In the earlier post, I quoted this argument about what does or does not constitute sexual promiscuity from a site called How about we ...
week month. You might even call these articles feminist in intent. Well, you would if you didn't step back and consider the portrait implicit in those paragraphs above.
It may be possible to present a bleaker picture of the "average 30 year-old American woman" than those three paragraphs but I don't know how you could do it.
For starters, lets look at the interesting linguistic slips here. The word "average", for example, tells us that this article is aimed at people who want to be thought average, which is to say "not weird". But the staggering bit of vocabulary is "sexual encounter". The survey that inspired this response asked men how many sexual partners a woman has to have before they would consider her sexually promiscuous. The writer at How about we ... read that as "how many sexual encounters ...."
So if we fill out the portrait we are getting of a typical user of dating services here we are getting a picture of a ... a loser. Yeah, I'm sorry to be so blunt but really:
By the way, does the average American woman lose her virginity at 17? If you go the link they give (it's Wikipedia) what you find is by some point in their seventeenth year fifty percent of American women lose their virginity. That does not correspond to any meaningful definition of "average".
And who wants to settle for average in any case? The word is only being used because the article is aimed at women who are still single (or single again after a divorce) in their thirties and are looking for reassurance that they are normal, well-adjusted women who would make good partners after all.
And when we read it that way, the thing gets trickier. We know that early sex is a bad thing if you want a successful marriage. That means that you don't want to be like the significant chunk of that fifty percent who have their first sex before their seventeenth birthday. I'd suggest a more meaningful conclusion is that waiting until you are seventeen is the minimum threshold to aim for.
The average American woman loses her virginity at 17 years old. So that's one sexual encounter.The folks at How about we ... publish a fair number of pieces arguing that women are unfairly represented in other places, Ask Men being a favourite target which isn't surprising given that five and half million women visit Ask Men every
So the average 30-year-old American woman will have been sexually active for 13 years. This means that, in addition to the initial sexual encounter, if a woman has sex with 4 partners over the course of 13 years, she's considered promiscuous. That's about 1 sexual encounter every three years.
Come on, men! Having sex once every three years does not a promiscuous woman make!
It may be possible to present a bleaker picture of the "average 30 year-old American woman" than those three paragraphs but I don't know how you could do it.
For starters, lets look at the interesting linguistic slips here. The word "average", for example, tells us that this article is aimed at people who want to be thought average, which is to say "not weird". But the staggering bit of vocabulary is "sexual encounter". The survey that inspired this response asked men how many sexual partners a woman has to have before they would consider her sexually promiscuous. The writer at How about we ... read that as "how many sexual encounters ...."
So if we fill out the portrait we are getting of a typical user of dating services here we are getting a picture of a ... a loser. Yeah, I'm sorry to be so blunt but really:
- She's single in her thirties,
- she's been sexually active for thirteen years but her sex life consists mostly of encounters and not long-lasting relationships.
By the way, does the average American woman lose her virginity at 17? If you go the link they give (it's Wikipedia) what you find is by some point in their seventeenth year fifty percent of American women lose their virginity. That does not correspond to any meaningful definition of "average".
And who wants to settle for average in any case? The word is only being used because the article is aimed at women who are still single (or single again after a divorce) in their thirties and are looking for reassurance that they are normal, well-adjusted women who would make good partners after all.
And when we read it that way, the thing gets trickier. We know that early sex is a bad thing if you want a successful marriage. That means that you don't want to be like the significant chunk of that fifty percent who have their first sex before their seventeenth birthday. I'd suggest a more meaningful conclusion is that waiting until you are seventeen is the minimum threshold to aim for.
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