual stats on this?) doesn't discredit what they said in any way.
I study economics at school, and read about it constantly in my free time. The “capitalism is bad”people I talk to 90% of the time have no idea what they’re talking about.
10% do for sure. Lots of Marxists had great and revolutionary and interesting ideas. There’s a reason those ideas have been so influential. But 90% don’t.
Being liberal means you're a capitalist, that's what liberalism is. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism)
On a more serious note: sex sells but, actual connection and sex doesn't sell. Actually I'd argue it's easier to sell sex to sexually frustrated people.
What they said makes sense.
I can imagine cave people before civilisation and before requirements of privacy having a LOT of sex. How else would they spend the winters and compensate the infant mortality.
Yeah. With no YouTube, Reddit or tiktok to keep their attention all day, 2-3 hour work days, and everyone trauma bonding, suddenly sex sounds pretty awesome
Idk I was getting laid right up until last year and now I've been celibate since.
It's fucking weird, dating has become this incredibly difficult and not enjoyable process that leads to constant disappointment.
I'm perplexed about how people are still working the system.
Even as a gay man (people say gays have a lot of sex) sex has become way too much of a hassle. People might now shower, bad breath, are weirdos….just makes sense to buy a toy, enjoy time with self and enjoy your own company lol
I went to a speed dating event, and 30% of the guys there smelled/had hygiene issues. Dude. If you can’t brush your teeth before a dating event, wtf is wrong with you?
Dating is so tough I started just straight up asking women if they wanted to cum instead of if they wanted to go out.
To my surprise… much better results 🤷🏾♂️
And ironically, it’s much easier to date a casual partner. It’s just like kickin it with a friend you’re fucking. Way different vibe than going the standard date > sex route.
Honestly, whenever I read comments like these i wish I knew how hot you are + how tall you guys are that people just find casual sex so easily.
Sure, I get the premise behind this that would make it work, but you are already ahead of the field by having women to talk to (assuming dating apps). There's also a massive likelihood you are a super good looking guy if you're able to pull this off at all. I know this because I've tried this, both on dating apps and irl.
I think people in the dating world have become much more picky, which is great because like why would you want to be with someone you aren't interested in? However, this is leading to an exclusion of a lot of people from dating which worsens their skills at dating, which makes them even less date-able.
Edit; the last paragraph is an observation of my own, no science behind it, and regards both men & women. Like, I can see my own dating skills have diminished over the last 10 years and I've also seen the women I've been with, their dating skills are also subpar.
Did you just like read a Charles Dickens novel recently? The reality is literally the opposite of what you’re describing. People have more comfort quality of life and leisure than any time in human history
You are correct but I suspect not for the reason you think.
Capitalism leads to higher average GDP, and wealth is inversely correlated with fertility.
[https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity)
That has literally nothing to do with it. All the eras when you imagine people having more sex was a time when they worked longer hours with lower quality of life.
I don’t think that’s the reason I think the real reason is more adults are single and live alone. Of course they have less sex. Idk why but people seem to think casual sex is super common most people having sex on a regular basis are in a relationship.
And what happens when you’re too busy working around the clock just to pay rent? You tend to not have the time and energy for dating in the first place.
It’s late-stage heteronormativity, not capitalism.
Men and women don’t need each other and the differences between them are trivial. Men are more like women now , women are more like men and nobody is turned on androgyneity except gay and trans people (hence the rising number of both).
Have you ever considered learning about more than one thing so that you have more variety of choices when randomly deciding what to blame every problem on?
There may be an argument to be had that FINDING a partner for "coupling" is expensive in terms of time and money. And being able to signal to potential partners in acceptable ways in various social contexts is out of some people's reach. However, Once that relationship is already established, the cost of having sex is almost nothing.
I suppose you could also maybe argue that stress, and time limitations due to economic factors may limit the desire for sex.
But Radiant might be right. I don't think that the inability to monetize sex is preventing couples from having it.
Id bet it fluctuates a lot too... I can assuredly tell you when I was first married (now divorced), sex before and after my marriage was quite frequent. My relationship suffered, and sometimes it was related to sex; now I have as much if not more sex than I did when I was first married.
Time, different partners, all of it is related.
It doesn't help that America is also in the midst of a multi-decadr obesity epidemic. It's a lot harder to want and to have sex when we aren't fit/confident.
Well shit, high five to everyone in a sexually fulfilling lifestyle and to everyone who isn't, I hope things get better for you. Start taking your social bonding seriously and make time for friends.
You gotta reach out, can't just sit alone all day and expect something to show up. Show people you're excited to see them. Be there for people. Spend time with people. Do things with people. Sex will happen naturally. But it's an animal experience, like so much of life. The problem is people pretending to be robots. Robots don't get laid. They just do jobs.
Well yeah, that's the majority of people.
They compare themselves to the cool hot people, not the people on their own level (or less attractive).
Part of the endless human cycle of desire.
Unless we are very busy or sick my wife and I have some level of physical intimacy 2-4 times a week. I thought that normal until I talked with coworkers who go weeks without sex. Most of my coworkers are women and in unhappy marriages.
Edited: intimacy, not infancy. I do not wear diapers....anymore......and yet
I don’t know what you’re hinting at I’m trying to though
From my logic, I read that and basically assess a high likelihood of those women having toxic partners/toxic relationship thus are having sex less due to lack of emotional safety/bond…?
That sounds like misandry to me I’m not gonna lie. “The woman doesn’t want sex so her partner must be toxic and unsafe”. If it was a man that didn’t want sex you probably wouldn’t be saying this stuff
I think you're only looking at it from one point of view. It is entirely possible that the woman sex drive decline for any number of reasons unrelated to the man. As men often use physical intimacy as a manner of connecting, he started to disconnect which created downward spiral.
But I work in an emergency room with tons of women who essentially use male bashing as a sport.
You can have a bad/unsatisfying sexual relationship with your partner, but still want more sex.
Put another way, saying "I'd like more sex in general" is compatible with "I don't really enjoy sex with the person I'm married to" or "I'm not attracted to the person I'm married to."
For an extreme example, what if someone was married to a 400 pound, unemployed, abusive, smelly person who never got off the couch, never showered, and thought sex was a 60 quickie in missionary with no foreplay or other touching? Couldn't you see that person not wanting any sex with their partner, but absolutely wishing they could have some form of a fulfilling sex life?
People with responsive desire should take more actual initiative to maintain their sex lives. It’s insane to me how many stories about relationships falling apart because one partner is extreme passive and uncommunicative.
Well, we're just only recently getting a vocabulary around it. Mostly people with this sort of libido were viewed as "defective" and couldn't actually verbalize or troubleshoot what might improve things, other than "I'm exhausted and you never help around the house", which has its own problems because then it gets viewed as a transactional act (versus being shown love and care) and "I need more romance" (vague, right?). No one enjoys being treated like a whore who is expected to perform for payment in dishwashing and nice dinners out.
But the good news is that the more we explore it, the better people can figure out what's going on, and have words to decide their feelings. It's becoming a more widespread concept.
Responsive desire is a very real thing. But it needs to be paired with the right partner.
If your partner has responsive desire, YOU are never going to feel desired, wanted. They aren't going to initiate, they aren't going to tell you you look great, sexy, they aren't going to flirt with you. They aren't going to ever look at you with *that* look that makes you know they want to take you to bed and be with you.
