The Other McCain

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Generation Incel: 15% of U.S. Males Ages 22-29 Had Zero Sex Partners Last Year

Posted on | March 22, 2019 | 2 Comments

 

A rising percentage of young American men report they are unable to find sexual partners, according to data from the General Social Survey (GSS) at the University of Chicago. The percentage of U.S. men 22-29 “reporting no sex in the past year” has increased more than 50% since 2009, from less than 10% to more than 15% of respondents in 2018, according to GSS data compiled by University of Virginia Professor W. Bradford Wilcox. The declining sexual activity of Millennial generation males has reversed normal behavioral patterns. Until 2010, young females in the GSS were more likely than males to report no sexual contact in the past year; now, the “no sex” number is significantly higher for under-30 men than women in the same age cohort.

 

Professor Bradford has written extensively about the trend he calls a “sexual counter-revolution,” which is related to declining rates of marriage and childbirth among the under-30 cohort. The percentage of men ages 18 to 34 who lived with a parent has increased from 30% to 34% since 2007, and the number of men 18-34 living with a spouse has declined from 30% to 25% over the same time-frame. Because of female hypergamy (the normal desire of women to marry men with higher socioeconomic status), the inability of young men to establish their economic independence is correlated with their failure to attract women — either as wives or non-marital partners — and this failure is in turn correlated with declining birth rates for women in the under-30 cohort.

 

The data highlighted by Professor Wilcox may foreshadow a growing threat of violence from the so-called “incel” (involuntary celibate) community, a trend implicated in several recent mass-murder incidents, including Elliot Rodger’s 2014 massacre in Santa Barbara, California. Wikipedia describes the “incel” phenomenon:

Self-identified incels are mostly white, male and heterosexual, and are often described as young and friendless introverts. . . .
Psychologist and sex researcher James Cantor describes incels as “a group of people who usually lack sufficient social skills and…find themselves very frustrated.” In social media forums, “when they’re surrounded by other people with similar frustrations, they kind of lose track of what typical discourse is, and they drive themselves into more and more extreme beliefs.” . . .
On April 23, 2018, a van driver (suspected to be Alek Minassian) killed ten people and injured fourteen others in a vehicle-ramming attack in Toronto, Ontario before being arrested. Shortly before the attack, Minassian had posted on Facebook that “the Incel Rebellion has already begun” and applauded Elliot Rodger. The term “Incel Rebellion” is sometimes used interchangeably with the term “Beta Uprising”, which refers to a violent response to incels’ perceived sexual deprivation.

Emily Rothman, a professor of community health sciences at Boston University, says men in online incel forums express “extreme” loneliness and sadness. She advocates research into the problem:

There’s a fixation with their physical appearance and shame they have so little experience with women. There isn’t a middle ground of “what can I do to acquire the skills that I need to connect with women?” There seems to be a fundamental lack of understanding of how dating and attraction work and that it isn’t solely about appearance. . . .
The main problem is that we don’t know how prevalent this problem is. It could be that there are relatively few people who identify this way. On the other hand, it could be far more prevalent than we realize. At this point, there have been mass shootings by people who identify as incels. Getting at the scope of the problem would help us figure out what other kinds of harm this might be causing. . . .
It appears to be a new and emerging threat. The point is, we don’t know, but there appears to be enough accruing information about decreasing rates of sexual activity in younger populations combined with the sort of online activity about involuntary celibacy that makes you curious.

An obvious factor in the problem is the anti-male climate on university campuses. Female students are now a majority (57%) of U.S. undergraduate enrollment, and discrimination against males in the education system is driving the decline of economic opportunity for young men, who are increasingly excluded from high-status jobs that require college degrees. “Diversity” policies at major corporations also contribute to the social and economic marginalization of young men. For example, according to a lawsuit filed last year, Google illegally mandated quotas as part of its hiring policies, effectively prohibiting recruitment of white and Asian males to the tech giant’s engineering workforce.

UPDATE: One of the commenters asks about the phrase “foreskin fetishist,” which I first coined a decade ago to describe Andrew Sullivan’s unhinged crusade against what he calls “Male Genital Mutilation.” As I said at the time, it was obvious that Sullivan (who is himself circumcised) had spent way too much time thinking about other men’s penises. How obsessed was Sullivan with this absurd “issue”? When his “Daily Dish” blog was hosted at The Atlantic Monthly, he had feminist Slate contributor Hannah Rosin as a “guest-blogger” while he was on vacation, but Sully banished Rosin from the Dish after she blogged in defense of circumcision. To state what should be obvious, it’s impossible to lament the absence of something you never remember having. The only way any circumcised man could get the idea that he has been deprived of anything useful is if, either through homosexual activity or exposure to pornography, he spent time comparing himself to uncircumcised men in such a way as to become fixated — rather similar to how some guys develop foot fetishes or other paraphilias. Until a few decades ago, about 80 percent of U.S. males were circumcised at birth, and this might explain why some men (particularly gay men) became obsessed with the “uncut” penis as something exotic. Ergo, “foreskin fetishist.”



 

Category: Sex Trouble

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2 Responses to “Generation Incel: 15% of U.S. Males Ages 22-29 Had Zero Sex Partners Last Year”

  1. Sunday Links | 357 Magnum
    March 22nd, 2019 @ 8:10 pm

    […] The Other McCain – Generation Incel: 15% of U.S. Males Ages 22-29 Had Zero Sex Partners Last Year […]

  2. Saturday Links | 357 Magnum
    March 23rd, 2019 @ 10:47 am

    […] The Other McCain – Generation Incel: 15% of U.S. Males Ages 22-29 Had Zero Sex Partners Last Year. […]