Contraception and Casual sex

Gail Collins writes about the uneasy relationship between social conservatives and contraception. She cites two arguments that social conservatives make about contraception: the first relies on incorrect biology and the second reflects uneasiness with casual sex.

Collins spends more time on the incorrect biology argument, but I think that the social conservatives are more motivated by their unease with casual sex. The incorrect biology is not literally true in any way, but social conservatives may believe that the biology is metaphorically true. That is, many forces within the modern world are inhibiting committed relationships and family formation, and they hypothesize that one of the forces is contraception, which is a logical fallacy, but the emotional argument is understandable.

Social conservatives are terribly troubled by the state of modern sexual ethics, or the lack thereof. Their nostalgia is to some extent false: premarital sex and casual sex were not invented with the birth control pill, and the decline of marriage is explained by a myriad of social, economic, and demographic factors.

Nonetheless, their argument has a real kernel of truth that few deal with because it violates third wave feminism: casual sex is more common than it used to be, and all the research I'm aware of finds that casual sex has more negatives than positives (click on the casual sex label for my earlier summaries of that research).

Casual sex occurs between closed doors, both liberals and conservatives have casual sex, and I know of no policy that would decrease casual sex. Given its murky origins, it's not surprising that social conservatives are indiscriminate in the policies and theories that they scapegoat to explain casual sex. Sex education, family planning, emergency contraception, abortion, and Arnett's theory of emerging adulthood do not cause casual sex, and casual sex probably does not inhibit family formation. Social conservatives just cannot think of better explanations, especially given the relative paucity of research on casual sex. Liberals fear that attacks on casual sex are disguised attacks on reproductive rights, rather than seeing that for many the opposite is true: casual sex is the enemy, and reproductive rights are the scapegoat.

And so we have these repeated battles that really all stem from the same thing: unease with casual sex and delayed family formation.

Most people having this dialogue are married, and most married people have long been insulated from the world of singles and their sexual decisions. Instead, they take sides based on their other political beliefs.

The married social conservatives believe that casual sex comes from liberals, not realizing how much exists organically among conservatives and how many liberals have wholesome sexual ethics and are eager to marry. The married liberals believe that casual sex does no harm as long as both the sex and its casualness are consensual, as if such consent were truly possible. My understanding of the qualitative research (Bogle's Hooking Up) is that women may freely consent to casual sex only within limited circumstances (e.g., experimentation), but see it as second best outside those circumstances; conversely, women create the circumstances that enable casual sex by discounting many men, artificially narrowing their dating pool, giving more power to the few men considered "good catches."

Both married liberals and conservatives have apparently forgotten, or maybe they never experienced, the dating market that makes all of these issues so complicated. We can agree on one thing: most people want to get married and have extremely high expectations for marriage, but the path to marriage is murky for myriad reasons. Until we know otherwise, probably the best we can do is practice good sexual ethics and help individuals wherever we can.

At a policy level, the marriage and family formation research indicates that economic factors inhibit marriage among lower income groups, and the decline of unions, widening income inequality, and reduction in good jobs are likely responsible. If we invested the trillions of dollars needed to upgrade our infrastructure from a D to a B, providing jobs for lower income groups, that could help the country both economically (e.g., improved productivity due to reduction in accidents and water main breaks) and socially (by giving income and good jobs to (mostly) men, some of whom would marry their female companions.)

NY Times on the undergraduate sexual economy

Just as Katherine Bogle found: The NY Times reports that women are outnumbering men on campus, and turning to hookups in hopes of hooking a man. Based on both what I've learned anecdotally and also read in Rachel Greenwald's qualitative study of dating among adults, that's counterproductive. As someone told me when explaining why he thought early sex was intrinsically casual sex, "Everyone knows that if you have sex on the first date, you'll never see each other again."

