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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 11, 2023

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If I had to guess, 'reported having more sex' is true, and a product of both a younger population, and probably that, when you're in a relationship with someone, you'll have more frequent sex than if you aren't, in large part due to ease of access. It's definitely true today that between ages 20 and 80, frequency of sex declines, and I'm pretty sure that should contribute to an overall trend. This figure seems to support the second claim. That's not really incompatible with a large number of unhappy or abusive marriages. I think reports of happiness or general satisfaction are pretty uninformative for anything more fine-grained than 'starving africans say they're less happy than westerners', because the way people conceive of happiness and a good life varies. You could totally imagine a liberal centrist position that it's good that people have sexual freedom, and it's also good for more people to partner up than are today, and that the combination of those two is both achievable after norms randomly drift a bit more and is better than either the 1950s or today.

(note that arjin's comment was posted before I edited in 8 paragraphs into grandparent comment)