Dollars and Sex

by Marina Adshade

  Taking into consideration economic factors such as income and education also prevents us from lapsing into a mistaken belief that access to contraceptive technologies is entirely responsible for promiscuous behavior today. Birth control may have historically played a role in stimulating the social change that brought us to where we are in terms of sexual freedoms today, particularly for women, but viewing current behavior as a function of access to birth control technology alone paints an incomplete picture. This is especially important because while birth control technology is unlikely to become any more efficient, economy factors are constantly changing—especially as governments adopt, and abandon, programs that influence the distribution of income and access to higher education.

  Speaking of higher education, we are about to delve into the realm of the hammered and horizontal academics. Student behavior has been influenced by increased access to contraceptives and changing social norms, just like that of everyone else. Because they are investing in education, they are subject to even greater pressure to avoid a costly mistimed pregnancy, or any other event that will make it difficult for them to finish school. Do these concerns reduce their promiscuity? Of course not! In fact, if any one knows about promiscuity, it is college students ... or at least that is what they like to tell me.

  2 Once, while I was working as a research assistant (coincidentally for the same eminent economist who is now giving the Casanova talk), I had the opportunity to look to the U.S. Census to see how many woman had both given birth as a single parent and completed a PhD. You can probably guess the answer—not one.

  CHAPTER 2

  HOOKING UP IN COLLEGE

  MY STUDENTS THINK THAT THEIR GENERATION INVENTED PREMARITAL SEX

  This is not an exaggeration. And even students whom I can convince otherwise continue to argue that even if they aren’t the first generation to have sex before marriage, they are certainly getting more action than anyone else. When I show them evidence that university students have sex less frequently, on average, than do people their age who are not students, they protest vociferously. Their proof? Well, of course everyone knows that university students have more sex.

  I sometimes worry that this is why my students are in college.

  There are two possible explanations for their skewed perception. The first is that the students in my sex and love class are not representative of students in general; they are having far more sex than anyone else on campus. Maybe that is true, but, to be honest with you, they already give me too much information, and so I would rather not know if this is the case. The second, more defensible, explanation is that my class is overpopulated with male students.3 And right now, more than ever before, university campuses are great places for young men who are looking for sex.

  Let me tell you a story that illustrates how economics helps us understand how the market for sex operates on university campuses.

  It’s a Thursday night and, as anyone who works on a university campus will tell you, Thursday is the new Friday (which, if you ask me, is why the fifth year of college is the new fourth year). A group of female friends is hanging out at an off-campus bar that is packed wall-to-wall with well-lubricated students out for the night. This bar allows students too young to drink legally to come in, but it doesn’t serve them alcohol, so the women in our group (some of whom are below legal drinking age and some of whom are not) started drinking hours ago on the front porch of the house they share. They are very drunk and dancing mostly with each other because in this bar, as on campus, there are far more women than men.

  The women in the group are all friends, but they differ in what they are looking for when they go out on a Thursday night. Some will use their own drunken state as an excuse to hook up with anyone who is willing. Others will ignore the guys who come by looking for action, interested only in hanging out with their friends. The remainder will enjoy the male attention, not because they are looking to hook up, but because they are looking for a relationship that will last more than one night.

  Sarah, our main character in this story, is in this final group of women who are looking for a relationship. It isn’t that she doesn’t like casual sex; it is just that she has learned the hard way that the events of a night that starts with a group of friends drinking can have life-altering consequences.

  Her lesson started a year ago, one night at the beginning of her first term on campus, in this same bar where she was happily drinking and having a good time with her new college friends. She had been on her way to the bathroom when a man she was passing grabbed her by the arm and dragged her back to the bar, proclaiming that she looked like she could use another shot. She was so drunk, and he was so good-looking, that all she could do was to laugh in response. After a few drinks, he suggested they go back to her residence to hang out, and to her that seemed like a pretty good idea. After a brief period of actual hanging out, she found herself in her dorm room doing what she believed everyone else on campus was also doing—having random sex with a virtual stranger. Later she remembered having asked if he had a condom and that he had told her just to relax, so that is what she did. She blacked out shortly after, only vaguely remembering the next day that she had woken up at one point to see him pulling on his jeans by the door, complaining that he had left his credit card in the bar.

  The next morning she realized, brain hammering on the top of her skull, that not only did she not know his name, but that she had never even seen him before on campus. She tried to laugh the whole episode off and, despite not remembering the sex, told her friends that that he was athletic and attractive—so she must have had a good time. Secretly she was flattered that an older, and more experienced, man had chosen her out of all the hot girls in the bar that night and congratulated herself for her quick integration to college life.

