First, you should know that everyone else is having less sex than you think. The median adult American has sex (with another person) 2 to 3 times a month. Even younger people, under forty, only have sex once a week, on average. Only 7% have sex more than 4 times a month and 18% have none at all. Students have less sex than others of the same age (except my students, who have assured me that is impossible) and married people have more.She is right here. I've been reading the research on this obsessively for decades now and well-designed studies always come up with numbers very close to what is given above. The press is statistically illiterate so they never get this*. Yes, there was a real sexual revolution and most people now have sex before marriage but any suggestion that sexual activity is exploding is nonsense. For all the talk about our hyper-sexualized society, the numbers just aren't there to justify the alarm.
Read the whole thing it's worth your time and trouble.
The following is also true: "Research suggests that promiscuity is not associated with increased happiness and, in fact, that the number of sexual partners needed to maximize happiness is exactly one."
Yup, that agrees with my experience but I would add that it matters a whole lot who that "one" is.
* The other thing about press reports of course is that they are usually written by prurient minded thirty somethings who desperately want to believe that the girls they see when they drive by the local college campus are servicing five guys a night.
I agree with you, just the general acceptance of sex before--even during--marriage has been, in itself, a revolution. In the 1950s Lucy and Ricky had to sleep in twin beds, and there was much discussion at CBS about whether they could show Lucy pregnant. Married women teachers had to stop working before they began to "show" (there were no women in business back then except secretaries) and unmarried women who became pregnant had to "go away" because it was a scandal.
ReplyDeleteI also agree with your comment on the horny 30-somethings in the media who probably exaggerate. If there was more promiscuity in the late 60s and 70s, it was a reaction to the repressiveness of the 50s. But I think there's been a leveling off starting in the 80s, people are less promiscuous today than they were during that time period, probably due to AIDS and the explosion of other STDs. I think that caused people to stop for a moment and think twice about the one-night stand. Its too bad though that people aren't having sex more often, but I can understand why.