Name: The Japanese Sex Drought.
Age: First floated in 2013.
Japanese Sex Drought. Didn’t I see them play the Other Stage at Glasto in the late 90s? Stop being flippant, this is a serious problem: Japanese couples aren’t having sex any more. A survey from the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) has found that 48.3% of Japanese married couples are in sexless marriages. That’s up from 31.9% when the survey started in 2004.
What is “sexless” exactly? It was defined as not having had sex for a month.
Only a month? Pff, if you’re watching a good box set, that can happen to even the friskiest. Is that why they aren’t having sex – the golden age of TV? No, there’s an interesting gender split in the reasons given. For men, the most common one was that their partner “doesn’t respond to my advances”; for women it was: “It’s too much hassle.” About 80% of men answered that they were interested in having sex, while about 40% of women answered that they were not interested.
Ouch. Yes, Kunio Kitamura, the head of the JFPA, commented: “This is a remarkable figure and could be regarded as a scream of misery from men.”
Perhaps, rather than screaming in misery, Japanese men need to ask themselves some hard questions? Possibly. Data shows Japanese men “do fewer hours of household chores and childcare than in any of the globe’s wealthiest nations”, which is not a very sexy state of affairs.
Indeed. I always say there’s nothing sexier than your partner whispering: “I’ve cleaned the bathroom, paid the council tax and there’s a pasta bake in the oven” in your ear. Or sexting you a picture of the emptied bin. Phwoargh. That’s enough about your kinks.
I feel like this isn’t the first time I’ve heard about Japanese people not having sex. Yes, the Japanese celibacy epidemic hit the news in 2013, and the BBC made a documentary about it. Then the 2017 results from the same survey prompted another wave of sex drought soul searching.
Should we be singling Japan out? Is the rest of the world hotter and heavier? Not necessarily. Data suggests people in the US, Germany, Australia and the UK are having less sex too. Even the French are experiencing “la sex recession”: this year a survey showed that the proportion of people who had had sex in the past 12 months was at its lowest level in 50 years.
Sacre bleu! What’s wrong with us all? Oh, I don’t know, the psychological aftershocks of a global pandemic, increasingly isolated lives mediated through screens, declining disposable income, the smorgasbord of existential threats facing life on Earth?
Nah, I still think it’s too much good telly. You might be right. That new Shôgun adaptation is better than sex.
Do say: “Shall we have sex?”
Don’t say: “No.”