  The day of her first midterm, Sarah woke up feeling as if she had run a marathon the day before. She had prepared all weekend for the test and so, unlike her dorm mates, had forgone the all-night study session in favor of a good night’s sleep. Apparently, the sleep hadn’t paid off—she was still exhausted. Drinking a coffee she had grabbed from the cafeteria and sitting outside on a bench in the sun, it suddenly dawned on Sarah that she was not just tired, something else was wrong. She had a few hours before the exam, so she grabbed her crib sheets in order to study while she headed over to the medical clinic and waited to see the nurse. Within an hour, she knew that she had a problem. Later, she would recall that, at that moment, she felt more sorry for the nurse who had the unfortunate job of telling her that she was pregnant than she did for herself.

  Being three weeks pregnant at midterm meant four difficult weeks of missed assignments and failed exams while waiting to have an abortion. She didn’t have a medical certificate to explain her poor performance, not because she couldn’t get one but because she was too ashamed to ask, and so her professors were unsympathetic. The term ended not with final exams and partying with friends, as she had thought it would, but with a medical procedure and a feeling that she had let herself down.

  So here Sarah is again, same bar and same friends, out on a Thursday night. While her friends are starting their second year of college, Sarah is getting a second chance at her first, thanks to the help of a sympathetic dean. She is not about to make the same mistake again and, as I have already said, is out tonight looking for more than one night of drunken sex. But because Sarah still wants to have sex, but with fewer risks, she would really like to have a boyfriend whom she could trust to consistently use protection.

  The problem she now faces is that on her campus there are far more women than men. That fact is not only making it hard for her to find a man; it is making it impossible to find one who is willing enter a relationship with a woman who is cautious about having sex. If she meets a man tonight, for example, she knows that not having sex with him in the first few hours after they meet will likely rule out any possibility that he will want to date her in the future. After all, he has to assume little of t
he risk of a casual sexual experience and, because the market for single men is so competitive on her campus, there are other women who are willing to take the risk—especially tonight, since they are having a hard time seeing the risk through their beer goggles.

  What Sarah would know if she was listening carefully in her Economics of Sex and Love class is that an excess of women on the college sex market has driven down the price of sex, making it, essentially, a buyer’s market. She would also know that there is a strong correlation between binge drinking and student promiscuity leading to pregnancy. But this last point, I suspect, she doesn’t need me to tell her.

  A BUYER’S MARKET FOR PROMISCUOUS MALE STUDENTS

  Another misperception that my students seem to hold dear is the idea that men like having sex more than do women. I would never try to convince you that is the case, mostly because I just don’t believe it myself. So how can I describe a market for casual sex where the desires of men are driving down the price as a buyer’s market? It isn’t because men want sex and women need to be compensated to be encouraged to have sex with them, that is, women are sellers; it is because men have a greater preference for multiple sexual partners than do women and women prefer to be assured that the sex they are having is not a one-time experience. Within this context then, the “price” that is being driven down is the level of assurance that a woman requires from the man she is having sex with that he will treat her well—whatever that means to the individual woman.

  If you doubt that men have a greater desire for multiple partners, I propose that you undertake the following study. Go and ask your friends, coworkers, and random people you meet on the street the following question: Ideally, how many sexual partners would you like to have over the next two years? I can tell you now that the men will report a desire to have far more partners than will the women. When these studies have been conducted in the past, women, on average, report that they would like only one sexual partner while men report that on average they would like to have eight. When asked if they would like to have sex with multiple partners at the same time, 42 percent of male respondents in a nationally representative survey said that they would, compared with only 8 percent of female respondents.4

  Statistically, women do not appear to share men’s love of variety in sexual partners. This is a topic we will return to in chapter 8, when we talk about infidelity in marriage.

  You could also ask this question instead: what is the minimum amount of time you would need to know someone before you had sex with him or her? I am going to guess that few women will say five minutes, but when these questions have been asked in surveys in the past, many men had no trouble with that time frame. Women, on the other hand, often said that ideally they would know a man for six months. In the same nationally representative survey I just mentioned, 31 percent of men reported finding the idea of having sex with a stranger appealing, compared with only 8 percent of women.

  RANDOM SEX WITH STRANGERS

  It is men’s desire for variety in sexual partners, and their willingness to engage in anonymous sex, that has fueled the world sex trade. But the reason a market for sex exists in the first place is that, in general, women have to be paid to have sex with a stranger. Men don’t have to be paid to have sex with strangers and, even if they did, most women would be unlikely to pay for their services.

  This fact explains why the sex market for female buyers is almost nonexistent.

  The best study that I know of that examines the willingness of men and women to engage in sex with strangers was done on university campuses in the late 1970s and again in the early 1980s. This evidence may seem outdated, but in fact the timing was perfect; the sexual revolution was in full swing, and yet lovers were still blissfully unaware that right around the corner was a new disease, AIDS, that was about to change the way we think about casual sex.

