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: 1, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @04:25PM (7 children)
I just can't decide on a lefty or righty, or to go full oil well blowout and use both.
(Score: 2) by Bot on Wednesday July 15 2020, @04:32PM (4 children)
But then, if things don't end up as planned and you divorce yourself, you get 100% of the blame, no good at all.
Account abandoned.
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Wednesday July 15 2020, @04:37PM (2 children)
You've got a hostile vibe...
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 5, Funny) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 16 2020, @12:30AM (1 child)
He's likely speaking from experience. Bot strikes me as the kind of guy whose hands get 10 separate headaches, one per finger, out of sheer self-defense whenever the thought of jacking off crosses what passes for his mind :D His mother had to have him via C-section because the idea of him coming anywhere near a vagina is one of the signs of the Apocalypse.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 2) by JoeMerchant on Thursday July 16 2020, @12:44AM
I was going for something more straight-forward: bot, robot, vibe, mechanical vibration....
🌻🌻 [google.com]
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @08:21PM
On the plus side, you get 100% of support payments.
(Score: 2) by Rupert Pupnick on Wednesday July 15 2020, @04:42PM
Safe sex is in the palm of your hand.
(Score: 2) by Opportunist on Wednesday July 15 2020, @09:56PM
Talk for yourself, you don't know where my hand has been. Jeesh.
(Score: 3, Touché) by jmichaelhudsondotnet on Wednesday July 15 2020, @05:21PM (1 child)
if you cant trust your car computer, id be very careful what networked electronic devices you put your other body parts into.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @07:26PM
Is there a hidden Tesla feature I haven't found yet? I'm not too sure about sticking a body part into the charging port, but I'll try (almost) anything once.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @05:24PM (37 children)
There's expected [bbc.com] to be a "jaw dropping" crash in world populations coming over the next decades.
Pair that with increased life expectancy and we'll have a world with a bunch of old guys and almost no labor force. Haven't our social decisions over the past 5 decades been awesome!
In other other news, I do genuinely think it's kind of a sad state of affairs that COVID let to a decline in most people's sex lives. Been cooped up with Mrs. Anonymous Coward over here and things have never been better.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 15 2020, @05:55PM (21 children)
Like in Japan. It's a big problem there, and it's why they are investing heavily into robotics.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by legont on Wednesday July 15 2020, @06:25PM (16 children)
Perhaps, the actual reason is they prohibit pretty much all immigration.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday July 15 2020, @06:34PM (14 children)
And the fact that young women often don't want to retreat into the home and be separated from the rest of society.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @06:46PM (7 children)
Combine covid with SJWs and nobody screws anymore. We can't be white, black, male, female, Italian, Jewish, christian, shituslim, or anything else without offending someone.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 15 2020, @07:05PM (4 children)
Dear Mr. Anonymous Coward,
Just look at your gender and your skin color!
Not very diverse is it?
Please change them both to something more diverse, and then come back and re-apply.
Enclosed is a magic marker you can use to change the latter.
Thank you
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @07:33PM (1 child)
I tried the white magic marker but I looked like MJ.
(Score: 2) by DannyB on Wednesday July 15 2020, @07:44PM
Enclosed is a pair of dull scissors to help correct the other issue.
To transfer files: right-click on file, pick Copy. Unplug mouse, plug mouse into other computer. Right-click, paste.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @04:12AM
You have convinced me!
Henceforth I now self-identify as a wheelchairbound black muslim transgender lesbian quadriplegic communist.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Friday July 17 2020, @02:47AM
Nor are the Japanese very diverse. They maintain their nondiversity by very restrictive immigration policies. And it has brought them to a demographic crisis.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Azuma Hazuki on Thursday July 16 2020, @12:31AM (1 child)
Why do you care? You're never going to have sex if this is how you operate, anyway.
I am "that girl" your mother warned you about...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @10:59AM
Azuma back with the victorian comeback. Seriously in this day and age, sex is the cheapest thrill anyone can get.
(Score: 4, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @09:39PM (4 children)
Surveys of young women in Japan have repeatedly shown that vast majorities of them insist that any man they marry be a high earner. There aren't enough high earners to go around.
As well, young men have watched their fathers work themselves to the bone, to come home and hand over all the money to their mother, who then graciously permits her husband a small allowance. Tales are legion of women who, upon their husbands finally getting to retire, bitterly resent that he's around "her" house all the time. Married women don't "retreat into the home", they lord over it like masters whipping their slaves. Young men are declining to be part of such a system.
This is a large factor as to why so many younger men in Japan are not only not interested in marriage, but not even interested in dating. It's not worth it! Yet everyone blames the men, while women and their expectations are never considered to be even a part of the problem.
(Score: 5, Informative) by Magic Oddball on Thursday July 16 2020, @04:15AM (2 children)
The surveys show that around half of the women wish to marry a high wage earner because even though the majority of women hold jobs, in Japan they're also expected to handle most (if not all) of the childcare & domestic work:
That's assuming that most Japanese women even find the idea of being a full-time SAHM/housewife appealing in the first place; the interviews in that article suggest that a lot of them don't.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @11:04AM
Nobody does. Only a handful of people all over the world want to die working. Funny how an issue of men becomes women not being allowed and then women not wanting to.
