Are Our Sex Lives Too Normal?
Todd Flanders
July 1, 1995
Sex in America: A Definitive Survey by Robert T. Michael, John H. Gagnon, Edward O. Laumann, and Gina Kolata (Little, Brown and Company, 1994), 300 pp.
The news from the University of Chicago last fall could have been a bombshell. It had, after all, been a long time since Alfred Kinsey peered into the American bedroom. But, despite the hype assured by its subject and comprehensiveness, Sex in America: A Definitive Survey was a dud. The news was that there wasn't much titillating news. "Faithfulness in Marriage Thrives After All," proclaimed the New York Times.
"Once married," the Survey found, "the vast majority have no other sexual partner.... The marriage effect is so dramatic that it swamps all other aspects of our data." That 80 percent of adult Americans ages 18 to 59 have zero or one sex partner in a given year "reflects the fact that most Americans in that broad age range are married and are faithful." Married people are fulfilled: 88 percent report enjoying great sexual pleasure and 85 percent great emotional satisfaction. Who would have thought, more than thirty years after the vanguard of the sexual revolution heralded our imminent liberation, that our sex lives would be so ordinary, so staid, so-dare I say it?-traditional.
A quick glance at the stats on monogamy and fidelity however, can be misleading. The more things appear to have remained the same, the more they actually have changed. "Monogamy" in our era of staggering divorce rates, for example, often means serial monogamy Further evidence of change: the "percentage of first [sexual] partnerships that were marriages" among survey respondents born from 1933 to 1942 was 85 for men and 94 for women; among those born from 1963 to 1974 the percentages were 34 for ...
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