If their concerns are long term, as many of these women and those in Bogle's study said, the women's decision to eliminate half the men to start with is also counterproductive. The article describes a campus that is 60% female where half the men are undesirable, and half of the desirable are coupled. Take a campus of 1000 students (all straight): 500 available women, 200 "undesirable" men, 100 available "desirable" men, and 100 each coupled "desirable" men and women. Effectively, the women have created a situation where the gender ratio is 5:1 female to desirable male, when it would otherwise be 5:3. Of course all the women expect that they are going to be the lucky 10% in a couple, so it would seem that this situation doesn't hurt them. In fact, since it seems likely that even couples are more unstable in a 5:1 gender ratio than a 5:3 gender ratio, labeling half the men as undesirable hurts even coupled women.

As one woman quoted in the article said, "As for a man’s cheating, “that’s a thing that girls let slide, because you have to. If you don’t let it slide, you don’t have a boyfriend.”" (Obviously counterproductive, no matter what the gender ratio is.)

"Hooking up" in the medical literature

Searching pubmed for the term "hooking up" reveals the following (sex-related) articles:

First mention was in 2003 in the Journal of Sex Research, and the most interesting paper by far: "both women and men rated their peers as being more comfortable engaging in these behaviors than they rated themselves. Men expressed more comfort than did women in engaging in these behaviors, and both sexes overestimated the other gender s comfort with hooking up behaviors."

Second mention: 2007, in J Interpersonal Violence about unwanted sexual experiences while hooking up.

2008: 3 mentions.
1. Hookups more likely among extraversion and less likely among low conscientious. [Note: this puts some context behind qualitative study of Bogle that women perceived all "dateable" men as interested only in hooking up: these women may view only high extraversion and low conscientious as dateable, while the low extraversion and high conscientious may have been considered less dateable.]
2. Oral sex seems not to be regretted, just vaginal sex, and especially with a one-time-only encounter or with someone met in last 24 hours.
3. More likely among higher income, white, alcohol users; women less positive reactions.

2009: 3 mentions.
1. The first longitudinal study looking for predictors of hookups (measured in the second wave), but nothing surprising: alcohol, high school hook-ups predict college hookups. Any sex in hookups associated with psychological distress for women but not men.
2. Qualitative study: men also have feelings about casual sex, not all positive, and not all no-strings-attached.
3. Hookups may have higher than normal STI risk, and may undermine sexual self-efficacy.

Interesting to find that there are only 8 articles that turn up. Obviously casual sex is more common in the literature, but the phenomenon of "hooking up" may be more widespread or normative than past casual sex. Certainly the first paper, about students' own attitudes towards casual sex being more ambivalent than their perceptions of their peers' beliefs, may not have been true a few decades ago.

An elderly psychiatrist's theories of casual sex

A recent paper in Dec 2009 found no greater mental health problems among students who "hook up" than students who don't.

I thought of this paper while reading the sex chapter in a book by psychiatrist Frederic Flach (1927-2006) who wrote much on resilience and depression. The thing I find so refreshing about his writing is how theory-based it is. I do not know whether the theories are right, but they allow him to tell a cohesive story in a way that data-driven writing would not.

1. Adolescence is a time for identity formation. Early sex interferes with that purpose of adolescence, and prevents sex from being integrated with their full identity. Sexual pressure may translate into substance use instead of the sex that they're not prepared for.

2. It's good that sexual guilt has been removed, but guilt also had a good effect of keeping people out of sexual affairs that may hurt people's self-worth or sense of personal integrity and lead to depression, such as marital infidelity, premature sex, or degrading situations.

3. The modern era has depersonalized many aspects of life, and people may be treated as statistical objects instead of people. Alienation is not rare. Sex has also been made impersonal in some contexts, but that may be because of the general social phenomenon of depersonalization, rather than something unique to devaluing sex (as some claim).

4. Sex may also be used to alleviate general loneliness and alienation, rather than for sexual purposes, and it's not successful at that. Low self-esteem in fact makes it hard to create a good relationship with trust and love, thus further reducing self-esteem.

