How the Sexual Revolution Has Hurt Women
https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-sexual-revolution-has-hurt-women-11660921139
Warning: long read
In today’s hookup culture the sexual playing field is not even, but it suits men’s interests to pretend that it is. Women are entitled to be angry.
Critics of free-market capitalism have observed that the pleasures of freedom are not equally available to all. As the economic historian and socialist R.H. Tawney wrote in 1931, “freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.” This is also true in the sexual marketplace, which was once strictly regulated but has now been made mostly free. In this case, however, the classes are not the workers and the bourgeoisie but, rather, men and women. More precisely, the group of people who have done particularly well from the free-marketization of sex are men high in the personality trait that psychologists call “sociosexuality”: the desire for sexual variety.
The standard questionnaire used by researchers to assess sociosexuality asks respondents how many different partners they have had sex with in the past 12 months, how many partners they have had sex with on only one occasion, and how often they have spontaneous fantasies about having sex with someone they just met, among other questions. Worldwide, there is a significant difference in average sociosexuality between the sexes, with men generally much keener to sow their wild oats than women are.
In a study of male and female sociosexuality across 48 countries published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2005, psychologist David Schmitt and colleagues found large sex differences to be “a cultural universal,” regardless of a nation’s level of economic and social equality between the sexes.
This difference is explained by what evolutionary biologists term “parental investment theory.” Put simply, women can produce offspring at a maximum rate of about one pregnancy a year, whereas promiscuous men can theoretically produce offspring every time they orgasm. Although there are some limited circumstances in which multiple short-term mating might be advantageous for women—in conditions of danger and scarcity, for instance, in which sex might be exchanged for resources and protection—in general, natural selection has favored women who are choosy about their mates.
We see this play out in male and female sexual behavior. Men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, while the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a committed relationship to casual sex. Sex buyers are almost exclusively male, and men watch a lot more pornography than women do.
Men and women also differ dramatically in their baseline levels of sexual disgust, with women much more likely to be revolted by the prospect of someone they find unattractive. Disgust induces a physiological response that can be measured through heart and respiration rate, blood pressure and salivation, although the individual may not be aware of these indicators, and studies find that, on average, the sexual disgust threshold is much lower for women than it is for men.
Being groped in a crowd, or leered at while traveling alone, or propositioned a little too forcefully in a bar—all of these situations can provoke this horrible emotion. It is an emotion that women in the sex industry are forced to repress. In fact, as the prostitution survivor Rachel Moran has written, the ability not to cry or vomit in response to sexual fear and disgust is one of the essential “skills” demanded by the industry.
It is crucial to remember that the sociosexuality difference between the sexes is an average one: There are some women who are exceptionally high in sociosexuality, and there are some men who are low in it. This means that, at the individual level, if you know a person’s sex, you cannot know for certain whether or not they will be highly sociosexual, although you can make an educated guess.
Sex is relational, of course, which means that a loving partner needs another loving partner. But this also means that the sex buyer needs sex sellers and the porn user needs porn producers. Plenty of people—mostly, by necessity, women—are available to provide for these desires, sometimes readily, sometimes in return for financial compensation. But this underestimates the extent to which participants in the sexual free market may be subjected to more or less subtle coercion, just as workers in an economic system act in response to incentives and constraints. Society is composed of both pikes and minnows, as well as people who may play both roles at different times.
In the West, hookup culture is normative among adolescents and young adults. Although it is possible for young women to opt out, research suggests that only a minority do. Absent some kind of religious commitment, this is now the “normal” route presented to girls as they become sexually active. And hookup culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex.
In a sexual marketplace in which such a culture prevails, a woman who refuses to participate puts herself at a disadvantage. As one group of researchers put it, “some individual women may be capitulating to men’s preferences for casual sexual encounters because, if they do not, someone else will.”
Yet studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. Men in casual relationships are just not as good at bringing women to orgasm in comparison with men in committed relationships: In first-time hookups, only 10% of women orgasm, compared with 68% of women in long-term relationships. These figures don’t suggest a generation of women reveling in sexual liberation. Instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant sex out of a sense of obligation.
Looked at coolly, we may be able to recognize the existence of a sexual marketplace with its own internal rules and incentive structure, and we can readily identify different interest groups within it. But that’s usually not how real people actually feel about their sexual lives, which are not only intimate and messy but also bound up with complicated issues of self-esteem.
