Sex on the Brain
by Brian Alexander
Sex on the Brain…
Why did you get married? What did you expect out of marriage?
I suppose the answer to those two questions might be very different from one person to another, but I am willing to bet you did not get married so you could have sex.
Heres a fascinating statistic I found while researching my MSNBC column for this week:
Among men born between 1933 and 1942, nearly 60 percent were virgins at age 18. Among women in the same age cohort, 81 percent were virgins at age 18 (a few girls must have been VERY popular). Most women in that age group were also virgins when they got married — 54 percent.
Just imagine the changes people who are now between 76 and 67 years old have seen! Those born in 1942 were 25 in 1967, the start of the Summer of Love and the 1960s impact on American sexuality is now so well known its a cliché. In the space of one generation the percentage of women who were virgins at marriage was cut by more than half.
Today, the mean age of first intercourse in this country is about 17 for both boys and girls, which means that a lot of boys and girls are having sex before age 17. (Sorry to ruin your day moms and dads.) Yet the average age of first marriage has risen to about 25 for women and slightly older for men, the oldest it has ever been.
So people no longer get married to bless their mutual lust. Sex has been cut out of the marriage equation.
If not for sex, then why? In the nineteenth century many people got married for institutional reasons — to seal family ties, secure property, create a family as a public unit of the society. After World War I, we got married for romance and friendship and to divide labor in the new suburbs: woman in apron, man in gray suit, lawn care on Saturday. As sociologist Christine Whelan pointed out to me, now many of us get married as a form of self-improvement, what she calls the personalized marriage. Somehow, we think, the marriage is going to make us, as individuals, a better, happier person.
When young people are asked why they might get married, raising children ranks eighth on a list. I found that amazing. Certainly many childless couples have long and happy marriages — I didnt find it amazing because I think having children is the only reason to get married — and certainly some unmarried people (I know one such couple, together for more than 25 years now) can raise great kids without ever getting married. But listing children as eighth stunned me.
Whats the most popular answer? Soul mate.
Really? I mean its great if your husband or wife is truly your soul mate, but doesn’t this set us up for some pretty deep disillusionment when your soul mate comes to the startling revelation that he totally missed out on that brief period when retro pork chop sideburns came back and wants to grow a pair? Or when your soul mate refers to the Disney Concert Hall, which you adore, as that over hyped hunk of crumpled paper? After all, qualifications for the job of soul mate can be pretty fuzzy, especially in the beginning of a relationship when your vision just might be clouded by your firm belief that it will never be physically possible to have enough sex with this person. Then, anybody could be a soul mate.
We love marriage in this country — we marry at nearly double the rate of some other industrialized nations — but Im not sure we get that marriage is a working relationship in which two parties have agreed to combine for a common purpose, one that probably should not include self-help or the expectation that the next fifty years is supposed to be spent in blushing bliss. That leads to divorce, or, in a worse-case scenario, standing before a bank of microphones trying to explain why you flew to Argentina to see a woman whose tan lines are, like, the best. Wed all like to avoid that.
Don’t forget to check out Brian Alexander’s MSNBC Sexploration column. Alexander, a freelance writer in Southern California, is the author of America Unzipped.
Tags: brian alexander, marriage, msnbc, Sex on the Brain, sexploration
Why did you get married? What did you expect out of marriage?
I suppose the answer to those two questions might be very different from one person to another, but I am willing to bet you did not get married so you could have sex.
Heres a fascinating statistic I found while researching my MSNBC column for this week:
Among men born between 1933 and 1942, nearly 60 percent were virgins at age 18. Among women in the same age cohort, 81 percent were virgins at age 18 (a few girls must have been VERY popular). Most women in that age group were also virgins when they got married — 54 percent.
Just imagine the changes people who are now between 76 and 67 years old have seen! Those born in 1942 were 25 in 1967, the start of the Summer of Love and the 1960s impact on American sexuality is now so well known its a cliché. In the space of one generation the percentage of women who were virgins at marriage was cut by more than half.
Today, the mean age of first intercourse in this country is about 17 for both boys and girls, which means that a lot of boys and girls are having sex before age 17. (Sorry to ruin your day moms and dads.) Yet the average age of first marriage has risen to about 25 for women and slightly older for men, the oldest it has ever been.
So people no longer get married to bless their mutual lust. Sex has been cut out of the marriage equation.
If not for sex, then why? In the nineteenth century many people got married for institutional reasons — to seal family ties, secure property, create a family as a public unit of the society. After World War I, we got married for romance and friendship and to divide labor in the new suburbs: woman in apron, man in gray suit, lawn care on Saturday. As sociologist Christine Whelan pointed out to me, now many of us get married as a form of self-improvement, what she calls the personalized marriage. Somehow, we think, the marriage is going to make us, as individuals, a better, happier person.
When young people are asked why they might get married, raising children ranks eighth on a list. I found that amazing. Certainly many childless couples have long and happy marriages — I didnt find it amazing because I think having children is the only reason to get married — and certainly some unmarried people (I know one such couple, together for more than 25 years now) can raise great kids without ever getting married. But listing children as eighth stunned me.
Whats the most popular answer? Soul mate.
Really? I mean its great if your husband or wife is truly your soul mate, but doesn’t this set us up for some pretty deep disillusionment when your soul mate comes to the startling revelation that he totally missed out on that brief period when retro pork chop sideburns came back and wants to grow a pair? Or when your soul mate refers to the Disney Concert Hall, which you adore, as that over hyped hunk of crumpled paper? After all, qualifications for the job of soul mate can be pretty fuzzy, especially in the beginning of a relationship when your vision just might be clouded by your firm belief that it will never be physically possible to have enough sex with this person. Then, anybody could be a soul mate.
We love marriage in this country — we marry at nearly double the rate of some other industrialized nations — but Im not sure we get that marriage is a working relationship in which two parties have agreed to combine for a common purpose, one that probably should not include self-help or the expectation that the next fifty years is supposed to be spent in blushing bliss. That leads to divorce, or, in a worse-case scenario, standing before a bank of microphones trying to explain why you flew to Argentina to see a woman whose tan lines are, like, the best. Wed all like to avoid that.
Don’t forget to check out Brian Alexander’s MSNBC Sexploration column. Alexander, a freelance writer in Southern California, is the author of America Unzipped.
Tags: brian alexander, marriage, msnbc, Sex on the Brain, sexploration
what was 2-7?