5. Based on theories of Erikson and Buber, it's important for sex to occur within a framework of emotional intimacy, love, trust, and sharing everyday activities and life. If the primary sexual outlet is casual sex, "the inevitable enhancement of self-esteem that results from the complete experience does not occur and a slow, progressive waning in self-worth takes place, however it may be denied. Sexual harmony is not rooted in fine technique; rather, its foundation lies in both partners generously sharing with each other their bodies and their souls." (p. 97-98).

What I like the most about this analysis is that it posits distinct theories about what will happen in dynamic way that we can't capture easily with quantitative data. Data has to be extensive in order to capture a primary sexual outlet being casual sex, the absence of love, and a decline in self-worth. Not to mention being able to define and measure love and self-worth in meaningful ways. And the existing quantitative data on casual sex doesn't come close to being able to capture this.

This analysis does imply that given the choice of sex without love or no sex at all, the latter is preferable. Alternatively, it's optimistic, rejecting the idea of love as ever impossible.

Is it possible to restore the norm of no premarital sex?

News today about gaps in sex education has a fantastically clear quote about the goals of conservative policy towards sex education:

"I don't think we'll be able to overcome this problem unless we restore the social norm of not having sex and not getting pregnant before marriage," said Peter Sprigg, senior fellow for policy studies at the Family Research Council.

Social conservatives do not generally support research about social norms about sexuality, so we do not know as much about sexual norms as we would otherwise. According to the earliest representative studies by sociologist Ira Reiss, the attitudes to allow what Ira Reiss called "permissiveness with affection" started shifting in the 1940s, and the shift was well underway by 1950 and definitely by 1960 when Ira Reiss wrote Premarital Sex in America (the link goes to the actual book). It seems unlikely that such a long-standing attitude shift could be easily reversed. By now, it is the standard that even many Evangelicals follow. If they marry right after college, it's possible they may abstain, but if they marry later, it's very unlikely, and many do marry later.

I would argue that permissiveness with affection is not a policy issue. No public health problems result from premarital sex within long-term committed monogamous relationships. Disease spread is self-limiting. Still, if changing that social norm is a worthy public policy goal, they have to look to more recent trends first.

One norm that has changed more recently are attitudes towards what Reiss calls "permissiveness without affection:" just as AIDS was emerging in the early 1980s, academics were declaring this to be the new norm. From the poll data in the link (which I would guess is an incomplete picture of the available data), it looks like endorsement of the norm may have declined with AIDS/HIV, and has begun to reemerge to some extent and even become part of public discourse, with everyone having heard of the idea of "Friends with Benefits". Unlike permissiveness with affection, there is some degree of a public health justification due to the herpes and HPV risks.

But that means you have to acknowledge that that nearly all Americans have premarital sex, and teach real sex education to protect them.

And then you have to think of a policy that can change social norms. Incidentally, changing social norms would seem to be totally inconsistent with a limited government of the sort that Conservatives say they want.

Quantifying and qualifying casual sex

A recent paper compares measure of "psychological wellbeing" between people whose most recent relationship was casual versus serious, and finds no difference. The paper motivates itself by the speculation in public discourse and the teachings of abstinence-only sex education that casual sex is harmful.

The qualitative research on the subject of casual sex seems pretty clear that, to the extent that they exist, the harms of casual sex would be unlikely to be found on a psychometric measure. Kathleen Bogle's qualitative study found that college-aged women feel frustrated and sometimes their feelings are hurt by differing expectations, which is also consistent with what Laura Sessions-Stepp reports in her journalistic book. I haven't ever seen anyone suggest higher rates of mental illness among people who have casual sex. It seems highly unlikely that casual sex poses a public mental health problem. (Casual sex does likely increase the total lifetime number of sex partners, so increases STD risk, but that's not the main issue here.)