If you’re a young woman launched into a sexual culture that is fundamentally not geared toward protecting your safety or well-being, in which you are considered valuable only in a very narrow, physical sense, and if your basic options seem to be either hooking up or celibacy, then a comforting myth of “agency” can be attractive. But this myth depends on naiveté about the nature of male sexuality. Too many young women today ignore the fact that men are generally much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable. Too many fail to recognize that being desired by men is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem.
It isn’t nice to think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people view you that way. It’s easier to turn away from any acknowledgment of what is really going on, at least temporarily. I’ve spoken to many women who participated in hookup culture when they were young and years later came to realize just how unhappy it made them. As one friend put it, “I told myself so many lies, so many lies.”
If you’re a woman who’s had casual sexual relationships with men in the past, you might try answering the following questions as honestly as you can: Did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden you wanted to be rid of? Do you ever feel disgusted when you think about consensual sexual experiences you’ve had in the past? Have you ever become emotionally attached to a casual sexual partner and concealed this attachment from him? Have you ever done something sexually that you found painful or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner, either during sex or afterward?
If you answer “no” to all of these questions, your high sociosexuality and good luck have allowed you to navigate successfully a treacherous sexual marketplace. But if you answer “yes” to any of them, you are entitled to feel angry at a sexual culture that set you up to fail.
Today’s sexual culture however, prefers to understand people as freewheeling, atomized individuals, all looking out for number one and all up for a good time. It assumes that if all sexual taboos were removed, we would all be liberated and capable of making entirely free choices about our sexual lives, sampling from a menu of delightful options made newly available by the sexual revolution.
In fact, our choices are severely constrained, because we are impressionable creatures who absorb the values and ideas of our surrounding culture. If I am, for instance, a young female student looking for a boyfriend at my 21st-century university, and I don’t want to have sex before marriage, then I will find my options limited in a way that they wouldn’t have been in 1950.
We can see this rapid shift in social mores through pop culture. In the 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause,” the teenage protagonist Judy is called a “dirty tramp” by her father for wearing lipstick. Compare this with the current TV hit “Euphoria,” in which teenage girls sell nudes online, are choked during sex and suffer the humiliation of seeing revenge porn shared around school. “Euphoria” is supposed to be daring, pushing at the boundaries of acceptability—but that was also true of “Rebel Without a Cause.”
When sex before marriage is expected, and when almost all of the other women participating in my particular sexual market are willing to have sex on a first or second date, then not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive disadvantage. The abstinent young woman must either be tremendously attractive, in order to out-compete her more permissive peers, or she must be content to restrict her dating pool to those men who are as unusual as she is. Being eccentric carries costs.
A society that prioritizes the desires of the highly sociosexual is necessarily one that prioritizes the desires of men, given the natural distribution of this trait, and those men then need to call on other people—mostly young women—to satisfy their desires. The sexual playing field is not even, but it suits the interests of the powerful to pretend that it is. When we strip back all sexual morality to the bare bones, leaving only the principle of consent, we leave the way clear for some particularly predatory pikes.
Sexual liberalism asks us to train ourselves out of the kind of instinctive revulsion that often has a protective function, but reverting to traditionalism doesn’t solve the problem. The world we live in now is very far removed from the world in which traditional religious codes governing sex were formulated. Our ancestors were confronted with material conditions that are wildly different from our own: They had no reliable contraception, lived in smaller and less complex societies, experienced very high birth and death rates, and by necessity assigned starkly different social and economic roles to men and women.
“How should we behave sexually?” is really just another way of asking “How should we behave?” After millennia of effort, we are nowhere near reaching an agreement on the answer to that question. At a minimum, however, a sophisticated system of sexual ethics needs to demand more of people—and as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation.
The word “chivalry” is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what we need. As the feminist theorist Mary Harrington writes: “‘Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But…the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.”
Ms. Perry is a journalist in the U.K. This essay is adapted from her new book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution,” which will be published on Aug. 29 by Polity.
Warning: long read
In today’s hookup culture the sexual playing field is not even, but it suits men’s interests to pretend that it is. Women are entitled to be angry.
