Don’t just have more sex

Gender gets in sex's way, again

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So I just read Have more sex, please!

I think it brings up some really interesting and important facts about sex and relationships in the US today. And as someone who for a brief time made her living writing and pitching stories for mass audiences, I get the pressure to have a “take” rather than simply saying “this is what’s going on and perhaps it would behoove us to think about it.” 

But I think “just have more sex” as a solution to loneliness and atomization misses the point, by a lot.

Should Americans have more sex? I mean, I guess so? Sex is demonstrably good for your health. But, research shows what is intuitive: For women especially on average, sex is most pleasurable within a safe, healthy, ongoing relationship. Plus, the majority of people, women especially, prefer sex within a monogamous relationship.

This isn’t necessarily to say women are more monogamous than men, on average. Wednesday Martin and other researchers have found that women tire of monogamy more quickly than men, on average. And at least anecdotally, when a het couple decides to open up, the majority of the time it’s at the insistence of the woman.

What seems to be the case is less that women just love monogamy and more that, given the choice between a hookup and a relationship, both men and women on average prefer the latter to the former.

Despite the ongoing moral panic over “hookup culture,” in reality only about 10% of the population engages in “casual sex.” Just like I think casual sex is fine, I also think eschewing it is fine as well. Being sex-positive doesn’t mean sex is good. And it certainly doesn’t mean if sex is good more sex is better. It just means sex is inherently morally neutral. So “casual” and “formal” sex are equally moral behaviors, in my opinion.

I’m thinking about this in part because I’ve been having a LOT less sex since moving from SF to Alabama. I think it’s a combination of knowing wayyy fewer people here, getting out less because there are fewer places to hang out within walking distance, and perhaps getting older.

But what’s also true, and perhaps more salient, is that I’m so much less interested in having more of the kind of sex it’s easy to have with a friend or stranger than I’ve been in previous years. I am much more interested in sex that’s easiest to have with within a safe, healthy, ongoing relationship.

So, telling a single person “Have more sex!” probably isn’t going to help.

What’s more helpful, imo, is to ask why people aren’t coupling up as often as they used to. This is a question I’ve written a whole lot about.

One thing I’m not sure I’ve addressed, except perhaps in passing, is the issue of aging.

Every day a person remains single, their chances of finding a high-quality partner decrease. This is actually borne out in the literature, though I don’t want to be bothered finding the studies. Basically, the lit shows high-quality partners tend to be high-quality people. You’re a lot more likely, statistically, to be in a happy, healthy relationship if you are, perhaps not shockingly, a happy, healthy person. And people in happy, healthy relationships are more likely to stay in those relationships until one of them dies. So that means every day you remain single another happy, healthy person permanently leaves the dating market. Which means as you age the dating market becomes increasingly bereft of happy, healthy people and overrun with miserable, sick fucks.

Of course death and divorce happen, even to happy, healthy people.

But even with this salve, aging is still worse for women. And no, not because we become ugly and undatable. It’s actually our preferences, again, that fuck us. Our preferences plus math. (Math, it never stops fucking me.) Men tend to be more willing than women to date significantly younger partners. So the average happy, healthy man who finds himself single in middle age has a larger cohort of women to choose from than the average middle-aged woman. I don’t have the numbers on hand, but I’d guess this is probably a huge part of why women on average are more likely than men to give up on dating and is probably part of why women are more likely to give up on dating as we age.

So. No bitch without a pitch, right?

I’ve already offered women a suggestion to consider dating men who have lower incomes and less education than themselves. Maybe it would also help to consider dating men who are younger, perhaps even significantly so.

I also think it’s worth thinking through why a person might choose to date or have sex, or to not do so. So many of us are told that the thing that will make us happy is to find a partnership where the man makes more money and is better educated than the woman so the woman can work part-time or stay home and raise the children and take care of the domestic work while the man works outside the home to support the family financially.

But if that’s not going to happen (and as I’ve written, for many of us it’s not due to math reasons), what’s the next best thing? I’ve recommended women consider marrying “down” in terms of income and education. But research shows those marriages are less stable and happy on average. I think this is less because humans are hardwired for the male breadwinner model and more because it’s difficult to go against the grain. If the man isn’t doing enough housework and childcare to make up for the lost income (and time-use surveys show he isn’t) the woman is going to feel well-earned resentment. If the man is doing enough housework and childcare to make up for the lost income, he may feel emasculated. Society punishes men far more than women for violating gender norms.

For women dating younger men, I’m reminded of a particular experience from my past. I was dating someone who very much wanted to “be a man.” To him, this meant taking leadership in our relationship. For instance, he once tried to dictate to me what was and wasn’t allowed into the home we shared. I hadn’t been paying rent up until this point, so I had a choice. I could either pay rent and have an equal say in these matters or continue to live for free, but under his control. I am not someone who particularly likes being told what to do in most contexts. But in addition, everything from our job histories to our social lives to his choice in who to have a kid with showed unambiguously that I was just better at decision-making than he was. I consistently made life choices that led to better outcomes by any reasonable standard of measurement.

So I paid him rent and then shortly thereafter broke things off.

The sex was frequent and extremely high-quality. But it wasn’t worth the tradeoff of having to navigate a situation in which the realities did not meet the requirements. He needed a partner who was willing to be subservient to him. I needed a partner who was either willing to be my equal or was equal to the task of leading me. I wasn’t going to follow him down the path he was walking. Because I knew I was already heading to a far better place.

The idea that who should make decisions in a relationship should be dictated by who has the penis and not who makes better decisions on average is so stupid it’s actually galling when you actually take a moment to think about it. But it’s what we both were told, explicitly, growing up in church. They call it “complementarianism” and Jesus and John Wayne covers it well.

Can het sex survive a reality in which women no longer depend on men financially and in which women are as good or better than men at making decisions?

Will many women settle for and be happy with men who are their inferiors in terms of education, income, age, and perhaps even judgment? Will many men be able to tolerate the gender norm violation of a female partner who “wears the pants?”

Is sex with someone who can’t meet all the expectations we were taught to have even worth the trouble?

I really don’t know. But I am pretty confident that “Just have sex” isn’t going to cut it.

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