On Wednesday, Salon published an interview with Mark Regnerus co-author of "Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate and Think About Marrying," The book explains that women who achieve success in college, then in the workforce are left with a small pool of similarly educated and financially stable men. The imbalance of power forces many women to compete for men. They argue that women’s success comes at a cost to sexual bargaining power, where men call all the shots with less commitment and more sex. Regnerus and his partner gathered their data from four national surveys and interviews with men and women between the ages of 18 and 23.
Regnerus explains in the interview that women as a group, not men put a value on sex. The price of sex is measured by the amount of time it takes a man and a woman to first have sex, and by the number of partners sub-optimal men have intercourse. Regnerus found that 35% of men’s relationships become sexual within two weeks, 48% within a month. In summation, it doesn't take long for men to access sex, so it must not be all that valuable. When comparing sub-optimal men (high school drop-out and unemployed) to men who are the road to success, Regnerus found that the sub-optimal men had more partners. These findings go against theory that if sex is valuable to a woman then she's not going to trade it away for a lesser partner.
In American colleges 57% of students are women, while 43% are men, so presuming that people seek out others who are like them educationally, it means looking for secure relationships is challenging because the sex ratio is so imbalanced. In this environment women are forced to compete for men’s attention, and to attract them. Regnerus explains that instead of banding together to artificially restrict the price of sex and make it rise to extract what they want from men, women use sex to attract men. Men on the other hand group together to try to help one another to access sex cheaply and without strings, sanctioning each other when people take on a girlfriend or fall in love because it threatens what the others are trying to accomplish.
When asked what a woman can do to improve her position and get a man to commit, Regnerus suggests that it’s in her interest to find someone, and make it work. Otherwise, she will end up being thirty with a severely depleted pool and that’s depressing. In order for women to reacquire control over the direction of their relationships, he says women should wait to have sex until later in the relationship, even if they don’t want to wait. Regnerus adds that it’s likely she will be underbid by other women, but it does increase her odds of succeeding, especially if she’s attractive.
This article is interesting, but it’s also pretty depressing. Not that everything Regnerus says isn’t true, it’s just sad that there’s been data collected and books written about how desperate women have become. It’s also depressing that his suggestion is to become chaste, unless a woman wants to end up in her thirties engaged to a “sub-optimal” man.