The lack of a quantitative measure for romantic frustration doesn't make it unimportant. Just as quantitative research finds that married men seem to be in better physical and mental health than unmarried, but no difference for women, doesn't diminish the importance of the desire of many unmarried women to be in committed relationships. Likewise, quantitative research finds that people with children are more unhappy than people without, and yet there is an entire medical subfield dedicated to making people unhappy by helping them have children. (Likewise, my understanding is that US medical doctors stopped performing sex reassignment surgery after quantitative studies found no improvement after surgery, and yet qualitatively transgendered people who choose surgery report an improvement.)

Intangibles are important. Keep those qualitative studies coming.

Booty Call journal article

Journal of Sex Research published an article about "The 'Booty Call': A Compromise Between Men's and Women's Ideal Mating Strategies." It is not even slightly representative, just some Texas undergraduates, but its conclusions are similar to those of the book Hooking Up that I reviewed here. Hooking Up was a qualitative study of two undergraduate populations that followed subjects in college and a year or two after graduation.

Here are its conclusions:

With regards to accepting versus rejecting booty call partners, physical attractiveness was considered the most important criteria by both genders. Fourth, whereas men tended to cite other reasons related to sexual access, women tended to cite reasons related to friendship, compatibility, and personality. Fifth, for booty calls that do not progress into long-term relationships, both genders attribute the lack of progression to the man's not wanting a long-term relationship. Taken together, our results suggest that, although booty calls are mostly a sexual relationship whereby physical attractiveness is important, there are elements in which booty calls differ from other casual sexual relationships, such as one-night stands or hookups. In addition, whereas men tend to favor the sexual aspects of booty calls, women tend to favor other, more long-term oriented considerations. These findings are consistent with our overall hypothesis that the booty call may represent a compromise between the short-term, sexual nature of men's ideal relationships and the long-term, commitment ideally favored by women.

As with Hooking Up, the women surveyed have long-term ideas in mind but are willing to settle for short-term. Unlike Hooking Up, none of the women discuss an initial stage of experimentation with hooking up when they did not want a long-term relationship and just wanted to experiment with short-term. Perhaps the survey did not ask them about that.

Bar mitzvahs as the Jewish Rainbow Party?

Brandeis sociologist Shulamit Reinharz writes in 614 magazine, the magazine of the Brandeis women's research institute, that Jewish girls are giving oral sex as a bar mitzvah present, a topic people have been speculating about since at least 2005 (for instance, this 2005 David Brooks column is skeptical of what sound like old rumors even then.) Without better substantiation than the vague assertion from an unnamed Brandeis student that oral sex at bar mitzvahs is "common", it sounds like another rainbow party urban myth.

As head of a research institute, I'm surprised Professor Reinharz couldn't spare even a work study undergrad to investigate whether this claim has any basis whatsoever before raising alarms about it, much less publishing it under the name of an institution that might be considered an authority on "Authentic Judaism."

Germaine Greer on abstinence-ish

At the very beginning of
this show with 1970s feminist Germaine Greer (author of the Female Eunuch which I remember really liking when I was 14 or 15), she mentions a couple interesting anecdotes about young adult/late adolescent women and sexual decision-making.

1. One of her students didn't feel ready for penetrative sex, and eventually her boyfriend left her for it. She would meet men at parties to hook up with, and say "By the way, I don't do penetrative sex." and the men would just walk away. Which is a strange anecdote. The qualitative book _Hooking Up_ describes most hook-ups as not going that far, often just kissing (at least that's what they would tell the sociologist.) Meanwhile this woman's housemates all had boyfriends and were all sexually active and having penetrative sex "because it was required of them" in Greer's words, but they were less accustomed to sexual pleasure.

2. She says Sex in the City depresses her because the characters focus so much on men and sex.


Just anecdotes, but I find it fascinating from the perspective of the earlier wave of feminism and earlier feminist sexual values.

