Why is there such a horrible epidemic of loneliness among young adults right now? Why are so few of them finding partners and having sex?
The simple explanation is that overall young people are more prudish and so overall they are having much less sex.
This alone is an excellent reason to fight tooth and nail against the Puritan Revival. The Sexual Revolution didn't happen because everything was peachy keen. Having a Sexual Counter-Revolution in the 2020s will cause a lot of pain in future decades.
Why do today's Neo-Puritan attitudes have more severe impact on men than on women? (as seen in the statistics showing that young men are leading the lonely and sexless trend among young Millennials and Zoomers)
The explanation is pretty simple. Most women prefer partners who are 3 to 10 years older than them. This is usually fine, because men don't seem to have a problem with women 3 to 10 years younger than them. When I was in high school it was common for juniors and seniors to date freshmen or sophomores. The older partner was always male.
(For simplicity I divide young adults into 3 age groups: 14-18, 19-24, and 25-30)
Young women aged 14-18 being romantically involved with young men aged 19-24 was extremely common throughout human history. Does that mean that young women aged 19-24 were lonely and celibate? Nope. They had partners aged 25-30. Even today women aged 19-24 are allowed to boink men who are 25-30. but men who are 19-24 are now strictly banned from becoming romantically involved with the group who they traditionally and historically most often love.
This is the main reason the cultural shift has impacted young men more than young women.
OG Puritans were virulently opposed to lust, frivolity, fornication of any kind. Oral, anal, group or anything homosexual was unthinkable to them. Masturbation was vociferously discouraged.
Neo-Puritanism has no problem with porn, gay, trans, or any of a broad spectrum of kinky behavior. But the Neo-Puritans are total fucking Prude-Freaks about age. Gens Y and Z talk about age gap sex the way the OG Puritans talked about bestiality. They are completely disgusted, horrified even.
How on Earth did this bizarre new taboo rise from nowhere?
Stranger Danger was a mass hysteria from the 80s than never went away. It just morphed into Sex Predator Panic which came to include Grooming Terror. Then it merged with a runaway MeToo movement and any imagined "power imbalance" suddenly caused rape and trauma on a galactic scale.
We stopped thinking rationally and became consumed by fear. This forced us to try to protect anyone who could even remotely be considered "vulnerable"
In this atmosphere we not only stopped believing that teens are young adults perfectly capable of running their own sex lives. We also started to believe that men are predators, women are victims, and age is a kind of power which is used for sexual evil.
So if a woman aged 19-24 breaks some norms and has sex that her Neo-Puritan society frowns on, she might get slut-shammed. But a man that age doing the same thing is likely to get violence, death threats, or a prison term.
The main reason that men aged 19-24 are lonely and sexless is that we reclassified teenagers. About 20 years ago we stopped recognizing the young adult status of post-pubescent 14 to 18-year-olds and we, absurdly, started to believe that they are children.
This new paradigm is wreaking havoc throughout our society. It's time to stop that shit.
If you want to say "Japan is a quirky outlier" that's fine. but that's also a good reason why it's irrelevant to this discussion.
Strict social norms which inhibit, distort, and repress natural healthy sexual expression (call it Puritanism, or give it any other name you like) will cause large numbers of people to be sexually unfulfilled, lonely, and depressed.
My original post is a comparison of the US today and the US 40 years ago. That is within living memory and we have tons of good statistics from the entire period. The point I made is solid and obvious. Vague and inaccurate notions about other countries make no difference.
I edited the title of my post to make clear that it is about US culture, and makes no claims about various norms around the world.
Also, unlike the original Puritans, Neo-Puritanism doesn't have much to do with Christianity. There are atheist feminists who are extremely sex-negative and definitely want to punish the majority of men for wanting sex too much. I also know two queer men who support trans causes and all sorts of bizarre kinks. One of them is Jewish and the other has no religion, but they are vociferously opposed to any sex that even remotely might have a hint of power imbalance between the partners. "What?!? She has a job, but he's unemployed?!? That's rape!!" Those are Neo-Puritans.
That actually quells the gist of my protests, thank you for clarifying.