[shagie]

https://www.healthdata.org/news-events/newsroom/news-release...

Why are we limiting this to western countries?

This is clearly a problem with (checks list) Bhutan, Maldives, Puerto Rico, Nepal, South Korea, Saint Lucia, Taiwan, Carbo Verde, Djibouti, and Bosnia. I'm missing the list of "most western countries" there in the most critical ones.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sub-replacement_fertility#Caus...

Is the reduction in fertility possibly more influenced by things like... https://www.statista.com/statistics/259518/birth-rate-among-... https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2019/08/02/why-is-th...

Or https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2015/05/07/family-...

> The more education a mother has, the fewer children she will have on average in her lifetime. While fertility drops somewhat with each additional level of education, the biggest fertility gap occurs between women who lack a high school diploma and those who have completed high school.

> Moms ages 40 to 44 who lack a high school diploma have about 2.9 children in their lifetimes, on average, while those with a high school diploma or some college have about 2.4 kids. Mothers at the end of their childbearing years who have a bachelor’s degree or higher have about 2.2 children on average.

Though I would certainly not say that one should be encouraging teenage pregnancy nor hindering the education of women in an attempt to boost the fertility rate.

Blaming the declining fertility rate in western nations on pornography seems to miss the more obvious causes.

[arandomusername]

There are other factors contributing to it, absolutely. I'm not disputing that.

What do you think are the main factors for highest % of men not being sexually active (compared to historically), highest % of people living alone (in US).

[shagie]

Economic stability (and the lack thereof) makes it difficult to start / grow a family. This also extends to difficulties in family planning. The result of this is that it can be economically safer / more stable to live alone in an apartment than it would be to spend money on courtship, expectations of a wedding, and house.

Lack of social support for families with children. Once you have a child, the costs and demands on the family are significant. This extends to things like reducing the support for WIC, difficulties in finding childcare (and its expense). Again, the outlook for having a child is a lot of money.

The difficulty of maintaining a family and a career (side bit - telecommuting is a step in the right direction for white collar jobs). Having a stay at home mother / wife is difficult in today's world. Both the expectations of "that's not what I want to do" and the income that isn't there. Supporting a couple on a single blue collar isn't viable, and supporting a family is way out of the question.

And so, yea, guys aren't sexually active. The social, medical, and economic risks are too high for all people involved.

Under this model, porn isn't the cause, but rather the symptom of the social and economic difficulties faced by individuals. Attempting to "treat" the symptom (of people watching porn) isn't going to make men more sexually active any more than a box of tissues next to the bed treats the flu instead.

Me? why am I a single male living alone? Because when I was in the SF Bay in the '90s and early '00s, the ratio of single women to single in the 20 to 29 age bracket was about 80 to 100 (map from 2015 http://visualizing.nyc/bay-area-zip-codes-singles-map/ - its better now than it was in the '90s ). The only place in the US that was worse were Air Force bases in Alaska. Put that down for two decades and then adding the "well, I got no money" after the dot com crash and '08 ... and I'm certainly not looking to start a family with some (un)lucky lady.

This story writ large of economic insecurity combined with misaligned demographics ( https://jonathansoma.com/singles/#2/3/2/0 ) in places where young men go to work. And while now I'm in https://jonathansoma.com/singles/#7/8/2/0 - I'm a cranky gray beard that is certainly not looking to start a family.

In an alternate universe with today's technology I would have stayed in my college town and worked remotely in tech and hooked up with that cute young woman (back then) from one of my classes rather than going our separate ways when I got a job ... though if I was 21 today that would be back to the "can't afford it" category.

The thing to do is to make the ability for someone to plan a family for the next 20 years something that can be done. Until one can look to the future and be able to feel some assurance that they'll be in a better situation than they are today, the risks and uncertainty of "settling down" are enough to stifle many of dreams of a family.

[wkat4242]

> And so, yea, guys aren't sexually active. The social, medical, and economic risks are too high for all people involved.

I don't really see how you equate being sexually active with reproduction though. In this day and age they are very different things. And many men and also many women (though I believe less, they often have an urge to have them) simply don't want kids. Doesn't mean that they can't have a relationship or a healthy sex life.

[shagie]

Up four comments in the chain we're replying and you get:

> Well, birth rates are below replacement rates in most western countries where pornography is consumed more than elsewhere. Also, more people are single, more men are not sexually active, high divorce rates, etc.

The implication is that porn is hindering the replacement rate of a population.

This gets into various other dog whistles (if you poke at dead comments you'll find even more overt ones). https://icsr.info/wp-content/uploads/2022/06/ICSR-Report-Sle... (page 22 is where the section on pornography begins) (the publisher of the document is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Centre_for_the_S... )