Uhh, I’m not sure you’re familiar with what sex is, if that’s your definition. After all, your description includes soaking, and those Mormon teens assured me that neither god nor the government would mind.

trans people only make up a small percentage of the population and they don't explain the surge visible in the graph

I mean, from your own link, those error bars come from:

The data being a clustered sample set,

That study wasn't specifically asking whether or not respondents were virgins, ie, had 0 sex partners.

...

The error bars there are large because the actual question was 'how many sex partners have you had in the past however many years?', and then your linked post explains how this particular dataset/survey/study was then presented to try to show the answer to a question that wasn't explicitly asked.

That can have a lot more variance than a survey/study that flatly asks binary question of 'have you ever had sex before?', and then goes on to define what does and doesn't count as 'having sex'.

...

And indeed when you actually do that kind of approach, there are many other graphs from many other studies showing it being increasingly for both young men and young women to be virgins, have had 0 sex partners.

https://news.iu.edu/live/news/26924-nearly-1-in-3-young-men-in-the-us-report-having-no

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/young-adult-sexlessness-skyrocketed-in-the-last-decade-while-male-virginity-doubled-study/ar-AA1z4kMy

https://www.cdc.gov/yrbs/dstr/index.html

All of these show a marked decline in the number of both young men and young women who have ever had sex, that more people remain sexless for longer, to an older age.

(Though this started earlier among men and is more pronounced, women are now catching up as well)

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Also worth noting:

Compared to adult participants in the 2009 survey, adults in the 2018 group were significantly more likely to report no penile-vaginal intercourse in the prior year, the researchers found. Study participants were also significantly less likely to report engaging in any other sexual behaviors examined in the study, such as oral sex or anal sex. All modes of past-year partnered sex were reported by fewer people in the 2018 cohort.

Yeah, contrary to the implication of OP's image... no, young men are not having more of some other kind of sex than male/female p/v, but still having some other kind of sex.

They're just not having sex with a partner. At all.

Bros are not en masse becoming gay or bi or pan or trans, and then having 'non-traditional' sex that would make them not virgins in a 'non-traditional' way, not in the numbers you'd need to make that a statistically viable explanation for lack of m/f p/v sex.

This is funny haha meme joke, but its not based in reality, its based in whimsy.

You can check that against male self-id rates as LGBTQ and see that there has been a slow, gradual rise, from about 3% up to about 5% for men right now... but nothing like an 8% to 28% rise in roughly the same time period.

https://www.statista.com/statistics/719697/american-adults-who-identify-as-homosexual-bisexual-or-transgender-by-gender/

This one particular graph having error bars does not mean this is not a real thing that is happening.

...

And in case its relevant, I am a queer guy who has had varying kinds of sex and intimacy with both men and women, trans-inclusive.

Honestly I trust a plot with huge error bars much more than a plot with tiny error bars or constant error bars.

that's just a straight line with extra steps!

Honestly, feels like they asked like 30 people total

I won't disagree that loneliness is an issue in our society. But I don't think it is the only "problem". Anecdotally for me: I wasn't ready to have sex, a relationship or for dating for a long time. So I'm mostly happy to have taken that time. In previous generations you'd marry and have kids for a while at that point. I think we have a lot more room to grow individually today.

Aren't they turning the gays to incels?

Didn't you know? When you turn 18 your body hits the virginity reset button!

I'm guessing thats to avoid some ethical grey areas. Or theyre specifically gathering data on men after highschool.

