¿Crisis erótica en Japón?

INFORME | ABSTINENCIA A LA JAPONESA
Crisis sexual en el país del sol naciente
Yasuyo, ama de casa, lleva ocho años sin practicar sexo. Ryotaro, comerciante, dos… Sólo el 34% de los japoneses lo hace una vez por semana, por un 72% de los españoles. La crisis sexual está hundiendo aún más la alicaída natalidad de los nipones
JUNKO TAKAHASHI desde Tokyo

Los japoneses son un pueblo orgulloso. Pero su vanidad se descoyunta cada vez que se publican encuestas sobre sexo. En la nación con menos huelgas del mundo, la gente sólo se abstiene del deber conyugal.

El síntoma más llamativo de esta crisis del sexo son los matrimonios asexuados. Ryotaro Kono, de 39 años, tiene varias empresas de alimentación en Tokio y todavía se acuerda de la última vez que se acostó con su mujer. Fue hace dos años. Ni siquiera le parece demasiado. “Antes de esa vez, esperé otros ocho años”, asegura Kono, casado desde hace tres lustros y con una hija pequeña de 10 años.

El alejamiento llegó al poco de haberse casado, debido al exceso de trabajo. Al principio, su mujer se quejaba de la falta de actividad en la cama, pero en cuanto tuvo el primer bebé, fue ella la que, siguiendo la tradición nipona, dejó de ver a su marido como un compañero de juegos. Así llegaron al acuerdo actual: no importa lo que se quieran, y aseguran que es mucho. En adelante, nada de sexo. “Me da pereza hacer el amor. Además, mi esposa es mi familia, y siento vergüenza de comunicarme sexualmente con ella” explica Kono a Crónica.

Por extraño que parezca, el caso de esta pareja no tiene nada de inusual en el Japón de hoy. “Entre nuestros clientes que quieren construir casas nuevas, la demanda de alcobas separadas está aumentando”, dice Shuichiro Takeshima, empleado de una firma constructora.

Mujeres solteras felices

Single and happy: it’s the freemales

Women are increasingly rejecting a desperate, Bridget Jones-like search for a perfect partner, preferring instead to enjoy their single status and refusing to compromise by settling for ‘Mr Mediocre’.
Caroline Davies
Sunday April 13, 2008

Observer
They are successful, spirited and single and their growing numbers are contributing to a major change in the make-up of the traditional British household.

‘Freemales’ - manless women who are happy to remain so for the present at least - are now a force to be reckoned with and are overturning the dated Bridget Jones image of the lonely woman staring despondently at an empty Chardonnay bottle. They are too busy living life to the full to make time for ‘Mr Mediocre’ and the last thing on their minds is, ‘Will I find Mr Right today?’ Instead, they are juggling careers with busy social lives and if they happen to bump into him, all well and good, but they are not going hunting.

A new report demonstrates we are now seeing the lowest marriage rates on record and more ‘freemales’ living alone. Released last week by the Office for National Statistics, it shows that the number of women living alone aged between 25 and 44 - the age when traditionally they would be married and having families - has doubled in the past two decades. The same report states that more than two-thirds of people questioned in a recent survey believed they did not need a partner to enjoy a happy and fulfilled life.

The trend towards people living alone looks set to continue partly due to an ageing population, with more people over 65 home alone, but also because of a rise in the number of divorces, with fewer women remarrying or cohabiting, and an increase in the number of young people living singly.

Efectos de los azotes infantiles en la vida erótica

Study: Spanking children affects their sex lives as adults
By Associated Press  |   Friday, February 29, 2008
DURHAM, N.H. - New research by a University of New Hampshire domestic abuse expert says spanking children affects their sex lives as adults.

Professor Murray Straus concludes that children who are spanked are more likely as adults to coerce partners to have sex, to have unprotected sex and to have masochistic sex.

Other studies have shown the link between spanking and physical violence, but Straus said his research is the first to show a link between corporal punishment and sexual behavior.

“My underlying motive was to bring this to the attention of parents and of more people,” Straus said, “in the hope it will help continue the decrease in the use of corporal punishment.”

Straus, co-director of UNH’s Family Research Laboratory, conducted a study in the mid-1990s in which he asked 207 students at three colleges whether they’d ever been aroused by masochistic sex. He also asked them if they’d been spanked as children. He found that students who were spanked were nearly twice as likely to like masochistic sex.

