Sexual and Relationship Habits in Japan, the Netherlands and the US

I'm posting links to two recent articles on relationships and sex in Japan, the Netherlands and the US. The articles show how cultural attitudes to gender, work, family, and sex drive the behaviour of young people in surprisingly far-reaching ways that are experienced as internal motivation.

Japan: no sex for us thanks
The article about Japan, which appeared in the Guardian, claims that young people are choosing to remain single and not get into sexual or romantic relationships at all.

"A survey in 2011 found that 61% of unmarried men and 49% of women aged 18-34 were not in any kind of romantic relationship, a rise of almost 10% from five years earlier. Another study found that a third of people under 30 had never dated at all. (There are no figures for same-sex relationships.) Although there has long been a pragmatic separation of love and sex in Japan – a country mostly free of religious morals – sex fares no better. A survey earlier this year by the Japan Family Planning Association (JFPA) found that 45% of women aged 16-24 "were not interested in or despised sexual contact". More than a quarter of men felt the same way."

Wow, that's a lot of people choosing celibacy over coupling. The article suggests that major economic changes which have destroyed men's career security, as well as the recent earthquake and tsunami, have ruined peoples' sense of certainty. But it also blames ultra-conservative attitudes toward women, which make motherhood or career a strictly binary choice, and which project virginal chastity and lack of desire onto women.

"Both men and women say to me they don't see the point of love. They don't believe it can lead anywhere," says Aoyama. "Relationships have become too hard. Marriage has become a minefield of unattractive choices. Japanese men have become less career-driven, and less solvent, as lifetime job security has waned. Japanese women have become more independent and ambitious. Yet conservative attitudes in the home and workplace persist."

This article has been critiqued in Slate magazine for bias. Americans too, says the author, are in a relationship crisis. Though his figures seem less drastic than the ones quoted in the Guardian article, I agree. So let's take a look at the Netherlands, which reveals a much healthier, and happier, picture.

The Dutch: sex and love and family togetherness
In the article on the Dutch vs the Americans, based on a new book by Amy Schalet, an almost opposite picture emerges--at least in the Netherlands. The article starts with some solid statistics: "Teen birth rates are eight times higher in the U.S. than in Holland. Abortion rates are twice as high. The American AIDS rate is three times greater than that of the Dutch."

Why this shocking disparity?

For a start, Dutch parents have a relaxed, open attitude about sex, so that boyfriends and girlfriends stay over, and hang out in the family, so that teen sexual experience is embedded in relationship, and safety. In the culture, sex has not been decoupled from love and relationship. Hookups are not the norm; love is!

Birth control is readily available (free of religious overtones) for teens in the Netherlands, and sex education teaches about sex in the context of love--rather than stressing, as we do here, the dangers of dating, and the importance of abstinance. Holland is free of American cultural myths (which all too quickly become adopted as being reality) that men "do love to get sex" and that women "do sex to get love". (Remember that one? People have even quoted it as truth in my human development class!) As the article says,

"For boys, our [US] culture devalues their impulse to love. But research shows that in the U.S., boys are quite romantic. Other research finds that for girls, recognition of sexual desire and wishes is taboo, so they have fewer tools to assess what’s right for them. That makes things very difficult.

In the US, Christian dominance has constructed a view that morality has to go with strict religious belief. If you slip from virginal chastity, you're in the realm of sin. So we have constructed a view of sex that gives only two options: "either a very sensationalized unrealistic scoring type of mentality or no sex until marriage." And it's also one that condemns victims of sexual assault, or LGB teens, to an agony of shame.

But the secular Dutch view is that people are naturally cooperative and decent. They have a concept called gezelligheid, which means something like ‘cozy togetherness’ or ‘conviviality.’ This important concept means that across generations people spend time together, enjoying each other's company. The Dutch social policies help maintain that, with part-time work and child care made easy. The result is less alienation, and more relating.

Where would you rather be discovering your sexuality?

The Hidden Trauma of the Wars in Europe

The generation of my parents were children during World War II. It's that recent. And it's horrific. The Blitz, in UK, included 58 days of continuous bombing. Fifty eight days. And the nights. Continuous. Likewise, Dresden, in Germany, was almost completely destroyed in the carpet-bombing campaign by the Allies.

And yet.....NOBODY TALKS ABOUT THE TRAUMA. And this happened to people who are still alive today.*

And it's not only the Second World War. My grandfather was gassed and shell-shocked somewhere on the front line in France in the First World War, and was never the same again. But we don't talk about that either. Even though almost every village in the UK has a monument to the men who died, usually with over a dozen names--they put the men of one village into a platoon together, so when the platoon was wiped out, so were all the men of an entire community. Eleven million men died across Europe, and an entire generation of women grew up and died spinsters because of it.

The French, as a nation, talk endlessly about the Holocaust, trying to make sense of what happened, and what they did to contribute. In UK, the War (meaning the second one) is referred to as 'Britain's finest hour'. In Germany, the discourse is one of national shame. But there is no discourse that I know of about the post-traumatic effect of the wars on the general population throughout Europe.
No discourse about the PTSD. Nothing about the effect on our cultural and familial psyche of two hideous wars in 40 years. (It's alluded to when people write about the drive behind the European Union, but that's it.)

Is this because the thing is too big and extensive? Is it shame, that the flower of our culture led to this? Was it swept under the rug in the urgency of reconstruction? Was the Holocaust so hideous that no-one else's trauma seemed valid beside it?

And yet I see it in our familial and personal psyches all the time. When the first Gulf War started, women my age fought physically over storable food in the aisles of French supermarkets, which were emptied every day of flour, sugar, pasta and oil--that was the memory of near famine. When the Falklands war errupted, my mother switched into another personality, and the country was swept away by jingoism--that was the memory of the patriotism that kept them going through the war. When I hear sirens, my entire body floods with terror--that's the family memory of the Blitz, in which my father and his family were buried in rubble when a church collapsed on them in Coventry.

John Cleese made great hay out of "don't mention the war". But it's about time we began to mention the war.

It's why Angela Merkel, who keeps bailing out Europe, is loathed in the very countries she has saved, and pictured with a swastika. It's why Israel is caught in a terrible re-enactment of unfathomable trauma with the Palestinians. It's why I save jars, string, paper bags and left-overs--because my grannies, who lived through both wars, never threw a thing away. It's why when my dear German friend Bettina, her mother, and I talked about the war at her mother's house in Berlin last year, the air seemed to thicken around us.

There's a positive side to it too. As Tony Judt points out in his book 'Postwar', Europeans do not share the unlimited US optimism and belief in progress, because we know what collective shadow looks like. We don't trust our governments. We are less keen to go to war. The Germans have a an unparalleled anti-nuclear movement, I believe, because they have recently experienced utter devastation. The French have a law against 'non-assistance of persons in danger', and don't allow 'my boss told me to do it' as a defense under the law, because of the camps. When their government does something they don't like, they strike and take to the streets. Those Greek riots we keep seeing--that's Europeans, remembering the war.

*Since I wrote this blog post, I've become aware of an excellent book called 'Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II', by Keith Lowe. If you're interested in the effects of the war on the general population of Europe, this book is a great place to start.