MORE ON REGNERUS AND UECKER, "PREMARITAL SEX IN AMERICA"

from me (Eve), at my blog.

Labels: "emerging adulthood", class, culture, gender differences, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, men, premarital sex, women

posted by Eve at 3:09 AM VOTE

BREAKING "THE RULES": Eve

in Doublethink:

Why don’t Americans know how to get and stay married? Whatever we think the word means we still value marriage very highly: The National Marriage Project and the Gallup poll organization have found that between 80 and 90 percent of American teens want to get married someday. And yet we delay, we divorce, and we churn through relationships so quickly that in 2004 only 61 percent of American children were living with both of their biological parents. Why can’t we get and keep what we say we want?

Maybe we lack role models. As we wander around aimlessly, the pejorative term “extended adolescence” has become the euphemism “emerging adulthood.” Kate Bolick’s much discussed Atlantic article, “All the Single Ladies,” seems to offer this explanation for its author’s eventual surrender to singleness.

And yet two recent books argue that a big part of our problem is that we do have role models, conventions, cultural mores, and rules to follow. It’s just that the rules don’t work. Paul Hollander’s Extravagant Expectations: New Ways to Find Romantic Love in America and Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker’s Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, And Think About Marrying take very different approaches to the question of how Americans mate and marry. Extravagant Expectations is a work of pop-philosophy that muses about how modernity and the Romantic movement have influenced personals ads and internet dating. Premarital Sex is a research-based look at the sexual practices and beliefs of young Americans from a broad range of class, cultural, and religious backgrounds. Yet both end up arguing that Americans today are working from fairly well-defined “scripts” about love, dating, marriage—and selfhood. Perhaps, they conclude, our marriage problems ultimately spring from a flawed understanding of what it means to become an adult.

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", cohabitation, culture, dating, Eve Tushnet, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

posted by Eve at 2:14 AM VOTE

PROFESSOR IMPLICATES THE PILL IN CHANGING FACE OF MARRIAGE: Washington Times

reports:

Among young, single Americans, men still want sex and women still want love and commitment. But the rules of engagement have changed dramatically since the birth-control pill and these rules “clearly favor men,” sociology professor Mark Regnerus told a think tank Tuesday.

There is collateral damage in this modern paradigm, added Mr. Regnerus, co-author of “Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying.”

More than a few women who plan to marry and have children before age 40 will not be able to fulfill those plans, he said. And men are becoming obsolete to women, especially those who were taught to rely only on themselves. ...

The changes in sexual norms happened largely because of the birth-control pill, Mr. Regnerus told the “Sexual Economics” forum at the Heritage Foundation.

Before the pill, the University of Texas professor said, sex and marriage were closely linked. If a young man wanted to have sex with a young woman, he had to “pay an elevated price” for it, with a marriage proposal, if not marriage. The young woman, in turn, got a serious commitment from the young man in exchange for her sexual favors.

But the pill ended that exchange rate, he said. Now sex is conducted without marriage, and “the price of sex is pretty low” — low-commitment or no-commitment sexual hookups are common, while high-commitment marriage is postponed, sometimes for decades.

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Labels: beyond marriage, contraception, culture, hooking up, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, men, premarital sex, sex, women

posted by Eve at 4:48 PM VOTE

THE COSTS OF "EMERGING ADULTHOOD": Colleen Carroll Campbell

at STLToday.com:

...Just as the concept of adolescence would have been foreign to 19th-century Americans who expected teenagers to shoulder adult burdens, so this new gray period between the first bloom of adolescence and the full flowering of adulthood puzzles many parents today. Some figure it's a good thing: Why shouldn't their children indulge themselves for a decade before settling down? Others fear that maturity delayed may not happen at all.

Two books published in recent months suggest that fear may be justified, especially when it comes to the slacker-style Peter Pans who have become a staple in romantic comedies and the horror stories of marriage-minded young women.

In "Manning Up: How the Rise of Women Has Turned Men into Boys," Kay Hymowitz argues that while young women have been making great strides in education and employment — women now outpace men in the quest for college degrees and men lost most of the jobs in our recent recession — men are falling behind. She worries about the 20-something "child-men" who play video games, guzzle beer and swap gross-out jokes with their buddies while their more ambitious female counterparts climb the corporate ladder. ...

Unclear expectations for young men often redound to the detriment of young women. In their data-driven book, "Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying," sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker paint a picture of a sexual marketplace in which commitment-averse young men call the shots, even as they fall behind young women in other realms of life. The relative scarcity of men on many college campuses and their widespread refusal to offer commitment or courtship in exchange for sex has created a skewed dynamic in which otherwise successful women settle grudgingly for casual sex because they find few men willing to offer something more.

Many of those young men, meanwhile, find less incentive to settle down when they can live their teenage fantasies well into their 30s, long after a woman's biological clock has forced her to grow up and move on. That Peter Pan perk has its costs, however. As Regnerus explained in a Slate article about his research, the ease with which young men now indulge their sexual whims "may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life" by encouraging them to dither throughout their 20s rather than settling into an adult pattern of professional and personal commitment.