He has bundled that study with three new ones that explore the connections between corporal punishment, coerced sex and risky sex. He presented all four studies this week at the American Psychological Association’s Summit on Violence and Abuse in Relationships in Bethesda, Md.

Abortos en 2006

El aborto se dispara

Una de cada 100 españolas interrumpe su embarazo - Fracasa la formación sexual

EMILIO DE BENITO / MÓNICA C. BELAZA
EL PAÍS  -  Sociedad - 04-01-2008

Una de cada 100 mujeres de 15 a 44 años (el periodo considerado fértil) aborta en España cada año. La cifra no deja de crecer desde la despenalización del aborto en 1985. Casi el 40% son menores de 25 años -y el 14% no llegan a los 19-. Cada vez se interrumpen más embarazos y a una edad más temprana, según los datos de 2006 hechos públicos ayer por el Ministerio de Sanidad en su web. Las interrupciones del embarazo se han duplicado en los últimos 10 años. ¿Se usa el aborto como un método anticonceptivo más? ¿Se ha perdido el miedo a abortar? ¿Por qué los jóvenes de la sociedad de la información no usan anticonceptivos? “Un aborto es un fracaso educativo y asistencial”, señala Guillermo González, presidente de la Federación de Asociaciones de Planificación Familiar. “Pero también hay que tener en cuenta que ahora los jóvenes tienen más relaciones sexuales y que las mujeres han asumido su derecho a interrumpir un embarazo cuando no se ven capaces de afrontarlo. Y lo hacen. Aunque ahora precisamente estamos viviendo una campaña que puede volver a instalar el miedo de 20 años atrás”.
Las cifras del ministerio llegan en un momento de especial beligerancia en contra del aborto. Con médicos y enfermeras en prisión preventiva por unos presuntos abortos ilegales realizados en Barcelona a mujeres en avanzado estado de gestación y con una fuerte campaña de grupos antiabortistas contra las clínicas que llevan a cabo interrupciones de embarazos.

Volver al mercado

Volver al mercado

Luz Sánchez-Mellado
EL PAIS SEMANAL - 23-12-2007

“Separado recientemente con buena presencia y máxima seriedad se ofrece para iniciar una nueva relación”. El anuncio pregona en la radio la semana de Citroën Eurocasión. Alude a la pasión que unía al propietario con su coche. Tanta, que les llevó a fundar un feliz matrimonio, pero que, una vez extinta, supuso la separación de la pareja, cuyos miembros, libres de nuevo, vuelven al mercado… de segunda mano. A los vehículos usados se les suele dar un repaso antes de volver a ponerlos en circulación. Las millas del cuentakilómetros y el desgaste del motor no se borran, pero una mano de chapa y pintura aumenta sus opciones. El símil no es muy delicado, pero sí gráfico. Los publicistas están al cabo de la calle.
Bárbara está en camilla, a punto de entrar en un quirófano de la clínica Ruber Internacional de Madrid. Se va a someter a una liposucción de abdomen, muslos y caderas bajo anestesia general. Un paño le cubre los pechos, sobre los que aún destacan las cicatrices de la elevación de mamas que le practicó el mismo cirujano en esta sala hace seis semanas. Entonces se operó un viernes y el lunes ya estaba en el trabajo. Ahora se ha tomado una semana libre previendo las consecuencias de una intervención que, además de otras molestias y dolores, le obligará a sufrir durante dos meses una faja pantalón de pecho a tobillos con un agujero en los genitales para evacuar. “Ahora estoy en medio del túnel, pero ya veo la luz”, dice ella. Según sus cálculos, esa salida coincidirá con la noche de Reyes. “Ése será mi mejor regalo, estar preparada para volver al mercado”.

Hijos de homosexuales

A Helena, futura madre lesbiana

Estuve ayer dudando si colgar el artículo sobre los hijos de lesbianas. ¿No ha quedado ya claro que su adaptación es más que adecuada?¿Que no padecen “confusiones” de ningún tipo? ¿Que lo único que necesitan son figuras de apego estables y que les den cariño? ¿Que esto sucede tanto en parejas homosexuales como heterosexuales? ¿Realmente hace falta insistir en lo obvio? Sí, hace falta…
Después leer un extracto sobre las creencias (no llegan a pensamientos) del antiguo presidente del Gobierno, es evidente que queda una labor dura por delante. Veamos lo que dice Aznar en sus Cartas a un joven español (2007):

