I am going to present numerous lines of evidence against the 'CCC' meme. I'm sure I don't have to explain the narrative. It almost seems like everything ultimately centers around it when it comes to pill discourse these days. With how trendy it has become you'd think it was well-supported by evidence, but as you'll see this doesn't seem to be the case. Let's see if we can lay it to rest for good.

Below is data pertaining to the lifetime number of opposite-sex partners among women aged 18-29 from the nationally representative US survey called the National Survey for Family Growth:

NSFG 2002 2006-10 2011-13 2013-15 2015-17 2017-19
Median 3 3 3 3 3 3
Mean 4.8 5.1 5.5 4.9 5 5.4
80th Percentile 7 7 8 7 8 8
95th Percentile 17 15 15 12 15 16

What we see is that whether you go by the median, the mean, or the 80th percentile, the numbers remain remarkably stable across the years. Even the more promiscuous women don't appear to be becoming any more promiscuous than they were 20 years ago. So it seems like claims of wildly escalating female promiscuity is highly overblown.

It's still possible that this sex is occurring with a smaller concentration of men though, so is there a gap in sexual activity among young men & women then?

Much was made of the 2018 Washington post graph sourcing the General Social Survey. It appeared that there was a spike in sexlessness which was uniquely driven by the male side. The subsequent survey however, which showed an apparent reversal of the trend for men and a sharp increase for women, received far less attention. No alarmist media headlines about the 'rise of female sexlessness' that's for sure. Now a fair criticism would be that covid may have been a confounding factor, and women are known to be more risk averse after all. It's not clear how this would explain the drop for men however. I heard it said that we should wait till the next one to draw any inferences. Well it turns out there has been another GSS survey conducted in 2022, showing a further drop for men and a massive plummet in sexlessness for women:

GSS 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2021 2022
18-29 Men 16.1% 12% 16.1% 11.6% 14.3% 12.9% 19.4% 17.1% 22% 25.3% 19.2% 11.3%
18-29 Women 11.2% 9.2% 13.6% 15.6% 8.1% 13.9% 11.4% 13.4% 18.9% 14.6% 30% 10.8%

(using the WTSSPS weight to make the previous results consistent with 2021/22)

It's clear that the GSS isn't the most reliable source for this kind of data, it's highly noisy owing to its limited sample size. It seems overall that while there has likely been an increase in sexlessness among young people in the past decade relative to the one preceding it, it may not be as gender-specific as has been typically claimed, and it may have been slightly exaggerated on top of that.

I'm going to return to the NSFG now since it boasts a much higher sample size, about 10x higher among 18-29s.

Here is the data on sexlessness in the past year among heterosexual men & women aged 18-19:

NSFG 2011-13 2013-15 2015-17 2017-19
Men 19.2% 18.5% 21.8% 22.8%
Women 18.1% 18.3% 17.8% 21.9%

So not only is the rise less pronounced than in the GSS data, there's also no evidence here for a disproportionately male-driven trend. Once again I have to stress how the sample size here is much greater than the GSS. While for each GSS year the sample size for 18-29 men is about 170 on average, for an NSFG survey cycle it is about 1,700. This means we should put a lot more stock in these results.

If you were wondering about the virginity rates:

NSFG 2011-13 2013-15 2015-17 2017-19
Men 13.1% 11.2% 13.8% 15.2%
Women 12.6% 12.8% 13.5% 15.5%

So no evidence for a male-driven trend here either, and no '1 in 3 young men' as has been shouted from the rooftops for the past 5 years. Not only was the rate in the 2018 male GSS data inflated by noise, the proxy the WaPo graph used was 'number of opposite-sex partners since turning 18, including the past year'. This is a flawed proxy for two reasons. One is that sex partners encountered before turning 18 may not be captured, and another is that they didn't control for sexuality, meaning gay men were inflating the rate further as most of them hadn't had sex with a female partner. Another thing worth considering is that the virginity rate drops below 5% for men between the ages of 25 and 30.