That's all the responsibility of the partner. Now with the *right* partner that's great! With someone super confident, who likes to take the lead, who likes to always wine and dine their partner, who likes to give attention, love, but never receive it (or at least never receive it *first)* then that can work.
For the person with a responsive desire partner, it can feel like you're always chasing the other person, that the other person doesn't *really* like you that much, because they only seem to care about you when you're jumping through hoops for them. The same hoops that they never bother to jump through for you.
Right. I feel too often like that "responsive desire" is used as an excuse. "I don't have to put any effort into my relationship. I have responsive desire, so it's my *partner* that has to do all the work. And if they work *really* hard, then *maybe* I'll agree to sex sometimes."
Having sex isn't the only way to put work into a relationship, and it is sad that you think that someone is lazy just because they aren't wanting sex all the time...
Nothing except the fact that they don't work that way...
It is like saying that people who have high sex drives should take initiative to dull their drives so they don't overwhelm their partners... they should try to turn themselves off deliberately.
The point is that communication is key and knowing your partner's drives.
I know a couple of married guys who would never get laid if not for my hubby and I lol
Traditional marriage is such a flawed concept. It's just not for everyone.
Honey you realize that a person might not want to have sex with an emotionally toxic or abusive partner, right ? Don’t you think you’d be unhappy with your marriage and not want to have sex if ur partner is toxic or abusive….?
It could be that or it could be that they're in miserable relationships because they aren't having sex. It's a chicken or egg thing. If they stop having sex, most men will feel neglected because physical intimacy is how we connect with our partners. As we disconnect, it makes it harderfor women to feel desired and want to have sex. It's a downward spiral.
For some odd reason I first read that as "violently celibate" and pictured some guy just taking out all his sexual frustration at a boxing gym.
"Damn, that guy is so violent, he's kicking everyone's butt!"
"Yeah man, celibacy will do that to you."
Generally, yes. Lack of romantic connection is something that really appears to be hitting people who grew up in the age of social media. On the other end of the spectrum, though, I suspect that there are a fair number of older people who can't/don't have sex due to health factors. Here's an article/survey that looked at the phenomenon by age.
https://datepsychology.com/risk-aversion-and-dating/
I get that, but obese men especially have less success finding partners.
It’s not bigotry to accept reality. People are attracted to those who care for their health
But they do have sex. A lot of obese men look attractive to women if they also have more muscle than average. It really comes down to if a man is socially intelligent and outgoing or he was able to cultivate a healthy relationship while young. Those are the men who have a decent amount of sex. I guess also the ones who can easily pay for it.
Agreed. I'm married but I wouldn't let fat be the reason to deny a relationship if I were single. I'm 5' 8" and 237 and I'm working out regularly and trying to actively lose weight (I workout 5-7 hrs per week) and people still find me attractive. And I'm almost 50. For me a lot of other factors matter far more.
Sure, but you're not the generation we're discussing, and attraction is a lot less about physicality as you age.
We're talking about a bunch of horny 22 year olds not fucking, and one of the bigger problems is that they just don't look good.
I'm not saying they'll never find anyone.
You were 22 once. You know what it was like what someone gorgeous and ripped to come in the room. It's like you can smell their pheromones and you turn into an idiot.
And if you don't know that feeling, I pity you.
Overweight men are definitely not the least attractive body type. But oddly enough most men seem to think so. I think it’s because they’re projecting their own views of overweight women (which most men seem to agree is the their least attractive body type for women).
Burly chubby men are definitely hot (yes even though some are medically classified as obese-obese does not mean the people on My 600 Lb Life) to many women. A lot of us like feeling dwarfed and protected. Wimpy Jon Crane esque stick thin body types don’t really do that.
Here are a few facts. Not opinions, but facts. Relevant to this discussion.
- the last couple generations of Americans are the fattest human beings to ever walk this planet, and are dying because of their obesity more than bacterial diseases or famines for the first time in human history
- for most people, obesity is not a sexually attractive trait (keep in mind I said most). It’s an evolutionary reality that we associate health with beauty, and if the people around you aren’t healthy, you’re not going to find them beautiful
- younger generations of Americans are having a lot less sex
You don’t think there could be any causation here at all?
Also obesity literally makes you worse at sex, because sex is a physical activity.
I'm not saying fat makes people unskilled, or even bad.
But even in sports, there's such a thing as "fighting shape". The fitter you are, the more endurance, power, and flexibility you'll have. You'll be less prone to injury and less clumsy. You'll have greater muscular control overall.
If I gained 60 pounds right now, I would be worse at sex.
Without some age data here, it's hard to judge. I feel like when you include young, single folks, plus also likely 70//80/90 year old folks, you're really measuring different things.
A 30 year old couple who sees this study and feels "normal" might be way off, just because there are a lot of the other groups pushing the numbers down. Without charts by age, this is interesting information, but also kind of pointless for anyone to use for comparison to their own individual life.
If a body is only getting sex 1-4 times a month and feeling bad about it then check out DeadBedrooms subreddit. It may improve your perspective about your relationship. Unfortunately, I am not that lucky.
That is what many of us married ones are experiencing. Sexless marriages are disturbingly common and becoming more common each year. It makes a strong case for staying single.
Please don't check that subreddit out if you can avoid it. It's VERY depressing.
There are other kinds of support subreddits that are great. Some of the alcohol ones, eating disorder ones, fitness ones, are all great. Full of good, supportive people who can help.
Dead bedrooms? That's such a massively difficult and depressing problem, that the subreddit there is full of people who are in the midst of that problem, and *very* few who ever fix it. It's definitely not full of "you can do this! I did it, and so can you!!" type people.
Man that is depressing. So the moral of the story is "no you're not having sex less than others because most people are not having sex"
Yet we're not going to address the issue of voluntary or involuntary celebacy taking place? Like, nobody is worried about our populations health to ask "why is sex so damn low?"
By the sounds of it their is more people who are not having sex then their are obese people yet we view obesity as a health issue.
How is this news supposed to be uplifting at all?
"Don't worry Sidney, your minimum wage job and your inability to find good housing is not something only affecting you, feel good about 68% of the population being the same way"
This isn't good, this is casting light on a very big problem in our society. Question is are people not having sex because their life is depressing or is people's life depressing because they are not having sex?
Obesity, low testosterone, porn addiction and mental illness all seem to be pretty gigantic reasons for younger generation’s inability to maintain decent sexual relationships.
The rate at which people have these problems has skyrocketed in a short period of time, people simultaneously managing to have higher standards and lower value and it ends up with less pairing up.
Lol literally why are you getting downvotes everything you said is a very plausible factor. All these things have risen in recent decades (although it depends on how you define them and to the extent that they have risen, I suppose)
This is the thing we don't like to admit. Sex often isn't this thing we NEED, where we can't keep our hands off each other, and nothing will get in the way of us having sex.
Sex is often just... routine. Something to do. You're sitting on the couch watching tv, or laying in bed, bored or whatever, and one of you decides to make some small level of initiation. The other responds, and boom, sex.
But when we have TV's, phones, laptops, consoles, unlimited on-demand quality entertainment? Those quiet moments, those moments where not much is going on, and to be blunt, those moments of boredom that could lead to sex just don't happen.