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", culture, Mark Regnerus, men, women

posted by Eve at 1:22 AM VOTE

PREMARITAL SEX IN AMERICA: Evan Hughes

reviews it in The New Republic:

...Of course Regnerus’s and Uecker’s analysis bears some resemblance to reality. Any straight nightlife spot will illustrate that there is a market for sex in which, as a rule, men represent the demand side of the equation and women the supply side. While hope for a deal may abound on both sides, women are looking for good reasons to make one, which sets off a collective merry-go-round of shopping and haggling. That this concept is not terribly surprising represents a problem for the book. Shaky when you examine it closely, the sexual economics theory in its broad outline seems almost trivially true: it describes what we know but does little to explain what we do not understand.

Despite these missteps, however, the book does manage to illuminate some important questions about sex in contemporary America. Based on a combination of data from large research surveys and the authors’ interviews with college students, the book reads at times grimly like an article from an academic journal, but arresting findings periodically appear: a young woman’s attractiveness is statistically irrelevant to how much sex she is having; among female college graduates, politically conservative respondents under twenty-eight were three times more likely to be married, while liberals were fifteen times more likely to be living with a boyfriend; those most able to financially support children are least likely to be having them, which has not yet depopulated the upper-middle class in America, but it has in Spain and Italy; the more sexual partners a woman has had, the more likely it is that she is depressed.

The last fact arises from the discussion of a touchy subject that Regnerus and Uecker handle well: the emotional travails that sexual decisions can bring. Consensual sex, they observe, appears to be an arena of free choice, but in practice it doesn’t quite feel that way, especially for young women. A woman might experience pressure to sleep with her boyfriend—even if he does not apply any pressure—because she thinks four months is a long time for a man to wait. The mix of societal cues that gave her that idea creates a background noise that drowns out the question of her personal willingness. Meanwhile, the boyfriend may be conditioned by Internet porn to think that four minutes is too long to wait, but he may have learned in sex-ed that you never push. We have a conflict, then, among different sexual “scripts,” to use a term Regnerus and Uecker often invoke; various sets of norms as to “what you’re supposed to do” are clashing.

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Labels: class, culture, heterosexual couples, Mark Regnerus, men, premarital sex, sex, women

posted by Eve at 12:31 PM VOTE

Premarital Sex in America: Matthew Schmitz

book review at The Public Discourse:

Media reports on the sex lives of America’s young people often tend more to exaggeration than explanation. Depending on the perspective of the writer, college campuses are portrayed as either sexual Somalias or oases of free love. In their new book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker assemble a vast body of research to argue that while today’s sexual culture may be more permissive, it is anything but lawless. Rather, today’s “emerging adults” embrace sex and delay marriage in response to a set of powerful social scripts as comprehensive, and often constraining, as the ideals of courtship that guided their grandparents.

Sex is quite common among emerging adults, though not as common as they generally believe it to be. Among 18- to 23-year-old women currently in non-marital relationships, only 4 percent are not sexually involved with their partner. (The figure for non-involvement is slightly higher for men because fewer men consider their sexual attachments to be relationships.) While these figures seem high, most emerging adults believe that their peers are having sex more often, and earlier, than they really are. This “pluralistic ignorance” is a powerful shaper of sexual behavior, often causing people to engage in sexual practices they might otherwise be reluctant to consider.

Surveys and interviews indicate that emerging adults base their desire to delay marriage on a set of widely shared reasons. Emerging adults describe a desire to “become their own person,” but struggle to express just what this means. Nonetheless, they are notably united in their belief that one’s 20s is a time that should be reserved for experimentation. Related to this is the common “travel narrative,” the belief that one should travel before getting married. People who cite this desire rarely have a specific destination in mind, and few are able to explain just how marriage (which generally reduces expenses and increases resources) nixes travel possibilities. ...

The remarkable educational gains made by women—for every 74 men in college in 2005, there were one hundred women—has tipped the sex ratio in favor of the men on campus. A female college student who hasn’t had a relationship in college has an 85% chance of being a virgin if 30% of the student body is female. The same woman on a campus that is 70% female has only a 36% chance of being a virgin. These figures are a significant reflection of the power women wield in sexual relationships, since women are usually (though certainly not always) the partner that seeks to delay intercourse and stands to benefit most from doing so.

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", culture, heterosexual couples, Mark Regnerus, men, premarital sex, sex, universities, women

posted by Imapp Staff at 12:27 PM VOTE

MEN HAVE UPPER HAND IN SEXUAL ECONOMY: Elizabeth Landau

blogs at CNN:

It's not a new theory: As women progress in educational and professional opportunities, their odds of finding a committed man appear to go down. Women in their 40s and 50s have long heard this, but new research finds it's true for women just entering adulthood as well.

That's one of the findings in the new book "Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying," by researchers Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker at the University of Texas at Austin.

They looked at the results from a number of national studies including the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health and the National Study of Youth and Religion, in addition to interviews with young people ages 18 to 23.

