for some singles, sex has become the getting-to-know you phase of courtship. In a study conducted for Match.com, Dr. Fisher found that among a representative sample, 34 percent of singles had sex with somebody before the first date. She calls it “the sex interview.”
I find the idea of deciding whether to begin dating someone by first having sex with the person to be. . .counterintuitive.
Of course, stories like this tend to be sensationalized, so one takes them with a grain of salt. Yet I think that there is a genuine generational difference. It used to be that your first impression of someone came from an in-person encounter. For young people today, it often comes from an app.
Lately, the thought has occurred to me that we are evolving a new species, that I might call Home Appiens, to distinguish it from Homo Sapiens. Technology is changing us in ways that we have not begun to grasp. Smart phones and the Internet are giving us new experiences and taking away old ones. People are developing new skills and new patterns of behavior. The factors that influence social dynamics are changing.
I think if you look into it you will find that this is already a culturally established norm in Iceland. No doubt, the country’s geographical features have much to do with this practice, Iceland being an insular and remote nation of only about 300,000 people who identify themselves by their first names rather than their common surnames. Sex appears to be more connected to the idea of physical pleasure than to romantic love as traditionally practiced in most Western cultures.
Iceland is certainly unique/rare among Western cultures due to its geography and demography. Do you think the difference you describe would show up in the consumption rates of say romantic novels or romantic films? Could the hook-up rate, if different, be due to the relative safety of hooking-up with strangers in a small, homogenous, high-trust, rule-of-law society?
I suspect the consumption rate of romantic novels and films is similar to other cultures. In every way, except sexual norms, Iceland appears very western. I’m not sure relative safety explains this key difference. When there is little opportunity for diverse pleasures, given the insularity, perhaps the always present opportunity for sexual pleasure takes on a more prominent and less exceptional role, a phenomenon seen in other communal but confined conditions.
Iceland is a small place, most of everyone is three degrees from having already dated by circumstance.
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I think part of the problem is that the definition of “first date” and “dating someone” is morphing. What has expanded due to technology (paper/ink, postal mail, telephone, Internet, cell phone, smart phone) is the opportunity for direct personal communication in the courting process.
The “first date” is the first physical encounter. It may have been preceded by hours of direct text/voice/video chatting. Hook-up culture is a separate issue that has been transformed by smartphone apps but I’m not sure how pervasive that technology is for people who are not far to the right on the physical attractiveness bell curve. Are hook-up apps/culture more transformative than widespread use/availability of birth control mechanisms?
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Ummmm. No.
New technologies have been a disequilibrium element in social dynamics for several generations, and will continue to disrupt social norms. New norms emerge, but are hard to predict accurately and precisely.
Mechanization of housekeeping chores helped to increase female participation in formal labor markets. Claudia Goldin writes:
“Reinforcing factors include the almost complete diffusion of modern, electric household technologies, such as the refrigerator and the washing machine, and the previous diffusion of basic facilities such as electricity, running water, and the flush toilet. The reduced price of these appliances served to decrease women’s reservation wage and increase the elasticity of the aggregate female labor supply function.”—”The Quiet Revolution That Transformed Women’s Employment, Education, and Family,” Richard T. Ely Lecture, AEA Papers and Proceedings 96:2 (May 2006) 1-20, at p. 5.
Here is a link to Goldin’s article (ungated):
https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/goldin/files/the_quiet_revolution_that_transformed_womens_employment_education_and_family.pdf
George Akerlof and Janet Yellen make a case that the pill and modern abortion techniques caused the social norm of shotgun marriage gradually to unravel, and also caused a major increase in out-of-wedlock births:
https://www.brookings.edu/research/an-analysis-of-out-of-wedlock-births-in-the-united-states/
More generally, David Friedman offers a wide range of reasoned conjectures about frontier developments in technology, culture, and human nature, in his fascinating book, Future Imperfect (Cambridge U. Press, 2008). An ungated draft of the book is available at the link below:
http://www.daviddfriedman.com/Future_Imperfect.html
Study data here.
In general, you just can’t trust what people say about their own sex lives, especially in no-stakes surveys. It doesn’t do any good to say, “Well, ok, they lie a lot, but maybe we can learn something from the trends if we assume the propensity to lie about it stays more or less the same?” No, the lying changes too.
The “streetlight effect” problems with these studies are well established. For instance, the male reports and female reports about how much sex they are having … well, “doesn’t add up” is putting it lightly. One has to love David Freedman’s refreshingly blunt and right-to-the-point book title on the subject, “Wrong: Why Experts Keep Failing Us.”