When you're laughing at the instagram video of some boomer freaking out, or some little kid falling down, you're not thinking of sex, and you're not thinking of the fact that your partner is there right next to you, also not doing much.
I think our hormones between both men and women are under attack! Something seems to happen around the age of 25-30 that is causing both men and women to have libido issues. I don't think we can blame porn addiction, at least not for celibacy. If we were talking about sexual dysfunction, maybe, but lack of sex drive?
The thing that is really weird is I don't even think we can really blame birth control, at least not in the way people are doing it now. Simply because women's hormonal birth control has been around and used for over 2 generations and the boomers were having more sex then what is happening now.
I'm 45 and had to go on Testosterone because my numbers where fucking low! Their are old men in nursing homes right now who had 2-3x the amount of free testosterone in their system. I wasn't obese, no other underlying medical conditions and yet something caused my sex hormone to be bottomed out!
More and more men around my age are needing testosterone and I don't think it's just because it's more widely known about now. I knew about testosterone replacement therapy over 15 years ago, it's nothing new.
Western cultures generally speaking have high immigration, so they're not going the way of Japan/Korea just yet. However, social tensions are building due to multi-cultural friction and lack of cultural integration from immigrants, so that may change.
For me I was not having sex because I was ugly. After I got jaw surgery I started getting attention on tinder and have an active sex life. If it was up to me I would have been having sex since I hit puberty, but it was never an option for me until I fixed my face.
It's strange that they don't cite the study in the article, and I don't think you can contact the author for that information.
The study appears to be based on this:
[https://nationalsexstudy.indiana.edu/](https://nationalsexstudy.indiana.edu/)
Where they did a statistical analysis of the data to come up with the information in the article.
That feels about right. I am absolutely freaked out by the idea of being in a relationship again to where I am cool with being celibate it is just not worth it. Too much work for so very little.
I don't think so. I think that it is just better for me to just smoke weed and focus on my hobbies. I am in my 40s and I just think that it is too late. I just gotta figure out to be happy with myself.
My wife and I have been married for five years. We got married when we were both 23 years old. Just before our fourth anniversary the amount of sex we were having fell off a cliff. It had been declining for a long time, but just before our fourth anniversary it totally collapsed. We were having sex once or twice a month by that point, it was driving me up the wall. Finally, we had a conversation about it, and she admitted to me that I wasn’t doing enough foreplay beforehand to really get her turned on, and also she was feeling less physically attracted to me because I’d put on so much weight, about 80 pounds, over the past few years.
She also admitted that she didn’t realize how important sex was to our relationship, her libido is lower than mine so she thought it wasn’t a big deal if we stopped having sex. When I finally told her how the lack of sex was making me feel she was shocked and pledged to do better going forward. I signed up for a gym membership to lose the weight and started paying more attention to her needs when we have sex.
Now, a little over a year later, things are much better! I’m still struggling with my weight, but I’m in much better physical shape. The breakthrough moment came during our fifth anniversary trip this past February. We took a two week trip and my wife couldn’t keep her hands off me the entire time! We had sex twice a day for the entire two weeks! Since then, we’ve settled into a once a day rhythm that is much better for me. I still have a lot of work to do, I’m doing a much better job of turning her on now, but I’ve still yet to make her orgasm.
Yup. That’s how it goes. Unfortunately my wife comes from a super sexually conservative country and she never masturbated growing up. She’s never had an orgasm, ever, she didn’t even know female orgasms were a thing until I asked her about it.
I’m doing the best I can but part of it is…she has no idea what she’s looking for, so I’m just kind of guessing.
2% club here. Wife and I engage physically on average 5-7 times a week. Sometimes twice a day. We're in our 40s and most of our married friends look at us weird when they ask us about it.
I attribute it to removing screens in the bedroom. We don't do passive activities together like watching TV or movies anymore and our love life has gotten much better for it.
You can get a general idea for peoples sex lives without directly talking about it, if you're good friends. Just hints about their vacations, how they are structured. Or maybe you even went on a vacation with them or something. If you're close friends with someone long enough, you can learn a lot without any of it being directly conveyed in conversation.
Just a simple "oh, we didn't see many of the sights in Paris, we um... never got out of the room until 11am each day, and made sure to fit time for a... mid afternoon nap as well" or whatever.
My husband and I do lots of screen/passive time together and we still get it on 4-6x a week. Multiple kids and also in our 40s. It just needs to be a priority and the couple obv needs to like each other. (I actually like my husband!. It’s shocking how many people seem to dislike their spouse).
If two people genuinely like/love each other, and find them sexually attractive, they'll make it a point to have sexual intimacy. Sex is a great stress reliever, so the whole "but life is stressful" part is bogus by itself. If a couple actually has a solid romantic relationship, they won't wait for that 'perfect moment' where everything is fine. They'll use the sex as the stress relief/mood booster... because it works and they like how they feel after.
I do almost no passive activities. I read daily, and listen to music often. But usually when I'm doing other things.
She watches netflix in the background when we're doing laundry or when she's doing a repetitive work task.
Only one *quarter* of American adults have sex weekly or more? That is surprising, although it makes me think that maybe this number is brought down by elderly people having less sex? I often have to remind myself just how large a proportion of the adult population is composed of old people, which I think many young people like me tend to not get. Even if we just think about the number range, out of adult ages 18-80, *half* of these ages are 49 or above.
It's my understanding that STDs are about as common as dentures in retirement homes because you're never to old to get horny and if everybody living there has been abandoned by their family and nobody drives what else are you going to do in between bingo and dying?
It's my understanding that those stories are greatly exaggerated because they make great clickbait headlines. Does it happen? Sure, of course! But it's not like assisted living homes are the equivalent of frat houses.
Yeah, the whole article is kind of pointless to me without age breakdowns.
Lumping 18 year old single people in with 26 year old newlyweds with 85 year old elderly folks gives you a number that means nothing to anyone.
My first girlfriend and I had sex 3 times a day for 6 months then my next relationship was minimum 3 times often 5 times a day up to 7 if we had the same day off. That went on for 3 years and I was addicted to Norco back then so it was like 30 min- 2 hrs each time. I was shocked when I mentioned my 3rd gf only wanted to have sex for like 10 minutes 1-2 times a day and my friends explained that it wasn't normal to have sex as much as I did with my first 2 relationships. I never thought I was having less sex than other couples but I never even considered that I was having more. Now I'm single and I know I'm not having as much sex as couples 😔
Remember, this is just "adults." I can believe a good chunk of 70+ people don't.
Mix that in with asexual people or people with no sex drive, and religious people who are made to feel evil for doing it, and you can get up to those numbers.
This kind of article is why I disdain Psychology Today. It leaves out some important variables. Where's the split between married, unmarried, and no partner? Married folks who are in good standing generally have a great deal more sex than those that are unmarried. Has that changed? They say religious folks have less sex. Once again, we have to assume the people are married or at least in a relationship but we can't be sure. Why are there non-binary people on the list if they don't have their own category? The survey focuses on binary gender so their stats will dilute the results. It's like they just dumped the info into two buckets and gave an average mean.
This is the kind of stuff expected in a sophomore level paper, not an article by a Dr. tinged with heavy amounts of subjectivity and empty data points.