Researchers found that since women in the 18- to 23-year-old group feel they don't need men for financial dependence, many of them feel they can play around with multiple partners without consequence, and that the early 20s isn't the time to have a serious relationship. But eventually, they do come to want a real, lasting relationship. The problem is that there will still be women who will have sex readily without commitment, and since men know this, fewer of them are willing to go steady.

"Women have plenty of freedom, but freedom does not translate easily into getting what you want," Regnerus said.

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Labels: committed relationships, culture, divorce, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Mark Regnerus, Marriage, men, premarital sex, virginity, women

posted by Eve at 8:42 PM VOTE

Deferred Gratification Makes Sexual Politics Sense: Maura Kelly

in the Guardian (UK):

Finally, two sociologists with a new book make the case for something I've been encouraging my female friends to do: hold out, ladies!

I often feel like an amateur sociologist myself, conducting interviews about the amorous exploits of friends and acquaintances – and occasionally sacrificing my own body for the social sciences. My data leads me to conclude that casual sex leaves plenty of women feeling awkward or dissatisfied – if not downright miserable – whereas most men don't experience a similar psychological hangover.

Legit research backs me up on this: an April report from James Madison University found women are more likely than men to prefer dating to hooking up, and are more likely to want to be in a relationship. A 2008 study out of England's Durham University found that most men enjoyed one night stands, reporting improved self-confidence and a greater sense of wellbeing afterward; if they expressed any regret, it was primarily about undesirable partners.

Roughly half the women, however, had negative feelings after their one night stands; they said they felt "used", or that they'd let themselves down. Lead researcher Anne Campbell, professor of psychology, explained the difference in evolutionary terms, saying that, historically, a man had the best chance of passing on his DNA if he put as much sperm out there as possible, whereas, through the centuries, women who remained faithful to carefully chosen ways fared best, by Darwinian standards – and we have evolved to act in ways that have helped our ancestors.

Nonetheless, young women today seem to think they should deny their instincts and behave, sexually, like men, say Mark Regnerus, associate professor of sociology at the University of Texas at Austin, and Jeremy Uecker, a fellow with the Carolina Population Centre, co-authors of Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying. "It's bizarre to watch women challenging each other to act – sexually – like men," says Regnerus.

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Labels: gender, gender differences, hooking up, Mark Regnerus, men, premarital sex, sex, women

posted by Imapp Staff at 7:45 PM VOTE

PREMARITAL ABSTINENCE: Three views

at Christianity Today:
Donna Freitas:

My initial response to the question--and I'm not being facetious--is the following: Stop talking about marriage when you talk about saving sex. ...

The unpleasant, unfulfilling realities of hookup culture have made abstinence more attractive. But tying a discussion about abstinence to marriage, in my opinion, is a pedagogical mistake. Most students need help in seeing their way out of hookup culture for this coming weekend, never mind being asked to see years beyond graduation to the second half of their 20s, when the average college graduate is likely to marry.

There is so much talk about sexual experimentation during the college years. Choosing abstinence is a kind of sexual experimentation. We just don't often discuss it in such terms. But college students love the idea, and, once they have thought about it for a while, are often eager to experiment with it.

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Mark Regnerus:

...What we can change, however, is our widespread misunderstanding of how marriage happens. Christian scholar James Olthuis reminds us that entering into Christian marriage is not a light switch that's flipped on at the wedding, but rather a process in this intended order: a pledge of fidelity, reliability, integrity, and friendship between a man and a woman, a covenant between the two persons and God, a communal recognition of the marriage, and sexual consummation.

In one sense, there's no such thing as premarital sex. There is only non-marital sex and marital sex. When couples skip some of the steps, it's the job of the church to make sure the others occur, or to call non-marital sex the sacrilege it is.

Far too many Christians link sexual morality to the issuance of a legal document by a secular state. But the state does not permit marriages; it only recognizes them. The biblical writers never presumed that marriage was the domain of the state, nor did they presume that it belonged to the church. It was simply an institution among institutions.

Unfortunately, most young Christians move into their 20s without realizing that a vocational calling--to marriage or singleness--has already been given to them by a loving Creator. Instead, they imagine marriage as the capstone to the self and a wedding as its commencement, to take place when they wish it to.

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Richard Ross:
...For teenagers who know Christ, that is a far stronger motivator than a desire to avoid disease and pregnancy. Risk avoidance is a weak motivator during adolescence, since the development of the brain's prefrontal cortex (which governs self-control) lags well behind the development of the amygdala (which drives emotions and impulses). Teenagers need to know about the risks of promiscuity, as well as about the benefits that total life purity brings. But the most powerful way to impact prom-night decisions is for parents, leaders, and peers to more fully awaken teenagers to God's Son, to invite them to make a promise to him, and to walk beside them in a journey toward purity.
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Labels: abstinence, Christianity, Christianity Today, Donna Freitas, Mark Regnerus, premarital sex, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 5:39 PM VOTE