Girls and casual sex: syphilis epidemic, but no rainbow parties

I've read a few accounts lately about girls and young women in casual sexual relationships, and the same pattern emerges. These women started a behavior for adventure and experimentation, but when they decide they've had enough of the behavior they feel unable to step away from the behavior pattern due to social pressure.

Hooking Up by Katherine Bogle is about casual relationships in college. She studied two colleges: one small and religious, and one secular and larger. Freshman young women hook-up initially out of a mixture of curiosity, interest, exercising independence from earlier restrictions, and perhaps because it's what others are doing. By hooking up these college students mean anything from kissing to oral or vaginal sex, with or without alcohol, but according to their reports one time hookups are more likely to be at the less intimate end of the spectrum and alcohol is a good social excuse ("beer goggles"). Hooking up is almost always with an acquaintance or an acquaintance of an acquaintance: the closed atmosphere of a college makes women feel safe being alone with someone they just met. Within a year or two, most of the women report that they stopped being so interested in hooking up: they want a real relationship. The dynamic on campus, though, is still aimed at hooking up. The guys who are unassertive are not part of the hook-up culture at all, and they don't date much either. The guys who are assertive are part of the hook-up culture, and seem to have numbers in their favor: they can almost always find a woman willing to hook up with them, so a woman who wants to have any sexual contact and sees her dating pool as comprising such guys has the choice between hooking up or not hooking up: they do not feel that they have the option of a relationship. Some women hook up and hope for a relationship, and are inevitably disappointed. They don't talk about why they don't go for relationships with the nice guys, though probably for the clicheed reasons.

After college, the women are able to assert themselves: they are meeting people outside their comfort zone, hooking up would be with relative strangers and does not feel safe to anyone, and perhaps the men mature as well. Women can insist on real dates and relationships in this new social environment.

Bogle describes a limited time period in which women get involved in casual sex for a time, get tired of it and want real relationships, but don't feel that they have other options. These women seem to feel coerced into hook-ups: not at a level of sexual contact beyond their comfort level, but in a non-relationship context that is beyond their comfort level. After college, women find more power in the romantic arena and are able to have relationships as they want.

This reminds me of the story of the group sex in Atlanta suburbs hosted by 13-16 year old girls that led to a syphilis outbreak. This interview talks about how the girls say that they started having group sex parties partially out of boredom, and partially for similar motivations as the freshman college women reported for hook-ups: curiosity, interest, independence. After awhile, though, the girls felt that they couldn't control the situation any longer: both within an actual event and over many events. At a single event as activity escalated, girls felt unable to slow or stop the activity, especially when with multiple males simultaneously. After going to a few activities, girls felt unable to turn down future activities. The girls engaged in sexual activity with each other as a means of controlling the activity together. Reading that description, I keep thinking of some generally misogynist contexts --- women trafficked into commercial sex work, perhaps --- and have to remind myself that these are upper middle class girls in the US who are told they can become doctors and lawyers and astronauts.

The girls here clearly seem to have less control than the hook-up case because they feel out-numbered and pressured by other attendees, and are obviously less mature and less confident and below the age of consent. Nonetheless, it's interesting that there is a similar dynamic here as well: becoming involved completely willingly initially, and ending up feeling coerced or forced into sexual contact that they did not want both within a single episode and within their social context.


College graduation and syphilis, respectively, intervened, but what if they hadn't? It seems so easy for an outsider to say that a woman should just walk away from a situation she is so uncomfortable with, and yet clearly they didn't feel able to. What inner resources do women need in order to extricate themselves from an uncomfortable situation filled with social pressures? It looks so easy on Degrassi Junior High: one girl finally gets uncomfortable enough to say "Enough! This is not cool." and then everyone suddenly realizes she is right. If nothing else surely these girls have seen Degrassi Junior High or similar! Clearly it's not that easy, and eventually it sounds like the girls did stand up and stop this, maybe before the syphilis, but not after they'd been well past the point of feeling forced and out of control and like they might be traumatized for their future sexual experiences.

No answers, just questions.