There is also data from the CDC's Youth Risk Behaviour Survey showing that male and female high schoolers' virginity has gone up basically in tandem, with boys' rising from 51% in 2011 to 71% in 2021, and girls' rising from 54% to 69%, and there is also data from other countries showing a highly balanced rate of men and women being sexually active, such as the German Health and Sexuality Survey (2018-2019), which found 64.7% of 18-25 men and 68.8% of 18-25 women, and 79.4% of 26-35 men and 80.7% of 26-35 women had had sex in the past month.

What about casual sex though, surely disproportionately more women engage in that right? Surely the 'chadopoly' at least applies there...

Why Are Fewer Young Adults Having Casual Sex?, South & Lei, 2021, found from data from the Panel Study of Income Dynamics Transition into Adulthood Supplement that in 2017, 24% of men and 22% of women reported having casual sex in the past month, down from 38% and 31% respectively.

"Nearly half of married men (48 percent) and women (47 percent) say they had sex in the past week. In contrast, fewer than one in 10 single men (9 percent) and single women (5 percent) say they had sex in the past seven days. Roughly four in 10 single men (38 percent) and single women (38 percent) report that they have never had sex."

https://www.americansurveycenter.org/research/march-2022-aps/

These results are from the Swiss National Survey, with men and women having a mean age of 26:

Lifetime Casual Sex Partners Male Female Casual Sex Partners In Past Month Male Female
None 24.8% 29% None 72.7% 75.8%
1 14% 14.4% 1 19.1% 20.2%
2-3 24.2% 24% 2-3 6% 3.6%
4-7 17.5% 16.8% 4-7 1.7% 0.3%
8-10 5.1% 6.4% 8-10 0.2% <0.1%
>10 14.4% 9.4% >10 0.3% <0.1%

So it doesn't look like it's the case here either.

Now for the claim that the 'top 20%', 'top 10%', or 'top 5%' depending on the mood, are racking up more sex partners than ever before, and this is typically said to be facilitated by dating apps (which will be covered soon).

This is also possible to test using survey data. Let's see how many more partners 'chad' is enjoying lately relative to a decade or two ago by analyzing the top 80th and 95th percentile in lifetime female sex partners in the NSFG data, again among 18-29 men:

NSFG 2002 2006-10 2011-13 2013-15 2015-17 2017-19
Top 80th Percentile 10 11 12 11 10 10
Top 95th Percentile 26 30 38 30 30 25

Huh, weird. Looks like if anything 'chad' has been slacking as of late.

There is a study which looked at the rates from 2002 and 2011-13 and drew conclusions from that, but it looks like if we take the subsequent surveys into account there doesn't seem to be an increasing skew.

For good measure here is what the GSS data says, increasing the age range to 18-35 due to sample size limitations:

GSS 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018 2021 2022
Top 80th Percentile 12 13 15 12 12 15 10 13 12 10 10 7
Top 95th Percentile 30 40 35 40 50 35 45 36 35 25 50 23

With the exception of a few blips like the top 95th percentile in 2021, it looks like this data also shows a downward trend for 'chad'.

But what about dating apps though, don't they clearly show that 'chad' gets all the girls? This has likely been the largest factor in the rise of the 'chadopoly' meme, but I'll argue that it's based on false extrapolations.

The first thing is to consider that at any one time at least 3x as many more men are using it, or even more in some places. I won't bother fetching sources for this as it's not hard to find and should be widely recognized by now. This is obviously going to heavily affect swiping dynamics. They won't become perfectly attuned to the ratio though, many men will go from being somewhat selective to not selective at all, as they figure a shoot first and ask questions later approach is more time efficient. Women will then become even more selective due to so many of their swipes leading to matches, potentially creating a vicious cycle.

Another thing is that over twice as many men report seeking casual hookups through dating apps, consistent with the well established sex gap in 'sociosexuality'.and men are known for dropping their standards in this context, presumably because it was low investment with high potential payoff in evolutionary history.

