The Premarital Sex Revolution
It's what I blame for the reduction in marriage and fertility. Not the phones.
In the days when pre-marital sex was taboo, many couples had at least one powerful incentive to marry. This may have been the case in 1969 when Gallup found that premarital sex was frowned upon by two-thirds of Americans, while only 21% felt these relations were acceptable. That critical view dropped sharply by the early 1970s to 47%, and in 1985 Gallup found a majority of Americans on the other side, with 52% saying premarital sex was morally okay. Today [2001], according to a May 10-14 Gallup poll, only 38% of U.S. adults say it is wrong for a man and a woman to have sexual relations before marriage, while 60% disagree.
Much of the change in attitudes about premarital sex took place between 1969 and 1973, when the percentage of people who approved of it went from 24 percent to 47 percent in just four years.
A few remarks:
If the decline in fertility in recent decades is downstream of the decline in young people getting married, then I would argue that this is in turn downstream of the decline in the taboo against premarital sex. I think that matters more than the phones.
Before 1973, the restrictions against abortion were part of a social “regime” to warn against (and arguably to punish) premarital sex. Only after Roe v Wade was the issue reframed as “right to life” vs. “right to choose.” I believe that the Supreme Court decision was made possible by the change in attitudes toward premarital sex.
No one anticipated the consequences for gender relations of removing the taboo against premarital sex.
Once premarital sex is ok, you do not need to rush to get married. This did not become obvious immediately, but it gradually seeped into the culture. In 1970, the median age at first marriage for men was 23.2 and for women it was 20.8, and even by 1980 it was still 24.7 and 22.0, much lower than today. In 2022, the figures were 30.5 for men and 28.6 for women. I think of the original impetus coming from the premarital sex revolution, with further increases happening as a gradual contagion effect: people seeing their friends getting married later.
Why did the premarital sex revolution take place when it did? I doubt that the birth control pill can explain it. Teenagers did not have access to the pill.
Nowadays, people gesture vaguely toward “sexual revolution” or “women’s liberation.” But it seems to me that the attitudes changed without being influenced by any particular ideology or manifesto.
The 1950s: Cars, Co-ed College, and Folk Freudianism
The revolution in attitudes about sex was on stage in the late 1960s. But it had been covertly in rehearsal in the two prior decades.
Teenage car culture emerged very rapidly in the late 1940s and especially in the 1950s. In the 1930s, parents were not lending their children cars to go to the prom, or giving them cars as graduation presents. During World War II, cars were not available, as factories were busy manufacturing other things and supplies of gasoline and tires were rationed.
After the war, all of a sudden the conditions existed to allow teenagers to borrow cars, or even to buy their own. They began to cruise the streets and to go to drive-in restaurants. Boys picked up their dates in cars, and getting your driver’s license became a key rite of passage.
For teenagers, having a car got you away from adults. It got you out of your neighborhood. That would lead to more sexual experimentation.
College was another place where sexual experimentation could take place away from one’s parents and community. In the 1960s, more women were going to colleges that previously had restricted men. That put young women and young men in proximity to one another. College became decreasingly willing to enforce parietal rules. At Swarthmore College, the rule that men and women together in a room must have one foot on the floor at all times was abolished shortly before I arrived, in 1971.
If there was an intellectual or ideological founder of the revolution in premarital sex, it might have been Sigmund Freud. But Freud never advocated premarital sex.
In the culture at large, though, many people took Freud as saying that repression of sexual desire was a cause of psychological problems. This “Folk Freudianism” penetrated American culture in the 1950s.
In the early 1950s, Alfred Kinsey published “sex research” showing that Americans were more adventurous than people knew or that the morals of the time would have condoned. Hugh Hefner launched Playboy, a magazine that featured topless females (full frontal nudity came later) in an otherwise high-brow publication. Movies and magazines began to feature more sex in their story lines. This was a way for them to compete with the new medium of television, which was restricted to be very prudish.
The 1960s: the curtain gets lifted
If the 1950s was a period in which violations of strict sexual norms took place under cover, the blanket was lifted in the late 1960s. Starting around 1965, a culture of sexual freedom seemed to burst into the open.
Between 1965 and 1968, the movie industry’s Production Code, which regulated sexual content of major motion pictures, was violated by several important films, such as The Graduate. No longer willing to enforce the code, the Motion Picture Association of America in 1968 switched to a rating system, in which some movies were labeled as having “adult” content. With mainstream movies becoming more explicit, pornography as a distinctive form of cinema seemed to fade away.
The hippie phenomenon was a big hit with national magazines. In those days, what we would now call clickbait consisted of lurid tales of young people practicing polyamorous free love and women displaying the consequences of having burned their bras.
Fast Forward to Today
Monogamy has mostly come back. Bras have mostly come back.
But the social norm against premarital sex has not come back.1 Above all, the need to seek marriage in order to be able to have sex has not come back.
I don’t think we realize the consequences of the sudden shift from treating premarital sex as wrong to treating it as normal. I think we took away from dating much of the romance, fun, amusement, and buildup of sexual tension.
