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When it comes to sex and relationships, the pandemic is creating a situation where people are either living in close proximity (possibly with partners, children or other family members) or are limited in their opportunities to find partners for prolonged periods of time. These circumstances can directly impact our intimacy.
A recent online survey found that a majority of participants in a sample of 1,559 adults reported a decline in the quality of their sex lives (43.5 percent) during the COVID-19 pandemic, while only a minority reported improvements (13.6 percent). Interestingly, however, despite people reporting a decrease in the frequency of sexual behaviours compared to the past year, one in five individuals (20.3 percent) added at least one new activity to their sex life, such as a new sexual position, incorporating pornography or engaging in cybersex. Compared to people who made no change, those who spiced things up were more likely to report improvements in their sex life since the beginning of the pandemic.
"As the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene says: 'You are your safest sex partner.'"
Journal Reference:
Less Sex, but More Sexual Diversity: Changes in Sexual Behavior during the COVID-19 Coronavirus Pandemic, Leisure Sciences (DOI: 10.1080/01490400.2020.1774016)
(Score: 5, Insightful) by acid andy on Wednesday July 15 2020, @06:00PM (12 children)
Most of it's pointless busy-work anyway. If you're not growing or distributing food, building or repairing homes, or a few other essential professions (doctor / nurse, firefighter, plumber, etc.) the world should get along just fine without your replacement, or a robot to do it.
Hardly "jaw-dropping". They took a quote out of context about the predicted rate of decline of the most affected countries to make a clickbait title.
OK, this guy sounds like a crackpot to me now.
The whole article reeks of some kind of propaganda. I guess they're anti-UBI, anti-post scarcity and want the population to keep booming to suppress wages and increase revenues, consumption and turnover. They know environmentalism is on the rise and some people will have less kids for that reason (one of the best IMO)
From your link:
So they try and mislead people into doubting the environmental benefits, even though nothing in the article refutes them. How would an aging but smaller population be more damaging to the environment than a larger one that, let's note, would still contain the same number of older people as well?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 2) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 15 2020, @10:22PM
It wouldn't of course, but as you've pointed out, it would be a disaster for our current "growth at all costs" economic system.
(Score: 4, Informative) by deimtee on Thursday July 16 2020, @04:07AM (3 children)
I highly recommend the book "Bullshit Jobs" by David Graeber. A short but entertaining expansion of this article [strike.coop] he wrote. Especially relevant in these covid times when everyone is bleating about the lack of jobs.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @06:07AM (2 children)
The article seems very myopic. His example is poorly chosen because it makes it so easy to emphasize this. The core example he uses is that there's more demand in society for corporate lawyers than poets. And most corporate lawyers don't like their job. Woe is us. Now let's dissect things:
Why do corporate lawyers exist? Because corporate law exists.
What does corporate law exists? Because corporations exist (and have done some naughty things).
Why do corporations exist? Because people *want* them to exist.
People want food readily and cheaply available, but nobody wants to be the guy picking fruit for pennies a pound. Yet the former leads directly to the latter. A guy may want to be a poet instead of a fruit picker, but people would rather have cheap fruit than listen to his poetry. His article in many ways feels reminiscent of conspiracy theorists who always feel there's some global cabal secretly controlling the world. And indeed there are countless very powerful global cabals, but mostly with a wide array of different motivations and none with some global capture on power. His statement "The ruling class has figured out that a happy and productive population with free time on their hands is a mortal danger" is just a slightly more mainstream insane appeal to the Illuminati who 'totally control like everything, dude'.
That's not to say that his observation is false. Indeed one can appeal to the countless variations of "The devil finds work for idle hands." But far from being some conspiratorial contract from the "ruling class", that notion is as old as time. And the particular spin on the quote I chose comes from none other than Henry David Thoreau - a poet. And this [wikipedia.org] is what the inside of our poet's home looked like. Society's current state is driven almost exclusively by consumerism. And nobody is forcing consumerism upon people, but people are stupid. Depending on your skin color you either need your $1000 phone (which is functionally identical to a $50 one for everything you use it for) or $400 sneakers (which are functionally identical to $20 sneakers for everything you use them for).
Getting back to 'simpler' times would require casting aside consumerism and living lifestyles much more akin to that of Thoreau, the poet. And that starts with *you*. Feel free to cast aside consumerism, move into a rural area, and start living a much smaller impact life. Become a mighty buzzard and pass your time fly fishing and shooting the shit (perhaps literally - if you didn't know the etymology of that saying). I'm not even mocking him (or you). It's a wonderful life. But 95% of society wouldn't even consider it. And so we get what we have today with a surveillance state supported by mass harvesting of data under the "innocent" premise of advertising, while people waste their money and time collecting shiny shit that they think will somehow fill their empty lives.
(Score: 2) by deimtee on Thursday July 16 2020, @07:12AM
The article was pretty much a rant about wasting time doing bullshit work. It sparked such a response that he wrote the book, which is a much more in depth analysis. The article makes a good hook, but you should read the book.
I don't know if this site is entirely legit copyrightwise, but the entire book is available free here [theanarchistlibrary.org].
One of the many themes is that people doing bullshit jobs(tm) are unhappy compared to those who have jobs that provide a sense of accomplishment. This leads to where productive jobs are paid less than bullshit jobs, because you have to pay more or people will go off and do something productive.
If you cough while drinking cheap red wine it really cleans out your sinuses.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday July 16 2020, @02:01PM
A lot of the city folk don't even know what they're missing. I'm hopeful that more young people are starting to think of the benefits of reduced consumption. You can reduce your consumption while living in the city. In many ways it's being forced upon them anyway through poverty.
