PAST PERFORMANCE IS NO GUARANTEE OF FUTURE RESULTS:
● Shot:
All around the world, young people are having less sex than previous generations. At the forefront of the so-called global “sex recession” is Japan, which has one of the lowest fertility rates on Earth, and it could serve as a cautionary tale for the U.S. and other industrialized countries.
Shota Suzuki works as a building custodian in Tokyo. After work, he likes to hang out in an area known for anime and manga with his friends. But at 28, Suzuki has never had a romantic relationship, and he’s pessimistic that he ever will.
“Yes, I’m a virgin,” he told CBS News. “I would like to get married, but I can’t find a partner.”
Suzuki is far from a rare case. It’s not difficult to find other young adults, like 27-year-old Kakeru Nakamura, who are surprisingly candid about their sexual inexperience.
“My parents want me to hurry up and get married,” he said. “I tell them I’m too busy.”
A review of Japan’s National Fertility Survey reveals virginity is on the rise; one out of every 10 Japanese men in their 30s is still a virgin. That puts Japan’s virginity rate well ahead of that of other industrialized nations.
—“The cautionary tale of Japan’s ‘sex recession,’” CBS News, September 27th.
● Chaser:
In the decade leading up to the publication of The Population Bomb and the creation of ZPG in 1968, a range of non-fiction films and television broadcasts engaged with population. Millions had viewed CBS Reports’ Emmy-award winning “The Population Explosion,” a television documentary about India, in 1959. Canada’s National Film Board produced People by the Billions (1960) and Population Explosion (1967), while the Ford Foundation’s National Educational Television (NET, later replaced by PBS) broadcast a six-part series on The Population Problem in 1965. The Squeeze (1964), a short experimental film about overpopulation by time-lapse pioneer Hilary Harris, won a Golden Gate Award for best fiction at the San Francisco Film Festival. And most famously, the Population Council commissioned Walt Disney’s Family Planning (1967). Translated into over twenty languages, the ten-minute cartoon starring Donald Duck cost $300,000 to produce and was accompanied by supplementary filmstrips, slides, leaflets, comics, posters, and other materials.
In roughly the same period, fictionalized narratives about overpopulation and population control also flourished. A thriving subgenre of science fiction, subsequently dubbed demographic-dystopian, or “demodystopian,” was not only published in paperback, but also broadcast on radio and television. Following Malthusian episodes of radio’s Exploring Tomorrow (1958) and television’s ABC Stage 67 (1966) and Star Trek (1969), ABC Movie of the Week aired “The Last Child” on October 5, 1971, just three months before Z.P.G. opened nationwide. Set in New York “sometime in the not too distant future”, the made-for-TV movie follows a young couple’s attempt to save their unborn child from state-administered abortion by fleeing the overpopulated police state America has become to Canada, where population control laws are more lenient. The narrative structure of defiantly reproductive heroes on the run from draconian authorities as well as the conservative (pro-family, anti-abortion) subtext of “The Last Child” was soon echoed in Z.P.G., the first demodystopian film to be seen not on television, in the privacy of homes, but in cinemas across the nation. The name of the film, identical to that of Ehrlich’s organization, brought ZPG into direct conflict with Z.P.G.
—“Malthus at the Movies: Science, Cinema, and Activism around Z.P.G. and Soylent Green,” US National Library of Medicine National Institutes of Health, October 18, 2018.
Similarly, as lefty historian Douglas Brinkley noted in his 2012 biography of CBS’s longtime anchorman Walter Cronkite, Cronkite became obsessed with radical environmentalism right after the first manned moon landing in 1969 — which, curiously enough, was precisely when the Democratic Party became obsessed with radical environmentalism. As Brinkley wrote:
[N]ow that Neil Armstrong had walked on the Moon, Cronkite sensed that ecology would soon replace space exploration as the national obsession. CBS News producer Ron Bonn recalled precisely when Cronkite put the network on the front line of the fight. “It was New Year’s Day, 1970, and Walter walked into the Broadcast Center and said, ‘God damn it, we’ve got to get on this environmental story,’ ” Bonn recalled. “When Walter said ‘God damn it,’ things happened.” Cronkite pulled Bonn from nearly all other CBS duties for eight weeks so he could investigate environmental degradation. He wanted a whole new regular series on the CBS Evening News— inspired by Silent Spring, the philosophy of René Dubos, and those amazing photos of Earth taken by the Apollo 8 astronauts. The CBS Evening News segments were to be called “Can the World Be Saved?” “We wanted to grapple first with air pollution, the unbreathable air,” Bonn recalled. “But then we wanted to deal with the primary underlying problem, which was overpopulation.”
Finally, as Jazz Shaw writes at Hot Air on “the Sex Recession,” “There may well be other factors, too. We have teenagers running around the world convinced that the Earth is melting down and they’ll all be dead in 12 years. What are we doing in response to this mass paranoid hysteria? We’re handing out awards for best performance, that’s what. That’s not exactly an incentive to invest in the future, is it?”