It's odd that we never see any mention of actual outcome related data in the discourse surrounding these apps. It's not like it's not out there. Here is what it says:

Source Men Women Outcome Sample Size (M) Sample Size (F)
How Many Millennials Find Someone On Tinder 21.3% (Millennials) 19.8% (Millennials) Met up with someone through Tinder
2,218 1,638
Sexual Health In The Netherlands, 2017
15% (Ages 18-24)
13% (Ages 18-24)
Been on a date through online dating
4,934 8,216
9% (Ages 18-24)
7% (Ages 18-24)
Had sex through online dating
10% (Ages 25-39)
7% (Ages 25-39)
Been on a date through online dating 427 687
7% (Ages 25-39)
4% (Ages 25-39)
Had sex through online dating
Sumter et al., 2017
44.4%
44.1%
Been on a Tinder date (Of those who've used it), M Age = 23.7
72 68
28.8%
7.6%
Hooked up through Tinder (Of those who've used it), M Age = 23.7
73 66
Swiss National Survey, 2017
35.2% (M Age = 26.4)
22.5% (M Age = 26.3)
Had sex through the internet
2,864 2,746
Morning Consult, 2018
6.2%
2.2%
Hooked up through online dating
1,061 1,143
8.7%
9.5%
Been on one or more dates through online dating
NSFG, 2017-19
8.6% (Ages 18-29, Heterosexual)
7.4% (Ages 18-29, Heterosexual)
Had sex in the past year with someone met through online dating
1,711 1,761
Rosenfeld, 2018 (HCMST, 2017)
1.4% (Heterosexual)
1.3% (Heterosexual)
Met someone off a dating app for 'dating, romance, or sex in the past year'

|1,405|1,438| |Chinese Private Life Survey, 2020 |19.3% (Ages 18-25) |17.2% (Ages 18-25) |Hooked up through the internet |2,253 (both)|| |Grøntvedt et al., 2020 |17.8% (M Age = 21.9) |21.6% (M Age = 21.6) |Hooked up through Tinder (Of those who've used it) |101|168| ||48.5% |57.6% |Met up with someone through Tinder (Of those who've used it) ||| |YouGov, 2021 |16% |13% |Been on one date through online dating |613|647| ||14%|9%|Been on more than one date through online dating ||| |Poerwandari & Berliana, 2022 |49.4% (Ages 18-30) |42% (Ages 18-30) |Had sex through online dating (Of those who've used it) |158|471|

So when when we look at the actual outcomes we see a much more balanced picture than what we get from narrowly focusing on swipe ratios.

Of course the now infamous Pew survey has since been frequently cited as a demonstration of the emergence of 'chad harems'. It'll be argued that the extra women 'feel' like they're in a relationship with a man who's only stringing them along along with other women, or who's 'spinning plates'.

There are a few issues with this. Here are what some other data sources found, with the gaps shown on the rows beneath women:

American Perspectives Survey (2020) Married Cohabiting Non-cohabiting Single
18-29 Men 13% 15% 11% 59%
18-29 Women 24% 26% 9% 38%
American Perspectives Survey (2022) -11% -11% -2% 21%
18-29 Men 17% 14% 10% 57%
18-29 Women 22% 19% 13% 45%
GSS 2021 -5% -5% -3% 12%
18-29 Men 15% 15% 6% 64%
18-29 Women 14% 21% 12% 52%
GSS 2022 1% -6% -6% 12%
18-29 Men 18% 13% 9% 59%
18-29 Women 19% 18% 14% 49%
Pew 2022 Survey (earlier in the year) -1% -5% -5% 10%
18-29 Men 16% 9% 18% 57%
18-29 Women 21% 26% 22% 31%
-6% -18% -4% 26%

The first is that as we can see this 29% gap isn't replicated in other sources, despite them having comparable sample sizes. Many of the panelists from the other Pew survey will have carried over onto the next survey which is why the rate is almost as high. The gaps these other sources give us in 2022 are 10% and 12%. How likely is it that it's actually close to 3x higher? I don't know what's going on with the Pew survey, maybe it was just a chance event. They happen, and when they do they're a lot more likely to make media headlines than these other more mundane results.

