ROSS POMEROY FROM REAL CLEAR SCIENCE
Much ado has been made about America’s worsening sex drought. But America’s dry spell is nowhere near as severe as Japan’s. There, the sexual landscape has been parched for some time. In a paper published earlier this month to the Journal of Sex Research, a team of scientists extensively surveyed the country’s burgeoning sex desert and attempted to explain it.
In Japan, the culture of sex is fascinating. “Sexual behaviors are often described as a puzzling and contradictory mix of permissiveness and expectations of discretion,” the researchers wrote. The upper levels of Tokyo’s signature multi-level department stores are often stocked with all sorts of “naughty” paraphernalia – video games, toys, dolls, art, and tools that would make anyone blush. Sex work is also legal in pretty much all forms apart from penetrative intercourse. Premarital sex is generally accepted. At the same time, hormonal contraception is rarely used and young people often forgo romantic pursuits until they attain socioeconomic success.
This cultural milieu has produced a fertility rate that has been below replacement (2.1 births per woman) for almost four decades. It reached a new nadir at 1.15 in 2024. For comparison, the fertility rate in the U.S. is 1.6 births per woman.
Driving Japan’s record low fertility is rising sexlessness.
“Findings indicated that sexual inexperience had increased during the past decades such that around half of the Japanese population remained sexually inexperienced into their mid-twenties and approximately 10% of the individuals had no sexual experience when reaching their 30s,” the researchers reported.
Sexual inactivity, defined as not having sex in the past year, has also risen this century.
“The latest available estimates from national probability surveys indicated that by the mid-2010s, around half of those in their early 20s and a fifth to a third of those in their late 20s to 30s were sexually inactive,” the researchers found.
Even married couples in Japan are having less sex.
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