There is no getting around to the fact that women WANT high earning men so they can enjoy life on his dime. And equally, men are willing to kill themselves in the rat race for a chance at pussy. Not many men will win the race, and so population is bound to decline.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 16 2020, @08:52PM
Not "being a full-time SAHM/housewife" is feasible now if she doesn't get married and doesn't have children. Hence the astonishingly low birth rate, even well below what China tried to accomplish with its one child per family rule.
The social climate will have to change if they want to maintain a population without *massive* immigration.
-- hendrik
(Score: 2) by legont on Thursday July 16 2020, @05:12PM
It's true in a way, but has slightly different connotation and applies to the whole Asia; not Muslim part perhaps.
A women up there is supposed to marry somebody who makes more money than her. Not necessarily a lot, but more. At the same time women's education level became high.
What's the issue? Getting education takes time. By the time an educated women is ready to marry she is rather, how should I put it, mature. Men who make more than her prefer young and fresh and can afford and get them. Hence there is an oversupply of highly educated women in their 30s, which makes finding sex for similar men a very easy task. This in turn makes the situation for women even more desperate.
There are funny consequences. All my colleagues who were sent for a long business trips to Japan came back married. Americans are OK with relatively old professionals for wives while women do want to marry.
BTW, this is similar to black women issue in the USA. It's just their men are in prisons.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @02:17AM
In the USofA, they tend to retreat into the home to take hostages & rob the place.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @05:11AM
Immigration only sounds like a solution until you stop and think about what you're effectively saying: 'Lets bring in a bunch of black and brown people to do all the labor and give most of everything they earn to the old 'yellow' people.' What a great idea...
Ahhh, but you can just pay them a lot! That's ignoring the very meaning of money. In situations like this, the like of which we've never really faced before, you're looking at a world where the vast majority of the population is simply not producing much of anything - yet consume not only their fair share but likely substantially more due to medical and related service costs. So you can't just pay the producers a lot - the money, and what it represents in particular, simply doesn't exist. This is probably part of the reason that Japan's economy has been in a 30 year stagnation/recession. Their economy today is smaller than it was in the early 90s for those who were not aware.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by PartTimeZombie on Wednesday July 15 2020, @10:17PM (3 children)
I know economists think it's a problem for the Japanese, but do the Japanese think it's a problem?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @01:56AM
Their government thinks it's a problem, so some of them must.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @05:21AM (1 child)
Oh yes. There have been some great (and depressing) documentaries on what's happening over there right now. See Dying Alone [rt.com]. The documentary talks about 'kodokushi' - lonely deaths. A number of companies now specialize in Japan in cleaning up the 'lonely deaths'. It's people who die alone often unnoticed by society until something, such as the smell, causes people to investigate.
What some people may not consider about things like the lack of fertility is that it gradually results in a society where the vast majority end up alone and lonely. Especially for people who haven't created a family, when your partner dies - it's just you. Let alone for the people today who think they'll just get through life without a husband or wife. All those friends you know today will gradually disappear. So of course you can say these people should just go make new friends, but that is of course not so simple. You can see the same thing in young Americans who are simultaneously more "connected" and more lonely than ever before. And it's *much* easier to meet people when young than when old.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 16 2020, @09:03PM
As I'm noticing after my wife died a year ago. And it's even harder during coronavirus lockdown. I'm 73 and I estimate that if I catch this disease I'll have a 10% chance of dying. So it's death versus meeting people.
I have children. The one that used to visit is now avoiding me because her job puts her at risk for catching coronavirus and thus giving it to me if she were to visit asymptomatically. She says she couldn't live with herself if that happened.
I appreciate that; I also miss her.
-- hendrik
(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.
------
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?
(Score: -1, Troll) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @07:47PM (1 child)
Count on blacks and Muslims to fill the gap, they breed like rats.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Thursday July 16 2020, @09:18PM
That'll likely stop when they reach the demographic transition.
Which seems to happen with industrialization and the education of women.
-- hendrik
(Score: -1, Offtopic) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @05:53PM (1 child)
Don't look Ethel!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @08:07PM
Offtopic? Flamebait or troll, perhaps, but it's bang on topic.
(Score: 2) by legont on Wednesday July 15 2020, @06:29PM (2 children)
My wifey is currently stuck in no fly zone over the ocean so we have 100% of decline as well as new so called spicy.
"Wealth is the relentless enemy of understanding" - John Kenneth Galbraith.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @08:34PM
You maybe
(Score: 1, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday July 15 2020, @10:10PM
> currently stuck in no fly zone over the ocean
That sounds bad, I hope the pilot is as good as Sully so they make a safe water landing when the plane runs out of fuel.
(Score: 2) by inertnet on Wednesday July 15 2020, @10:34PM (1 child)
Can't wait for the kids to go back to school already, so we finally get some more privacy again.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday July 16 2020, @04:26AM
Socially isolate them inside a dark, locked pantry.
(Score: 3, Interesting) by Phoenix666 on Thursday July 16 2020, @07:01PM
There's a company in NYC [maskarts.com] that makes custom BDSM coronavirus masks from leather or latex. You can be kinky and safe.
Washington DC delenda est.