Americans are becoming too poor for sex

 

the pic was taken from here

Americans are becoming too poor for sex

What’s up with the Great American Sex Drought?

 

It torments me. I feel so helpless, so speechless, so impotent. Sometimes I have no idea what to tell my dateless friends when they humble themselves and ask for advice. Many of these men are in their thirties, the time of life when people usually have the most sex.

I empathize with the pain they’re experiencing and I start to feel it myself. Sexlessness, when it’s not something we chose, is a painful open wound that festers on our hearts.

I’ve had a few years of sexlessness in my day and let me tell you, it felt awful. Your mind starts to play tricks on you, especially if you’re not overly busy.

Without anything to occupy my mind, I’d stress about it. I used to feel immense pressure wash over me at every moment as I struggled to figure out if I’d ever get it together.

You start to wonder if you’re completely undesirable. It’s hard to separate the experience of now from predictions of the future. It seems like tomorrow will be just be a continued extension of today. I remember my first cold spell in my early twenties when I moved to another state and couldn’t seem to make friends of any sort.

I felt invisible. I felt forgotten. I felt unloved and unlovable.

And when my friends reach out to me, I know they feel the same.

But these thirty something friends of mine are the exception, not the rule. The rule is, people in their thirties are usually settled down in a relationship. They’ve found partners and they enjoy the rewards of the relationships they’ve forged.

But something odd is going on with younger people. They’re just not having any sex. It’s a statistical anomaly that professionals are having a hard time explaining.

Back in 2019, some rather alarming data was released with the General Social Survey from the University of Chicago. In short, the data hinted at the fact that Americans are going through a large scale sex drought. And the people who we generally think of as highly sexually active are some of the people driving the drought.

Published in Science Alert in April of 2019, the findings showed that almost one-quarter of American adults were celibate over the course of the past year. Twenty three present of Americans reported not having any sex. The total amount of sex Americans were having seemed to be on the decline.

Part of the explanation has to do with aging and the differences in population between the generations. Older people tend to have less sex than younger people do, as age wears on health, as marriages oftentimes grow stale, and as life partners sometimes tragically die the number of Americans over sixty years old jumped, from only 18% of the American population to a massive 26%.

They don’t call them the “Baby Boomer” generations for nothing, they come from a post-war baby boom in the wake of the second world war, meaning there are many more people now entering their sixties than there were in previous decades. And a full 50% of this group reports having no sex.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

What’s truly startling is the decline in sex that’s taking place in the age group of 18 – 29, a group that’s experienced to most sudden and unexplainable dip.

Overall, sexlessness among this younger cohort rose from around 16% in 1997 to 23% by 2019. That’s almost I out of 4 young people who are not having any sex.

And what’s driving this change? Sexless young men.

While 18% of the women in this cohort were sexless, a whopping 28% of the men are sexless. And this wasn’t always the case. In decades prior, spanning all the way back to the 1980s, men and women in their late teens and twenties had roughly the same amount of sexlessness. But starting around 2008, a huge spike of sexless men began to grow and never stopped.

Professor of psychology at San Diego State University, Jean Twenge says that this may be evidence of a cultural shift in the American way of life, with younger people becoming less rebellious, taking fewer risks, and being generally more socially tolerant, albeit less risky. Her book even describes these phenomena.

And the theory goes that these cultural shifts have made it so younger people are settling down later on in life. Previous generations would settle down in their twenties or even their late teens, getting married and starting a family, but Zoomers seem to be holding off on all of this entirely. The question this theory leaves in its wake, of course, is why?

Some haves suggested something quite painful. The economy.

Stop and think about it. This trend started in 2008, in the wake of recession that crippled the global economy. And since then, the trend has only grown over the past decade and a half, nearly.

As Pew Research discovered, for the first time in ages, more adultsbetween 18 and 34 are living at home than living by themselves or with partners, or any other living arrangement for that matter, such as with siblings.

19% of women at the time lived with their parents, while 25% of men lived with their parents. Twenge assumes that it’s this fact that makes it hard for younger people to bring their partners home and do the deed.

It seems our sex lives are just one more victim in the ongoing housingcrisis we have in America, with a shortage of homes that grows by the year, and no solutions in sight to fix the problem. People are too poor to have sex if they can’t afford the place to do it.

And guess what …

I chose numbers from 2019 because that’s the last full year we have before the pandemic hit. This would suggest that people are having even less sex now than they were in 2019.

We’re sex-starved in America and I think it’s time we change that.

 

 the original article was here.