Lies about Premarital Sex in America
March 7, 2011
THE latest big news regarding marriage is that premarital sex was always normal in America. That’s right. If you thought there was something called the sexual revolution, you were wrong.
In today’s New York Times, Ross Douthat, the “conservative” columnist, writes about the impossibility of a “traditionalist utopia” in which the only sex is married sex. He states:
No such society has ever existed, or ever could: not in 1950s America (where, as the feminist writer Dana Goldstein noted last week, the vast majority of men and women had sex before they married), and not even in Mormon Utah (where Brigham Young University recently suspended a star basketball player for sleeping with his girlfriend).
The study cited by Goldstein and others is, “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954-2003,” by Lawrence B. Finer. According to the Guttmacher Institute, which funded the study, Finer proves “[C]ontrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, the study shows that even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage.”
Actually, public perception holds that the sexual revolution began in the 1960s. Those who were born in 1940 would turn 20 in 1960. Therefore, this study does not deflate the general impression that premarital sex was not widely accepted in the past and dramatically increased in the 60s.
The age of the first sexual encounter decreased over the course of the years included in the study from 20.4 to 17.6. The study did not examine whether the first sexual encounter was with a future marriage partner or how many partners on average respondents had.
The idea that trends in premarital sex in America have differed little over the years is not proved by this study.
Of course, no one believes there was ever a society in which there was NO premarital sex. The idea that traditionalists believe ALL non-marital sex can be prevented, which is what Douthat suggests traditionalists believe, is the sort of “idiotizing” of conservatism one expects from a liberal. Paint every conservative as a small-minded lunatic.
There has never been a society in which lying and stealing didn’t exist either. If lying and stealing were shown to increase in the 1960s or when people began to marry later, should we breathe a sigh of relief and say that proves they are good?
The widely-held ideal for most of American history was chastity before marriage. As for Goldstein’s assertion that premarital sex is necessary because people now marry later, there is no law requiring that people marry later. She asserts later marriage is a great cultural development. There were Roman aristocrats who thought their declining fertility and disappearing families were a great development too. Their society died.
— Comments —
Lawrence Auster writes:
The audacity, the audacity of these leftists. Not only do they say, which is of course true, that premarital sex existed in the past, but they have the audacity to declare, “[C]ontrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past…” Meaning that premarital sex is NOT much more common now. Meaning (as you put it) that the sexual revolution never occurred. It’s an Orwellian rewriting of history.
But this is a standard leftist mind-control tactic. In order to make it impossible for people to criticize or question the current leftist order, they try to make people believe that things have always been exactly the way they are now, and therefore there is no basis to criticize the way things are now.
For example, they say that “America has always been a multicultural society,” thus making it impossible to criticize multiculturalism as the radical departure from our past that it is. And here, in the same way, they say that “America has always had as much premarital sex as it has now,” making it impossible to criticize the current reign of promiscuity.
Laura writes:
The study is consciously spun to give the impression that most of the adults who married in the 40s and 50s had premarital relations. In fact, it looks at those who were teenagers in the 1950s and what happened (supposedly) in their lives later, often many years later. It is deliberately devious. Even if premarital sex was much more common in the 40s and 50s than is generally assumed, which is not proven by this study, the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past is not proven wrong.
The study suggests that our culture has become not more hedonistic but more honest. Our parents and grandparents were hypocrites.
Art from Texas writes:
Indeed, one of the main methods of the left is to rewrite what happened, and then leave peple with extreme doubt on the way people lived in the past. Then they can assert their own honesty and superiority. And this paves the way for conservatives to add another action to the list of liberal beliefs which they accept because they don’t believe there was any better attitude in the past. Look at the conservative attitude towards “don’t ask don’t tell,” popular culture and television, and then you can see that the lefts abilty to keep the conservative moving to the left will keep them on the road to the progressive “utopia” ahead. Statistics such as these are one weapon in their arsenal. It can be extremely hard to educate people on the true way in which people lived in the past when this kind of misinformation is spread around.
James Kabala writes:
I should have noted the distinction between Goldstein and the Guttmacher Institute’s press department and what Douthat was saying. However, he also misrepresented this study. He says, “Yes, in 1950 as in 2011, most people didn’t go virgins to their marriage beds.” That may be true but the study quoted did not show that.
You are right he does not deny the nature of the changes since the Sexual Revolution, although he makes no mention of the era before the 1950s. He says, “But earlier generations of Americans waited longer to have sex, took fewer sexual partners across their lifetimes, and were more likely to see sleeping together as a way station on the road to wedlock.”
This is true, but there was also a time when many people probably did go to their marriage beds virgins. He seems to suggest that the ideal of chastity before marriage is unworkable and utopian.
Douthat says, “The point isn’t that we should aspire to some Arcadia of perfect chastity.”
Well, of course we should aspire to perfect chastity before marriage. To say that conservatives hold this ideal is not to say they will always be in a state of panic because premarital sex is occurring. Obviously, it will always exist. But conservatives are naturally in a state of panic now.
Perfect chastity before marriage is precisely the point and has been achieved by many in previous generations. For conservatives to hold up the ideal of chastity does not mean they cannot cope with reality. The very nature of an ideal is its perfection and its beauty. We aspire to have a society in which there is no crime too.