- Familia: hombre y mujer. Por mi parte yo creo, Santiago, en una familia compuesta de un hombre y una mujer, con hijos, y extendida a todos los miembros que por costumbre, por consanguinidad o integración, pertenecen a ella. Existen otras formas de convivencia, homosexuales o heterosexuales. Hay que respetarlo. Pero no estoy de acuerdo en que se considere cualquier situación equivalente a la familia de la que te hablo. Ni equivalente, ni alternativo.
- Hijos de homosexuales. No sé, y creo que nadie lo sabe, qué pasará cuando un niño o una niña no puedan llamar padre ni madre a quienes se dicen sus progenitores pero que en muchos casos no lo van a ser. ¿Qué idea del mundo y de la realidad van a tener unos niños así criados? ¿La de que todo es posible? ¿La de que las leyes pueden dar satisfacción a todos los deseos?

La revolución de los solteros

LA REVOLUCIÓN DE LOS ‘SINGLES’

Andrés Pérez

Un nuevo segmento comercial ha emergido en la primera década del siglo XXI. Son ricos, felices y viven solos en pisos céntricos. Sin embargo, lo que la sociedad olvida –o silencia– es la otra cara de estos neosolteros: pobres sin interés para el marketing, divorciados, parados e ignorados por el mercado.

Hace unos años, una broma pesada corría en el mundo de los negocios a propósito del segmento de mercado entonces de moda, al descubrirse el envejecimiento de la pirámide de población: los llamados seniors. La broma rezaba así: “¿Cuál es la diferencia entre un viejo y un senior?”. Y la respuesta, que se suponía debía dejar estupefacto al interlocutor de turno, antes de hacerle reír a carcajadas, decía así: “30.000 euros en la cuenta corriente. Si el viejo los tiene, es un senior; si no, no es más que un viejo”. Este chiste tiene garantizado un próspero futuro con el nuevo segmento del mercado puesto de moda por la gente de los negocios en esta primera década del siglo XXI. Se trata de los llamados singles o, si prefiere, los neosolteros.

Porque, ¿cuál es la diferencia entre un solterón fracasado, que no encuentra pareja, desempleado, ignorado por todos, aislado y sin recursos en un barrio deprimido, y uno de esos estelares singles, célibattants, solos y neosolteros tan en boga en las revistas de último grito, en las series de televisión de mayor éxito, categoría ascendente de nuestras sociedades, objeto de toda la luz de los proyectores del planeta? Obligado reconocer que la única diferencia es el poder adquisitivo. Poderoso caballero: ha hecho perder la brújula a los medios de comunicación, que desbordan ríos de tinta sobre un supuesto mundo de solos libres, felices y ricos, cuando todos los indicadores señalan que las tasas de pobreza son brutalmente elevadas en el mundo de los solteros.

¿Qué hacer con los abusadores juveniles?

How Can You Distinguish a Budding Pedophile From a Kid With Real Boundary Problems?

By MAGGIE JONES
In the early 1980s, a therapist named Robert Longo was treating adolescent boys who had committed sex offenses. Their offenses ranged from fondling girls a few years younger than they were to outright rape of young children. As part of their treatment, the boys had to keep journals — which Longo read — in which they detailed their sexual fantasies and logged how frequently they masturbated to those fantasies. They created “relapse-prevention plans,” based on the idea that sex-offending is like an addiction and that teenagers need to be watchful of any “triggers” (pornography, anger) that might initiate their “cycle” of reoffending. And at the beginning of each group session, the boys introduced themselves much as an alcoholic begins an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting: “I’m Brian, and I’m a sex offender. I sexually offended against a 10-year-old boy; I made him lick my penis three times.”
Sex-offender therapy for juveniles was a new field in the 1980s, and Longo, like other therapists, was basing his practices on what he knew: the adult sex-offender-treatment models. “It’s where the literature was,” Longo, a founder of the international Association for the Treatment of Sexual Abusers, told me not long ago. “It’s what we’d been doing.”
As it turns out, he went on to say, “much of it was wrong.” There is no proof that what Longo calls the “trickle-down phenomenon” of using adult sex-offender treatments on juveniles is effective. Adult models, he notes, don’t account for adolescent development and how family and environment affect children’s behavior. Also, research over the past decade has shown that juveniles who commit sex offenses are in several ways very different from adult sex offenders. As one expert put it, “Kids are not short adults.”