Critics of free-market capitalism have observed that the pleasures of freedom are not equally available to all. As the economic historian and socialist R.H. Tawney wrote in 1931, “freedom for the pike is death for the minnows.” This is also true in the sexual marketplace, which was once strictly regulated but has now been made mostly free. In this case, however, the classes are not the workers and the bourgeoisie but, rather, men and women. More precisely, the group of people who have done particularly well from the free-marketization of sex are men high in the personality trait that psychologists call “sociosexuality”: the desire for sexual variety.
The standard questionnaire used by researchers to assess sociosexuality asks respondents how many different partners they have had sex with in the past 12 months, how many partners they have had sex with on only one occasion, and how often they have spontaneous fantasies about having sex with someone they just met, among other questions. Worldwide, there is a significant difference in average sociosexuality between the sexes, with men generally much keener to sow their wild oats than women are.
In a study of male and female sociosexuality across 48 countries published in the journal Behavioral and Brain Sciences in 2005, psychologist David Schmitt and colleagues found large sex differences to be “a cultural universal,” regardless of a nation’s level of economic and social equality between the sexes.
This difference is explained by what evolutionary biologists term “parental investment theory.” Put simply, women can produce offspring at a maximum rate of about one pregnancy a year, whereas promiscuous men can theoretically produce offspring every time they orgasm. Although there are some limited circumstances in which multiple short-term mating might be advantageous for women—in conditions of danger and scarcity, for instance, in which sex might be exchanged for resources and protection—in general, natural selection has favored women who are choosy about their mates.
We see this play out in male and female sexual behavior. Men, on average, prefer to have more sex and with a larger number of partners, while the vast majority of women, if given the option, prefer a committed relationship to casual sex. Sex buyers are almost exclusively male, and men watch a lot more pornography than women do.
Men and women also differ dramatically in their baseline levels of sexual disgust, with women much more likely to be revolted by the prospect of someone they find unattractive. Disgust induces a physiological response that can be measured through heart and respiration rate, blood pressure and salivation, although the individual may not be aware of these indicators, and studies find that, on average, the sexual disgust threshold is much lower for women than it is for men.
Being groped in a crowd, or leered at while traveling alone, or propositioned a little too forcefully in a bar—all of these situations can provoke this horrible emotion. It is an emotion that women in the sex industry are forced to repress. In fact, as the prostitution survivor Rachel Moran has written, the ability not to cry or vomit in response to sexual fear and disgust is one of the essential “skills” demanded by the industry.
It is crucial to remember that the sociosexuality difference between the sexes is an average one: There are some women who are exceptionally high in sociosexuality, and there are some men who are low in it. This means that, at the individual level, if you know a person’s sex, you cannot know for certain whether or not they will be highly sociosexual, although you can make an educated guess.
Sex is relational, of course, which means that a loving partner needs another loving partner. But this also means that the sex buyer needs sex sellers and the porn user needs porn producers. Plenty of people—mostly, by necessity, women—are available to provide for these desires, sometimes readily, sometimes in return for financial compensation. But this underestimates the extent to which participants in the sexual free market may be subjected to more or less subtle coercion, just as workers in an economic system act in response to incentives and constraints. Society is composed of both pikes and minnows, as well as people who may play both roles at different times.
In the West, hookup culture is normative among adolescents and young adults. Although it is possible for young women to opt out, research suggests that only a minority do. Absent some kind of religious commitment, this is now the “normal” route presented to girls as they become sexually active. And hookup culture demands that women suppress their natural instincts in order to match male sexuality and thus meet the male demand for no-strings sex.
In a sexual marketplace in which such a culture prevails, a woman who refuses to participate puts herself at a disadvantage. As one group of researchers put it, “some individual women may be capitulating to men’s preferences for casual sexual encounters because, if they do not, someone else will.”
Yet studies consistently find that following hookups, women are more likely than men to experience regret, low self-esteem and mental distress. Female pleasure is rare during casual sex. Men in casual relationships are just not as good at bringing women to orgasm in comparison with men in committed relationships: In first-time hookups, only 10% of women orgasm, compared with 68% of women in long-term relationships. These figures don’t suggest a generation of women reveling in sexual liberation. Instead, a lot of women seem to be having unpleasant sex out of a sense of obligation.
Looked at coolly, we may be able to recognize the existence of a sexual marketplace with its own internal rules and incentive structure, and we can readily identify different interest groups within it. But that’s usually not how real people actually feel about their sexual lives, which are not only intimate and messy but also bound up with complicated issues of self-esteem.
