Despite having been previously unheard of sexual freedoms, it appears that the modern-day generation is shunning sex, causing intimate bodily pleasures to be on the slide in a range of well-developed countries.
Japan, which has one of the lowest fertility rates in the world, has been reported to be leading in the worrying trend, with the country’s long working hours typically being blamed for it, as is the huge uptick in the number of robot users.
With as many as 300 robots for every 10,000 people, the Japanese are increasingly comfortable working alongside robots, with the trend having spread well beyond the workplace.
'Gatebox Fairy'
The number of sex robots, holographic partners, and home assistants has gone up more considerably in popularity in Japan than elsewhere, with the most widely reported holographic character to date being Azuma Hikary from Gatebox – a wildly popular digital assistant akin to Amazon’s Alexa that can provide company for users, fulfil “smart home” functions, and even texts the owner when feeling lonely.
The £2,000 fee covers access to news and weather updates , as well as effective control over home heating and lighting, while the “Gatebox fairy” herself is widely seen as eligible for serving as a female companion.
Akihiko Kondo, a 35-year-old Tokyo resident, appears to have long cashed in on the opportunity and has even married his hologram called Hatsune Miku.
In the US, the trend has likewise been there for quite a while, CNBC reported, adding that the “real threat to the US economy” may be that fewer and fewer Americans are in the mood for love.
Per a recent study, the “iFidelity Survey,” sponsored by The Wheatley Institution and the National Marriage Project, collected by YouGov in late December 2018, the current cohort of young adults (i.e. Millenials and iGen) are dating less, marrying less, and having sex less than older cohorts did.
A similar trend has made itself obvious in South Korea as well, The Japan Times posted, zeroing in on the nation’s radical feminist movement called 4B, from the “four nos”: no dating, no sex, no marriage and no child-rearing.
'Swiping' Culture Effects
Peter Ueda, from Tokyo University, is one of those who directly links the declining sexual activity, as well as prolonged virginity or even celibacy, to employment peculiarities in his country. He concludes that there could be different extremes in the way working commitments impact one’s sexual life:
“Compared to men who had a regular employment, those with part-time or temporary employment were four-times as likely to be heterosexually inexperienced in ages 25 to 39, and those who were unemployed were eight times more likely”, Ueda told CBS News, while another expert sex tech researcher Eleanor Hancock stressed to the Daily Star that this is also where the Tinder culture comes in, having lasting impact on users’ sexual potential.
“One thing I will say is that the ‘swiping’ culture definitely dilutes the potential for meaningful & emotional connections, because it becomes so easy just to ‘swipe away’ and dismiss people over their looks”, Hancock summed up her observations.
She is certain that by marrying bodily satisfaction with technology, humankind is likely to arrive at “something even bigger than the sex recession you can see now”.
The two-way current trend shows that while many people’s sexual life suffers from the harmful presence of gadgets in intimate spaces – something that perhaps no-one would deny – it is again technology that is expected to come to the rescue of human sensations as people “will soon be considering non-human life partners”, Dr David Levy predicts.
“The first marriage will be before, not after 2050”, he says, while Jenna Owsianik and Ross Dawson’s Future of Sex Report assumed that 10 young adults will have had sex with a humanoid robot by 2045.