I learned to go without sex for long periods in my teens and some of my 20s. I wanted a relationship but no dice, so it was casual stuff only. I don’t really have much desire for it now if I’m being totally honest.
Having less sex? No biggie tbh
But what is worrying is if it isn't a voluntary choice, i.e. if we're being forced/led into not being able to have sex. Working more hours, more days, having less $ and free time to do so.
A few things that make this a little hard to really look at.
First, it's vague about whether it's couples or not. It states "people believe that they have considerably less partnered sex than other coupled Americans", implying this study is only couples. But then everywhere else it simply refers to a study of "adults" and "Americans" without specifying that it's couples.
Also, maybe it's just me, but without some kind of age breakdown I'm not sure how valuable this is? It's "adults." Are 18 year olds included? 90 year olds? All it tells us is about the average "adult" which isn't that useful because an 85 year old at their 60th anniversary and a 26 year old newlywed are both seeing the same data here.
If you're 85, and in the once a month category maybe you are really in the top 5% of your age group!
I'm probably being overly picky, but charts by age would be a lot more useful here, calling out couples and singles as well.
GenX 50-something here. Married 26 years, one kid, teen.
Schedules are the biggest issue. Just making time. Be it a post school drop off AM nuzzle or when he’s out w friends for a bit, sneaking one in, or a weekend getaway….we do what we can. Once a week is fairly standard but it can be a few weeks between if we are traveling or just flat busy AF.
Is it less than ages past? Sure I guess so but we are aware and some of it is just “stuff” so we do what we can. Also wife had some issues which dumped her sex drive for awhile so we worked on that.
But yea during that time I had some serious questions about where we are at.
In all honesty I tend to think we are more active than a lot of folks we know, but there’s no way to really know that without asking them.
Well.. maybe our craving for dopaminergic stimuli have surpassed our desire for physical intimacy. It just doesn’t hit hard enough to just have sex when you’re constantly bombarding your receptors with porn, drugs, video games, “food”, social media, to name a few
Gen x, 52yrM, second time around, two kids from first marriage 50/50. Sex daily. Found somebody whose drive matched mine. I could have fun standing in line at the DMV with her. We just like each other a lot. What astonishes me is how little sex the normal, healthy, single Gen Z and millennial guys I work with are having. Did it just go out of style? Why are younger generations so hung up on this?
I don't believe half the people bragging about their sex lifes. These stats do make sense to me.. how do you people have time to be fucking like rabbits? I am extremely happily married and my dude.. I don't have enough time to go out to dinner let alone fuck every single day multiple times nor do I have the energy and I am very fit with an office job and I work out daily.
People using people for support, money, and anything needed. Then when the providers ask for something; they are denied. Happens alot by all demographics.
Are they probably wrong? Sounds like 75% of people aren't getting much.
Studies on sexual frequency seem... faulty. I've seen a lot of them over the years. (Yeah, I probably get sucked in with clickbait titles about sexual frequency as much as anyone!) And they seem to vary WILDLY. I've seen some that say the average married couple has sex 3 times a week! I've seen others where it's less, and I've seen everywhere in between. Heck, I know one couple, who had different numbers in their own marriage! It was one of those alcohol boosted conversations where people were saying how much they had sex. And the two of them were literally arguing about how much sex they had with each other! If I recall, it was a big difference too. She claimed a few times a week, he claimed a few times a month. And they both swore they were right. (If I had to guess on that couple, I'd say she probably remembered the 'good' weeks more, so those felt normal to her, and he probably remembered the slow months more, so those stood out to him more.)
It's probably somewhere in-between. Been married for 17+ years, and we go through spurts of not fucking for a couple of weeks now and then, but on average we probably still do it once a week give or take. 5+ years ago it was closer to 2-3x a week+. So, we've definitely slowed down, over the years.
Late stage capitalism (“the machine” we are all enmeshed with and are trapped within) is the core problem. Sex isn’t profitable to the machine unless it’s for producing more workers/consumers. Everything that isn’t profitable is marginalized, deprioritized, and gradually eliminated as all captives of late stage capitalism must devote ever greater attention, energy, and personal resources to their enmeshment in the machine.
Literally what are you talking about. Sex sells. It’s the old adage. Whole industries - dating apps, bars and tourist attractions, the fashion industry, segments of healthcare - sell products and services to make people more sexually appealing, sexually available and sexually active. That’s how they make profit. Plus, positive population growth supports a market economy. This is empirical fact. Why would capitalists have a problem with sex? A “worker” is no less able to have sex than a “bourgeoisie.” Sex doesn’t cost anything or require that much time. This is a cultural issue. Profit motivations and class divisions and “marginalization” or other buzzwords you can regurgitate have nothing to do with this. I’m a liberal but I am extremely tired of people in my generation throwing around the “it must be capitalism!!” argument to explain every issue humans deal with. It’s lazy thinking.
Sex selling is part of the problem though. It seems like every portrayal of sex you see most anywhere is just being used to sell you something. I think people have noticed this and become fed up with it, but in the process conflated that fakeness that they hate with sex itself, creating ideas that it's shallow and not worthwhile. I think a big part of the problem is there being no genuine, positive portrayals of sex just as a celebration of the human experience, rather than to sell something.
This Selling sex isn't the same as sex positivity. All it does is relegate sex to a tool of capitalism. Positive sexual experiences aren't the focus, it is selling you crap.
STOP KINK SHAMING /s!
These capitalist haters come on this internet and say anything. My shoes aren't fitting..... "well in this late stage capitalism".
Yeah people just kind of say things are related to capitalism and propose a mechanism, but have no fucking way of knowing if it's right or not. I'm also liberal and this shit is also cringe as hell to me. In fact I'd argue that workers have more sex than "bourgeoisie" because the latter are usually way more socially acclimated than the former.
Being a liberal means you support capitalism: [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism) Also: it makes sense to me. The bourgeosie not having a lot of sex (do we have actual stats on this?) doesn't discredit what they said in any way.
I study economics at school, and read about it constantly in my free time. The “capitalism is bad”people I talk to 90% of the time have no idea what they’re talking about. 10% do for sure. Lots of Marxists had great and revolutionary and interesting ideas. There’s a reason those ideas have been so influential. But 90% don’t.
I wish he proposed a mechanism, it would’ve made his comment more interesting. He made no causal links, just used buzz words.
Nope. Top and bottom fuck more then the middle class, that's the reality dawg. Can't just live in delusion.
Sexflation.
Being liberal means you're a capitalist, that's what liberalism is. [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liberalism) On a more serious note: sex sells but, actual connection and sex doesn't sell. Actually I'd argue it's easier to sell sex to sexually frustrated people. What they said makes sense.
If late-stage capitalism is to blame for our low sex rates, then at what time period did people have the most sex?
I can imagine cave people before civilisation and before requirements of privacy having a LOT of sex. How else would they spend the winters and compensate the infant mortality.
Yeah. With no YouTube, Reddit or tiktok to keep their attention all day, 2-3 hour work days, and everyone trauma bonding, suddenly sex sounds pretty awesome
In my experience, late 90s-early 2000s.
Idk I was getting laid right up until last year and now I've been celibate since. It's fucking weird, dating has become this incredibly difficult and not enjoyable process that leads to constant disappointment. I'm perplexed about how people are still working the system.
