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Spot on assessment. I spent a semester in Rome while I was in college. I had a nice time but was very disturbed to see what modern Italian culture has turned into. The young people were especially frightning. I thought American 20-somethings had problems with nihilism, and then I saw our Italian peers . . . yikes! If these young people are the future of Italy, then it will not survive - it will become like France, and frankly I'm surprised it's not already as bad as France.

I'm not surprised at all that the birthrate is so low there - family is the last thing on the minds of so many of these young people. To top it off the young Italian men tend to be very effeminate. If I were an Italian woman, I would have a very difficult time mustering up an ounce of attraction towards some of these guys. What red-blooded woman gets turned on by a young man wearing red, silky, tight "booty-pants" and a silky pastel shirt that is both low cut (like a woman's) and so tight that you can see his nipples? No grazie! I have heard other Europeans joke that the only difference between a gay Italian man and a straight Italian man is four drinks. After seeing what I saw in Rome, I'm not inclined to disagree.

Meanwhile the younger women in Rome tend to be alarmingly thin. Not the healthy thinness that one gets from not eating fast food and sitting on her butt all day, but more like anorexic thin. One of my professors, an Italian lady in her late 30s said that eating disorders are extremely common among young Italian women. Many girls consume nothing but espresso and cigarettes, and some resort to drugs to keep their rail-thin figures. It is sadly not uncommon to see girls in Rome with knees thicker than their thighs. If these girls someday wanted to have children, they might find they can't due to the abuse they put their bodies through. This isn't going to help the birth rate in Italy much either.

For the sake of Italy's future I hope that these trends are more of a Roman thing. Maybe it's better in the south and in the countryside. Italian-Americans certainly aren't like this either. Nonetheless, it was very disturbing to see.

Part of the issue is a side-effect of the same kind of cultural issues we have here. A man doesn't need to marry a woman to enjoy her sexual goodies. There are enough attractive women who give that up for a relatively low cost (compared to marriage, for example), that there just isn't a need to marry and raise a family.

Men in the western world can now enjoy the upside of sexual pleasure without the downside of commitment, with the added bonus of variety. You can't really blame them for going down that path.