Often overlooked – young singles are having sex less because they consume less alcohol. Thread. ?
If you are old enough to remember the 90s you will remember a great deal of discussion on how drugs and alcohol contribute to unsafe sex.
There was no inebriated consent discourse.
The way to hook up was basically go to bars or parties and drink.
There has been a great deal of research on the effect of alcohol on risky sexual behavior. Here are some well replicated findings from this review of the research.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6736570/
The relationship between alcohol use and hooking up is global.
Alcohol use predicts: likelihood of hooking up, frequency of hooking up and total number of hook-up partners.
The amount of alcohol consumed also seems to show a linear relationship with hook-up behaviors.
More frequent and heavier drinkers are more likely to have hook-ups.
About 60-75% of all hook-ups involve alcohol.
This is a very good review of the research on drinking and hooking up. I would recommend reading it in full.
An important point is that most of this data is from before dating apps and the era of being chronically online. Between 1995 and 2015 or so.
The social environment has shifted from the house party, bar, and club to the Internet.
There is less social pressure to drink.
Fewer opportunities to make drunken bad decisions about sexual behavior.
Many young men will never experience the kind of house party that they see in movies from the ’80s and ’90s.
College dorms and fraternities heavily cracked down on substance abuse, following numerous assault controversies related to alcohol over the past decades.
In this paper, we see that online dating is actually associated with a lower likelihood of alcohol use preceeding hook-ups.
Online dating may have helped remove alcohol from the picture.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/26813742/
People who are extremely motivated by sex itself can still find it through apps.
However, those who would rather wait for relationships not may not find themselves drunk on a date and making decisions that they would not have had made while sober.
Similarly, young men who would use getting drunk as a dating strategy may have less opportunity than in the past to take advantage of drunk women.
And they may be less willing, as it is treated as a crime more often now.
This is all basically a good thing.
And it is not taken into account very much in the discussion of the mating crisis.
Basically, that what we are seeing with fewer young people having sex is actually fewer young people making bad decisions.
Because remember, we don’t actually see a reduction in the number of people forming relationships.
We do see a reduction in the number of people having sex.
https://datepsychology.com/how-have-relationships-changed-in-the-last-ten-years/
And it’s easy to forget that fewer people having sex is actually fewer singles, specifically, having sex outside of relationships.
Is that really a bad thing?
I would think for social conservatives at least it would be desirable.
This was basically the goal of the anti-sex propaganda I grew up with.
The message we all received:
1. Don’t have sex outside of marriage. If it’s in a committed relationship it’s more tolerable. And if it’s casual sex it’s the worst.
2. Don’t mix sex and drugs/alcohol.
3. Always use protection to prevent STDs and unwanted pregnancy.
This was typical conservative advice.
Now it’s almost the opposite.
Like:
1. Young people need to be having more sex.
2. Birth control is bad.
And so on.
I have never seen the 42% of women who abstained from sex praised for their chastity.
Somehow the narrative has become “jobless male juveniles need to be fucking more.”
And I point out women specifically here, because women are the gatekeepers of sex (mostly).
The fact most single men can’t get laid is a testimony to the good decision making of women in that age cohort.
And I suspect avoiding alcohol and social pressure has facilitated that.