I think the proper comparison is to see how satisfied or not men of similar ages are who have no relationship at all, and are single. We don't have that information.
I know plenty of single guys in their 40s and up who basically NEVER have sex...for months or years sometimes. Pretty sure they're not satisfied either.
Isn't it possible that satisfaction with your sex life just gets worse over time, for most people, after their 30s? Would that not be an unsurprising result? How many people even expect to still have sex after a certain age (55? 65? 75?). I would guess most of your respondents who have been relationships for more than 12 years are much older. And it is a very, very rare person indeed who thinks they are having hotter and more satisfying sex at 55 than at 30. I mean seriously, that's actually a ridiculous idea.
I would imagine if you polled people about their satisfaction with their financial lives, you would get almost opposite results, with older people and people in longer relationships being more satisfied than younger people and those in short relationships.
There's a time for everything.
Oh, and the question I've wondered about with all of this data is what's the correlation with how good looking respondents are on all of these? I thought I remembered you asking that question. Definitely would guess there's a strong correlation between being attractive and cheating.
My biggest thought here is that your 20% audience selection from porn is a little understated.
First, your close porn followers have continued following you for years after major porn activity, and stuck through your detailed discussions of sex work, invitations to kink parties/dates, etc.
Second, even if people don't know you from those sources originally, because your content is so sex focussed, it's almost like 80% of us know you from porn just based on the last few surveys.
While "everyone" uses porn, to engage on it in this level I would expect a higher level of focus than general population - we are the real porn experts at this point. And we real porn experts know about being poly and kinks and extramarital affairs.
I know this is the usual "not a random sample" issue, but it's still interesting.
'Often when people ask why I’m popular, others respond, “tits.” And maybe this is partially true, but it immediately kicks the legs out from under the serious stuff I’ve done'
Not necessarily. At least among serious people, your serious stuff will be evaluated by its merits. Like, here you have a big relationships survey, and it's cool and serious. If you respond to the valid critical comments above with your reasoning or further analysis, this will be even cooler and more serious. For example, the one about the confounding by age (i.e., how much of this 'longer relationships suck' is actually explained by 'being old sucks') and another about comparing monogamous men's sex lives with what single men usually face in this respect.
Meanwhile, enjoying your tits and fucking is fun and refreshing, which lets you do more serious stuff, so it should be a win-win, really:)
Firstly the sample size is terrible: 680 males and 142 females
Thats not balanced at all, but lets just go with it for now.
From these graphs its pretty clear that women are not pulling their weight to make men satisfied or happy but men are doing sufficiently well at achieving it for their woman.
This does not surprise me with the high levels of selfish attitudes women have these days where they just think they need to look pretty and thats all they have to do. Where as men have to have every attribute under the sun, probably rarely get compliments and pay for all the dates, initiate all the sex etc. Its exhausting for men for little reward other than solving their loneliness most likely.
Then they wonder why men feel less fulfilled, watch more porn, desire other women and get bored of the relationship as time goes on. And even then its still women who end the relationships most of the time - most likely because the guy gives up but doesn't end the relationship because he would be lonely.
Everyone focussing on "men are cheaters, men are bad". Maybe women are just not good partners so men step out to get their needs met....
It's no surprise men cheat more, but the graphs also show men are less satisfied sexually than women, more men report their partner doesn't satisfy them over time, the rate of sex frequency decreases over time which is probably the biggest factor of the lot for men.
Another graph shows women feel more physically desired than men do by their partners, No wonder they want to cheat and watch porn.
Thinking about why guys might be more unhappy. they are more visually stimulated, so its easier to be tempted in other directions? I am also wondering how easy it is in reality to see your older wife just as pretty as the younger lady. I would say it pretty difficult turn of whatever switch in me that says the younger lady is prettier. so in comparison I am doomed to be 'unhappy' to some degree in that sense.
sure current culture has just made this worse with all the visual stimulation you can get easily, but still that inherent switch is still there IMO.
Have you researched the existing sex research literature? I would be really interested if someone could compare and contrast this with the existing landscape of sex research, given that you have a large data set which would probably be difficult for normal university researches to achieve.
There was a great book back I read a decade or more ago called What Do Women Want by Daniel Bergner that talked about a lot of research in to female sexuality that ran counter to our conventional narratives (e.g. women are more sexually promiscuous than society admits, desire sex more than expected) and I'm pretty sure the sex research that backed that didn't have 22k data points.
Can we get a Scott Alexander overview of the sex research landscape?! Anyway, cool article, I'm curious about the polyamorous version :D
would be great to control for the age a little, e.g. to qualify this: `At around 8-10 years, males satisfaction with their sex life drops to ‘neutral’, and after that they’re (on average) more likely to be dissatisfied than satisfied. By ~16 years on, on average they’re closer to disagreeing with the statement “My partner sexually fulfills me” than agreeing with it.`
I think the proper comparison is to see how satisfied or not men of similar ages are who have no relationship at all, and are single. We don't have that information.
