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There's a lot of good hypotheses put forward in the thread, many of which I hadn't considered before. I have generally thought that that reason they're having less sex is largely due to that generation having internalized the prudish leftist messaging that "sex is harmful, you're likely to harm women if you don't ask for permission every
minute, no wait,30 seconds, no wait10 seconds, no wait just don't ever stop asking for permission just to be safe. Or just avoid fucking alltogether because only jerks and potential rapists feel like they need to have sex in order for a relationship to be fulfilling, and if you feel that way then you're just someone who thinks that women owe you sex, and you might as well be raping them."In addition I've felt like there's a component by which younger people (and even millennials, too) kinda feel like bodies are gross. This has been a trend for a long time, with promotion of obsessive cleanliness to the point of it probably not even being useful, like people feeling they need to take showers multiple times per day, and also wear deodorant and cologne/perfume. I hear about historical views towards sex, like apparently Napoleon might have written a letter to Joséphine telling her not to bathe for 3 days before he came home to her from war, because her smell turned him on. The modern reaction to that story generally disgust and confusion. But think about how much the world much have smelled strongly like people's bodies, and bodies must have smelled really strong, for milennia before regular bathing was a thing, and people still has lots of sex back then.
Sex is very connected to bodies, sweat, fluids, and smell. People are raised on porn these days, with tissues at the ready to mop up any fluids shortly after their release. Sometimes when I watch porn, I think about how different it is to watch these recorded sex acts than it probably was for the actors to make them. Just thinking about the smell is interesting, considering that that sensation is completely absent when watching porn. I suspect that many people these days may have watched so much porn from a young age that the thought of sex being so much more messy and smelly with someone else's body that they'd rather just keep their nice, contained, fairly clean method of getting off to porn instead.
In addition to porn presenting a stylised, sanitised version of sex in which all of the participants are impossibly gorgeous and up for anything, and lacking any of the gustatory and olfactory stimuli central to the real thing - you can also watch animated porn, which depicts things that are literally physically impossible in the real world. I'm sure there are young people out there whose entire "sex lives" consist of masturbating to hentai throughout adolescence, without ever having ventured into the comparatively earthy and raw world of live-action.
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I’ve often wondered if our current culture is so regimented that kids don’t take risks at all as they fear that messing up is going to alter their life trajectory too much to be safe. They hear parents and older siblings talk about, or worse live out the consequences of one bad decision made in the moment. Maybe sex and you either get the girl pregnant or get accused of rape afterwards — there goes the hope of being comfortably middle class in adulthood. Or drinking. A car accident, saying the wrong things, maybe partying and possibly not doing well enough on your grades to get into the right school. It’s almost, just looking at the trends like kids have a sense that being spontaneous, doing something crazy, means messing up, and that messing up is unrecoverable.
This actually is much more true than it used to be. For example, my grandfather only went to elementary school and worked in a factory. He was considered poor even then, but he didn't have a bad life. He could raise a whole family on his factory wages, in circumstances no worse than many people today.
Today you would need both parents to hold a decent, respectable office job to have a similar quality of life. Anything below that, you're competing with the entire Third World (either through imports or immigration). Add to that things like stringent environmental laws. The mines are gone, the factories are almost all gone, and the EU is currently in the process of de facto outlawing agriculture. What'll even be left for you to do, if you don't get the respectable office job?
There are many more people, and there are fewer opportunities to achieve the living standards of a factory worker 50 years ago. And so, life has turned into a vicious, high-stakes game of musical chairs. There's no room for slip-ups.
To me this sounds a bit backwards. Much of the working class has it better than ever and their skills are increasingly in demand and paid better and better.
It's the lower rung of office workers (and some service workers) that have precarious situations and are struggling to keep up.
If you're actually ready to work in the industry, construction or in a trade things are really good. Farming seems like a pretty raw deal though, I agree.
Most farmers today have a ton of assets. Even if liquid cash isn't always easily available. Simply owning enough land to make the irrigation, crop storage, and harvesters worth it is a multi million dollar endeavor. In bad years they have to leverage those assets with the bank for loans. In good years they pay back those loans, or expand the land/equipment they own.
If we are talking about "farmers" as in farmhands, the people that just work at a farm. Then yeah they have a raw deal. Its difficult physical labor for minimal wages.
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Growing up in an upper-middle class family, childhood was basically presented as a straight line passing through a set of exams and good schools to a good degree at a good university and then finally to a magical world where I would ‘meet interesting people’ and be able to do worthwhile things. My parents weren’t strict or particularly regimented but they clearly, genuinely believed that significant slip-up at any step along that path would doom me to mediocrity or poverty. Looking at how some of the other children I knew ended up, they weren’t wrong.
This was a while back. I can’t imagine how much stress my zoomber counterparts are under.
I have this sense as an adult. But the only way to find out if it’s true is to try, and what if you turn out to be right?
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