The next is that the relationship gap actually primarily exists within the contexts of cohabitation and marriage, leaving little room for the secrecy that's typically implied by the 'spinning plates' narrative. The average gap for non-cohabiting relationships is only 4%, which is also in line with the Pew result. These women are not marrying the same guy, I hope I don't need to remind people that polygamy is illegal in the US, and it's unlikely that a significant number are in polyamorous relationships with 'chad' in the same household as other women. There is also data on this but this should also go without saying.

Now of course the main critique of this data will be that it relies on self-reports.

First off, I'll mention the bogus pipeline procedure whereby participants answer sex related questions while hooked up to a (fake) lie detector. The answers received from this are remarkably close to those received from anonymous conditions:

Sex differences were largest in the non-anonymous condition (d = .71). Crucially, the size of the sex difference remained stable across the anonymous (d = .37) and lie detector conditions (d = .36). This result confirms responses to sex surveys under anonymous conditions are as valid as when administered under a lie detector condition. So, sex differences in sexual attitudes do not "disappear" from view when men and women are presumably more likely to tell the truth. They are the same as when people are given true feelings of anonymity when completing sex surveys (which most sex researchers know to do; Robertson et al., 2017).

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/sexual-personalities/201707/can-we-trust-what-men-and-women-reveal-sex-surveys

Second, we don't have to rely on self-reports to test the narrative. We also have STDs. It's pretty hard to 'lie' about those, unless the CDC is fudging the numbers.

Page 11: Chlamydia

While this one is higher overall for women, it's likely due to higher susceptibility/being screened more frequently alongside pap smears. Nonetheless the rate is not rising disproportionately among women.

Page 34: Gonorrhea

Very consistently similar rates for both heterosexual men & women, women's rate isn't rising disproportionately.

Page 50: Primary and Secondary Syphilis

Same as above.

https://www.cdc.gov/std/statistics/2019/std-surveillance-2019.pdf

How can STD rates be on the rise if promiscuity isn't also you may ask? Probably because while less sex is occurring, it's being done in an increasingly unsafe manner:

The CDC’s study on STD rates in the United States in 2017 will be published in full this fall, at which time more details, such as demographic information about who is most affected, will be available. But when I asked Gail Bolan, the director of the CDC’s Division of STD Prevention, how exactly these two trends in sexual behavior were happening at once, she explained that the sexual behaviors known to be contributing to widespread STD transmission have almost nothing to do with how much sex people are having—rather, it’s riskier sex that’s being had.

Two factors Bolan identifies as potentially contributing to the record-high rates of reported STDs are a rise in condom-less sex and a rise in high-risk sexual behaviors associated with opioid use and addiction.

https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/2018/08/why-are-stds-on-the-rise-if-people-are-having-less-sex/568909/

Finally, it's not clear to me why one would even expect this to occur. I think it may be at least partly due to the tendency to project male sexuality onto women. In reality they are far less interested in sex for the sake of it relative to men. Can you blame them when they only infrequently orgasm from casual hook ups?:

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0003122412445802

On the other hand they're almost as likely to orgasm as men are when sex is had in the context of a committed relationship. Seems like it goes against the idea that they're only aroused by 'chad', if you assume the casual hookup partners are a lot more physically attractive than the so-called 'beta providers' they're in relationships with.

All in all, while it seems likely there is something at least approaching a 'sex recession' under way, the cause doesn't seem to be women being increasingly monopolized by the chad bogeyman.

Some researchers have suggested that a trend in less risk taking behaviour such as alcohol consumption, as well as delayed adolescence, i.e. staying at home longer, may be important factors.

Another is likely the simple fact that people are socializing in person a lot less than they used to and are retreating to an online world of social media, video games, etc. instead of making real world connections.

If hypergamy is a factor, it's more likely to be in the form of women going their own way as they can't find a guy that meets their expectations. Female singleness rates have actually risen at comparable rates according to various data sources.

Of course I'm always open to arguments, but so far all I've seen in response to this data is to claim everyone's lying (which doesn't seem like it could explain much in the way of trends unless you also assume there's also a trend in these lying patterns, and which I think I've addressed adequately), an attempt to concoct a conspiracy theory: 'they're fudging the numbers to prevent us from revolting!', or just an outright dismissal of empiricism: 'we know what's going on, stop trying to overcomplicate things bro'.