Friday, March 4, 2011

Why Sex Comes Cheap Nowadays


I had to post this article since it relates so much to what our side has been saying for so long. The interesting part is that this article is not directed as black people, but at the overall population. The BWE/IR bloggers would have you to think that such trends below don't exist among whites and other non-blacks, but as we can see this isn't true. One can say that such trends are simply more intense among blacks. But lets take a look at the article below:

Sex Is Cheap
Why young men have the upper hand in bed, even when they're
failing in life.


We keep hearing that young men are failing to adapt to contemporary
life
. Their financial prospects are impaired—earnings for 25- to 34-year-old
men have fallen by 20 percent since 1971. Their college enrollment numbers trail
women's: Only 43 percent of American undergraduates today are men. Last year,
women made up the majority of the work force for the first time. And yet there
is one area in which men are very much in charge: premarital heterosexual
relationships.

When attractive women will still bed you, life for young men, even
those who are floundering, just isn't so bad. This isn't to say that all men
direct the course of their relationships. Plenty don't. But what many young men
wish for—access to sex without too many complications or commitments—carries the
day. If women were more fully in charge of how their relationships transpired,
we'd be seeing, on average, more impressive wooing efforts, longer
relationships, fewer premarital sexual partners, shorter cohabitations, and more
marrying going on. Instead, according to the National Longitudinal Study of
Adolescent Health (which collects data well into adulthood), none of these
things is occurring. Not one. The terms of contemporary sexual relationships
favor men and what they want in relationships, not just despite the fact that
what they have to offer has diminished, but in part because of it. And it's all
thanks to supply and demand.

To better understand what's going on, it's worth a crash course in
"sexual economics," an approach best articulated by social psychologists Roy Baumeister and Kathleen Vohs. As Baumeister, Vohs, and others have
repeatedly shown, on average, men want sex more than women do. Call it sexist,
call it whatever you want—the evidence shows it's true. In one
frequently cited study
, attractive young researchers separately approached
opposite-sex strangers on Florida State University's campus and proposed casual
sex. Three-quarters of the men were game, but not one woman said yes. I know:
Women love sex too. But research like this consistently demonstrates that men
have a greater and far less discriminating appetite for it. As Baumeister and Vohs note, sex in
consensual relationships therefore commences only when women decide it does.

And yet despite the fact that women are holding the sexual purse
strings, they aren't asking for much in return these days—the market "price" of
sex is currently very low. There are several likely reasons for this. One is the
spread of pornography: Since high-speed digital porn gives men additional sexual
options—more supply for his elevated demand—it takes some measure of price
control away from women. The Pill lowered the cost as well. There are also,
quite simply, fewer social constraints on sexual relationships than there once
were. As a result, the sexual decisions of young women look more like those of
men than they once did, at least when women are in their twenties. The price of
sex is low, in other words, in part because its costs to women are lower than
they used to be.

But just as critical is the fact that a significant number of young men are
faring rather badly in life, and are thus skewing the dating pool. It's not that
the overall gender ratio in this country is out of whack; it's that there's a
growing imbalance between the number of successful young women and successful
young men. As a result, in many of the places where young people typically
meet—on college campuses, in religious congregations, in cities that draw large
numbers of twentysomethings—women outnumber men by
significant margins. (In one Manhattan ZIP code, for example, women account for
63 percent of 22-year-olds.)

The idea that sex ratios alter sexual behavior is well-established.
Analysis of demographic data from 117 countries has shown that when men
outnumber women, women have the upper hand: Marriage rates rise and fewer
children are born outside marriage. An oversupply of women, however, tends to
lead to a more sexually permissive culture. The same holds true on college
campuses. In the course of researching our book Premarital Sex in America, my co-author and I
assessed the effects of campus sex ratios on women's sexual attitudes and
behavior. We found that virginity is more common on those campuses where women
comprise a smaller share of the student body, suggesting that they have the
upper hand. By contrast, on campuses where women outnumber men, they are more
negative about campus men, hold more negative views of their relationships, go
on fewer dates, are less likely to have a boyfriend, and receive less commitment
in exchange for sex.

The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health data offer other
glimpses into just how low the cost of sex is for young men ages 18 through 23.
Take the speed with which these men say their romantic relationships become
sexual: 36 percent of young men's relationships add sex by the end of the second
week of exclusivity; an additional 13 percent do so by the end of the first
month. A second indicator of cheap sex is the share of young men's sexual
relationships—30 percent—that don't involve romance at all: no wooing, no dates,
no nothing. Finally, as my colleagues and I discovered in our interviews,
striking numbers of young women are participating in unwanted sex—either
particular acts they dislike or more frequent intercourse than they'd prefer or
mimicking porn (being in a dating relationship is correlated to greater
acceptance of and use of porn among women).

Yes, sex is clearly cheap for men. Women's "erotic capital," as Catherine
Hakim of the London School of Economics has dubbed it, can still be traded for
attention, a job, perhaps a boyfriend, and certainly all the sex she wants, but
it can't assure her love and lifelong commitment. Not in this market. It's no
surprise that the percentage of 25- to 34-year-olds who are married has shrunk by an average
of 1 percent each year this past decade.

Jill, a 20-year-old college student from Texas, is one of the many
young women my colleagues and I interviewed who finds herself confronting the
sexual market's realities. Startlingly attractive and an all-star in all ways,
she patiently endures her boyfriend's hemming and hawing about their future. If
she were operating within a collegiate sexual economy that wasn't oversupplied
with women, men would compete for her and she would easily secure the long-term
commitment she says she wants. Meanwhile, Julia, a 21-year-old from Arizona
who's been in a sexual relationship for two years, is frustrated by her
boyfriend's wish to "enjoy the moment and not worry about the future." Michelle,
a 20-year-old from Colorado, said she is in the same boat: "I had an
ex-boyfriend of mine who said that, um, he didn't know if he was ever going to
get married because, he said, there's always going to be someone better." If
this is "the end of men," someone really ought to let
them know.

And yet while young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in
the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to
achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked,
redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex. Today's
young men, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern
Sexuality
put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and
authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty
sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.


The last paragraph is the kicker and pretty much sums up what so many black men have declared before and so many black women insist on denying. Women's sexual behavior significantly influences the behavior of men. This is reality. Women have always been the ones who bring restraint to heterosexual sexual activity which is why gay men have on average three times the number of sex partners as straight men, even in this day of female sexual liberation. It's such restraint that motivates men to achieve and commit in order to have such female affection at hand. Nowadays, commitment and true success are no longer necessary for sex and this is made worse by the low standards and unrestrained bad boy love prevalent among today's women with black women leading the way.


It is clearly not solely a black phenomenon but this problem is quite notably more intense in the black community. Black women have on average more sex partners than women of other groups in America and based on the words of the experts cited, this directly influences the higher level of average sex partners for black men. Women are the ones most in control of whether sex occurs or not.

The last paragraph is worth repeating:

And yet while young men's failures in life are not penalizing them in the bedroom, their sexual success may, ironically, be hindering their drive to achieve in life. Don't forget your Freud: Civilization is built on blocked, redirected, and channeled sexual impulse, because men will work for sex. Today's young men, however, seldom have to. As the authors of last year's book Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality put it, "Societies in which women have lots of autonomy and authority tend to be decidedly male-friendly, relaxed, tolerant, and plenty sexy." They're right. But then try getting men to do anything.