I found a pretty revealing New York Times podcast discussion about the sexlessness of the younger generation, especially among men. I thought it was worth sharing and discussing: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/04/opinion/the-argument-joe-biden-2020.html.

For anyone who can't listen to it due to regional restrictions or audio malfunction, here are some mirrors for the podcast:

• https://www37.zippyshare.com/v/4XMaHv7X/file.html
• https://vocaroo.com/i/s1SIM8rtHrJ4

The relevant part starts at 18:42.

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(EDIT: I realize that this is a long post, so now I've tricked it out with fancy bold stylings to highlight the juicier bits)

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I find it interesting how in this discussion, they seem to lay the blame at social conservatives .. and men, of course. But let's ignore the men for a second and go back to the conservatives. Ross Douthat (at around 19:30), tries to blame conservatives for.. wishing for less promiscuity. He doesn't explicitly blame them for the low levels of sex but words it in a "be careful what you wish for" kind of way, which is completely baffling to me. I think Ross is trying to frame this as some sort of ironic anecdote, but it really comes off as a lazy attempt to lay blame at conservatives when they realistically cannot be blamed for this. He says (and please excuse my quick and highly imperfect transcription of the discussion) "you can imagine the social conservative of 1985 wishing for less promiscuity.. and getting it. But the way we've gotten it has not been this remoralization of sexual life that conservatives imagine. It's been just this straightforward decline of relationships and marriage. The simple reason why sex is declining among younger people (but older than teens) is due to the decline or postponement of marriage. So the social conservatives have gotten their less sexually active before marriage society in a sense, but they've gotten it at the expense of the institution and social bonds that they imagined that they wanted to reforge."

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I think that's a ridiculous thing to say, because conservatives never advocated for a decline in marriages, nor for a postponement of marriage until late 20s, for example. I'm pretty sure they were highly against teen marriages, but not against people marrying in college. On the contrary, it's all the liberals and feminists who encouraged women in college to not hurry in tying themselves down to a man and to advance their education, career, explore themselves, their consciousness, the world, to sleep around, and so on. The male partner part was expected to happen on its own, as it had since forever. But more on that later.

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Then, Michelle Goldberg chimes in to highlight that young men are having much less sex than women and Ross responds to that at 21:25, by expressing scepticism in the rise of incel men. His argument for this is that there has been a lot of discussion and consternation about the general sexlessness of young people and that this is just one statistical point that shows that men are doing more poorly in some regard, so we shouldn't take it seriously.

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I find this ridiculous. If anything, the statistics are inaccurate in the other direction. Without a doubt, women tend to downplay how much sex they're having, how many sex partners they've had, while men tend to overreport these numbers. It's not a complicated concept and anyone who's been around the block and is intellectually honest will actually admit that. But not these guys. I think it's a generational difference. I don't think they're willfully deceiving anyone. They just don't understand the current culture we live in, where women are running the show when it comes to dating and sex (aside from a small percentage of truly top tier men).

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The moderator, David Leonhardt, then jumps in to say he finds the whole thing "to be depressing". That it's all a part of the overall breakdown in the health of our social interactions. And you see this refrain over and over. The general sentiment is: "this whole thing is quite unfortunate and depressing, but women and progressives have no blame in this and men and social conservatives need to take responsibility for it".

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Michelle Goldberg then jumps in to say how this is a part of the rising mental problems (anxiety, depression) crisis that is affecting youths more and more, then goes on to agree with Ross in that we're not sure if incel numbers are actually growing (i.e. the NYTimes crew doesn't like this finding from the survey, so they're trying to write it off), but those incels sure are annoying and it's so horrible that they are able to congregate on the internet and discuss how much they're being deprived of sex. Then she goes on to say how these incels then become white nationalists, because they are targeted by those groups. Then, she at least concedes that "having large cadres of unattached men with not much to do is extraordinarily destructive".

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Ross jumps in to agree with her, then says:

"This is where the argument for a certain kind of social conservatism where you want to structure society in such a way that the male sex drive is linked to personal responsibility. But this is unfair to women, because they shouldn't be cast into these passive roles and limits their personal choices too much".

"The difficulty is removing all rules and structure in how people think of what you're supposed to do in order to have a normal, healthy sexual relationship. You've created a dynamic where men seem to think that they're entitled to the levels of sex that our culture thinks are necessary for 'the good life', while having no clear, structured way to get there. And maybe that's just the price we pay to get there".