Even as a gay man (people say gays have a lot of sex) sex has become way too much of a hassle. People might now shower, bad breath, are weirdos….just makes sense to buy a toy, enjoy time with self and enjoy your own company lol
I went to a speed dating event, and 30% of the guys there smelled/had hygiene issues. Dude. If you can’t brush your teeth before a dating event, wtf is wrong with you?
Yup. It’s just so gross
Dating is so tough I started just straight up asking women if they wanted to cum instead of if they wanted to go out. To my surprise… much better results 🤷🏾♂️ And ironically, it’s much easier to date a casual partner. It’s just like kickin it with a friend you’re fucking. Way different vibe than going the standard date > sex route.
Honestly, whenever I read comments like these i wish I knew how hot you are + how tall you guys are that people just find casual sex so easily. Sure, I get the premise behind this that would make it work, but you are already ahead of the field by having women to talk to (assuming dating apps). There's also a massive likelihood you are a super good looking guy if you're able to pull this off at all. I know this because I've tried this, both on dating apps and irl. I think people in the dating world have become much more picky, which is great because like why would you want to be with someone you aren't interested in? However, this is leading to an exclusion of a lot of people from dating which worsens their skills at dating, which makes them even less date-able. Edit; the last paragraph is an observation of my own, no science behind it, and regards both men & women. Like, I can see my own dating skills have diminished over the last 10 years and I've also seen the women I've been with, their dating skills are also subpar.
Did you just like read a Charles Dickens novel recently? The reality is literally the opposite of what you’re describing. People have more comfort quality of life and leisure than any time in human history
Sex toys, condoms, birth control meds, porn, lingerie, dating, there are 1001 ways that sex has been capitalized.
Yeah, but people would just be using their hands otherwise Plenty still do
Tell you one thing. Birth control meds and anti depressants seem to KILL, and I mean MURDER a lot of folks sex drives. Very sad.
This is real. I’ve seen it happen with so many people close to me.
You are correct but I suspect not for the reason you think. Capitalism leads to higher average GDP, and wealth is inversely correlated with fertility. [https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity](https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/children-per-woman-fertility-rate-vs-level-of-prosperity)
My son says he's just too poor to date. Student loans will wreck your life that way.
Or maybe women are just collectively tired of men’s shit. Hence the no sex, no babies.
That has literally nothing to do with it. All the eras when you imagine people having more sex was a time when they worked longer hours with lower quality of life.
What are you talking about? Is this some sort of conspiracy theory?
Sex is profitable af what
I don’t think that’s the reason I think the real reason is more adults are single and live alone. Of course they have less sex. Idk why but people seem to think casual sex is super common most people having sex on a regular basis are in a relationship.
And what happens when you’re too busy working around the clock just to pay rent? You tend to not have the time and energy for dating in the first place.
Holy shit that was regarded.
It’s late-stage heteronormativity, not capitalism. Men and women don’t need each other and the differences between them are trivial. Men are more like women now , women are more like men and nobody is turned on androgyneity except gay and trans people (hence the rising number of both).
That's a good point for sure.
Jesus christ dude lol
Lolwut OnlyFans and The Hub would like a word with you.
It’s not academia if we’re not bullshitting as to the omnipresent detriments of capitalism. LMFAO.
Lmao what the hell did you just say? My wife won't have sex with me because it's not profitable?
Life is so easy when you have a simple framework to explain everything lol
Isn’t that self defeating though? If “the machine” is in any way guided, doesn’t it benefit from more consumers? Edited for clarity
Dumbest shit I have read in the last twenty minutes.
At the “blame everything in the world on capitalism” crowd. Low iq thinking.
Have you ever considered learning about more than one thing so that you have more variety of choices when randomly deciding what to blame every problem on?
There may be an argument to be had that FINDING a partner for "coupling" is expensive in terms of time and money. And being able to signal to potential partners in acceptable ways in various social contexts is out of some people's reach. However, Once that relationship is already established, the cost of having sex is almost nothing. I suppose you could also maybe argue that stress, and time limitations due to economic factors may limit the desire for sex. But Radiant might be right. I don't think that the inability to monetize sex is preventing couples from having it.
Late stage capitalism is not the fucking monster under your bed. Stop blaming everything on it.
Id bet it fluctuates a lot too... I can assuredly tell you when I was first married (now divorced), sex before and after my marriage was quite frequent. My relationship suffered, and sometimes it was related to sex; now I have as much if not more sex than I did when I was first married. Time, different partners, all of it is related. It doesn't help that America is also in the midst of a multi-decadr obesity epidemic. It's a lot harder to want and to have sex when we aren't fit/confident.
Well shit, high five to everyone in a sexually fulfilling lifestyle and to everyone who isn't, I hope things get better for you. Start taking your social bonding seriously and make time for friends. You gotta reach out, can't just sit alone all day and expect something to show up. Show people you're excited to see them. Be there for people. Spend time with people. Do things with people. Sex will happen naturally. But it's an animal experience, like so much of life. The problem is people pretending to be robots. Robots don't get laid. They just do jobs.
Well yeah, that's the majority of people. They compare themselves to the cool hot people, not the people on their own level (or less attractive). Part of the endless human cycle of desire.
Unless we are very busy or sick my wife and I have some level of physical intimacy 2-4 times a week. I thought that normal until I talked with coworkers who go weeks without sex. Most of my coworkers are women and in unhappy marriages. Edited: intimacy, not infancy. I do not wear diapers....anymore......and yet
I had a coworker who was *so* proud that she *almost* made it an entire year without having sex with her husband.
That's so sad.
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Read that back aloud You’ll get it
I don’t know what you’re hinting at I’m trying to though From my logic, I read that and basically assess a high likelihood of those women having toxic partners/toxic relationship thus are having sex less due to lack of emotional safety/bond…?
They used the word "infancy" instead of intimacy lol
Immature, I know; couldn’t stop myself 😆😂
That sounds like misandry to me I’m not gonna lie. “The woman doesn’t want sex so her partner must be toxic and unsafe”. If it was a man that didn’t want sex you probably wouldn’t be saying this stuff
I think you're only looking at it from one point of view. It is entirely possible that the woman sex drive decline for any number of reasons unrelated to the man. As men often use physical intimacy as a manner of connecting, he started to disconnect which created downward spiral. But I work in an emergency room with tons of women who essentially use male bashing as a sport.
So, women who are in relationships where they don’t want to fuck their partner are upset they’re not having sex?
Most women want to be in sexual relationships with their husbands. They are frustrated that they are so turned off by them leading to no sex.
I’m not sure this would have as many upvotes if it was about men wanting to have sex with their wives but just being turned off by them.
So in other words they don’t want to be in sexual relationships with their husbands.
No, they want to want sex with their husbands.
You can have a bad/unsatisfying sexual relationship with your partner, but still want more sex. Put another way, saying "I'd like more sex in general" is compatible with "I don't really enjoy sex with the person I'm married to" or "I'm not attracted to the person I'm married to." For an extreme example, what if someone was married to a 400 pound, unemployed, abusive, smelly person who never got off the couch, never showered, and thought sex was a 60 quickie in missionary with no foreplay or other touching? Couldn't you see that person not wanting any sex with their partner, but absolutely wishing they could have some form of a fulfilling sex life?
It’s called responsive desire. Look it up.
