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Comment by lainga | Hacker News Reader

Can we look to other cultures where widespread celibacy (especially extramarital) is already practiced for cues as to how this will affect the US?

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There is Japan which has a culture of "herbivore men": https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herbivore_men

There is a similar movement growing in the US which is called "MGTOW", men going their own way: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Men_Going_Their_Own_Way

Personally, I'm a bit scared that we're going towards a culture of increasing isolation and tension between the genders.

I think MGTOW are different from herbivore men. I'm not expert on either group buy my understanding is Herbivore men are men that don't or never have sought out relationships with women, while MGTOW is more comprised of men that have had bad relationships with women and decide not to pursue further relationships (especially divorced men).

Do they not pursue relationships, or do they simply re-prioritize? I think it's healthy for people to develop their independence, and I think you need to be independent as a person before you can be interdependent as a couple - as opposed to need a mate to function as a person.

I'm not aware of any culture that encourages "widespread celibacy"–which ones are you talking about?

The only historical culture(s) with widespread non-religious celibacy among substantial portions of the population are Western European but widespread celibacy certainly existed there. It’s also a thing in the Buddhist and Hindu world but that was mostly a life stage rather than life long celibacy.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Western_European_marriage_patt...

> The Western European marriage pattern is a family and demographic pattern that is marked by comparatively late marriage (in the middle twenties), especially for women, with a generally small age difference between the spouses, a significant proportion of women who remain unmarried, and the establishment of a neolocal household after the couple has married. In 1965, John Hajnal discovered that Europe is divided into two areas characterized by a different patterns of nuptiality. To the west of the line, marriage rates and thus fertility were comparatively low and a significant minority of women married late or remained single and most families were nuclear; to the east of the line and in the Mediterranean and particular regions of Northwestern Europe, early marriage and extended family homes were the norm and high fertility was countered by high mortality.

Unless I'm missing something, there's nothing in your response that implies that Western Europe has widespread celibacy.

"in the decades after the Great Famine... as much as a third of Irishmen and a fourth of Irishwomen never married due to chronic economic problems that discouraged early marriage."

That is by most peoples' expectations widespread, up to some allowance for out-of-wedlock births (which the Catholic Church in Ireland famously acted forcefully against).

There's a difference between unmarried and celibate.

Not before widespread birth control there isn’t. We can see quite clearly the first hints of the demographic transition in France. It starts off with delaying marriage but fertility within marriage basically being an increasing function of time. People had sex and this made babies. But then people stop having so many children. The pull out method was invented or spread society wide for the first time. Our knowledge of biology is not innate. The Romans got the fertile and infertile phases of the menstrual cycle exactly wrong. There are Amazonian peoples who believe in partible paternity so if a women has sex while pregnant a child can have more than one father. Whores in medieval England thought fast sex was non-procreative.

Historically if you weren’t celibate there was going to be a baby.

Even in the relatively abundant west world today 70% of infertility may be caused by diet (https://www.healthstatus.com/health_blog/ovulation-2/diet-an...). In the past poor people had even worse diets, it was probably even worse for the post famine Irish you used as an example.

> Our knowledge of biology is not innate

It's not,but we've known what the result of "seeding a woman" has been for several thousand years so I have a hard time believing it took that long to come up with the pull out method. For the poor bedrooms are also a recent invention, they probably got a lot more sex-ed passed down directly.

Read up on prostitution in the past.

A quick google search of the terms "japan sex rates" [1] will return pages and pages of results about the high number of Japanese millennials that aren't engaging in sexual or romantic relationships, with some articles citing numbers as high as 40% of all Japanese people aged 18-34 are virgins [2]. It's even got its own name: "celibacy syndrome" [3]. A search for Korean sex rates shows very similar articles as well. [4]

I'm not sure what lessons we can draw from Japan/Korean, though, as these revelations all seem to be from relatively recently and the long-term impacts haven't been seen or explored yet. The main obvious consequence is plummeting birth rates [5, 6], which will probably have drastic economic consequences, but we may not see those consequences for decades.

1: https://www.google.com/search?q=japan+sex+rates

2: https://www.cnn.com/2016/09/20/asia/japanese-millennials-vir...

3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Celibacy_syndrome

4: http://theconversation.com/why-young-people-in-south-korea-a...

5: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2018/dec/27/japan-shrinkin...

6: https://qz.com/1556910/south-koreas-birth-rate-just-crashed-...

I had no concrete examples, I'm not even sure it happens; I was casting around to my fellow readers in case any of them knew of cultures where it does occur.

Shakers: they died out https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shakers

Any such culture would be long gone or full of hypocrisy.

There are cultures where sex ratio has been manipulated, e.g. India and China, to favor males, but this is not the point of the research and I lack relevant data for these.

Isn't extramarital celibacy sustainable, given that you can have sex and children once you are married?

How do you jump from "men are having disproportionately less sex than women" to "Celibacy is being practiced?"

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