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naraburns  nihil supernum  2yr ago (text post)   Edited 2yr ago   34788 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of November 14, 2022

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We have way more access to safe, 'consequence free' (not counting the emotional component) and pleasure-oriented sex than ever before

Do we really? Then why is every generation having less of it, and people taking longer to lose their virginities? Why are the most developed countries the most sexless?

Yeah, this reminds me of an old joke which I will shamelessly steal:

Tradition won't take off in the West cause everyone is a temporarily embarrassed hedonist.

Everyone loves the idea of being a free spirit. Free to do whatever you like. That's the image sold by the media too about the liberal world and many liberals value this image. The old suffocating religious strictures were supposed to dissolve and we'd all be having guilt-free sex.

But what we've actually learned is that the sexual marketplace is like the other one; inequity proliferates, except perhaps even worse because "redistribution" is practically much harder.

The average male especially would probably benefit more from having a long-term marriage, sex-wise, but everyone is fantasizing about "freedoms" most of them will never practically get to exercise that much.

Why are the people injecting chemical happiness into their arms so consistently among the least-happy people in society? Why has the invention and proliferation of cheap, ubiquitous chemical happiness coincided with a general decline in overall happiness?

The world wonders.

How do we know that there has been a general decline in overall happiness over the period you have in mind?

I could point to surveys of self-reported happiness, rates of substance abuse, mental illness, suicide, crime, divorce rates.... but generally, I'm skeptical that there's actually a way to determine the answer to this question in any sort of rigorous fashion. If you see it, you see it. If not, feel free to dismiss the above argument out of hand. After all, "I'm happy. I'm happy every day."

Yeah, I don't want to be annoying about asking for evidence about these things, but I haven't seen a partic vivid trajectory personally except for unhappiness having to do with recent Covid issues of course. I just don't attach much weight to this personal impression given that I am in a relatively well-off context.

I do think one can easily support claims about general unhappiness in terms of objective statistics for 'obviously bad things that make people unhappy', like poverty, drugs, crime, etc (although it is tricky with regard to people taking say, happiness drugs, as they could have been unhappy before and just not taken drugs, when there is a recent pervasive marketing of them). Maybe there are indicators one can find elsewhere in culture, media that more unhappy people are liable to consume to see their feelings reflected back at them.

Never be afraid to ask for evidence here.

I just don't attach much weight to this personal impression given that I am in a relatively well-off context.

An entirely sensible position, I think. I'm in a relatively well-off context as well, but I was in a much worse one for quite a while, which probably shapes my views on such things.

And yeah, the question is itself really tricky. You can ask people "are you happy", but what you're really asking them is "do you want a specific kind of change". People can be very unhappy, and still be unwilling to embrace changes they don't like.

I think the truly happy, CONTENT people are harder to detect because they're just out there enjoying life and not complaining.

But the rates of drug abuse, suicide, and all the other ills you mentioned are really hard to ignore as social red flags.

That's my thinking as well, but the reality is that there's no answer to sheer denial, because we have no unbiased access to others' internal state, and the question is too loaded for honesty to work at scale. The first step is admitting you have a problem, because that's not something people, generally, are inclined to do. So it goes.

I didn't say otherwise, I am also asking these questions.

There's access in the sense that the tools and understanding and opportunities to engage in the casual sex with minimal risk are ubuiquitous. It is counter-intuitive that people wouldn't be exploiting this access.

But the apparent slump in younger people actually having sex is one of those weird side effects I'm curious about.

Isn't this just young males having less of it and females having equal or more than before while sharing an ever decreasing number of "desirable" partners?. I think this is the case at least in the US dating Market.

I've seen statistics that reflect young people of both sexes having less sex, though if I recall correctly it is the males who report having less sex than they would like to have.

https://www.aei.org/articles/more-faith-less-sex-why-are-so-many-unmarried-young-adults-not-having-sex/

https://gssdataexplorer.norc.org/variables/5057/vshow

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