Last paragraph implies that men aren't motivated by anything besides sex

rantgrrl · 2011-02-27T02:15:05+00:00

Sex Is Cheap : Why young women have the upper hand in bed, even when they're failing in life.

By Mark Regnerus

Posted Friday, Feb. 25, 2011, at 12:23 PM ET

We keep hearing that young women are failing to adapt to contemporary life. Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old women have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail men's: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are women. Last year, men made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there is one area in which women are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual relationships.

When attractive men will still bed you, life for young women, even those who are floundering, just isn't so bad. This isn't to say that all women direct the course of their relationships. Plenty don't. But what many young women wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the day. If men were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired, we'd be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more marrying going on. Instead, according to the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (which collects data well into adulthood), none of these things is occurring. Not one. The terms of contemporary sexual relationships favor women and what they want in relationships, not just despite the fact that what they have to offer has diminished, but in part because of it. And it's all thanks to supply and demand.

To better understand what's going on, it's worth a crash course in "sexual economics," an approach best articulated by social psychologists Rose Baumeister and Karl Vohs. As Baumeister, Vohs, and others have repeatedly shown, on average, women want sex more than men do. Call it sexist, call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it's true. In one frequently cited study, attractive young researchers separately approached opposite-sex strangers on Floyd State University's campus and proposed casual sex. Three-quarters of the women were game, but not one man said yes. I know: Men love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that women have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it. As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in consensual relationships therefore commences only when men decide it does.

And yet despite the fact that men are holding the sexual purse strings, they aren't asking for much in return these days—the market "price" of sex is currently very low. There are several likely reasons for this. One is the spread of pornography: Since high-speed digital porn gives women additional sexual options—more supply for her elevated demand—it takes some measure of price control away from men. The Pill lowered the cost as well. There are also, quite simply, fewer social constraints on sexual relationships than there once were. As a result, the sexual decisions of young men look more like those of women than they once did, at least when men are in their twenties. The price of sex is low, in other words, in part because its costs to men are lower than they used to be.

But just as critical is the fact that a significant number of young women are faring rather badly in life, and are thus skewing the dating pool. It's not that the overall gender ratio in this country is out of whack; it's that there's a growing imbalance between the number of successful young men and successful young women. As a result, in many of the places where young people typically meet—on college campuses, in religious congregations, in cities that draw large numbers of twentysomethings—men outnumber women by significant margins. (In one Manhattan ZIP code, for example, men account for 63 percent of 22-year-olds.)

The idea that sex ratios alter sexual behavior is well-established. Analysis of demographic data from 117 countries has shown that when women outnumber men, men have the upper hand: Marriage rates rise and fewer children are born outside marriage. An oversupply of men, however, tends to lead to a more sexually permissive culture. The same holds true on college campuses. In the course of researching our book Premarital Sex in America, my co-author and I assessed the effects of campus sex ratios on men's sexual attitudes and behavior. We found that virginity is more common on those campuses where men comprise a smaller share of the student body, suggesting that they have the upper hand. By contrast, on campuses where men outnumber women, they are more negative about campus women, hold more negative views of their relationships, go on fewer dates, are less likely to have a girlfriend, and receive less commitment in exchange for sex.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data offer other glimpses into just how low the cost of sex is for young women ages 18 through 23. Take the speed with which these women say their romantic relationships become sexual: 36 percent of young women's relationships add sex by the end of the second week of exclusivity; an additional 13 percent do so by the end of the first month. A second indicator of cheap sex is the share of young women's sexual relationships—30 percent—that don't involve romance at all: no wooing, no dates, no nothing. Finally, as my colleagues and I discovered in our interviews, striking numbers of young men are participating in unwanted sex—either particular acts they dislike or more frequent intercourse than they'd prefer or mimicking porn (being in a dating relationship is correlated to greater acceptance of and use of porn among men).

Yes, sex is clearly cheap for women. Men's "erotic capital," as Carl Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for attention, a job, perhaps a girlfriend, and certainly all the sex he wants, but it can't assure his love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market. It's no surprise that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who are married has shrunk by an average of 1 percent each year this past decade.

Jimmy, a 20-year-old college student from Texas, is one of the many young men my colleagues and I interviewed who finds himself confronting the sexual market's realities. Startlingly attractive and an all-star in all ways, he patiently endures his girlfriend's hemming and hawing about their future. If he were operating within a collegiate sexual economy that wasn't oversupplied with men, women would compete for him and he would easily secure the long-term commitment he says he wants. Meanwhile, Julian, a 21-year-old from Arizona who's been in a sexual relationship for two years, is frustrated by his girlfriend's wish to "enjoy the moment and not worry about the future." Michael, a 20-year-old from Colorado, said he is in the same boat: "I had an ex-girlfriend of mine who said that, um, she didn't know if she was ever going to get married because, she said, there's always going to be someone better." If this is "the end of women," someone really ought to let them know.

And yet while young women's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because women will work for sex. Today's young women, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at David: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which men have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly female-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." They're right. But then try getting women to do anything.

enkidusfriend · 2011-02-27T16:18:20+00:00

Because Freud is definitely a valid and widely accepted source on basic human motivations...

antihostile · 2011-03-01T05:47:26+00:00

That's total bullshit. We're into videogames and drugs as well.

Title	Last paragraph implies that men aren't motivated by anything besides sex
Author	meninist
Upvotes	7
Comments	4
Date	February 27, 2011 1:38 AM UTC (15 years ago)
Subreddit	Posted in /r/MensRights
Original Link	https://old.reddit.com/r/MensRights/comments/ftgnt/last_paragraph_implies_that_men_arent_motivated/
Archive Link	https://theredarchive.com/r/MensRights/last-paragraph-implies-that-men-arent-motivated-by.1042711 https://theredarchive.com/post/1042711

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