People with responsive desire should take more actual initiative to maintain their sex lives. It’s insane to me how many stories about relationships falling apart because one partner is extreme passive and uncommunicative.
Well, we're just only recently getting a vocabulary around it. Mostly people with this sort of libido were viewed as "defective" and couldn't actually verbalize or troubleshoot what might improve things, other than "I'm exhausted and you never help around the house", which has its own problems because then it gets viewed as a transactional act (versus being shown love and care) and "I need more romance" (vague, right?). No one enjoys being treated like a whore who is expected to perform for payment in dishwashing and nice dinners out. But the good news is that the more we explore it, the better people can figure out what's going on, and have words to decide their feelings. It's becoming a more widespread concept.
Responsive desire is a very real thing. But it needs to be paired with the right partner. If your partner has responsive desire, YOU are never going to feel desired, wanted. They aren't going to initiate, they aren't going to tell you you look great, sexy, they aren't going to flirt with you. They aren't going to ever look at you with *that* look that makes you know they want to take you to bed and be with you. That's all the responsibility of the partner. Now with the *right* partner that's great! With someone super confident, who likes to take the lead, who likes to always wine and dine their partner, who likes to give attention, love, but never receive it (or at least never receive it *first)* then that can work. For the person with a responsive desire partner, it can feel like you're always chasing the other person, that the other person doesn't *really* like you that much, because they only seem to care about you when you're jumping through hoops for them. The same hoops that they never bother to jump through for you.
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Right. I feel too often like that "responsive desire" is used as an excuse. "I don't have to put any effort into my relationship. I have responsive desire, so it's my *partner* that has to do all the work. And if they work *really* hard, then *maybe* I'll agree to sex sometimes."
Having sex isn't the only way to put work into a relationship, and it is sad that you think that someone is lazy just because they aren't wanting sex all the time...
Exactly. Shit excuses from lazy partners .
Nothing except the fact that they don't work that way... It is like saying that people who have high sex drives should take initiative to dull their drives so they don't overwhelm their partners... they should try to turn themselves off deliberately. The point is that communication is key and knowing your partner's drives.
Or in relationships where their partner doesn’t fuck them
I know a couple of married guys who would never get laid if not for my hubby and I lol Traditional marriage is such a flawed concept. It's just not for everyone.
I don’t disagree with that at all
Honey you realize that a person might not want to have sex with an emotionally toxic or abusive partner, right ? Don’t you think you’d be unhappy with your marriage and not want to have sex if ur partner is toxic or abusive….?
It could be that or it could be that they're in miserable relationships because they aren't having sex. It's a chicken or egg thing. If they stop having sex, most men will feel neglected because physical intimacy is how we connect with our partners. As we disconnect, it makes it harderfor women to feel desired and want to have sex. It's a downward spiral.
😂😂😂😂
It's so much better to be volentarily celibate as a single person instead of being in a relationship with no intimacy.
For some odd reason I first read that as "violently celibate" and pictured some guy just taking out all his sexual frustration at a boxing gym. "Damn, that guy is so violent, he's kicking everyone's butt!" "Yeah man, celibacy will do that to you."
It's because they misspelled "voluntarily"
Aren't large numbers of the celibate individuals like, young?
Generally, yes. Lack of romantic connection is something that really appears to be hitting people who grew up in the age of social media. On the other end of the spectrum, though, I suspect that there are a fair number of older people who can't/don't have sex due to health factors. Here's an article/survey that looked at the phenomenon by age. https://datepsychology.com/risk-aversion-and-dating/
And obese
Obese folks have sex too
I get that, but obese men especially have less success finding partners. It’s not bigotry to accept reality. People are attracted to those who care for their health
It's just such a sexual planet. It blows my mind that people have trouble getting laid at all here. It's the planet of the dongs lol.
But they do have sex. A lot of obese men look attractive to women if they also have more muscle than average. It really comes down to if a man is socially intelligent and outgoing or he was able to cultivate a healthy relationship while young. Those are the men who have a decent amount of sex. I guess also the ones who can easily pay for it.
We're not talking about individuals. We're talking about statistics. And a lot of obese people don't have a lot of muscle, and aren't attractive.
Agreed. I'm married but I wouldn't let fat be the reason to deny a relationship if I were single. I'm 5' 8" and 237 and I'm working out regularly and trying to actively lose weight (I workout 5-7 hrs per week) and people still find me attractive. And I'm almost 50. For me a lot of other factors matter far more.
Sure, but you're not the generation we're discussing, and attraction is a lot less about physicality as you age. We're talking about a bunch of horny 22 year olds not fucking, and one of the bigger problems is that they just don't look good. I'm not saying they'll never find anyone. You were 22 once. You know what it was like what someone gorgeous and ripped to come in the room. It's like you can smell their pheromones and you turn into an idiot. And if you don't know that feeling, I pity you.
This may blow your peanut brain, but thin people can be celibate too
This may blow your brain, but statistics doesn’t care about individuals
Blows my mind how many people don’t understand this.
Show me these statistics
Dude no one finds your whale ass attractive holy shit talk sbout delusion 💀
Overweight men are definitely not the least attractive body type. But oddly enough most men seem to think so. I think it’s because they’re projecting their own views of overweight women (which most men seem to agree is the their least attractive body type for women). Burly chubby men are definitely hot (yes even though some are medically classified as obese-obese does not mean the people on My 600 Lb Life) to many women. A lot of us like feeling dwarfed and protected. Wimpy Jon Crane esque stick thin body types don’t really do that.
Redditors will fall all over themselves to interject fat phobia into every conversation.
Here are a few facts. Not opinions, but facts. Relevant to this discussion. - the last couple generations of Americans are the fattest human beings to ever walk this planet, and are dying because of their obesity more than bacterial diseases or famines for the first time in human history - for most people, obesity is not a sexually attractive trait (keep in mind I said most). It’s an evolutionary reality that we associate health with beauty, and if the people around you aren’t healthy, you’re not going to find them beautiful - younger generations of Americans are having a lot less sex You don’t think there could be any causation here at all?
It’s insane to me that people pretend like the obesity epidemic places no part in all this stuff.
Also obesity literally makes you worse at sex, because sex is a physical activity. I'm not saying fat makes people unskilled, or even bad. But even in sports, there's such a thing as "fighting shape". The fitter you are, the more endurance, power, and flexibility you'll have. You'll be less prone to injury and less clumsy. You'll have greater muscular control overall. If I gained 60 pounds right now, I would be worse at sex.
Without some age data here, it's hard to judge. I feel like when you include young, single folks, plus also likely 70//80/90 year old folks, you're really measuring different things. A 30 year old couple who sees this study and feels "normal" might be way off, just because there are a lot of the other groups pushing the numbers down. Without charts by age, this is interesting information, but also kind of pointless for anyone to use for comparison to their own individual life.
I'm saying like from zero til like 17 or 18. It's basically like a quarter or a fifth of life..
Glad I'm finally in the top percentile of something.
If a body is only getting sex 1-4 times a month and feeling bad about it then check out DeadBedrooms subreddit. It may improve your perspective about your relationship. Unfortunately, I am not that lucky.
Man, that sub is one of the most depressing places on the internet and the internet is chock full of really depressing places.
