Panicology

by Hugh Aldersey-Williams

  The Marriage Squeeze

  ‘A good man is harder to find’ Newsweek

  Twenty years ago, Newsweek magazine published a story, based on Yale and Harvard research, about the difficulties that older women have finding a husband.1 It brought to the fore the problems of reconciling a career and children and prompted much hand-wringing, countless newspaper articles and TV debates and no doubt provoked many a tearful discussion between single women and their mothers.

  It started:

  The dire statistics contained in a new demographic study confirm what everybody has suspected all along: many women who seem to have it all will never have husbands. White, college-educated baby boomers in particular are victims of a marriage squeeze – a shortage of available men that adds up to a numbers game that women can’t win.

  It went on to say that these white, college-educated women ‘born in the mid-1950s who are still single at 30 have only a 20% chance of marrying. By the age of 35 the odds drop to 5%. 40-year-olds are more likely to be killed by a terrorist: they have a minuscule 2.6% probability of tying the knot.’ The catchy reference to terrorists was, it seems, journalistic licence and did not appear in the academic report.

  The story sparked a crisis of confidence among America’s growing ranks of single women, and the core message quickly became entrenched in pop culture, even though the study was widely criticized. The media was blamed for inventing ‘a national marital crisis on the basis of a single academic experiment of dubious statistical merit’.2 Some saw it as a backlash against feminism, with one columnist writing that the report gleefully warned women: ‘Reach too high, young lady, and you’ll end up in the stratosphere of slim pickings.’

  The US Census Bureau responded by publishing far more promising probabilities, suggesting that thirty-year-olds had a 60 per cent likelihood of finding a husband, with the odds dropping to around 20 per cent for forty-year-olds, respectively three and eight times greater than the odds in the original article.3 With the benefit of hindsight – two decades on we can see what actually happened to these women – and looking at the personal experiences of the two authors of this book, the notion that ‘women are over the hill at thirty’ looks a little bit archaic. The latest US census records show that only one in ten college-educated women now aged in their fifties has never married.

  The mistake in the research was apparently a simple one – namely to assume that current and future generations would behave as past generations did. Just because, for example, most women used to be married by thirty in the past and those that did not tended to remain single, did not mean that those not married by thirty in the future would also remain single. The Newsweek episode offers a cautionary tale of what can happen when the media oversimplifies a complicated and less than perfect piece of academic work. Nonetheless it clearly hit a nerve as it did in part reflect the experiences of many people.

  These fears and worries have been dramatized in recent years in humorous blockbusters which ensure that the marriage-prospects blues remain once the laughter has died down. Bridget Jones’s Diary told the story of a single woman over thirty who smokes too much, drinks too much and has a tendency to say whatever comes into her mind. Her mother keeps setting her up with dorks, and she has an awkward fling with her boss, leaving us wondering if she will ever find a husband. Sex and the City told of the antics of four attractive female New Yorkers who gossiped about their sex lives – or lack thereof – and searched for new ways to deal with being a woman as they navigated the turn of the millennium.

  So, after the magazine and big-screen-drama-induced panic, what are the facts? In most western countries, there are roughly equal numbers of men and women at the crucial ages. Although more boys than girls are born – roughly a ratio of 105 to 100 – male teenagers and men have higher death rates than their female counterparts, prompting the numbers gap between the two sexes to narrow until some point in middle age when women start to outnumber men.

  In the UK, the official population estimates are very evenly balanced between the two sexes from the age of twenty up to forty-four, but the reality is probably more favourable than that for women, as it is widely believed that the population census in 2001, on which these figures are based, undercounted the number of young to middle-aged men by several hundred thousand. A slightly more favourable situation for women prevails in the US – there are 2.22 million males aged twenty-five compared to 2.10 million females, and it is only at age forty-two that females start to outnumber males.

  If there are enough men, the root of the problem is changing attitudes and behaviour patterns. Marriage has been hit hard by the increasing tendency to cohabit, but unfortunately there is very little decent data telling us exactly how relationships are evolving over time. People are behaving more flexibly – moving in and out of relationships, including marriage, more frequently than in the past, making it harder to track and monitor. And the definitions are complex in any case – would people in long-term relationships but living separately, an emerging trend especially among middle-aged people with established lives, be said to be single? And what about the increasing number of people who are living an openly gay or bisexual life?

  What is clear is that marriage has been pushed later with each decade for all post-war generations. While 86 per cent of men and 92 per cent of women born in the 1940s had married by the age of thirty, the early figures for those born in the 1970s suggest the rate has nearly halved, to 45 per cent and 50 per cent respectively. The striking figure is the change in the proportion of women who never married between those born in the 1960s and 1970s. For the current thirty-somethings, half are not married, compared to only a quarter of the women a decade older.