El matrimonio en Estados Unidos (II)

Marriage in America
Barbara R. Bergmann

Alan Booth, Paul R. Amato, David Johnson and Stacy J. Rogers
ALONE TOGETHER
How marriage in America is changing
336pp. Harvard University Press. £29.95 (US$45).
978 0 674 02281 2

Kay. S. Hymowitz
MARRIAGE AND CASTE IN AMERICA
Separate and unequal families in a post-marital age
192pp. Chicago, IL: Ivan R. Dee. US $22.50.
978 1 566 637091
David Blankenhorn
THE FUTURE OF MARRIAGE
260pp. Encounter Books. £22.50 (US $25.95).
978 1 5940 3081 9

Marriage has served a crucial function in human society: it has been the means by which the male half of the species has been hooked into providing substantial amounts of goods and services to the offspring they engender, a duty from which their close relatives, the male chimps and gorillas, have been exempt. Human males have been burdened with this duty as a result of human cleverness. As we started wearing clothing, building shelters, using difficult-to-manufacture tools, herding animals, and moving into colder climates, human children needed more than they could get from just their mothers. The institution of marriage responded to this need with a pledge by a man to make contributions on a long-term basis to a woman and her children. In return he got her domestic services, plus a promise of exclusive sexual access, which gave him assurance that he had sired her children.

There has always been more to marriage than material provision to offspring. There’s nurturance, companionship, stability, passing down of property, family alliances, home cooking. And, of course, there’s love. Ay, there’s the rub – love is notoriously changeable. The increased freedom in the modern world to follow one’s heart wherever it leads has led some to an avoidance of new commitments and many to exits from previous ones.

In the developed West this societal institution, so central to human functioning throughout history, has been steadily weakening for decades and could possibly disappear. In the United States, the post-war baby boom ended in about 1960, and almost every year since has seen a decline in the proportion of women who are currently married. About half of marriages eventually end in divorce. As the currently married share of the population has dwindled, cohabitation by the un-married, a considerably less stable form of alliance, has grown rapidly. In 1960, there were ninety-seven married couples for every cohabiting heterosexual couple counted by the US Census Bureau, while in 2005 there were twelve. A third of American children are now born to unmarried mothers, and most of those mothers, together with the many divorced mothers, are struggling to bring up their children by themselves.

Menstruación en la adolescencia

Journal of Marriage and Family

Volume 69 Issue 1 Page 272-273, February 2007

Girls in Power: Gender, Body, and Menstruation in Adolescence. Laura Fingerson. Albany: State University of New York Press. 2006. 190 pp. ISBN 0-7914-6900-X. $21.95 (cloth).

Despite its ambiguous title, Girls in Power offers a compelling look at girls’ and boys’ collective talk about menstruation and the body. Its contribution lies in its emphasis that understandings of menstruation (and, subsequently, social power between girls and boys) are constantly negotiated and shift in various social settings and contexts. The ambiguity arises out of a promise in the title of the book that menstruation might on balance be more a source of power for girls than its opposite, a finding not borne out in Fingerson’s data (individual and group interviews with 37 Midwestern girls and boys). Girls in Power better implies the location of girls in power relationships, emphasizing agency and constraint associated with the embeddedness of menstrual discourse in the social relations of gender.

Naturismo y sexualidad

Nudity can be erotic and naturists should not have to deny it

The relationship between social nudity and sexual feelings is complex, says Glenn Smith

Wednesday June 6, 2007
The Guardian

Patrick Barkham seemed unaware that the main reason younger people are not becoming naturists is the inability of modern naturism to engage with the issue of sexuality (A Stitch in Time, May 31). While it is true that “naturism became popular in Germany…as a healthy outdoor lifestyle”, this lifestyle also included a recognition that, socially, nudity could sometimes be erotic. It was only when naturism arrived in a more sexually conservative Britain that sexual feelings were censored out to make naturism culturally acceptable. Locating naturist clubs in isolated locations, closing their doors to younger single males, condoning activities that limited views of genitals, and creating strict rules and regulations - all these indicated that sexual feelings had become feared and denied.

Ignoring this historical and cultural context can lead to a simplified view that fails to challenge the well-rehearsed comments which naturists often use in their defence, such as those quoted in Barkham’s article: “naturism is not the least bit sexy”; “it’s not an orgy”; “there is no sexual tension at all”.

Sexo a edad temprana

June 5, 2007
New Findings Add Nuance to Discussion of Early Sex
By NICHOLAS BAKALAR

Girls who have sex at an early age are at slightly greater risk than their peers for feeling depressed, a new study has found. But their self-esteem suffers only if the sex occurs outside a romantic relationship.

