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Comment by leesec | Hacker News Reader

Honestly I think it's the top 20-10~ percent are having a lot more sex and the rest is having less. I believe this is because people's potential mating/social circles have grown to encompass the whole world via the internet.

Where before a very attractive person might only have access to the people in their friend group/workspace/etc and wind up settling/sleeping with/marrying one of them, now they can expand beyond that and literally shoot to the top of the gene/status pool, e.g. a very attractive girl might date a professional basketball player instead of the cute guy in the office.

This can happen on a smaller scale as well because of things like Tinder. Why date the amiable and friendly but 6/10 coworker when there is a rich, successful, charming 9/10 down the block.

Even if people are not doing this they might not be partnering up as much because of the possibility of it happening. FOMO is constant in relationship these days, IMO.

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If what you say is true, then it would require that these highly attractive people all monopolize multiple mates simultaneously. Particularly in a gender-imbalanced fashion. Then, we'd notice a steep dropoff in the percentage of people in exclusive relationships, and the amount of time they remain in exclusive relationships. (Stats which one should be able to verify or falsify fairly easily)

If, however, monogamy has remained the norm, then the percentage of people in relationships will probably be about the same, and the only prediction one might be able to make about internet access is that it would strengthen the trend of assortive mating.

If the latter is true, then the decline in sexual activity remains a phenomenon to be explained.

Yeah, the comment you're replying to is very red-pill and based on a weird asymmetrical set of standards.

My feeling is that the high-libido (HL) people are assortatively mating with other HLs. They're no longer pursuing the medium-libido (ML) or low-libido (LL) people. The internet helps this a lot.

Without the HL people, the ML/LL people are free to have a more relaxed and less active sex life. That may mean being single if the libido isn't high enough to overcome social anxiety or inertia but at least they aren't stuck in a mono relationship with an unhappy HL who's prone to cheating.

This is an interesting take on assortive mating, and likely has at least some explanatory power.

I suppose, also, prostitution can skew the numbers. If some people regularly service hundreds or thousands of people, then that could have a similar effect on the total numbers. It would seem like there's less sex, but really the number of sexual sessions is the same or more, just with a fewer percent of the population.

As with anything life is complex. But I don't think sex /=/ relationships, though it does play a factor.

Also like I mentioned it's possible people are avoiding sex at the chance of something better, instead of actually receiving it. I think it would be pretty hard to get metrics about things like this.

It's totally possible the top 10-20% are sleeping with each other a lot and the rest's sexual frequency has declined on the hopes that they are able to woo over someone in that upper tier.

Another factor I think is that people in general are staying in more simply because it's easier and more fun now than ever to do so. We all know it can be hard to meet new friends/mates, possibly because the internet/netflix/home life as gotten really comfortable and people aren't as interested in leaving it to go pursue uncomfortable and often fruitless mating/courting situations.

Idk though, I've read about this a bit but I'm really just thinking out loud.

> This can happen on a smaller scale as well because of things like Tinder. Why date the amiable and friendly but 6/10 coworker when there is a rich, successful, charming 9/10 down the block.

Part of this is also because apps like tinder put the focus so much on looks too, whereas meeting people in other places allow other attributes to shine. So many young people are now spending a lot of time at the gym to compete in this new arms race.

Let's not forget today's obesity rates on the other end either, a lot more people are considered completely unattractive by their potential mates than in decades past.

This reads like red pill cult brainwashing.

Sorry it came off like that. I assure you I don't ascribe to that sort of thing. I was mostly just speculating based off things I've read such as:

https://medium.com/@worstonlinedater/tinder-experiments-ii-g...

I've seen similar studies by OKCupid and others as well.

What?

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