The Decadent Society by Ross Douthat FTP: When The Author Misses a Point

This is from the chapter titled Sterility. This section is about how America and much of the West is sinking below the replacement level. The West is having fewer babies (in fact, despite the manosphere’s psychosexual fantasies, men and women, on the whole, are having less and less copulation; aka the number of partners one has in a lifetime for men and women aged 27-44 is around 4 partners for each sex, it was almost double that over 40 years or so ago). And that portends a stagnant, aging society. Douthat lays out a Liberal and Conservative viewpoint. Then he injects his observation.

But the facts themselves are indisputable: people reacted to the social revolutions of the 1960s first by marrying less and divorcing more and having fewer children, and even — in trends from the last two decades — having less sex, period.

Maybe the decline of sex and baby-making as well as marriage, the substitution of masturbation for intercourse, and asexuality for both, just reflects the free choices …