For boys, having sex at an early age does not increase depression or decrease self-esteem.

“I suspected that there might be negative effects of early sex for some groups,” said Ann M. Meier, the study’s author and an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Minnesota. “And that’s what I found — but only under very specific circumstances.”

The findings, the authors say, may have relevance for the abstinence education provision of the welfare reform act of 1996. Programs that are financed through the legislation must teach, among other elements of abstinence, that “sexual activity outside of the context of marriage is likely to have harmful psychological and physical effects.”

This study, which appears in the May issue of The American Journal of Sociology, found mixed evidence for that assertion.

Ciencia y ficción de la vagina

BMJ 2005;330:970 (23 April), doi:10.1136/bmj.330.7497.970
reviews
Book
Origin of the World: Science and the Fiction of the Vagina. Jelto Trenth

The vagina—and here I follow the title of the book by using this term as lay shorthand for women’s genitalia—is a paradoxical part of women’s bodies. Reviled but also revered, it has been received in different historical and cultural contexts with revulsion, awe, fascination, denial, violence, and even entrepreneurialism.

In recent years in the West the academy and popular culture have focused attention on the vagina. This fascinating and lively account of the “science and fiction of the vagina,” which takes its main title from Gustave Courbet’s 1866 painting, is part of this shift in interest. It covers an incredibly diverse range of issues, from historical, anthropological, sociological, psychological, sexological, physiological, and other perspectives. In so doing Drenth urges us to think beyond the idea of flesh as just flesh and describes the enormous—and changing—influence of culture and context on how we understand, perceive, and experience anatomy and physiology. Even our “parts” are (much) more than the sum of their parts.

El matrimonio en Estados Unidos

Marriage in America

The frayed knot
May 24th 2007 | MORGANTOWN, WEST VIRGINIA
From The Economist print edition

As the divorce rate plummets at the top of American society and rises at the bottom, the widening “marriage gap” is breeding inequality

THE students at West Virginia University don’t want you to think they take life too seriously. It is the third-best “party school” in America, according to the Princeton Review’s annual ranking of such things, and comes a creditable fifth in the “lots of beer” category. Booze sometimes causes students’ clothes to fall off. Those who wake up garmentless after a hook-up endure the “walk of shame”, trudging back to their own dormitories in an obviously borrowed football shirt, stirring up gossip with every step.

And yet, for all their protestations of wildness, the students are a serious-minded bunch. Yes, they have pre-marital sex. “I don’t see how it’s a bad thing,” says Ashley, an 18-year-old studying criminology. But they are careful not to fall pregnant. It would be “a major disaster,” says Ashley. She has plans. She wants to finish her degree, go to the FBI academy in Virginia and then start a career as a “profiler” helping to catch dangerous criminals. She wants to get married when she is about 24, and have children perhaps at 26. She thinks having children out of wedlock is not wrong, but unwise.

A few blocks away, in a soup kitchen attached to a church, another 18-year-old balances a baby on her knee. Laura has a less planned approach to parenthood. “It just happened,” she says. The father and she were “never really together”, merely “friends with benefits, I guess”. He is now gone. “I didn’t want to put up with his stuff,” she says. “Drugs and stuff,” she adds, by way of explanation.

There is a widening gulf between how the best- and least-educated Americans approach marriage and child-rearing. Among the elite (excluding film stars), the nuclear family is holding up quite well. Only 4% of the children of mothers with college degrees are born out of wedlock. And the divorce rate among college-educated women has plummeted. Of those who first tied the knot between 1975 and 1979, 29% were divorced within ten years. Among those who first married between 1990 and 1994, only 16.5% were.

At the bottom of the education scale, the picture is reversed. Among high-school dropouts, the divorce rate rose from 38% for those who first married in 1975-79 to 46% for those who first married in 1990-94. Among those with a high school diploma but no college, it rose from 35% to 38%. And these figures are only part of the story. Many mothers avoid divorce by never marrying in the first place. The out-of-wedlock birth rate among women who drop out of high school is 15%. Among African-Americans, it is a staggering 67%.