Reasonable advice to the drunk looking for his keys is to not even bother, and just give up and come back after sunrise. On the other hand, it would be unreasonable to attend a lecture in which the drunk described the key-like hallucinations he had under the streetlight, to eagerly absorb his tales, and then give them the presumption of reliability as if they were accurate reports. “Did you hear the latest about keys and how they now resemble discarded cigarette butts? What does it portend for our time?” In the first instance, we laugh at the drunk. In the second instance, the drunk should laugh at us.
As for matching and connecting, one of my favorite questions to ask new acquaintances in relationships is how they met their lover. A decade or two ago, it was always a story that could be told with some touching elements, which is why I like it, because it encourages people to open up, drop their guard, allow themselves to feel the emotions of the moments in the narrative and receive your feedback that you share those emotions with them, and thus quickly accelerating the impression of comfort and familiarity.
It’s a great short-cut to friendliness and works, within limits, to bridge gaps across moderate cultural gaps. People are usually something like ‘proud’ to tell these stories of connection – they seem enjoy the process, perhaps with some subconscious awareness that they are signalling social proof and their own worth, sexual market value, and ability to attract mates.
Gradually, I began to get an answer of “online”, with some furtiveness or impression of embarrassment, and the need to gently pry a little to get them to tell “the rest of the story”, often using “leading the witness” maneuvers like asking them to tell me about “that magic moment when you really knew” and so forth.
Now I get the online / app answer and reaction all the time, and I have to use other, less effective fall-back techniques. #Sad?
(Aside: I know ‘lover’ sounds very 70s / francophilic, but sorry, I just can’t stand the use of the word ‘partner’ – short for “regular sex partner” – in matters of romance. The need for more general and euphemistic terms goes way back, but at least in Hemmingway’s day they would use warmer terms like ‘companion’ and avoid the dryness and clinical sterility of politically correct research publication language.)
There are also aspects of the post sexual revolution here. Most studies tend to show the newer generations are having less sex and fewer partners that Generation X so maybe while they are having sex quicker (I doubt) they are still less sexual active generally speaking.
Also men simply aren’t as willing to treat women as charity anymore. The grand dating trade for a long time was attention for sex with a bias against men having to pay upfront with questionable return on that investment. Now more men are simply effectively demanding payment up from prior to giving that attention as they, given earlier point, are less vested in sex given video game support groups. Or to be more blunt “We are equal now and I don’t owe you shit. You want me to pay attention to you, I want sex, but past practice shows you and your peers generally refuse to provide the goods after payment. As a result you can have sex first and then we can pillow talk or I will go play Counterstrike instead”
With anxious doubts, with endless scruples vexed,
And some restraint implied from each perverted text.
-Countess of Winchilsea Anne Finch
Hispanic internet users in the U.S. lead in social media consumption on smartphones, with a weekly average of 279 minutes on social media via smartphone every week, according to Statista.
According to the CDC, Hispanic women also have the highest total fertility rate: 2,006.5 compared to the TFR for all US women of 1,765.5, and 1,666.5 for whites and 1,824.5 for African Americans. Total fertility rates are estimations of the number of births that a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have over their lifetimes, based on age-specific birth rates in a given year. Replacement level fertility is a TFR of 2,100.0 births per 1,000 women; this is the number of births required to sustain a population at the same level. Sadly, but as to be expected in an oppressive and bigoted country, the important question of Lusitanian fertility was completely ignored by the CDC. Nevertheless this bodes ill for the future of the USA as most US hispanics descend from citizens of countries with presidential systems of government and might be expected to be less receptive to the constitutional reforms necessary to transform the country into a viable, modern parliamentary democratic state.
Hasn’t Hispanic fertility rates dropped a lot the last decade from ~2.8 to ~2.0? The biggest CDC demographic change is Hispanic women had a much higher fertility rate in the 1980s – 2008 was the biggest contributor but this reality is diminishing closer to other American groups.
Poor women collecting early on their marriage bonus.
In my experience narratives about changing sexual norms almost always carry more bark than bite. At least when I compare what I read in public vs. what people actually do when their own wellbeing is at stake.
On a personal level, practically every single time I’ve operated under the presumption of whatever ‘new norms’ were carrying the day I was eventually corrected and lead back to the much more mundane baseline reality.
Even better, the response from the other person was always along the lines of ‘well, duh, of course it’s like that’ whenever I expressed surprise that said person didn’t have any proclivities towards newer, more modern attitudes towards intercourse.
I’m fairly certain we’re getting sexually lamer, and almost every story to the contrary veers toward circumstantial clickbait.