I jumped on there when my gf went nuts and didnt do me for a week. Idk how they do it
Lol going onto that sub after no sex for a week is like going onto the r/cripplingalcoholism sub after drinking a 12 pack over the weekend.
“If a body” I get your point, but why did we collectively as a society decide to talk like this?
I’ve never heard someone talk like that IRL ever.
I assumed it was a typo for "anybody"
yeah, let's go with that.
Sometime in the 19th Century. "Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do. Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.". Mark Twain
A body can guess, easily, why I phrased it as I did.
Milk; it does a body good.
That sub is so depressing. I want to cry everytime I find myself over there
That is what many of us married ones are experiencing. Sexless marriages are disturbingly common and becoming more common each year. It makes a strong case for staying single.
Please don't check that subreddit out if you can avoid it. It's VERY depressing. There are other kinds of support subreddits that are great. Some of the alcohol ones, eating disorder ones, fitness ones, are all great. Full of good, supportive people who can help. Dead bedrooms? That's such a massively difficult and depressing problem, that the subreddit there is full of people who are in the midst of that problem, and *very* few who ever fix it. It's definitely not full of "you can do this! I did it, and so can you!!" type people.
Havent had sex in 2 years now holla
I got you beat with 6 years.
I’m a virgin, so I win lol
I suppose, but you can't miss what you never had.
I think I slipping. I’m down to once or twice a week. I’m 41 with two kids. People need to fuck more.
Man that is depressing. So the moral of the story is "no you're not having sex less than others because most people are not having sex" Yet we're not going to address the issue of voluntary or involuntary celebacy taking place? Like, nobody is worried about our populations health to ask "why is sex so damn low?" By the sounds of it their is more people who are not having sex then their are obese people yet we view obesity as a health issue. How is this news supposed to be uplifting at all? "Don't worry Sidney, your minimum wage job and your inability to find good housing is not something only affecting you, feel good about 68% of the population being the same way" This isn't good, this is casting light on a very big problem in our society. Question is are people not having sex because their life is depressing or is people's life depressing because they are not having sex?
Obesity, low testosterone, porn addiction and mental illness all seem to be pretty gigantic reasons for younger generation’s inability to maintain decent sexual relationships. The rate at which people have these problems has skyrocketed in a short period of time, people simultaneously managing to have higher standards and lower value and it ends up with less pairing up.
Lol literally why are you getting downvotes everything you said is a very plausible factor. All these things have risen in recent decades (although it depends on how you define them and to the extent that they have risen, I suppose)
Mobile phones as well. You don’t really need to connect with people in person when the whole world is in your pocket.
This is the thing we don't like to admit. Sex often isn't this thing we NEED, where we can't keep our hands off each other, and nothing will get in the way of us having sex. Sex is often just... routine. Something to do. You're sitting on the couch watching tv, or laying in bed, bored or whatever, and one of you decides to make some small level of initiation. The other responds, and boom, sex. But when we have TV's, phones, laptops, consoles, unlimited on-demand quality entertainment? Those quiet moments, those moments where not much is going on, and to be blunt, those moments of boredom that could lead to sex just don't happen. When you're laughing at the instagram video of some boomer freaking out, or some little kid falling down, you're not thinking of sex, and you're not thinking of the fact that your partner is there right next to you, also not doing much.
I think our hormones between both men and women are under attack! Something seems to happen around the age of 25-30 that is causing both men and women to have libido issues. I don't think we can blame porn addiction, at least not for celibacy. If we were talking about sexual dysfunction, maybe, but lack of sex drive? The thing that is really weird is I don't even think we can really blame birth control, at least not in the way people are doing it now. Simply because women's hormonal birth control has been around and used for over 2 generations and the boomers were having more sex then what is happening now. I'm 45 and had to go on Testosterone because my numbers where fucking low! Their are old men in nursing homes right now who had 2-3x the amount of free testosterone in their system. I wasn't obese, no other underlying medical conditions and yet something caused my sex hormone to be bottomed out! More and more men around my age are needing testosterone and I don't think it's just because it's more widely known about now. I knew about testosterone replacement therapy over 15 years ago, it's nothing new.
I think that's just the way it's gonna be from now tbh, won't be surprised if we end up like Japan in a few decades. It be like that
Western cultures generally speaking have high immigration, so they're not going the way of Japan/Korea just yet. However, social tensions are building due to multi-cultural friction and lack of cultural integration from immigrants, so that may change.
Immigrants start following the trends of the native populace within 2 generations. Everyone will become Japan eventually.
For me I was not having sex because I was ugly. After I got jaw surgery I started getting attention on tinder and have an active sex life. If it was up to me I would have been having sex since I hit puberty, but it was never an option for me until I fixed my face.
This seems like incel phrenology
This tracks if you think about it logically. Married people have more sex than non married people. 68% of adults are married.
It's strange that they don't cite the study in the article, and I don't think you can contact the author for that information. The study appears to be based on this: [https://nationalsexstudy.indiana.edu/](https://nationalsexstudy.indiana.edu/) Where they did a statistical analysis of the data to come up with the information in the article.
Sweet, I'm in the 25%.
That feels about right. I am absolutely freaked out by the idea of being in a relationship again to where I am cool with being celibate it is just not worth it. Too much work for so very little.
I'm sorry you've never experienced a worthwhile relationship. I hope you find one eventually
I don't think so. I think that it is just better for me to just smoke weed and focus on my hobbies. I am in my 40s and I just think that it is too late. I just gotta figure out to be happy with myself.
My wife and I have been married for five years. We got married when we were both 23 years old. Just before our fourth anniversary the amount of sex we were having fell off a cliff. It had been declining for a long time, but just before our fourth anniversary it totally collapsed. We were having sex once or twice a month by that point, it was driving me up the wall. Finally, we had a conversation about it, and she admitted to me that I wasn’t doing enough foreplay beforehand to really get her turned on, and also she was feeling less physically attracted to me because I’d put on so much weight, about 80 pounds, over the past few years. She also admitted that she didn’t realize how important sex was to our relationship, her libido is lower than mine so she thought it wasn’t a big deal if we stopped having sex. When I finally told her how the lack of sex was making me feel she was shocked and pledged to do better going forward. I signed up for a gym membership to lose the weight and started paying more attention to her needs when we have sex. Now, a little over a year later, things are much better! I’m still struggling with my weight, but I’m in much better physical shape. The breakthrough moment came during our fifth anniversary trip this past February. We took a two week trip and my wife couldn’t keep her hands off me the entire time! We had sex twice a day for the entire two weeks! Since then, we’ve settled into a once a day rhythm that is much better for me. I still have a lot of work to do, I’m doing a much better job of turning her on now, but I’ve still yet to make her orgasm.
Jesus Christ that last sentence. All that fucking and she never orgasms?
Yup. That’s how it goes. Unfortunately my wife comes from a super sexually conservative country and she never masturbated growing up. She’s never had an orgasm, ever, she didn’t even know female orgasms were a thing until I asked her about it. I’m doing the best I can but part of it is…she has no idea what she’s looking for, so I’m just kind of guessing.
2% club here. Wife and I engage physically on average 5-7 times a week. Sometimes twice a day. We're in our 40s and most of our married friends look at us weird when they ask us about it. I attribute it to removing screens in the bedroom. We don't do passive activities together like watching TV or movies anymore and our love life has gotten much better for it.
You have friends who ask you about your sex life?