Reglas para ser infiel

Lust in Translation

The Rules of Infidelity from Tokyo to Tennessee
Pamela Druckerman

Penguin Press

French Men Don’t Get Caught
By Jardine Libaire, Best Life

Jane and Thomas were high school sweethearts, and now their own kids are in high school. About a year ago, Thomas, 47, a financial officer at a large corporation, suddenly started volunteering to take his son to soccer practice on Sunday mornings and began using his laptop at home. Jane noticed he seemed to hide the computer from her, and he never used it in front of her. He sought excuses to be alone; she became uneasy. One night, he made a hushed phone call downstairs while she was in bed. When he came upstairs, she asked who it was. He said it was no one, told her she was “hearing things,” and said it must have been the TV. His denial was all she needed. She asked right then if he was having an affair, and soon enough he admitted he was. Their world came crashing down.

The other woman is a fellow employee who reports to him. She is 14 years Jane’s junior and possesses, in Jane’s words, “a Victoria’s Secret body.” Thomas agreed that he must end the affair, but for the past four months the evidence says otherwise. Jane has discovered cryptic text messages on her husband’s cell phone and there are regular hang-up calls from a blocked number. Jane considered telling the other woman’s husband about his wife’s affair, but then the woman—out of revenge—could sue Thomas for sexual harassment. This has the potential to bankrupt the family. So would divorce. Every time Thomas stays late at work, Jane can’t help but accuse him—even if it’s silently, just with a look—of having been unfaithful again. In their own home, Jane and Thomas are now deadlocked in marital misery, fighting tearfully and viciously.

Does it have to be this way? Must an affair lead a couple inexorably to divorce court or bankruptcy? Do other cultures handle the circumstances of infidelity with different protocol and ethics? I asked these questions of Anna, 30, an American with a European background and a 1960s Italian art-film look: a decadent face, a slim, curvy body in a tweed pencil skirt. One night exactly a year ago, Henri, a Parisian client of Anna’s company, came to town for a professional event. They flirted unapologetically throughout the evening. When she invited people to her place for late-night drinks, Henri stayed. Before they even kissed, he held up his finger. “You see I’m wearing this ring,” he said. Anna said she did. “You know nothing will change,” he continued. She answered that she did know that.

Sin pareja

Estoy solo, ¿y qué?

Maite Nieto
EL PAIS SEMANAL - 08-04-2007

Son más de siete millones en España y el número sigue en aumento. Se adaptan a cualquier hábitat de la geografía nacional, pero su medio natural son las ciudades de más de 100.000 habitantes. Cuanto mayor sea la urbe, más fácil resulta encontrarse con ellos.
Tienen gustos y aficiones distintas, pero comparten la inquietud por estar activos y atentos a lo que ocurre. Su nivel de ingresos fluctúa entre tener que apretarse el cinturón para llegar a fin de mes después de haber pagado la hipoteca, y poder permitirse caprichos de sibarita sin tener que preocuparse por el color de los números de su cuenta corriente. Pero, al margen de su situación bancaria, la mayoría están dispuestos a hacer un dispendio sólo “porque yo lo valgo”.

Se cuidan. Seleccionan lo que comen, se preocupan por mantenerse en forma, e incluso el 50% del grupo, los que pertenecen al sexo masculino, considera mayoritariamente que la cosmética y el cuidado personal son ya hábitos normalizados entre sus costumbres.

Su casa suele estar abierta a los amigos y la familia, de hecho se preocupan por crear en ella un ambiente agradable, pero la realidad es que pasan más tiempo fuera que dentro. Superan la media nacional en estar al tanto de la oferta cultural de su entorno, y se mueven con soltura por Internet para ampliar sus relaciones amorosas y sociales.

Por el número ya habrán deducido que se trata de una especie cada vez más común, con grandes expectativas de crecimiento para el futuro (baste decir, por ejemplo, que en Madrid suponen un 13,8% de la población, mientras que en Berlín, considerada su capital en Europa, son ya el 50%) y que, por tanto, se ha convertido en un grupo codiciado por la industria, que ve en ellos un auténtico filón de potenciales consumidores.

Con o sin parejas en su pasado reciente, con o sin hijos en su presente, todos ellos se agrupan bajo una denominación que los identifica. Son los llamados impares o singles. Dos términos que, según quien los maneje, se refieren a grupos de población diferentes que comparten algunas características y divergen en otras.

Para las empresas dedicadas al ocio, single engloba a todas aquellas personas de entre 25 y 65 años que viven sin pareja convencional, ya sean solteros, separados, divorciados o viudos. Sin embargo, algunos estudios de mercado utilizan este término para referirse exclusivamente a aquellos que viven solos: más de tres millones en España, según datos de la consultora TNS Worldpanel.