I was at a small regional conference a few weeks ago. It brought together evolutionary biologists and geneticists. There was this plenary session about the Y-Chromosome shrinking and fertility rates in general.
In the discussion afterward a young woman stood up and said she would like to ask a question of the men in the room? “What is your number? And how old are you?”
I hate being asked this. I always seem like such a loser. But things went in surprising directions.
There turned out to be 7 men between 60 and 70 in the room. The lowest number of partners any of them claimed was 8. Then it comes to me and I say “3”. People were actually staring at me.
The woman next to me, and I will be coming back to her, said, “let me guess. You started young and your first partner lasted a long time. And you are happily married and have been for decades.”
That would have been a stunningly good guess but she wasn’t guessing. I explained my first partner and I lasted 11 years, from the time I was 13 until I was 23. I call her J1, all their names start with J and sound quite similar. I have got in terrible trouble by calling them by the wrong name, thus the numbers.
I was with J2 for 8 years from 24 to 31, then I hit the one (J3) and we have been together for just over 30 years. Our 30th Anniversary is in late August. People applauded like that was an achievement, my parents were married for 66 years.
The stunning part was when the younger men started answering the question. The younger the group of men, the fewer the partners. This isn’t totally surprising, the older you are the more years you have had to find partners and have sex. It was how steep the drop off was that stunned me. That and the large number of young men who had never had sex. In the 30-40 group it was 2/9 with and average of 3 partners and in the 20-30 age group it was 4/10 with an average of less than 2 partners.
Then we did it with women but in reverse order. 5/9 women 20 to 30 had never had sex and the average number of partners was 2. 4/11 from 30 to 40 had never had sex and the average number of partners was just under three. From 40 to 50 not only were none of the women virgins but the average number of partners was 7. From 50 to 60 it jumped to 10.
Then we got to 60 to 70 and the average was around 12 when it came to the women sitting next to me, and she said, “39”.
I stood up and said my turn to guess, “you started very young and were with that first partner for years. Then, when that relationship ended you realized you were free to play the field and went a little wild and now you are happily married and have been for decades.”
We explained we were each other’s first. And that J1’s wife was sitting with us. I call her J4 because she has the same name as my wife (J3). The three of us were there because we are work shopping, there is no other word for it, a paper we are co-authoring arguing that the electromagnetic energy from our electronic devices alters the binding properties of steroids.
It is the team’s contention that we are lowering our libidos and making ourselves sterile by doing exactly what I am doing now. Staring at a computer screen. There is by the way an entire team working on this and my only role was to serve as the statistician.
This is becoming more and more common. Many scientists now farm out their math and statistical work to consulting statisticians and mathematicians. I and the young woman who is taking over this project from me were there to hear criticism from our professional peers (and did we ever).
I spent a bunch of time over the week of the conference learning about how little sex people are having in their teens, twenties, and thirties.
For an interesting take here is an article from Time.
The original title was, “Is sex dead?”
time.com/…
As the article says people who are married or presumably in long term relationships where they live together have more than the average amount of sex per week. I started wondering exactly how many times I have actually had sex. My wife, who whatever else she is doing is always an artist knows exactly how often she and I have had sex because she has been recording her sex life since long before we met. She has been charting it in this large accordian book of graphs with footnotes and pictures and different coloured dots depending on how good the sex was. Yes, I get rated each and every time. Anyway someday the accordian will be the center of an art installation.
You can see these discontinuities. For example, the 6 months we had no sex while she recovered from brain surgery is flagged. A long string leads to an MRI of her Pituitary Adenoma. Beside that is he advice the doctor gave her when less than 24 hours out of the surgery he kicked her out of the hospital.
He said, “Well, I can see you are conscious and you can certainly talk and walk and see, so the surgery was a major success. Get out of here before you pick up some weird infection. Oh, damn I nearly forgot, for the next six months you can’t sneeze.”
Turns out they go up through your sinuses and it leaves a hole that needs time to close up again. In the meantime you can theoretically leak cerebrospinal fluid out through your nose. Minimally this can lead to an unimaginably bad headache. If not caught it could be fatal. Not sneezing lowers the risk.
My wife asked if we could have sex, or when we could have sex. He says, “anytime you like if you can do it without sneezing or moving your head suddenly.” So for six months we had no sex.
IVF is another point where we go months without sex. And now we have my health. I lost all libido, or pretty much all, for months. Mercifully the meds are working and it is coming back and the line on the graph is slowly climbing back up.
But by the time my wife and I met we were both well past our horny teenager stage. We know J3 had a lot of sex with her two fiances while they were living together and actually when she was living on her own. J1 and J2 tell me we used to be like rabbits.
If we simply assume I had the same rates of sexual congress as my wife when I was her age then I have probably had sex about 4,800 times in my life. I have been having sex for 2,603 weeks as of next Monday. That isn’t even twice a week which used to be the North American average. But it is a hell of a lot more than is apparently typical today.
And so let me end by asking you,
Do you think it is true we are having less sex than we used to have? And if you think we are having less sex what do you think is causing the reduction?