The subtitle says it all: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love and Lose at Both.
My reading of such books follows a formula. Pick up said charge that voluntary individual behavior is leading to a crisis. Sort author’s mush into a rational choice model with either social externalities or imperfections within the self. Evaluate said model using evidence, in particular whether the other implied predictions are plausible.
So why might young women choose too much casual sex?
1. Their discount rates are too high.
2. There is an "arms race": the looseness of one woman makes the "putting out" requirements more extreme for other women, but no single woman takes this effect into account.
3. Obsession with school work is the real problem. Casual sex takes less time than a boyfriend, but girls overvalue how much good grades matter and underinvest in serious relationships.
4. Women are bad at estimating what will make them happy, a’la Daniel Gilbert.
5. Women underestimate the strength of their own addiction to causal sex.
6. Matters are efficient, but men are earning all the surplus. Easy birth control allows men to use "loose women" as a threat point in the bargaining game. (But hey, these *are* the loose women!)
7. We pursue the feeling of "being in control," even when it does not benefit us. Women want to feel they are in control of their sex lives, and to feel they are not bound by social convention, although this is an illusory gain.
#1 and #4 are true but not essential to the question at hand. #2 and #5 seem inconsistent with the evidence — found in this book — of women pushing for a loosening of general standards. The women are not supporting a local cartel of tighter sexual standards, quite the contrary. #3 seems efficient to me, not a mistake. I can see truth in #7, a quintessentially Cowenian theme.
Overall on this matter I am a Coasian who sees a Nash bargaining solution at work. In other words, don’t worry.
Which doesn’t mean I am going to show this book to Yana.
Which is perhaps more evidence for #7.
Here is one insightful look at the book. Note also that the author never adds up the welfare gains of the young men involved…
As a non-economist, I’d suggest a correlation with putting off marriage until later, after going through the educational hoops that give higher and higher payoffs. Developing a set of social norms that enable sexual satisfaction without damage to one’s reputation is rational, both for society and for the participants. The fact that some (many?) get involved in the vicious circles of sexual addiction is a reflection of human psychology.
You don’t get to make Cowenian a word.
I wouldn’t be so quick to discount #1. A high discount rate or time preference would push someone towards the looser end of the market where transaction costs are significantly lower. The search for a suitable match and dating to confirm are a significant investment. Especially when a beautiful woman need only show up to the right bar and wait find a casual encounter.
Stepps is writing about a nonexistent problem. The recent evidence shows that women who pursue more education and delay marriage actually have higher marriage rates and longer lasting marriages than women with less education. So at least for the demographic cohort that preceded the women in Stepps’ book, sex before marriage (90% + of us do it) hasn’t affected well-educated women’s ability to have successful serious relationships later. Besides, if these elite-educated women who hook up are supposed to end up being lonely spinsters, can you tell me who the heck is having all these $100k weddings and showing up all over the NYTimes wedding page?
BTW, Stepps’ book says nothing about whether hooking up leads to sexual addiction. The term “hooking up” covers anything from kissing to sex. And “sex” covers everything from kissing while naked to acts not suitable for mention in Tyler’s column. Does drunkenly making out with someone at a bar lead to sexual addiction and a lifelong inability to have relationships? Doubtful. And do you really think that the privileged young white women in this book told a privileged white woman twice their age what really went on between the sheets?
By the way, young men at these same academic institutions focus too much on grades and hook up a lot too. Tyler, when’s your book on that subject coming out? So can you guys (and you’re obviously all guys here) let this one drop and let this book molder in the discount bin?
The next question you should examine is correlation between the belief that women can’t do math and that “young women choose too much casual sex”, or as one of the reviewers puts it “the female body … can be tarnished by too much use.”
Surprized nobody has mentioned decreased fertility rates. Reliable contraception and delayed motherhood just too boring an explanation for delayed monogomy? Of course that’s just shifting the causal question further down the line.
Speaking as a college sophomore at a state school who can also speak from personal experience on a “field with little research”:
Number of friends: 98
Female: 45
In a relationship: 24
Percentage: 53%
Male: 53
In a relationship: 18 (give or take 4)
Percentage: 26%-41%
Number of friends that could be categorized as “promiscuous”: 3
Percentage: 3%
There’s no large secret society of women who have lots of sex and yet no ability to have a relationship, unless they all avoid me or all seek out ONLY sexual encounters with men (as opposed to informal friendly encounters)
Reproductive structures are critical to how well a society performs — look at how American inner cities collapsed after out of wedlock births became popular in the mid 1960s — so a “don’t worry about it” attitude is prima facie dubious.
7. We pursue the feeling of “being in control,” even when it does not benefit us. Women want to feel they are in control of their sex lives, and to feel they are not bound by social convention, although this is an illusory gain.
What’s illusory? Maybe it’s an illusion that they aren’t bound by social convention, but don’t they gain from the illusion?
The Inductivist reveals some stats about the happiness of women with regard to marital and occupation/student status here: http://inductivist.blogspot.com/2007/02/married-houeskeepers-are-happier-than.html
In this sphere, men are competing with men, and women with women. Men and women don’t compete with each other. Monogamy benefits low-status men, who wouldn’t otherwise be able to get a woman, and high-status women, who would otherwise have to share their high-status men.
knzn,
There’s also a signaling component. If a woman complains about lack of monogamy, she is signalling that she is high status. And a man would be signalling that he is low status, which would further decrease his chances with the ladies.
(At least until the man is old enough that he can believably be concerned more about the welfare of his high status daughters.)
I am just jealous. I was in college over 20 years ago. Did well with the women, but boy would it be fun today.
Now that I think about it, I don’t see what is wrong with sharing men. Why should a high-status woman, if she is fully satiated, be a dog in a manger and refuse to rent out the remainder of her husband/boyfriend’s available sexual services (which exist by assumption)? If women can make optimal sharing arrangements, therefore, it seems that the monogamy constraint is unambiguously bad for women: without it, the low-status women get the services of higher-status men, while the high-status women get paid some epsilon for making available the otherwise redundant excess services from those men.
In real life, though, I suppose women simply have a preference for monogamy. I suppose that there is an evolutionary reason for this preference. From an evolutionary point of view, sexual services are useful only for their reproductive function, but a promise of fidelity by a male has the advantage of increasing the female’s share of his other, potentially more useful services (hunting, protection, etc.). High-status women are biologically programmed not to want to share their men’s sexual services, because in the evolutionary environment, this would have meant sharing other services as well.
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