People weren't gay until 1989 so that makes sense. Literally not a single one. 😏

My hypothesis is the decline is caused by a multifaceted change in environment:

• cost of living crisis caused by inflation, folks are making only about 1/3rd what their grandparents made for the same labor
• debt crisis caused by the above, crippling debt causes anxiety
• educational treadmill, folks are working harder for top jobs, so schooling takes longer and is much harder
• hormonal crisis, many young women are on hormonal birth control which is well known to significantly reduce libido in a large percentage of the population
• food supply crisis, cheap, poor quality highly-processed food make folks just slightly less healthy all the time, possibly can affect libido with lowered testosterone caused by preservatives
• social media crisis, evolution caused us to want to be nosy about 70 members of our tribe, not hundreds of millions. Social media is causing us to have the social equivalent of Daredevil's acute hearing, but it's addicting so folks can't easily shut it off (as I write on social media...)
• fitness crisis, many folks just aren't healthy enough to lift and run, so they have less testosterone which lowers libido for everyone regardless of sex/gender
• reproductive fear, folks realize they have it bad with little hope of improvement, so they don't want the same for their offspring
• perfectionism causing a lack of confidence, being able to see the best in the world at any second on your phone causes acute perfectionism that prevents folks from even trying. Look up rates of musical instrument playing to see how few are even starting compared to 20 years ago. Skills in an area lead to increased confidence which makes a person more confident
• protective parenting combined with extremely restrictive schooling, leads to less "free time" where folks can hang out and build social skills
• hyper niche porn on demand, every person can access the porn of their choice on demand at all times. This causes unrealistic tastes and lack of confidence.
• infection fears, everyone is taught from a young age to be afraid of STDs and pregnancy, so it's a looming fear in many
• entertainment quality, we've created the most addicting games, movies, shows, and apps. These make it more interesting to sit and zone out than socialize
• anxiety/depression crisis from the above leads to a population with lower libido, SSRIs are well known to reduce libido in a large subset of the population

All in all, we've got a society that is nearly perfectly designed to reduce libido in the population. Those that manage to avoid or ignore these challenges find a very small dating pool compared to decades past. Those that pair off are less likely to have offspring, such that we will likely have a population collapse in the next hundred years. Hopefully by then have figured enough of this out that we build a society that makes it easy to be a human who finds joy and love in other humans and not in a screen.

It think that rather than early - really early - exposure to porn turning everyone into sex-fiends, it's actually terrifying a lot of them. What if I don't want to gargle cum like Adriana Chechik? What if I don't have a 10 inch cock to stuff my stepmother with?

A more optimistic reading might be that masturbating is easier, freer, quicker, and more accepted than ever before. Rather than risk an STI, pregnancy or human relationship, just crank one out and get back to work.

I'd say 10% not fucking is pretty standard/average and your thinking you were all (100%) doing it is either clouded by your own experiences or you grew up in a very liberal community where it deviates.

Why its rising is questionable. Personally, I'd say its due to rising depression rates.. well, it correlates at least.

Sex is such a basic human need I can't imagine what going without is doing to mental health.

In some cultures (mostly thinking if predominantly Muslim ones, but there are probably others) having sex in your youth isn't expected or even accepted, so really not having sex alone is fine. It's the whole Western idea of sex = self-worth that really fucks people up.

Speculating wildly, I think it was a lot more common back then for teenagers to just disappear off for hours on end without their parents knowing where they were.

If you're over 40 how many times did you get laid because "One thing led to another"? Like you ever chill and vibe so hard with someone you feel the need to fuck about it?

In the tail end of my singleness I found that I was able to have more and better conversations with women online or via txt/dm because we could share things and experiences without being in the same room... But we werent in the same room, to shoot your shot you had to arrange something, give them a chance to overthink it, give yourself a chance to overthink it, sort out the scheduling issues, work out transport and then hopefully when you get into the same room still have the same magic going on.

When we were bored we hung out to not be bored, sometimes that led to fucking.

But it was also something people lied a lot about so the numbers could be shaky. Maybe we should redo it and ask old people when they got laid the first time.

it seemed like we were all fucking, even the nerds

Checking in as a nerd who went to high school in the 00's. Yes, we were still fucking then. Especially the marching band nerds. Don't get me started on what people got up to on our long bus trips...

It’s not obviously internet porn

It's social networks and the loss of 3rd (and 1st) places. Everybody knows what the problem is. Everybody has some idea how to fix it (look how to fix car transit). Every person in power is intent on refusing to improve things in any way and making it worse.

There are more bi guys than society recognizes though.