In this particular case, the researcher is not just being paid as a contractor to do one study by the multi-headed hydra monolith of Match Group (what’s the HH index concentration score for that sector?), but she is on the payroll as Chief Scientific Advisor. Which position, while not officially located in the marketing department … well, it’s not crazy to suspect that companies with disproportionately single male paying clients might be talking their book by having prestigious and authoritative experts assert that the summer of love never ended and the fornication bubble never popped and continues to inflate, such that quick and easy sex is, contrary to what they might have heard or seen with their own lying eyes, actually pretty common these days. And just a click away! And premium accounts with better access to that bonanza can be yours all for the low, low price of …
Sex sells, especially if you’re actually selling sex.
I think this is very true. The sexual revolution didn’t even occur to the extent it is believed to. From what I hear the 70s were a pretty lascivious time, but things returned to the norm afterward. And before the sexual revolution, there was still the equivalent of casual sex, people just pretended officially that it didn’t happen or was rare. In fact, regarding sex, traditional societies were often fairly lax as long as one was discrete and officially towed the line, whatever one did in private.
Some people, at some points in their lives, behave this way, and they do so with less shame/stigma than they used to, but most people most of the time – young people as much as any others – tend to do things, for lack of a better word, normally.
“In fact, regarding sex, traditional societies were often fairly lax as long as one was discrete and officially towed the line, whatever one did in private.”
Putting the difficult question of trends in frequencies of particular sexual behaviors to the side, I believe your statement is compatible with a deeper and more general insight about the nature of pleasant and functional civilizations and social practices as a kind of adaptation, coping mechanism, and “pressure release valve” safety mechanism, to avoid a particularly nasty Social Failure Mode and to minimize the inherent and inevitable tension between formal and explicitly articulated moral regulatory principles on the one hand, and informal and tacit norms on the other. Let me explain. (Briefly, so with some important omissions. Even an introduction to the topic deserves a much more thorough and comprehensive treatment, and I’m sure some scholar with an Emergent Ventures grant could harmoniously stich together the pieces of what I’d guess is already an extensive but mostly un-synthesized existing literature touching on aspects of the matter.)
From a very general perspective, there is a deep and unsolvable philosphical problem with ‘law’. Due to the practically irreducible complexity of life, limited ability to forecast future conditions, the ‘level of generality problem’, and what game theory teaches us about the nature of the dynamic equilibrium of social interactions in conditions of rival interests, there are core questions which are indeterminable and indescribable in any stable, well-defined manner, and thus fundamental limits to what can be accomplished by attempting to use human words to capture or express ideas regulating behavior, and thus a whole variety of dangerous pitfalls awaits anyone or any system which takes the effort too seriously and with too little awareness of this special problem.
Abstract ideological principles are necessarily artificial (worse, ‘anti-natural’) metaphysical constructs which simply cannot be mapped to the needs of actual human existence or to vague and unmeasurable goals, for example, of ensuring peace and stability, or maximal flourishing or welfare.
Which might lead one to conclude that a solution could be propagating that awareness. But that just generates different and equally dangerous problems and failure modes. When ‘the rules’ are communicated via language instead of automatic osmosis via social observation and the instinctive picking-up on environmental cues, a certain amout of unreasonable deference to the accurate descriptiveness of those words (i.e., that they represent the Truth, the whole Truth, and nothing but the Truth), seems to be some kind of psychological necessity to give them any compelling power at all which isn’t perceived as merely a matter of some people imposing their will on others as a matter of pure domination: a socially unstable state of affairs. The illusion serves a beneficial purpose in terms of genuine belief strong enough to inspire self-regulation and trustworthiness (i.e., can be relied upon to “do the right thing when nobody is looking”), some minimal level of which is indispensible to enable the constant leaps of faith required for essential levels of cooperation, coordination, and loyalty. Undermining the tendency to take “rule words” with literal seriousness – while justified if one is trying to be accurate – breaks the valuable spell. Not just for children, but for most people.
The best one can do, perhaps, is keep the matter bottled up as a kind of esoteric knowledge shared by a class of elites – perhaps communicating with each other in Straussian code – with some capacity to contain open moral arguments, and to insist that everyone participate in and pay lip service to the noble lie of the perfect applicability and truth of the rule words, while privately maintaining reasonable flexibilities and exceptions, so that rules are more bent than broken, which is the minimal level of respect that allows an effective system of rules to exist at all. In terms of both stability and the preservation of such flexible judiciousness, there is probably no good alternative than that a particular authority or institution be able to defend an exclusive monopoly on the power of interpretation and that the monopoly is widely accepted as legitimate, which inevitably requires some ability to effectively suppress any open challeges which could undermine that legitimacy.