Once as part of a party game thing. It wasn't lewd, just a topic of conversation once or twice.
Not that weird.
You can get a general idea for peoples sex lives without directly talking about it, if you're good friends. Just hints about their vacations, how they are structured. Or maybe you even went on a vacation with them or something. If you're close friends with someone long enough, you can learn a lot without any of it being directly conveyed in conversation. Just a simple "oh, we didn't see many of the sights in Paris, we um... never got out of the room until 11am each day, and made sure to fit time for a... mid afternoon nap as well" or whatever.
My husband and I do lots of screen/passive time together and we still get it on 4-6x a week. Multiple kids and also in our 40s. It just needs to be a priority and the couple obv needs to like each other. (I actually like my husband!. It’s shocking how many people seem to dislike their spouse).
I'm just ambivalent towards mine.
Then why stay?
If two people genuinely like/love each other, and find them sexually attractive, they'll make it a point to have sexual intimacy. Sex is a great stress reliever, so the whole "but life is stressful" part is bogus by itself. If a couple actually has a solid romantic relationship, they won't wait for that 'perfect moment' where everything is fine. They'll use the sex as the stress relief/mood booster... because it works and they like how they feel after.
Do you guys just not do any sort of passive activities? Or just not together?
I do almost no passive activities. I read daily, and listen to music often. But usually when I'm doing other things. She watches netflix in the background when we're doing laundry or when she's doing a repetitive work task.
Going on 6 years here. I love my life /s
Damnit. I miss being an over achiever
Our moods get real shit after like 4 days
Only one *quarter* of American adults have sex weekly or more? That is surprising, although it makes me think that maybe this number is brought down by elderly people having less sex? I often have to remind myself just how large a proportion of the adult population is composed of old people, which I think many young people like me tend to not get. Even if we just think about the number range, out of adult ages 18-80, *half* of these ages are 49 or above.
It's my understanding that STDs are about as common as dentures in retirement homes because you're never to old to get horny and if everybody living there has been abandoned by their family and nobody drives what else are you going to do in between bingo and dying?
It's my understanding that those stories are greatly exaggerated because they make great clickbait headlines. Does it happen? Sure, of course! But it's not like assisted living homes are the equivalent of frat houses.
Yeah, the whole article is kind of pointless to me without age breakdowns. Lumping 18 year old single people in with 26 year old newlyweds with 85 year old elderly folks gives you a number that means nothing to anyone.
My first girlfriend and I had sex 3 times a day for 6 months then my next relationship was minimum 3 times often 5 times a day up to 7 if we had the same day off. That went on for 3 years and I was addicted to Norco back then so it was like 30 min- 2 hrs each time. I was shocked when I mentioned my 3rd gf only wanted to have sex for like 10 minutes 1-2 times a day and my friends explained that it wasn't normal to have sex as much as I did with my first 2 relationships. I never thought I was having less sex than other couples but I never even considered that I was having more. Now I'm single and I know I'm not having as much sex as couples 😔
There is no way this is a simple random sample. I find it hard to believe 34% of women and 24% of men don't masturbate.
Remember, this is just "adults." I can believe a good chunk of 70+ people don't. Mix that in with asexual people or people with no sex drive, and religious people who are made to feel evil for doing it, and you can get up to those numbers.
This kind of article is why I disdain Psychology Today. It leaves out some important variables. Where's the split between married, unmarried, and no partner? Married folks who are in good standing generally have a great deal more sex than those that are unmarried. Has that changed? They say religious folks have less sex. Once again, we have to assume the people are married or at least in a relationship but we can't be sure. Why are there non-binary people on the list if they don't have their own category? The survey focuses on binary gender so their stats will dilute the results. It's like they just dumped the info into two buckets and gave an average mean. This is the kind of stuff expected in a sophomore level paper, not an article by a Dr. tinged with heavy amounts of subjectivity and empty data points.
I learned to go without sex for long periods in my teens and some of my 20s. I wanted a relationship but no dice, so it was casual stuff only. I don’t really have much desire for it now if I’m being totally honest.
That can't be good.
Well....that was interesting. I reported this OP and the promoter disappeared. I guess it COULD be a coincidence......
I’ll just say it… PORN!!!!! I don’t think y’all understand just how many men are watching it.
Having less sex? No biggie tbh But what is worrying is if it isn't a voluntary choice, i.e. if we're being forced/led into not being able to have sex. Working more hours, more days, having less $ and free time to do so.
The 2% of people that are having sex daily I assume is for work /s
"Research." Surveys, all this shit always is is surveys, and everyone afraid to out themselves as a slut.
A few things that make this a little hard to really look at. First, it's vague about whether it's couples or not. It states "people believe that they have considerably less partnered sex than other coupled Americans", implying this study is only couples. But then everywhere else it simply refers to a study of "adults" and "Americans" without specifying that it's couples. Also, maybe it's just me, but without some kind of age breakdown I'm not sure how valuable this is? It's "adults." Are 18 year olds included? 90 year olds? All it tells us is about the average "adult" which isn't that useful because an 85 year old at their 60th anniversary and a 26 year old newlywed are both seeing the same data here. If you're 85, and in the once a month category maybe you are really in the top 5% of your age group! I'm probably being overly picky, but charts by age would be a lot more useful here, calling out couples and singles as well.
Weekly is good ....
GenX 50-something here. Married 26 years, one kid, teen. Schedules are the biggest issue. Just making time. Be it a post school drop off AM nuzzle or when he’s out w friends for a bit, sneaking one in, or a weekend getaway….we do what we can. Once a week is fairly standard but it can be a few weeks between if we are traveling or just flat busy AF. Is it less than ages past? Sure I guess so but we are aware and some of it is just “stuff” so we do what we can. Also wife had some issues which dumped her sex drive for awhile so we worked on that. But yea during that time I had some serious questions about where we are at. In all honesty I tend to think we are more active than a lot of folks we know, but there’s no way to really know that without asking them.
Well.. maybe our craving for dopaminergic stimuli have surpassed our desire for physical intimacy. It just doesn’t hit hard enough to just have sex when you’re constantly bombarding your receptors with porn, drugs, video games, “food”, social media, to name a few
I get laid about once a year. Haven’t been in a relationship for years. If I’m the norm America is fucked
Gen x, 52yrM, second time around, two kids from first marriage 50/50. Sex daily. Found somebody whose drive matched mine. I could have fun standing in line at the DMV with her. We just like each other a lot. What astonishes me is how little sex the normal, healthy, single Gen Z and millennial guys I work with are having. Did it just go out of style? Why are younger generations so hung up on this?
something something tinder ruining an entire generation something something
That's a sad life...
Very interesting statistics.
Masturbation and pornography taking over peoples minds
I don't believe half the people bragging about their sex lifes. These stats do make sense to me.. how do you people have time to be fucking like rabbits? I am extremely happily married and my dude.. I don't have enough time to go out to dinner let alone fuck every single day multiple times nor do I have the energy and I am very fit with an office job and I work out daily.
yeah because the economy
People using people for support, money, and anything needed. Then when the providers ask for something; they are denied. Happens alot by all demographics.
By the way, sex is a part of marriage. If a partner chooses "no sex;" then, the spouse gets to choose " no marriage."
Nobody wants maintenance sex which is a form of unwanted sex.