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Unhooked
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...
Posted by Tyler Cowen on February 23, 2007 at 07:03 AM in Education | Permalink
Comments
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.
Posted by: Bill Harshaw at Feb 23, 2007 9:26:59 AM
This is to some degree just a different way of putting your answer but the better way, I think: that is, this is a made-up problem or at best a problem for a few people projected much further than reality. Given that it's not a real problem any attempt to explain it will be hopeless.
Posted by: Matt at Feb 23, 2007 9:33:42 AM
You don't get to make Cowenian a word.
Posted by: josh at Feb 23, 2007 9:46:20 AM
The hormones released in the female body after orgasm cause the woman to bond to her sexual partner. If that partner is not part of a commited relationship, the woman is going to have short and possibly long term psychological problems.
Posted by: Buzzcut at Feb 23, 2007 9:59:20 AM
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.
Posted by: awhogan at Feb 23, 2007 10:00:54 AM
I think the largest issue, if it is one at all, is #3. Many women try hard and remove the "It's a man's world" mentality of society and begin to fill the roles that men used to exclusively control. After some time it becomes just a part of their social fabric. They start to see themselves less as fighting a system, and more as participating in society. I think it is a natural progression from women who would hold their sexuality sacred, a historically womanly thing to do, and begin to freely express and enjoy their sexuality, a historically manly thing to do. Is this a problem? Maybe in terms of potential unwanted pregnancies rising, but #6's easy birth control availability will likely keep this from reaching epidemic.
Posted by: bjoerges at Feb 23, 2007 10:08:04 AM
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?
Posted by: Noshua Watson at Feb 23, 2007 10:36:39 AM
The assumptions underlying the book, that marriage later is better than casual sex now and later, is entirely subjective. Personally, I can't decide which turns me off more.
Posted by: Aaron Fix at Feb 23, 2007 11:09:23 AM
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."
Posted by: joan at Feb 23, 2007 11:15:28 AM
Women underestimate the strength of their own addiction to causal sex.
Correlational sex does not imply causal sex.
Y'all are SLOW today!
Posted by: billypilgrim37 at Feb 23, 2007 11:16:35 AM
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.
Posted by: Jason Bullman at Feb 23, 2007 12:40:09 PM
It seems like this woman did less research for her non-fiction work than Tom Wolfe did for his novel I Am Charlotte Simmons.
Highly promiscuous women have "daddy issues," plain and simple.
The easiest way to garner male attention at a bar/nightclub/frat party is to simulate lesbianism with 1 or more of your girlfriends via body shots, grinding on the dance floor, and/or kissing and groping. Young women have begun to embrace the post-feminist, Girls Gone Wild-esque, exhibitionist style of seduction because it's so easy to get attention, which is after all, what women are now looking for. Sex and love are byproducts.
Posted by: Christina at Feb 23, 2007 12:43:32 PM
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)
Posted by: Robert Olson at Feb 23, 2007 12:56:49 PM
If you're going to consider the welfare gains to the young men involved, you should also consider the welfare losses to the less attractive young men that aren't involved. One man can hookup with many women within a short period of time but only have a serious relationship with one at a time (usually). A monogamy constraint forces some women to choose between relatively unattractive men and no sex at all, since the attractive men will all be taken. Without the monogamy constraint, the attractive men can service multiple women (assuming, as folklore suggests, that men want more sex than women do), and the unattractive men become redundant. Given the distributional effects, looser sexual standards are not Pareto-improving for men. In fact, if one is allowed to make interpersonal comparisons based on some assumed diminishing marginal utility of sex, a case could be made that, on average, looser sexual standards benefit women at the expense of men.
Posted by: knzn at Feb 23, 2007 12:58:54 PM
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.
Posted by: Steve Sailer at Feb 23, 2007 2:04:47 PM
knzn,
You are exactly right. If women are more picky than men, they will be better off without a standard of monogamy. The few desirable men could service several women since they aren't that picky, and limited supply of attractive men will go farther.
This all breaks down if there is another pupose for monogamy such as childrearing, of course. Or if sexual service is not what (or not all) women desire from those few attractive men. If the demand is for exclusive rights over those men, then they can't be shared and the women would not be better off.
Posted by: liberty at Feb 23, 2007 2:16:05 PM
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?
Posted by: Douglas Knight at Feb 23, 2007 3:05:10 PM
Seems like knzn got it right.
I don't think I agree with Steve Sailer, in particular there are plenty of other probable causes for inner city collapse. But he makes a good point that's not easily dismissed.
Posted by: Reticent Man at Feb 23, 2007 3:37:52 PM
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
Posted by: TGGP at Feb 23, 2007 5:58:50 PM
#6 raises the question as to why the respective elasticities should be so different. This is, after all, an economics blog, and "elasticity" is an awfully fun word to say (though not quite as much fun to type).
Posted by: dWj at Feb 23, 2007 7:18:14 PM
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.
Posted by: James at Feb 23, 2007 9:53:44 PM
James has an interesting point. It didn’t occur to me that monogamy constraints have distributional consequences among women too. There seems to be a tendency for women to be stronger advocates of monogamy than men, and perhaps this apparent tendency results from the fact that high-status people (of either sex) have more of a voice than low-status people.
Posted by: knzn at Feb 24, 2007 8:46:52 AM
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.)
Posted by: doctorpat at Feb 25, 2007 9:00:15 PM
knzn's analysis of polygamy seems flawed to me. Instead of thinking "husband and wife", think "fish and chips" or "milk and brownies", and suppose that these products were in inelastic supply with strictly joint demand. If the technology were to become more flexible - for instance, if people grudgingly started eating chips without fish, chips suppliers would obviously be better off and fish suppliers would be worse off, but the differential effect wrt. quality would be ambiguous, depending on the relative role of Ricardian vs. scarcity rents.
Posted by: anonymous at Feb 25, 2007 11:23:37 PM
I am just jealous. I was in college over 20 years ago. Did well with the women, but boy would it be fun today.
Posted by: Murphy at Feb 26, 2007 11:47:12 AM
doctorpat, good point.
anonymous, I don't see how your fish and chips analogy applies. Sex always requires two partners. You can't have the chips without the fish. The question is whether there is a one-to-one matching of fish suppliers with chips suppliers. Fish (women) are caught by lumpy fishermen, but chips (men) are fried using a highly scalable technology. If you require one-to-one matching, then every fisherman has to be matched with a separate chips producer, so all the chips producers get to play. Otherwise, it becomes inefficent for the low quality chips producers to produce when the operations of the high quality producers can be scaled up.
Posted by: knzn at Feb 28, 2007 12:57:51 AM
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.
Posted by: knzn at Feb 28, 2007 10:55:46 AM
knzn:
To learn more about women men and marriage read "the manipulated man" by Esther Vilar
A reason why high status women don't want to share their high status men with low status women is maybe because, they only want his high status genes to run through her son's and daughter's veins and not through other womens :-) Meaning less sexual competition to her sons and daughters. If the man's high status genes run through several women's children's genes their will be more competition for the children of the high status women (HSW), so it is the interest of the HSW to make sure that the HSM only make children with her.
Generally women get a LOT financially out of marriage and if she can find a semi rich man she might not even have to work :-)
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