The whole rural living-off-the-land lifestyle works best with a lower population though (otherwise the roads and buildings wanted just turn it urban again), so I think the low birth rate needs to be part of it if it were going to work for a big portion of humanity. Either that or we start engineering floating rural islands in the ocean.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @05:01AM (2 children)
It's not clickbait. As they said, catastrophic collapse would follow pretty quickly. People don't realize how large a role fertility plays in our society. Let's take two groups, as an example. One group is just slightly below the population sustenance level, the other is slightly above it. So we'll look at fertility rates of 1.5 and 2.5. And we'll start with 100 units of population. How long should we run our experiment for? They talk about 3 centuries. An average generation now a days is somewhere around 30 years, so let's go with 10 generations:
Generation - Group 1 Population (1.5 fertility) - Group 2 Population (2.5 fertility). I add the group two fertility to show also how a low reproducing group (correlates with higher income, higher educated, secular) can be rapidly replaced by a lower income group (correlates with lower income, lower education, highly religious). The world's going to look like a very different place in the not so distant future.
0 - 100 - 100
1 - 75 - 125
2 - 56 - 156
3 - 42 - 195
4 - 31 - 244
5 - 23 - 305
6 - 17 - 381
7 - 13 - 476
8 - 10 - 596
9 - 7 - 745
10 - 5 - 931
------
Now two disclaimers on the above numbers:
1) That is with 1.5 fertility. The current US fertility rate is 1.7, but that's largely driven by people in poverty. Those earning less than $10,000 per year tend to have about 50% [statista.com] higher fertility rates than those earning more than $200k per year. If we manage to ever overcome poverty, or if these trends also start to affect those in poverty (let alone if the trends become even worse) you're looking at *much* lower fertility rates. 10 generations of 1.2 fertility = extinction. Crazy, huh?
2) The above numbers don't represent the total world population at any given generation. They represent the amount of new people. So if most people stay alive until the start of generation 3 you'd have a population of 273, but only 15% of people below the age of 30, and 65% older than 60.
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The point you should take from the above is about the time the population itself starts declining, it's not the end - but already the middle. In our table above where humanity goes into dangerous territory after only 10 generations, the population would not start declining until some time around generation 4-5, depending life expectancy and the average age of procreation. Once it starts declining, it'd be a precipitous fall because it means the elderly (who now make up the vast majority of society) would start dropping off at a rapid rate while fewer new people than ever were being born.
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday July 16 2020, @02:24PM (1 child)
I understand the mathematics. The headline and the quote about the species disappearing are misleading because they're based on looking at the declining birth rates in developed countries and then extrapolating those rates far into the future. The article also predicts a trebling in size of the population of sub-Saharan Africa by the end of the century, so I think the species is safe! They also admit that the low birth rates in developed countries are by choice. If the population density of the world greatly reduces, with the consequent reduction in competition over land, jobs and other resources, people may start to have more free time and choose to have more children again as well.
The current human world population is enormous and will likely be still growing massively for decades to come. at least. Our industry has polluted every corner of the Earth and the negative ecological impacts are accelerating. In that article it's incredibly disingenuous of them to try to mislead readers into doubting the environmental benefits of a lower birth rate. There are human benefits too, if only economies can be redesigned to handle a shrinking population. Everyone could live in luxury, with large, open spaces.
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @04:37PM
Just because something is by choice doesn't mean it will change, even if necessary. Obesity is purely by choice. It is literally impossible to become obese unless you consume sufficiently large number of calories. And nobody wants to become obese - it's a recipe for a short, miserable life - yet a skyrocketing number of Americans are choosing to let themselves become obese - because it's a whole heck of a lot easier and more pleasant than not becoming obese. Raising children is not easy and it does effectively require women to sacrifice any sort of a meaningful professional life. Baseline maintenance of a population requires each woman has more than 2 children, and that's in the prime of their lives while everything else is given a distant secondary interest. And then there comes the decade of raising them before they become even remotely self capable.
Creating a sustaining population is not just something you can switch on or off. And keep in mind again that this is not some effect that happens over hundreds of generations - we stand to go from everything to nothing in fewer than 10 generations.
Really puts all the environmental stuff in context. Environmentalism is fundamentally about humanity. The Earth will be fine regardless of its condition. And the animals on this Earth, hopefully besides humans, will also inevitably go extinct - sooner rather than later. It's happened multiple times in the past and it'll inevitably happen once again. Only thing that *might* save them is humanity, yet if humanity cannot even maintain its population then everything dies.
(Score: 3, Touché) by jb on Thursday July 16 2020, @06:01AM (3 children)
I really hope you mean "some people will have fewer kids".
Deliberately having fewer kids (e.g. deciding to have 2 instead of 3) is a perfectly reasonable choice for a couple to make.
On the other hand, deliberately having less kids (e.g. having the same number of them, but using some bizarre genetic engineering technique to ensure that each one is born missing some body part or other, so there's "less of them") strikes me as a cruel and highly unethical thing to do.
(Score: -1, Flamebait) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @06:12AM (1 child)
You have got to be a Brit, because that is like some 50th level language trolling.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 16 2020, @09:16PM
I completely agree with the fewer/less distiction. it bothers me every time someone gets it wrong.
It's similar tho the much/many distinction. Roughly speaking, one is singular and the other plural.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by acid andy on Thursday July 16 2020, @01:47PM
I deserved that. I'm not adverse to a bit of Grammar N**iism myself, so fair play to you. I did notice what I'd done when I re-read the post but it was too late then and anyway, the less / fewer thing has never bothered me all that much.
Perhaps if they (it?) were considered as some amorphous commodity, measured out by mass, the word could also be applicable. A human resource?
If a cat has kittens, does a rat have rittens, a bat bittens and a mat mittens?