Young Westerners increasingly resemble captive panda bears who have to be pushed into one another and bribed with delicacies to be persuaded to mate.
Young Westerners increasingly resemble captive panda bears who have to be pushed into one another and bribed with delicacies to be persuaded to mate.
W e need to talk about sex.
It’s an awkward topic to discuss, but one of the biggest problems in the country today is the almost cartoonish lack of interaction between young men and young women. A recent large-N study published by the Date Psychology network reveals that roughly 50 percent of young men have never or almost never approached a woman to ask for a date. Specifically, “in the entire data-set, 29% of men said they [had] never approached any woman in person before.” Another 27 percent said that they very rarely did and that “it had been more than one year” since this last happened.
You can’t marry — or, more bluntly, procreate with — someone you are too damned nervous to talk to. And, despite constant internet chatter about whether young women or young men are more “porn brained” or “fatherless” in their behavior, national trends reflect this. As I noted in a previous article for NR, only 30 percent of today’s high-school seniors — most of them young adults ages 17–19 — have ever had sex. Only 21 percent are currently “dating” in the old sense: involved in a monogamous love relationship that is sexually active in one fashion or another.
Most such people do eventually find life partners (it gets better), but this takes quite some time in the absence of social skills. Per recent OECD figures, which look similar if not nearly identical to the latest from the United States, “The average age for first marriage is 31 for women and 33 for men.” This stands in sharp contrast to the peak point for human biological fertility, which is given by most medical experts as ages 22–24. Because of this, and because of other factors including the ubiquity of hormonal birth-control use among sexually active young couples, humans in the developed world no longer seem to be having babies.
The United States’ total fertility rate per male/female pair is currently 1.84 — well below the replacement level of 2.1 — with most of that concentrated at the lower end of the economic distribution. And, at that, we are doing better than most of the global North in this regard. The current fertility rates for other first-world societies include 1.09 for Taiwan, 1.11 for South Korea, 1.17 for Singapore, 1.23 for Hong Kong, 1.24 for Italy, 1.29 for Spain, 1.37 for Bosnia, 1.39 for Japan, 1.4 for Greece, 1.41 for Poland, and 1.57 for Canada. Young Westerners are becoming increasingly resemble captive panda bears, who have to be pushed into one another and bribed with delicacies to be persuaded to mate.
Many factors clearly play into this bizarre situation — it strikes me as foolish to blame popular culture-war targets such as “feminism” or pornography rather than “widespread use of birth control” for declining birth rates. But one key variable that I have recently become aware of is how much lunatic “expert” advice — of the Campus-Wide Dating and Consent Code variety — is currently influencing the overall picture. For example, I was recently sent this document by a young-male mentee. Following the State of California’s passage of the nation’s first “Affirmative Yes Means Yes” sexual-consent law, at least one major law firm is attempting to argue that almost a dozen fairly common behaviors can constitute rape because they allegedly cause perceived “coercion” and thus “duress.”
The list the document gives includes “constant requests . . . for sex,” jokingly “begging for sex,” offering a date a strong night-cap (“If your partner encourages you to drink or do drugs . . . they are coercing you”), noting that sex is an expectation or duty in a marriage or love relationship, making statements like “It’s been a while,” or threatening to eventually “break up (with) or divorce” a sexless partner.
It is worth noting that the firm’s arguments are probably, at least from the technical perspective of a criminal-court judge, BS. No other states have laws that match California’s, and, even in the Bear Flag Republic, the practical definition of “coercion” seems to conform to the usual standard of “threats of illegal force.” What we are probably seeing here is a respectable business casting a wide net for potential clients, before going on to pursue a few valid cases against actual Diddy-style abusers.
But principles like those outlined above do govern more than a few of “Title IX’s kangaroo courts” currently operating on American campuses. Young men, and for that matter healthy and normally aggressive young women, are seeking partners in a climate where lawyers and HR reps are telling them that domestic banter is illegal — and where national campaigns have been launched against such “symbols of sexism” as the song “Baby, It’s Cold Outside.” This is hardly a spring-like climate for young love to grow in.
This kind of thing recalls my argument last month about the useless and nonproductive “expertification” of day-to-day life. Today, complex codes of formal rules are proliferating in every imaginable sector of life — one might think here of the lists of hundreds of “genders” recognized by sites such as Tumblr and taught in some schools. And, often, we find that no one much wants to publicly oppose these. There are essentially two reasons for that: Doing so means going up against the supposed cognoscenti, and normal citizens fear being called “creepy” or bizarre for taking an interest in edgy topics in the first place.
However, the plain fact remains that offering a date a drink or noting that there are mutual expectations in an adult relationship is not “abuse,” much less “rape,” and there would be major social consequences for actually allowing such a reclassification. These are normal and healthy behaviors that — judging from my own large-scale if imperfectly scientific polling — about 80 percent of humans engage in. Regular, productive citizens do not, in fact, need formalized legal or psychiatric rules to tell us how to handle such situations or how to otherwise negotiate normal life — and, in fact, such attempts to “bulletproof” everything almost invariably make existence worse and more complicated.
In her recent best-seller Bad Therapy, the center-right author Abigail Shrier makes an absolutely key point: We have traditionally utilized true experts of the legal and medical variety only to fix rare things that go wrong. When nothing is wrong, with the exception of an annual checkup or some such, we have not interacted with these worthies — nor have we needed to. In contrast, today, when professional troubleshooters are routinely brought in to analyze and regulate the lives of basically normal people, this often results in what we might call “iatrogenic” or “doctor-caused” problems.
Shrier’s primary example of this is the mass migration of young upper-middle-class women into professional therapy — which has resulted in an astonishing 56 percent of white liberal women under 30 being diagnosed with technical mental illnesses, despite objectively seeming no more unusual than the bulk of other people around them. Similarly, it is highly predictable that drafting campus- or statewide codes to regulate consensual dating – codes that replace 3,000 years of accumulated cultural and genetic knowledge — will do far more harm than good.
The best path toward solving the birth-rate crisis would logically seem to involve almost the opposite of what we are actually doing today: telling college students and high-school seniors about some important but almost undiscussed realities of human mating (the actual age cutoffs for peak fertility and geriatric pregnancy, the benefits of marriage), and then encouraging them to put down their damn phones, go outside, and hang out in situations that are as unregulated as possible.
Music and dancing might be a good idea.