I know plenty of single guys in their 40s and up who basically NEVER have sex...for months or years sometimes. Pretty sure they're not satisfied either.
Isn't it possible that satisfaction with your sex life just gets worse over time, for most people, after their 30s? Would that not be an unsurprising result? How many people even expect to still have sex after a certain age (55? 65? 75?). I would guess most of your respondents who have been relationships for more than 12 years are much older. And it is a very, very rare person indeed who thinks they are having hotter and more satisfying sex at 55 than at 30. I mean seriously, that's actually a ridiculous idea.
I would imagine if you polled people about their satisfaction with their financial lives, you would get almost opposite results, with older people and people in longer relationships being more satisfied than younger people and those in short relationships.
There's a time for everything.
Oh, and the question I've wondered about with all of this data is what's the correlation with how good looking respondents are on all of these? I thought I remembered you asking that question. Definitely would guess there's a strong correlation between being attractive and cheating.
My biggest thought here is that your 20% audience selection from porn is a little understated.
First, your close porn followers have continued following you for years after major porn activity, and stuck through your detailed discussions of sex work, invitations to kink parties/dates, etc.
Second, even if people don't know you from those sources originally, because your content is so sex focussed, it's almost like 80% of us know you from porn just based on the last few surveys.
While "everyone" uses porn, to engage on it in this level I would expect a higher level of focus than general population - we are the real porn experts at this point. And we real porn experts know about being poly and kinks and extramarital affairs.
I know this is the usual "not a random sample" issue, but it's still interesting.
So, in your other post, you are saying:
'Often when people ask why I’m popular, others respond, “tits.” And maybe this is partially true, but it immediately kicks the legs out from under the serious stuff I’ve done'
Not necessarily. At least among serious people, your serious stuff will be evaluated by its merits. Like, here you have a big relationships survey, and it's cool and serious. If you respond to the valid critical comments above with your reasoning or further analysis, this will be even cooler and more serious. For example, the one about the confounding by age (i.e., how much of this 'longer relationships suck' is actually explained by 'being old sucks') and another about comparing monogamous men's sex lives with what single men usually face in this respect.
Meanwhile, enjoying your tits and fucking is fun and refreshing, which lets you do more serious stuff, so it should be a win-win, really:)
Firstly the sample size is terrible: 680 males and 142 females
Thats not balanced at all, but lets just go with it for now.
From these graphs its pretty clear that women are not pulling their weight to make men satisfied or happy but men are doing sufficiently well at achieving it for their woman.
This does not surprise me with the high levels of selfish attitudes women have these days where they just think they need to look pretty and thats all they have to do. Where as men have to have every attribute under the sun, probably rarely get compliments and pay for all the dates, initiate all the sex etc. Its exhausting for men for little reward other than solving their loneliness most likely.
Then they wonder why men feel less fulfilled, watch more porn, desire other women and get bored of the relationship as time goes on. And even then its still women who end the relationships most of the time - most likely because the guy gives up but doesn't end the relationship because he would be lonely.
Everyone focussing on "men are cheaters, men are bad". Maybe women are just not good partners so men step out to get their needs met....
It's no surprise men cheat more, but the graphs also show men are less satisfied sexually than women, more men report their partner doesn't satisfy them over time, the rate of sex frequency decreases over time which is probably the biggest factor of the lot for men.
Another graph shows women feel more physically desired than men do by their partners, No wonder they want to cheat and watch porn.
Thinking about why guys might be more unhappy. they are more visually stimulated, so its easier to be tempted in other directions? I am also wondering how easy it is in reality to see your older wife just as pretty as the younger lady. I would say it pretty difficult turn of whatever switch in me that says the younger lady is prettier. so in comparison I am doomed to be 'unhappy' to some degree in that sense.
sure current culture has just made this worse with all the visual stimulation you can get easily, but still that inherent switch is still there IMO.
There's an old joke:
Women want everything from one man
Men want one thing from every woman
I wonder if we take this survey in Middle East or Africa would it yield closer results.
Have you researched the existing sex research literature? I would be really interested if someone could compare and contrast this with the existing landscape of sex research, given that you have a large data set which would probably be difficult for normal university researches to achieve.
There was a great book back I read a decade or more ago called What Do Women Want by Daniel Bergner that talked about a lot of research in to female sexuality that ran counter to our conventional narratives (e.g. women are more sexually promiscuous than society admits, desire sex more than expected) and I'm pretty sure the sex research that backed that didn't have 22k data points.
Can we get a Scott Alexander overview of the sex research landscape?! Anyway, cool article, I'm curious about the polyamorous version :D
would be great to control for the age a little, e.g. to qualify this: `At around 8-10 years, males satisfaction with their sex life drops to ‘neutral’, and after that they’re (on average) more likely to be dissatisfied than satisfied. By ~16 years on, on average they’re closer to disagreeing with the statement “My partner sexually fulfills me” than agreeing with it.`
Doing God's work spreading this truth.