UPDATE: Reader Jeff Johnson writes: “That statistic is shocking – but what causes people to go against their basic instincts, procreation in this situation? One thing that the article didn’t mention is that the Japanese economy and been stagnant for a long time. When there is no bright future, who wants take the time and expense to woo a mate let alone to start a family? Virtual girlfriends and worlds don’t have the problems or complexities that the real world has, but it also doesn’t have the rewards either. Maybe Japan will turn into Solaria as in Asimov’s novels, Robots and Earth and Foundation and Earth?” Well, that didn’t work out so well.
Virtual sex is only going to get better. At the moment, it is limited to ubiquitous porn. Within a few years, though, it will extend to effective virtual realities where you can indulge yourself with the sexual partner(s) of your dreams. At that point, physical sex, relationships, and the responsibilities of marriage will have a true competitor. Can it win? Questionable.
All of the “institutions” of civil moderation of sexual relationship – marriage, children, families – are founded on the male urge to have sexual relations with women. Men don’t screw women to marry them or have babies or families. They screw them because they are horny. Babies, families, and marriage are the price they have to pay in order to scratch that horniness
If you want to get a gander at what straight males will do when they have an effective sexual substitute for screwing women, take a look at relationships in the gay male world. And look for the socons to seek bans on tech-sex, once they realize what potent competition it represents for their traditional sexual structures. (Which is another reason they hate and fear male homosexuality, by the way).
There’s your answer, Bill; we’ll just outbreed you.
Scott Adams famously had Dogbert predict that, when virtual reality gets cheaper than dating, society is doomed.
“Is Dilbert available?”
“He’s been in the holodeck since March.”
(Adams himself claimed that he’d just stay in the holodeck till he died of starvation, getting full-body massages from Cindy Crawford and her identical twin sister.)
It’s been a while since I read Robots and Empire, but as I recall things worked out pretty well for the Solarians. Granted that their numbers declined by about 80% over 20,000 years, but they missed out on the destruction of both the other Spacer worlds and the Galactic Empire.
Of course we don’t have Three-Law positronic robots to rely on, but the Eloi may be counting on using illegal immigrants instead…
You’ll just outbreed me?
I’m nearly 66, and I’m not planning on outbreeding anybody at this point. But as for “breeding,” the only religious doing prodigious breeding in the modern world are the Muslims. And their rates are dropping radically in the west as well.
The truth is, SDN, that the more modern a society becomes, the lower its reproductive rate goes. Humanity is not going to vanish over it, but this one fact will destroy (is destroying) economic, political, and social strategies based on the notion of an ever-increasing population.
I think the best sex is when you are actually trying to impregnate a woman who wants you to impregnate her (“I’m going to give you a baby, Honey”). One could, I suppose, get this enjoyment from a replicunt if you actually believed it was an impregnable woman.
You’d be a fooled fool, though. Ersatz is ersatz.
The receptacle is ersatz, but the orgasm is real. For a lot of guys, that’s enough.
Yep, just as it is with the ever popular and always willing and able Rosy Palm herself.
Unfortunately, YKW, your preferences run afoul of the facts. As the costs males must pay for orgasms (marriage, kids, all the rest) continues to rise, the percentage of them willing to pay the cost drops.
Rebuking Feminism: U.S. Marriage Rates At Historic Low and Falling
Yes Bill, and males have always tried to get out of those costs, by leaving town, for an example. The more costly “going all the way” is, the more it will be avoided. But males also want to have kids if they can afford them (and by “afford” you can define that as being as relatively effort free as you want).
A king with a harem will have hundreds of kids, yet even for a king, kids and the conflicts that come with them can be a lot of trouble. Abortions have been available in some form or other for a long time, so if a man as powerful as a king really didn’t want to have kids, why wouldn’t he see to it that he didn’t have any?
I also think that part of the general trend you show in the graph is a reaction to the unfairness of our feminist society. We are living in an age when, absurdly, the female, who is genetically predisposed to be careful about mating because she has always born the consequences of pregnancy, is the only partner who can legally escape those consequences after the fact, while the male, who is genetically predisposed to get it when he can, is trapped if the female gets pregnant and chooses to trap him. Since the female has 100% choice and the male has none, except to deny his overwhelming drive (the feminist might, for the sake of convenience at this point, argue that women have a strong sex drive too, but the fact that 99.9% of the sex for money business is selling sex to men immediately undercuts her argument rather dramatically) it’s not surprising that men have a far more cynical attitude towards marriage and commitment than they did in the 60s.
Actually, I think guys want sex, and women want kids. As far as the two primary drivers go, that is.
I can’t see any way to disagree with that.