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Here, Ross said something very substantial. He cut to the core of the malaise in our dating/relationships breakdown. This highly disturbed Michelle Goldberg, so she jumped in with what seems like a non sequitur:

"Progressives aren't saying you should ignore everything that makes a person a decent mate. They're saying that you actually have to treat women with more respect, more egalitarianism. And in fact, it is what you have to do to successfully pair up in the society we actually live in."

Maybe someone can explain to me how we go from Ross hinting at how hard it has become for men to meet women (if I were to speculate, he might be referring to the workplace and the internet) to Michelle saying "you shouldn't ignore everything that makes a person a decent mate". I feel like there are a lot of assumptions and a lot of things are being left unsaid.

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Michelle goes on:

"Incels refused to learn that you have to treat women as equals if you want to have a family. And we can't blame that on progressivism".

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Soon after this, David jumps in to ask Ross what he thinks social conservatives should do about this situation. The mod goes on to say that he largely agrees with them regarding the importance of the family unit, especially that 2 parents are better for a kid than just 1.

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My thought here is - why is it the responsibility of social conservatives to suggest concrete courses of action when it's the progressives who have done away with numerous concrete institutions and social norms? Why should soc cons be left fixing the mess? Is it because they care more about stable families than the progressives and progs are expecting soc conservatives to fight for it indefinitely, like some force of nature?

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The suggestion Ross comes up with is that colleges should segregate students by gender, so as to encourage a more traditional courtship culture in place of the hook-up culture. The same question is then given to Michelle, who responds (around 29:50) by saying, first and foremost, that "young men need to step up and that it's not the job of young women to make men better, to tame and civilize men. Young women shouldn't settle for the 'extremely cold and brutal sexual cultures that seems to prevail thanks to the hookup culture and apps. Women should demand more kindness and consideration and feel more empowered to demand more from the men they have sex with. There is a lot of evidence current sex culture is making women unhappy."

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There is so much wrong with this. First of all, she falls for the apex fallacy and is completely unaware of the dynamics of the SMV/RMV. The majority of women online are chasing a small percentage of men. These men are sort of calling the shots, but they are only able to do so because all these women are eagerly openings their legs for them. While Michelle does actually and explicitly advocate for women to hold these 'fuckboys' more accountable, the irony, of course, is that these fuckboys are NOT INCELS, which is the GODDAMN TOPIC they're discussing. Once again, she's focusing on alphas and is ignoring the incels, after previously acknowledging that "having large cadres of unattached men with not much to do is extraordinarily destructive". When it comes to actually dealing with the issue, actually diving into details, she completely writes off incels, completely forgets that they exist and becomes very concerned with how many women's feelings are hurt by the fact that the hot badboys they hooked up with are not interested in being exclusive with them for the foreseeable future. She does not explicitly state this, but the members of this podcast reference older articles and the hookup culture a lot, so this is what I'm inferring.

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Michelle goes on to say that "if women are empowered to expect more of men, maybe more men will rise to the occasion". As if women's expectations of men aren't sky high already! Example: https://www.cnbc.com/2017/05/17/economists-men-now-need-more-than-just-money-to-be-marriageable.html.

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So let's recap. The topic of discussion is "young men are having dramatically less sex than women", which is followed by an acknowledgement that this is a bad thing, based on a lot of evidence from other countries. But Michelle's primary concern is that WOMEN ARE UNHAPPY, and I quote, "there is a lot of evidence current sex culture is making women unhappy." And it's the men's responsibility to fix it and they can only fix it by becoming more progressive and egalitarian. So there is an obvious and explicit acknowledgement that the current system isn't working, an implicit acknowledgement that we arrived at the current state of affairs thanks to progressivism, feminism, and women, but the responsibility to fix this mess falls on men and on social conservatives, even if everyone knows and agrees that they didn't cause these problems.

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Notice how the problem was first identified with a lot of men being undersexed (i.e. a problem that MEN are having), which becomes a non-problem quickly, because the real problem is that WOMEN ARE UNHAPPY with the hook-up culture (that is only possible because women are enabling it). In other words, from Michelle's standpoint, men's problems aren't problems. Even after all the panelists have agreed that is a problem, she pivots away from it.

tl;dr: do you agree with the NYTimes panelists' viewpoints that men and social conservatives need to fix this situation? Do you agree that this is their fault? Do women have any responsibility?