Japanese People Reaching Their 30s Are Still A Virgin
So in the age of Tinder and other internet dating sites, you wouldn’t expect someone to be a virgin at 30 with our latest generation of teenagers and twenty-somethings seen as being more sexually active than ever before, but the data tells a different story. The Millennial demographic has been shown in several studies to be having sex less often, and with fewer partners, than their Generation X or Baby Boomer counterparts – and in Japan, the problem is manifesting itself as a genuine population crisis.
No i know this isn’t a normal post for us but with around a third of the population being over the age of 60, Japan has the world’s highest proportion of elderly citizens, and that’s in part due to a low rate of fertility. By the year 2035, it’s projected that around one in four people in Japan will not marry during their childbearing years, and the population has actually been declining since the year 2011. Now, a new study surveying Japanese men entering their 30s found a staggering number of them were still virgins. We need to be having more Sex!
The study, conducted by the National Institute of Population and Social Security Research, took data from 2,706 men and 2,570 women between the ages of 18 and 32. The results of this study, however, will be worrying for the Japanese government officials hoping to oversee a population boom. The study found that 70 per cent of unmarried men and 60 per cent of unmarried women are currently single, and worryingly, a large number of those singletons had been single throughout their lives. Around 42 per cent of men and 44.2 per cent of women in that age group – expected to be peak childbearing years – are yet to have sex, and that number is up significantly from seven years ago, with 36.2 per cent of men and 38.7 per cent of women admitting they were virgins back in 2010.
There are many factors leading to a sexlessness epidemic in modern Japan, Kyoto University of Foreign Studies’ Public Diplomacy Professor Nancy Snow suspects that changing social and economic norms may be affecting the chances of coupling.
In the past, Japanese women were expected to stay at home to take care of the kids, but more professional women are now taking on a career of their own.
“Men are making about a third to half of what they used to make during Japan’s economic boom years in the 1980s. Some men’s sense of self is tied to their salary and they feel threatened by women who are empowering themselves. While men are going from a cradle to grave trajectory, there are a lot of professional women with disposable incomes, who think that marriage might not just be worth it.”
According to one of the surveyed women who was asked why so many of her age group were single, many men in Japan “cannot be bothered” to go on dates. 26-year-old comedian Ano Matsui backed up this notion, noting that there are a lot of men who find women “scary”.
“I don’t have self-confidence. I was never popular among the girls. Once I asked a girl out but she said no. That traumatised me. There are a lot of men like me who find women scary. We are afraid of being rejected. So we spend time doing hobbies like animation. I hate myself, but there is nothing I can do about it.”
It’s an emerging problem that’s happening around the world, but as the nation of Japan attempts to manage a population decline. So come on guys and girl under 30, lets make babies!!