  Partnership rates for thirty-year-olds by decade of birth, percentages

  * * *

  Men Women

  Decade of birth Never married Never partnered Never married Never partnered

  * * *

  1920s 23 22 16 15

  1930s 18 17 12 12

  1940s 14 12 8 6

  1950s 25 15 14 8

  1960s 38 15 24 7

  1970s 55∗ 21∗ 50∗ 13∗

  * * *

  Source: ‘Roona Simpson, Living like the Bridget Jones’s?’, BHPS conference paper 2005.

  Note:∗ caution to be exercised in considering these figures due to the small number of cases in the sample at this stage.

  The explanations for delaying marriage and childbirth are many and varied. Increased graduation rates and changing career patterns have certainly played a part. Hard-working professional people are often expected to work hardest in their twenties and thirties, making it difficult – especially for women – to find time to marry and have children. Many people simply enjoy being single at a time when it has become acceptable, in a way that was not the case a generation ago, to set up home on your own. Indeed, one survey suggested that 97 per cent of people aged between twenty-five and thirty-four believed that it was important to live alone before settling down.4 One rather depressing survey suggested that people do not enter relationships because they don’t expect them to last.5 And a new ‘social class’, dubbed the ‘regretful loner’, has been coined for men in their late thirties and forties who live alone and have either failed to form relationships or are the victims of failed relationships.

  But for most people, being single is just a phase. If surveys are to be believed, most women say that they want to get married, but at the same time they seem to be asking themselves about the cost in terms of scaling back their careers or sacrificing their (probably) enjoyable single lives. Men, too, it seems, are also keen to marry – as indeed they ought to be as surveys suggest that married men are healthier and happier than their single counterparts. But, according to the media, ‘the problem’ of falling in love with someone suitable to marry is more of an issue for women. It is certainly true that nearly all newspaper articles on the issue are written by women. Whatever the truth, much of the media coverage leaves us with the impressio
n that the men who don’t marry come from the bottom of the barrel while the women who don’t marry are the cream of the crop.

  While the reasons for delaying cohabitation and marriage are perfectly sensible, it brings a price. Surveys have shown that single people – male or female – consume more alcohol, often work longer hours, tend to skip meals and eat less healthily and might well not have someone close to share life’s problems with.6 It is also more expensive to live on your own. Most notable, however, is the anxiety related to the biological clock and a desire that many women still cherish to have children. In essence, the more fun or the more career that a woman has, the less time she leaves to find a husband and to produce babies.

  As ever, when faced with a challenge, behaviours change. Women in their thirties have set about the task of finding a mate with the same efficiency that they might bring to their professional careers. The booming singles industry, based around the internet and variants of speed dating, has emerged to cater for all needs. And artificial insemination is now widely available if the priority is to have a child.

  In most western countries, the situation is not too bad: it boils down to difficult personal choices in rapidly changing social environments, and of course, a good dollop of luck. As one woman said, ‘I’m not a statistic. I am one woman. I need to find one man.’ Most people do, if they want to, eventually marry despite the demographic forecasts. And most manage to juggle careers and children without screwing up too badly. It is also said that hooking up with someone later in life is less of a gamble than doing so earlier on – certainly the divorce rates are lower – as both parties have matured and have a better idea what they want from life.

  Whatever the problems in the West, relationship forming is likely to be much more problematic for the young in China, where a severely unbalanced sex ratio will leave millions of men unable to find brides. Sons have been traditionally preferred in China, and most couples can have only one child, so many prospective parents have, over the years, aborted pregnancies if tests showed that the foetus was female. As a result there are 119 boys born for every 100 girls in China, well above a global ratio of no more than 105. In some parts of China where the ratio has been even more distorted – as high as 134 boys to every 100 girls – programmes have been launched, largely successfully, providing benefits and cash payments, to encourage families to have girls. Meanwhile, the State Commission for Population and Family Planning estimates that there will be 25 million men who will fail to have wives by 2020. How long before a male Bridget Jones comes out of China?

  Something for the Weekend?

  ‘Sex with many partners? No thanks, we’re British’ The Times

  Virtually all western homes have a toilet, a washbasin and a bath or a shower. But one item of bathroom equipment shows that hygiene habits are not universally shared. It is the bidet: ‘this hygienic French invention of the 18th century has taken the world by storm,’ according to the French journalist Agnès Poirier writing in the Observer. ‘Only the USA and Britain are bidetilliterate’. Market evidence confirms the truth of this. Multinational sanitaryware manufacturers find they sell no more than two bidets for every hundred toilets in the United Kingdom, whereas in Italy they sell seventy-one.1

  This is an astonishing disparity. But what does it mean? A dictionary definition describes the bidet as an installation for ‘bathing the external genitals and the posterior parts of the body’ – not, as some British holiday-makers insist, a receptacle for washing socks. So, in countries where bidets are prevalent, do people wash their genitals more often? And, more to the point, do they do it because they are getting more sex, as Anglo-Saxons suspect? Or is using a bidet just a substitute for a proper wash, something Anglo-Saxons also suspect, mindful as they are that the French buy less soap than they do and that Napoleon preferred Josephine not to wash before they made love. In which case they are probably still getting more sex, the dirty beasts.

