Japan's declining birthrate and its cultural ties

http://news.yahoo.com/s/afp/20110114/lf_afp/japansocietysexpopulation

Stress? Desensitization? Diet? I could see any of these being responsible. I don't know if overcrowding can play in a role in the subconscious sex drive, but that would also be a prime candidate.

edited 14th Jan '11 7:19:49 PM by UnabashedFornicator

... wait, why is falling birthrate a bad thing for Japan?

^ The average age in Japan was around 50 or something the last time I checked. They have a lot of old people, and old people aren't very efficient workers.

Oh god not this herbivorous man shit again.

-sigh- It would not surprise me if this was just an overreaction spread by irrational fears.

It's possible. I can buy that the average guy in his late teens or early twenties in Japan may credibly be too stressed out there to think about sex, however. When I was at the height of grad school frenzy I had zero libido.

Edit: I also have no clue how credible government surveys in Japan are (or anywhere, for that matter).

edited 14th Jan '11 7:36:48 PM by UnabashedFornicator

It's not sex, it's demographics. You need immigrants.

2.2 million people in 2008 were foreign born citizens. out of 127,360,000.

Is using "Julian Assange is a Hillary butt plug" an acceptable signature quote?

If the claims I've read about working conditions and average stress levels of Japanese employees are to be believed, I would not be at all surprised if that was a major factor in a diminishing sex drive.

In the U.S. I can manage my anxiety enough to be a generally successful adult. The kinds of pressures I hear about people having to deal with in Japan would have me going Hikikomori in an instant.

Visit my contributor page to assist with the "I Like The Cheeses" project!

Pff, Japans moving in the right direction.

Fight smart, not fair.

in b4 potshots at Japan for nationalistic reasons

If anything, it ensures Japan won't be that overpopulated in the future...

Half-Life: Dual Nature, a crossover story of reasonably sized proportions.

Hmm, so a supermajority of young women display an active disinterest in sex. Oh yeah, All Women Are Prudes, nothing to worry about there.

A few more men feel the same way than last survey? FREAK THE FUCK OUT!

So yeah, there's Japan's birthrate problem in a nutshell: Dumbasses can't identify the obvious reproductive bottleneck.

Retirement age is approaching 70 for them if this keeps up.

Well, that spares thousands of young girls...

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There are a lot of older people working in Europe as the entire world is "aging" after the baby boom years following WW 2.

Yeah, I find it amusing that although the birth rate continues to nosedive in the developed world, the moment I mention life extension technologies, the peanut gallery typically goes "OH NOES OVERPOPULATION" because apparently defeating the aging process means nobody will die of unnatural causes either.

We in the developed world have done a bang-up job of stacking the economic incentives away from the "have huge families" or indeed the "raise children at all" direction. We can stop worrying about that now. So now we've got the "overpopulation" thing licked, let's deal with the matter of how a society with an aging population can remain viable. As I see it, we've painted ourselves into a corner where we need to either evolve or die. I don't see a third option apart from transhumanism or genocide.

More than likely we'll just expand onto somewhere like Mars or one of the moons of Jupiter/ Saturn.

That way we can at least survive, and then robots will be doing most of the actual "work" so it'll just be a question of what we want to do, rather than what we have to. I see a big boom in the entertainment industry

Awesome! So instead of being frustrated artists with a shitty day job we can all just be artists!

edited 15th Jan '11 3:11:13 AM by TibetanFox

Pretty much. At least that's my hope for the future. You don't really need a large population to get things done when science has effectivly made up for a lot of the problems you needed them for.

I certainly hope that's how things will turn out. A society where being a snarky gentleman of leisure is a viable lifestyle for people who are neither old money nor Stephen Fry.

And then we shall use biotechnology to become foxes of leisure in little coats and top hats.

“Love is the eternal law whereby the universe was created and is ruled.” — St. Bernard

It's comforting to find other people feel the same way as me here about the issue.

I just had a particularly potent argument with friends and family tonight that left me alienated. I went to bed after a long time without sleep, and woke up from an inability to fall back asleep. Feeling disoriented and that the world was truly too surreal to believe. And alienating when coming back to the world in the form of the internet, just plain alienating.

Coming back to something like this makes my night a bit better.

Anyway, I think that socio-economic stress can be a pretty big Anaphrodisiac. And really, Japan's whole economic workings need fixing. Also, I don't think attitudes telling Japanese men All Men Are Perverts and should be, and A Man Is Not A Virgin, and to take initiative, is not helping the problem.

edited 15th Jan '11 3:49:20 AM by Ukonkivi

Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]

I'm still surprised nobody's noticed the big obvious bottleneck here.

You see, there's one gender where if the supermajority go off sex, the birthrate is not necessarily going to plummet. And there's one gender where if the supermajority go off sex, the birthrate is going to drop like a goddamn rock.

And the latter gender is the one where the supermajority has gone off sex.

But people are going You Can Panic Now about the former gender going off sex in a non-supermajority way.

Am I missing something here? Is Mister Seahorse the norm in Japan?

I'm a bit tired right now. But I'm not exactly sure what you're trying to get at.

Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]

Holy shit I actually need to spell this out explicitly. DAAAAAAMN YOU GEORGE W BUSH! LOOK WHAT YOUR ABSTINENCE-ONLY SEX EDUCATION HATH WROUGHT!

Unless she gets artificially inseminated or uses a turkey baster or something, a woman has to have sex with a man in order to get pregnant.

Men going off sex = Single mothers = Not exactly the end of the world.

Women going off sex = No babies = KIND OF A PROBLEM.

Essentially, what you're saying is, if anything, All Women Are Prudes is a bigger problem to reproduction than All Men Are Herbivores, if anything.

Or it appears to be. And I said myself, I'm tired and sleepy and out of it. And honestly I found it a bit confusing and vague. Not simple.

I still don't get the part where you appear to be saying women having sex is more important than men having sex. Considering that it requires sperm and egg, I don't see how the new inputs can be weighed unevenly in importance. There's the existence of Sperm Donations, but you're talking about sex. And that part about single mothers simply baffles me.

Perhaps I need not come online when so sleepy.

edited 15th Jan '11 4:35:27 AM by Ukonkivi

Genkidama for Japan, even if you don't have money, you can help![1]

It takes two to tango. If there aren't any men around willing to sleep with the women they can't get pregnant.

Although, men can impregnate more than one woman at the same time, so maybe you just need less of them. Speaking from a purely biological and not social view, though.

edited 15th Jan '11 4:37:08 AM by LoniJay

Be not afraid...