Jean Twenge on Premarital Sex
the consequences of the rapid change in attitudes
Note: On Monday, May 8, Bryan Caplan will join us for our paid subscriber Zoom at 8 PM. On Monday, May 15, Freddie deBoer will join us.
In a nationwide survey, 85% of U.S. adults said that premarital sex was wrong in 1967, which plummeted to 37% in 1979.
—Twenge, Jean M. Generations: The Real Differences Between Gen Z, Millennials, Gen X, Boomers, and Silents—and What They Mean for America's Future (p. 90).
The subtitle for Jean Twenge’s book suggests that it will consist of sociological woo-woo based on labels applied to different birth cohorts. Fortunately, the contents are a lot more like the quoted sentence, presenting meaningful data documenting cultural trends. She mainly uses the generational labels as shorthand.
I think that the sharp, rapid change in attitudes on premarital sex that took place in the late 1960s and 1970s is a fact that all of us should bear in mind. I contend that it helps you understand why bans on abortion were unsustainable, why marriage is increasingly delayed, and why fertility is down.
Before the mid-1960s, pregnancy was regarded as the punishment that fit the crime of premarital sex. OK, premarital sex was not a crime in the 1950s, but you know what I mean: it violated the widely-expressed social norms. But when social norms shifted, the rationale for requiring a young woman to bear an unwanted child fell by the wayside. And I claim that is why laws against abortion were destined to go away.
Twenge believes that there has been a major trend toward individualism. Premarital sex has become an individual choice, whereas until the late 1960s it was socially regulated. I would argue that abortion, too, rapidly came to be regarded as an individual choice.
I understand that the majority of Americans believe that there should be some restrictions on abortion. But think that through. Who do you want to decide at what week to draw the line? Who do you want do decide what exceptions (rape, health concerns of the woman, etc.) to allow? If you think that legislators or judges or “the will of the people” should be making those decisions, then you are a bigger fan of state power than I am.
Approval of premarital sex also probably affected marriage and fertility. Twenge writes,
In 1956, the median age of first-time brides reached an all-time low of 20.1. Let that sink in: Nearly half of new brides in the 1950s were teenagers.
…The fashion for marrying young lingered well into the 1960s, with the median age of first marriage for women not reaching 21 again until 1973, and not reaching 22 until 1981. p. 50-52
Twenge points out that approval of premarital sex meant that young people could marry later without having to forego sex. This produced greater marital stability, because marrying later means you are less likely to make a mistake leading to divorce.
More recently, I read that young people are not having sex as early as they used to. The result of starting sex later is that are likely to get married even later still.
That gets back to the question of why young people are having sex later. 17 is the new 15. I am sure that Twenge will say something about that when I get to the chapter in the book that discusses the current young generation.
I suspect that marrying later contributes to the decline in the number of children per woman. The physical toll of bearing and caring for children rises with age. Twenge writes,
Benita Eisler found that the ethos of the 1950s and 1960s prized “doing it yourself” when it came to child rearing, without the expectation of the intergenerational and paid help common in families just a few decades before. p. 54
I can imagine that in those days, young mothers raised their broods because they were up to it. Much as my oldest daughter loves babies and children, having started her family after age 30 she is not in shape to spend as much time as a 50s mom dealing with kids.
This essay is part of a series on human interdependence.
You’ve got the causality backwards. People starting engaging in and approving of premarital sex because the costs of premarital sex plummeted. The pill and legal abortion (declared by judicial fiat, not some market or democratize faction) meant that you could have sex without the risk of creating life. Note that it’s not sex without consequences, because sex always has consequences on the person engaging in sexual activity, especially women.
To your question on who decides abortion laws, I don’t care how it gets implemented but I want to stop wholesale legal murder of innocent infants. Science and common sense both dictate that life begins at conception. At the very least, we could get heartbeat laws. A child born of rape and incest is an innocent child and also a human person with the same rights as you, but in general I’m willing to tolerate those exceptions if it gets the laws passed.
I think the missing driving factor in this story is the general decline in trust in, and respect for, traditional institutions of authority over the same time period. This includes secularization but also encompasses decline in trust in secular institutions-- anybody who would tell you to follow norms "because I/we say so".
Martin Gurri rightly says that technology decreases this trust when it makes the public more viscerally aware of the malfeasance, incompetence, and hypocrisy of those in authority. That trend didn't start with social media, and the 1960s were just as much a time of acceleration for it as the 2010s. Think of the photos and TV footage of the Vietnam War, or the DNC demonstrators in 1968 chanting "The whole world is watching!" Ironically, this same process has *increased* the stringency of sexual behavior norms specifically for powerful men: JFK was the last POTUS who could be confident reporters would withhold from the public their knowledge of his philandering.
In an individualistic society with low trust in traditional authorities, the difficulty of enforcing a norm is a function of two main factors:
1. The intrinsic cost of norm compliance. How big a sacrifice are you asking people to make?
2. The ability to tell a credible-sounding story of how norm violators materially harm innocent bystanders. Paternalistic stories that imply "you don't know what's good for you" won't cut it.
For example, modern social-justice-related language-bowdlerization norms are relatively easy to enforce because they have very low intrinsic cost of norm compliance: to all but a few curmudgeons, larding one's speech with euphemisms is a minor annoyance. Nonetheless, the norm-enforcers feel compelled to tell an elaborate story about "microaggressions" dressed up with pseudoscience to support the claim of material harm from norm violation. The story is fragile-- it is easy to point out that that story is unsupported by evidence and that hurt feelings are not material harm-- and this predicts that the norms themselves will also be fragile.
Flight-shaming and other anti-consumption environmentalist norms are examples where, despite a much more credible harm-to-bystanders story, enforcement is unlikely to get very far because the cost of compliance is too high. Even most people very concerned about climate change (fwiw I would include myself in this category) realize that we need technology to drastically lower, indeed ideally to eliminate, the compliance cost of reducing one's carbon footprint, because moral suasion isn't going to work.
Norms against premarital sex are doubly doomed. The compliance cost in intrinsic pleasure foregone is extremely high, and in the presence of effective contraception and STI protection, the harm-to-bystanders story becomes very difficult to support-- and arguments about long-term marital happiness are an ineffective substitute because they are paternalistic.