  ‘French are way ahead in the bedroom league’ is typical of the headlines that fuel Anglo-Saxon anxiety that they are missing out compared to Latin lovers. The headline refers to a survey carried out in 2002 by the condom manufacturer Durex in which French people claimed to have sex 167 times a year, the British 149 times a year, and Americans just 138 times.

  The Durex survey has grown each time it has been done. In 2005, it polled 317,000 respondents in forty-one countries. This colossal undertaking sounds authoritative, but it is not. Researchers into sexual behaviour and attitudes criticize the survey’s leading questions, its biased sample of respondents limited to those with internet access who feel like filling in a questionnaire, and its apparent lack of ethical safeguards.

  Its shortcomings are revealed when you try to compare the results over time – something not encouraged by Durex, which updates the results on its website and not in academic journals. Recall that in 2002 the French were claiming to have sex 167 times and the British 149 times a year. In the same survey for 1998, the figures were 141 times and 112 times respectively. But by 2005, the figures were 120 and 118.2 What made everybody so frisky in 2002? The Chinese went from being the most faithful lovers to being the most promiscuous in the space of two years, according to the same survey. Hardly likely.

  The inability to compare results from one year to the next doesn’t bother the media, however. Durex’s context-free findings guarantee a titillating headline. One country will always have the sexiest girls, the highest level of unprotected sex, or the most one-night stands – and if it’s a different one each time then so much the better.

  This kind of survey, which makes it easy to compare regions or countries (but not different time periods, age groups or social classes), encourages us to regard sex as something that it is appropriate to put in league tables, like hospital waiting lists or school exam results. This is clearly a nonsense since sex is a matter for individuals and is not administrated in this way. Whereas our grandparents supposedly grew up fearful about sex because of widespread ignorance, today we grow up fearful about sex because we are not having as much, in as many ways, with as many people, as everybody else. The recent addition to the Durex survey of a number of Asian countries, for example, reveals a greater sexual conservatism among these respondents compared to their peers in the West. Presumably the company hopes that their nations’ ‘low’ placing in the tables may lead some young Indians and Indonesians to become more sexually active – thereby providing new market opportunities.

  Many commercial interests have now seen how easy it is to gain publicity by adding the spurious authority of a ‘survey’ to the sure-fire ingredient ‘sex’. Durex is merely the leader in an increasingly crowded field. ‘Much more sex please… we’re British’ was the headline to news of a poll by a New York marketing agency.3 This pleased the media because it confounded the usual stereotype. ‘Single Britons are the most promiscuous in the world, an international survey of sexual attitudes says,’ the Guardian reported enthusiastically. An entirely different slant could have been put on the same data. The poll showed, for example, that two-thirds of British men felt entitled to regular sex with their partners, but that less than half of women did. In the four other countries surveyed, these figures were considerably higher for both sexes. One could equally have concluded that the British are closer to giving up altogether on regular sex with their partners than the French, Germans, Americans or Chinese.

  There again, perhaps the Anglo-Saxons have the last laugh. The myth of the Latin lover went limp recently when the New York Times headlined ‘Spain says adiós siesta and hola Viagra’. The story concerned a man who held up a Madrid pharmacy, demanding the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. The article went on to theorize that the exploding Spanish market for such drugs was due to the abandonment of the siesta and the discovery of the work ethic, leaving men too stressed to perform in bed.

  Occasionally, the message of constant sex is contradicted by these polls. ‘Teenagers in no rush to have sex’ was the headline result from another onli
ne survey of 16–24-year-olds,4 this one said to be supported by the Department of Health and conducted by an odd alliance of popular radio stations, MTV and the indefatigable Durex. The report noted that 69 per cent ‘waited’ until the age of consent at sixteen. Interestingly, Durex’s separate global survey produced results not incompatible with this – giving 16.6 as the age at which most British people lost their virginity, compared to around 18 in Latin countries. But on its website Durex ignored the newspaper’s take on the national result and, with an eye for the market, drew attention instead to its global result that ‘the trend is for people to lose their virginity earlier’.

  One newspaper at least seemed to have the measure of things. Under the headline ‘Teen sex surveys ruin your love life’, the Daily Telegraph lampooned the tendency for these heavily publicized polls to highlight promiscuity among the young: ‘Many young people claim to be regularly taking part in two surveys a day, often with different research organisations.’

  Newspaper readers are not all young, of course. What about something for the mature reader? ‘Does great sex start at 40?’ queried another headline in the Guardian. ‘A global survey has found that sex just gets better as we get older, with those aged 40 to 80 reporting the most satisfying bedroom antics of all.’ The article that followed gave the title of the survey – the portentous-sounding Global Study of Sexual Attitudes and Behaviours – and the fact that 30,000 respondents took part. It unaccountably failed to mention that it was sponsored by Pfizer, the maker of Viagra. Its target market may be older, but Pfizer’s message is essentially the same as Durex’s – you too should be getting more, and our products can help you get it. Both companies know that the best way to suggest this is to insinuate that your peers are already at it like rabbits.