I don't think people have sex or not because the cost of living. Poor people have had plenty of sex in the past. I think modern society is more occupying and people just interact less in a romantic sense because they are getting attention drained, in the same way a vampire drains your blood. We relieved the hard labor from peoples life but we also replaced it with attention suction devices that occupied peoples hours at much higher rates.

If you were a peasant in 1300s you worked hard probably 8-12 hours a day but once it was dark or the winter what you did radically changed because you couldn't see. It was just hanging out with people or going to bed, or other indoor task that usually involved other people or being around a limited light source. Those were the options of which one is kind of boring after a while. You'd thus interact with people and by interacting you'd end up having sex because it was fun when compared with doing anything else. Porn also didn't really exist so that as an outlet was basically zero so I'd attribute that to part of the attention occupying culture we have today

Maybe make it illegal to publish a video of someone without their consent.

“Planet Japan” is where we are headed it seems. Japan got there first.

All these trends are happening everywhere to varying degrees with less developed places like much of Africa simply earlier on the curve but following the same trajectory.

So where does it end? I’m skeptical of population doomerism but shrinking population, like too rapid population growth, creates economic and social problems.

On the other hand if we are about to automate tons of stuff it means we need less humans to run things, and if medicine keeps getting better longer life and health spans somewhat offset lower birth rates.

> while our own teens didn't have places where to get intimate, outdoor sex was way more common than it is today!

I just dont think teen outdoor sex is the thing that should come back.

Just comparing hours hides the reality of what the time outside those hours looks like. When 50h weeks were the norm, you generally had a stay-at-home wife making that whole equation possible.

For some reason when we started sending women out to work, the work they had been doing at home stopped being counted as work. But of course it is work, it still needs to be done. As a result, the modern 50h weeks can be anything between 60-80h weeks depending on your comfort with living in squalor, and the presence of children, it's just we for some reason only count the part you get paid for.

No contraception before the '60. A couple could have sex once a year and still produce lots of babies.

how much did women work back then, work that is counted as work - and it is represented in "50hr/w was the norm"?

I guess commute times don't help much as well in Japan. But yeah 50 hours per week ain't really that much, especially if it would include lunch break. 8 hours is minimum in many European countries and easily can get to at least 8.5-9 hours per day for majority, so 10 hours per day ain't really that special.

I'm not sure the responses could be trusted.

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Maybe the moire effect is a Pavlovian turn-on for them?

Uncensored Japanese Adult Video is also apparently quite common these days, despite being illegal.

60% is a lower figure than I would have expected. Prostitution has always been part of Japanese culture (though not as much as the Western view of the geisha would imply). And given the proclivity of young men to "try everything at least once", I imagine it's something many young men have tried. More interesting would be the percentage of people who pay for it regularly. Does a person that tried it once but hasn't done so for years really count?

So it might be a supply side and not a demand side issue?

That’s nothing new and very unlikely to be the cause. Pornography maybe but that’s also not new, just more abundant.

> porn is banned in the UK

As usual, games of telephone change things pretty radically:

  Porn showing choking or incest

Young men becoming increasingly conservative exasperates the issue. Women are opting out largely because of the traditional expectation that they do everything in a household.

This male/female divide is becoming huge in Korea, if I've heard correctly.

This doesn't sound right. How do you explain places like Utah?

(Not that Mormon voting was ever directed by Japanese mating habits. But you get my point.)

> But when you get out into the more rural areas, you can really feel it.

yup.

the rural town i'm originally from is down from ~9500 residents to a bit more than 6000 (and trending down).

There are many cases mammal species that almost never breed in captivity. Giant Pandas and Elephants are perhaps the more well known ones.

Yeah this is why it's such a pain in the ass to produce dairy products. Have to find a wild pregnant cow and capture it, then throw away the calf before it drinks all the milk.

The name doesn't really mean anything though. "Sexual attraction to a fictional character" and "fictosexuality" are the exact same word, one is just shorter. You can make up a word to shorten anything. Maintaining milk in your fridge can be called lactostasis.

I bet you should shot the journalist here. Having sexual feelings toward fictional characters is basically watching porn. You can't bucket that with romantic. I bet the journalist confused the two in the that remark. There's no romantic "parasocial" behavior there.

Japan has the highest birth rate in East Asia.

The problem is we cannot distinguish cause from effect.

Maybe people are watching porn because they can't get the real deal?

Many marriages succumb to 'dead bedrooms' and many young people feel that they cannot compete in the modern dating game, which is essentially Top Trumps for Humans.

it would be more interesting to see how many of those 90% had paid sex to avoid being in those 10%

Pretty much. Porn is also getting better and more varied, filling more niches people have. And by porn I don't mean the things you only see on pornhub and from professional studios. Anything that gets you off.

Have you guys seen how beautiful some of the women in Kpop are? Not only that, but they are also idols, meaning they have a strong presence on social media (post pictures, shorts), appear on variety shows, interact with fans through all sorts of fanmeets, online services and so on... They make fans feel like they have a relationship with them. After an event/concert you can usually easily find 4K fancams of the idol. They fill that gap both emotionally and sexually as they're really lovely girls. Japan also has a strong idol culture, although it's not as popular as Korea's internationally.

Then there's things like onlyfans, live-streamers and so on... Of course people are having less sex. On top of what you said of people just generally choosing to interact less because of the amount of digital entertainment. 50 years ago if you didn't get of your house the most entertainment you would have is probably books or TV, situation is wildly different these days. With AI probably gonna get even worse.

All that said, I don't think it's necessarily bad. But for future generations human interaction won't be the default anymore. They will have toto re-discover the value of that interaction.

It's probably this. Same in the West too.

In real life there are social and legal implications for relationships: if something goes wrong You could be in a nightmare divorce or simply interpreting things wrong with somebody can cause problems in your life. In the modern world every error pays expesively.

But in the digital world You just swap apps, nobody judges, and You alway get dopamine.

I agree with this. Sex may actually be overrated. It’s just another way of seeking instant gratification, using another person for it. It requires a lot of effort to get there (for most people), and even more to maintain it being exciting over time (with the same person). In the past people didn’t have that many ways to get intense pleasure, so sex always was the pinnacle and gold standard. But that clearly has changed.

To me it’s surprising that so many observers and pundits seem to be so confused about this development.

> Our world today is filled with far more interesting things.

More interesting than each other?

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That's interesting.

I remember when I lived in Japan and was with my male friend visiting temples. I was 21 years old and I'm male. At one point he grabbed my hand to direct me to a temple and didn't immediately let go. I felt strange because in the US that would be misconstrued.

Are you sure Japanese people hate physical contact? I never really considered whether that's true or not.

Are you Japanese and can be provide more insight? I ask because it's common online by non-Japanese (especially on places like Reddit) to make wild generalizations about who Japanese people are because they visited Japan once for a week or want to visit Japan someday.

In my experience of having lived in Japan, I find this simply not true. Of course this is my own anecdata. Physical contact, from my experience, is seen as a more intimate gesture. It depends on the nature of the relationship. In places like America, lots of people would give a hug (at the very least a one arm hug) to their friends when they're parting ways. Japanese don't do that ever from what I've seen, they'll just wave goodbye to each other. But I have seen plenty of hugging, hand holding, and other public displays of affection among those who are intimate.

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Anecdotally alcohol also had the same function, but people just started drinking less

Better legalize MDMA then

Because we don't see that decline in other animals in the same environments as the humans.