  During the course of the study, moderately attractive men/women walked up to a woman/man on a university campus and said, “I have been noticing you around campus, I find you very attractive. Would you . . .” and then offered the unknowing participant one of three options: “have dinner with me tonight?”; “come to my apartment tonight?”; or “go to bed with me tonight?” Both the target men and women must have found the person attractive since more than 50 percent of each group said yes to dinner (56 percent of women and 50 percent of men). The interesting result, though, is that as the offers became more sexual the men increased, while the women decreased, their willingness to participate. Remarkably, 50 percent more men were willing to have sex with the random stranger than were willing to have dinner with her. And even those who said no (only 25 percent of the sample) expressed regret at having to do so.

  None of the women in the sample agreed to have sex with the handsome random stranger. Not one.

  It isn’t true that no women like sex with strangers—just as it isn’t true that all men do—but there aren’t enough to make female brothels, for example, profitable business ventures. After all, if women turn down offers of free sex, why should anyone think that they’d be willing to pay for it?

  The outnumbering of women to men on university campuses not only makes it difficult for women to find partners from a simply numerical perspective (fewer men means each individual woman has a lower probability of finding an available man), but it is also changing the nature of male-female relationships as men have acquired greater sex-market power.

  Using data collected from a large number of U.S. students from a variety of different colleges, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker find that in colleges where the ratio of women to men is high (women greatly outnumber men), women have more negative attitudes toward dating and sexual relationships than in those in which the ratio of women to men is low.

  Comparing campuses where women outnumber men to those where men outnumber women allows the authors come to the following conclusions. They find that women who have never had a college boyfriend have a 69 percent chance of being a virgin when only 47 percent of all students are female, compared with only a 54 percent chance of being a virgin when 60 percent of all students are female. When there are fewer men available on campus, women who have never been in a committed relationship are more likely to have had sex at least once compared to when there are more men available.

  The gap between those who have been sexually active and those who have not is no smaller for women who report having had at least one college boyfriend. These women have a 45 percent chance being a virgin on a campus in which men outnumber women but only a 30 percent chance of being a virgin on campuses in which women outnumber men.

  Even women with a current boyfriend seem to have a better chance at postponing sex when there are fewer women on campus relative to men; those women have a 17 percent chance of being a virgin when there are more women than men on campus and a 30 percent chance when there are more men than women.

  This evidence demonstrates that when there are fewer men than women, individual women lose some of their ability to negotiate at what point a couple has their first sexual experience together.

  Given this evidence, you won’t be surprised to hear that casual sex is also more frequent when women outnumber men on a campus. For example, women who have had a boyfriend in the past but are currently single have a 27 percent chance of having had sex in the last month on a high-sex-ratio campus compared with only a 20 percent chance on a low-sex-ratio campus; single women are more sexually active when men are relatively scarce than they are when men are relatively abundant.

  Traditional dating is far less common when fewer men are available. This isn’t really surprising, of course, as there are simply fewer men to date, but the data suggests that there is far less traditional dating than the mere shortage of men would suggest. In fact, a 1 percent decrease in the proportion of female students increases the probability that a woman will have had six or more traditional dates by an incredible 3.3 percent.

  This evidence supports the idea that when women are abund
ant, there is far less traditional dating and far more “hooking up.” Beyond that, the same authors report in their recently published book that a number of the women who they interviewed were participating in sexual acts they disliked or were having sex more often than would have been their choice. That says to me that a woman’s ability to bargain with her sexual partner over both the timing and nature of sex acts has been eroded on university campuses in the face of increased competition for men among relatively abundant women.

  BOTTOMS UP

  The behavior of Sarah and her friends in the bar that night wasn’t just about male-female bargaining over sexual relationships. Part of the promiscuity on campuses everywhere has to do with binge drinking. How much is an empirical question that we can answer, thanks to research that has been published by economist Jeffrey DeSimone. Using data collected from 136 U.S. postsecondary institutions, DeSimone finds that binge drinking is a major contributing factor to risky sexual behavior on university campuses.

  According to his research, in the month preceding the survey, 46 percent of students reported that they had binge drank at least once, and 60 percent reported that they had sex in the preceding three months, with 12 percent claiming that they had multiple sexual partners. Many students admitted to not being cautious when having sex; 65 percent of those who had sex in the last month say they didn’t use a condom. And, just in case you think my story of Sarah is an exaggeration, 10 percent reported that they had previously become pregnant or had impregnated someone else at least once.

  What is one of the main determinants of how sexually active a student is? Alcohol consumption. The (almost) half of the student population who are binge drinkers are far more likely to be having risky sex than the non-binge-drinking half. For example, relative to the non-binge-drinking students, binge drinkers are 25 percent more likely to be sexually active, 20 percent more likely to have had sex without a condom, and 94 percent more likely to have had sex with multiple partners (not necessarily at the same time, just in case you were wondering).