If you’re a young woman launched into a sexual culture that is fundamentally not geared toward protecting your safety or well-being, in which you are considered valuable only in a very narrow, physical sense, and if your basic options seem to be either hooking up or celibacy, then a comforting myth of “agency” can be attractive. But this myth depends on naiveté about the nature of male sexuality. Too many young women today ignore the fact that men are generally much better suited to emotionless sex and find it much easier to regard their sexual partners as disposable. Too many fail to recognize that being desired by men is not at all the same thing as being held in high esteem.
It isn’t nice to think of oneself as disposable or to acknowledge that other people view you that way. It’s easier to turn away from any acknowledgment of what is really going on, at least temporarily. I’ve spoken to many women who participated in hookup culture when they were young and years later came to realize just how unhappy it made them. As one friend put it, “I told myself so many lies, so many lies.”
If you’re a woman who’s had casual sexual relationships with men in the past, you might try answering the following questions as honestly as you can: Did you consider your virginity to be an embarrassing burden you wanted to be rid of? Do you ever feel disgusted when you think about consensual sexual experiences you’ve had in the past? Have you ever become emotionally attached to a casual sexual partner and concealed this attachment from him? Have you ever done something sexually that you found painful or unpleasant and concealed this discomfort from your partner, either during sex or afterward?
If you answer “no” to all of these questions, your high sociosexuality and good luck have allowed you to navigate successfully a treacherous sexual marketplace. But if you answer “yes” to any of them, you are entitled to feel angry at a sexual culture that set you up to fail.
Today’s sexual culture however, prefers to understand people as freewheeling, atomized individuals, all looking out for number one and all up for a good time. It assumes that if all sexual taboos were removed, we would all be liberated and capable of making entirely free choices about our sexual lives, sampling from a menu of delightful options made newly available by the sexual revolution.
In fact, our choices are severely constrained, because we are impressionable creatures who absorb the values and ideas of our surrounding culture. If I am, for instance, a young female student looking for a boyfriend at my 21st-century university, and I don’t want to have sex before marriage, then I will find my options limited in a way that they wouldn’t have been in 1950.
We can see this rapid shift in social mores through pop culture. In the 1955 movie “Rebel Without a Cause,” the teenage protagonist Judy is called a “dirty tramp” by her father for wearing lipstick. Compare this with the current TV hit “Euphoria,” in which teenage girls sell nudes online, are choked during sex and suffer the humiliation of seeing revenge porn shared around school. “Euphoria” is supposed to be daring, pushing at the boundaries of acceptability—but that was also true of “Rebel Without a Cause.”
When sex before marriage is expected, and when almost all of the other women participating in my particular sexual market are willing to have sex on a first or second date, then not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive disadvantage. The abstinent young woman must either be tremendously attractive, in order to out-compete her more permissive peers, or she must be content to restrict her dating pool to those men who are as unusual as she is. Being eccentric carries costs.
A society that prioritizes the desires of the highly sociosexual is necessarily one that prioritizes the desires of men, given the natural distribution of this trait, and those men then need to call on other people—mostly young women—to satisfy their desires. The sexual playing field is not even, but it suits the interests of the powerful to pretend that it is. When we strip back all sexual morality to the bare bones, leaving only the principle of consent, we leave the way clear for some particularly predatory pikes.
Sexual liberalism asks us to train ourselves out of the kind of instinctive revulsion that often has a protective function, but reverting to traditionalism doesn’t solve the problem. The world we live in now is very far removed from the world in which traditional religious codes governing sex were formulated. Our ancestors were confronted with material conditions that are wildly different from our own: They had no reliable contraception, lived in smaller and less complex societies, experienced very high birth and death rates, and by necessity assigned starkly different social and economic roles to men and women.
“How should we behave sexually?” is really just another way of asking “How should we behave?” After millennia of effort, we are nowhere near reaching an agreement on the answer to that question. At a minimum, however, a sophisticated system of sexual ethics needs to demand more of people—and as the stronger and hornier sex, men must demonstrate even greater restraint than women when faced with temptation.
The word “chivalry” is now deeply unfashionable, but it describes something of what we need. As the feminist theorist Mary Harrington writes: “‘Chivalrous’ social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But…the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise.”
Ms. Perry is a journalist in the U.K. This essay is adapted from her new book, “The Case Against the Sexual Revolution,” which will be published on Aug. 29 by Polity.
