So, US Milennials Are Going the Way of Japan's Lost Generation

You can knock sex for this or that, but you can't deny that the sex drive is strongly associated with vigor, drive, ambition, and general vitality.

So it doesn't really surprise me that Japan's economy went into the crapper about the same time that 30% of its young men decided they would rather collect Pokemon whatevers (I have no idea what you'd collect with Pokemon but I assume there's something to collect) and go to Cuddle Parties where they don't have sex and cuddle with whatever gender that looks snuggly.

And so here is your future, America.

They’re pioneers of an emerging sexual identity, one with its own nomenclature and subcategories of romance and desire, all revolving around the novel concept that having little to no interest in sex is itself a valid sexual orientation. Rae tells me she’s an aromantic asexual, Sean identifies as a heteroromantic demisexual, and Genevieve sees herself as a panromantic gray-asexual.

Not sure what these terms mean? You’re not alone. The definitions are still in flux, but most people who describe themselves as demisexual say they only rarely feel desire, and only in the context of a close relationship. Gray-­asexuals (or gray-aces) roam the gray area between absolute asexuality and a more typical level of interest. Then there are the host of qualifiers that describe how much romantic attraction you might feel toward other people: Genevieve says she could theoretically develop a nonsexual crush on just about any type of person, so she is "panromantic"; Sean is drawn to women, so he calls himself "heteroromantic."

...

Friends and family often find such identities flat-out strange and assume that it's all some kind of postadolescent phase or that something is seriously wrong. They might wonder if it’s really just a stop on the way to homosexuality or maybe the result of trauma or a hormone imbalance. But to those who embrace this approach to sex, it's just how they are...

The conventional wisdom today is that lust and gratification are natural and healthy, a nonnegotiable aspect of being human. We presume that freedom of sexuality is a fundamental human right. But the idea of freedom from sexuality is still radical. It is an all-new front of the sexual revolution.

There's nothing new about this at all. It's called 'marriage."

Haha, beat you to the hacky joke, hacky joke-tellers.

posted by Ace at 01:23 PM

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