In general, we can define ‘reasonableness’ by the method of opposition, that is, in contrast to its easier-to-describe opposite, ‘unreasonableness’. To be unreasonable is to refuse to change ones mind when one should, for instance, when exposed to strongly compelling new evidence, arguments, or changes in circumstances. For any kind of pragmatic decision or reasonable judgment on proper behavior or culpability or consequences that would be a step consistent with long, indefinitely-iterated game of the overal social incentive system, there are many dimensions of potentially dispositive considerations and factors, the adjustment along the spectrum of which should, in some fuzzy area, begin to flip the resolution of discontinuous determinations (e.g., guilty ot not). Rules in words, by contrast, tend by their very nature to lead to inflexibility and unreasonableness (e.g., ‘zero tolerance’), which creates all kinds of social tension and pressure in the form of injustices and evasions. So it seems that some societies stumbled upon the same adaptive mutation in their suite of social technologies, which was helpful enough that it arguably came to dominate through natural selection.
This results in something like a “Salutary Hypocrisy Tacit Understanding”, which takes the form of a kind of “bargain” of unacknowledged lenience, “looking the other way” willful blindness, and general level of prioritization significantly lower than public claims, in exchange for highly cautious discretion when commiting mild and low-harm forms of these transgressions unobstrusively, in combination with the restraint to not rock the boat. This allows for a middle category and humane treatment of behavior between binary extremes. Many of these transgressions are mistakenly thought of as harmless or ‘victimless crimes’, but in fact the harm of some activity is not in the act themselves but in the conspicuous performance of them, that upsets the general social perceptions of stigma and condemnability necessary to bolster and reach the optimal level of discouragement. Psychologically there is apparently not much room for feeling strongly about something which is perfectly fine if done quietly in private, but truly terrible if done openly in public. An exception is “public appearance regulation”, e.g., prohibition of nudity, but actually the deeper rationale behind those regulations applies much more generally. This seems to be the way that Anglospheric cultures traditionally dealt with sexual deviance, with members of the behavior regulation system generally not having the heart to take it seriously or do much about it, except when they were essentially forced into a corner by an act of recklessness creating a prominent scandal rising to public attention, where authorities had little choice but to be seen to treat the transgression just as seriously as any other on the books. (Some have made the controversial argument that this is what happened in Turing’s unfortunate case.)
This tacit ‘deal’ and the pressure-relief valve of trading hypocritical leniency for discretion and lip service is, unfortunately, a kind of top-level “inside joke” of an open-secret regime of tolerating unprincipled exceptions, and can break down in several predictable ways when people who don’t get or weren’t let it on the joke and don’t appreciate the salutary benefits – we might call them ‘literalists’ or perhaps ‘fundamentalists’ – take charge or are otherwise allowed to upset the apple cart by pointing out and complaining about the hypocrisy, and then upset the apple cart by insisting on the elimination of these humane, reasonable, and reality-shaped exceptions in favor of the harsh but logical implications of the artificial and anti-natural word-based rule. The worse aspect of this is that is creates an immediately salient axis of disagreement from which rival coalitions will spontaneously form according to differences in interests, and thus threatens to generate a perception of rivalry and sub-populaiton solidarity (e.g., a “class consciousness”) which can foment the most dangerous forms of discord and fission in a formerly cohesive and unified polity.
This Social Failure Mode gives rise to ideological singularities where “ideological entrepreneurs” race with each other in a tournament of competitive sanctimony to eradicate all the reasonable hypocricies and unprincipled exceptions which actually make life livable and keep people from tearing at each others throats in a frenzied orgy of evil bloodletting in the name of purportedly high-principle, which typically get worse and worse until finally someone is able to impose order again, which is impossible to do without the powers and capabilities of an authoritarian dictator. E.g., the French Revolution then Napoleon (and, alas, a sad history of so many other historical tragedies).
Our own trouble is that any order we would recognize as minimally classically liberal is vulnerable and susceptible to this particular failure mode and thus carries with it the seed of its own demise.
Jaron Lanier’s third argument for deleting your social media accounts is pretty compelling all on its own. Knitting websites, too.
It’s hard to imagine someone who is physically in the same room as her victim somehow deluding herself into believing that her friend Beverley or Velma knitting something with the words “Make America Great Again” is secretly an agent of white supremacy.
Lanier says, “If the species dies and some future species of intelligent flying octopus inherits the Earth and they go back over us, they’ll probably blame Facebook for our demise.”
But Ravelry too. Lanier talks about becoming self-righteous and nasty and uncharitable back in the 80s on Usenet.
What he’s calling the “continuous behavior modification” we’re volunteering for now is just an extension of what was already pretty unpleasant for people who were online then.