Young men used to assume that doing without sex was something that all unmarried men had to accept. Now, those who do not have opportunities for sex must take it personally.
In the old days, young women who disliked casual sex had an easy way to say “no.” They could agree to go out on a date without treating this as tantamount to agreeing to have sex. As saying “no” becomes more difficult, they say “yes” and regret it, acquiring and spreading negative attitudes about men.
And I think we greatly reduced the propensity to marry and have children.
Reportedly, there is less premarital sex taking place. But that is not because it is considered wrong as was the case before the late 1960s. Today, the story is that young women are repelled by the alleged creepiness of males. Meanwhile, young males are turning to porn instead.
In Samuel Eliot Morison's "The Oxford History of the American People," (published in 1965) he goes into some detail about the Sexual Revolution - except he was talking about the one that took place in the 1910's through the 1920s.
Quote from the book: "Dr. Kinsey, in his famous 'Reports' on sexual behavior (1948-53) seems to have been surprised because sexual practices varied from class to class. Any observant boy who grew up around the turn of the century could have told him that. While middle-class intellectuals observed fairly well the principles of the Protestant ethic, the daughters of certain immigrant peoples were notoriously 'easy.' These were known as 'chippies,' in contrast to the professional 'tarts.'"
Another quote: "The loose morals of the 1920s are generally ascribed to the First World War, but a general laxity was observable for at least seven years before America entered that war."
Morison, born in 1887, was from an upper-class Boston family and graduated from Harvard in 1912...one gets the impression he had some first-hand experience with the change in sexual mores.
He mentions several factors contributing to the relaxing of sexual mores:
- The women's organizations that were promoting Prohibition and women's suffrage complained of the double-standard that required virginity from young women but not young men.
- There was an outcry circa 1910 about prostitution and venereal disease. Kauffman's novel "The House of Bondage" (1910) was a best-seller and described the seduction of an innocent country girl into prostitution, which left her a hopeless syphilitic. The U.S. Immigration Commission conducted a crackdown on "white slavery" and found that girls were being imported from Europe (often unknowingly, being promised jobs as domestic servants). When my grandmother immigrated from Transylvania in 1913, she had to provide a letter from her father as proof she was not being trafficked. The American Social Hygiene Association was founded in 1914 to provide sex education in the hopes of reducing rates of sexually transmitted diseases. Morison observes that "Increased knowledge of sexual hygiene counteracted the terror of infection."
- The corset went out of fashion amongst the younger set in the mid-1910s. Quote from the book "...girls whose parents did not allow them to follow the fashion had to discard their corsets surreptitiously in cars and dressing rooms, or risk being called 'Old Ironsides' by the boys."
- Automobiles became more common, and offered an easy way for young couples to escape from supervised courtship in the family parlor or on the front porch.
- It became more socially acceptable for women to drink hard liquor, and to go out dancing. Quote from the book "...dancing made them thirsty, and the more they drank the more wildly they danced. And jazz, which the Reverend Henry Van Dyke called 'a sensual teasing of the strings of sensual passion' was now the principal dance music."
"Thus a revolution in sexual morals was well underway before the war started, but the war quickened it. American troops who went overseas indulged in experiences denied to them by law and custom at home, and a paternal government gave them inoculations to prevent venereal disease. Nurses, Red Cross and YWCA workers had their eyes opened. All returned to a country where there was more of everything - money, leisure, sexy movies, dance halls, jazz; not more liquor fora time, but Prohibition made drinking more exiting, and the sort of liquor one got removed inhibitions." [Morison served in WWI as a private in the Army.]
- The writings of Sigmund Freud, Carl Jung, and Havelock Ellis were very popular among the educated set. Quote from the book: "In 1919-20 one began to hear college students comparing their dreams and prattling knowingly (as they thought) about complexes, inhibitions, infantile sexuality, introverts and extroverts, and the libido....A girl who objected to being kissed and handled by her swain of the evening was apt to be silenced by a quotation alleged to be from Jung; a young man indifferent to girls would now be accused of being permanently in love with his mother; virginity became something to get rid of, chastity a medieval relic." [Morison taught at Oxford University in the early 1920s and became a professor at Harvard in 1925.]
He reports that "The revolution we have been describing occurred, sooner or later, throughout the Western world. It came earlier in Sweden, Germany and Australia than in America, about the same time in France and southern Europe; somewhat later in Britain and Latin America."
IIRC, birth rates were declining dramatically in the 1920s and 1930s; the post-war Baby Boom was a temporary resurgence to the pre-1920s levels and was then followed by a "baby bust" in the late 1960's. I was born in 1968, and my elementary school had such a steep decline in enrollment that they had to consolidate into fewer classes - we had a combined first/second/third grade class, and a combined fourth/fifth/sixth grade class as well.
"This ‘Folk Freudianism’ penetrated American culture in the 1950s.“
I wish that more scholars would explore this topic in more scientific detail. It should be given the full scholarly treatment in all the best academic journals. For example, how deep was the penetration in American culture and how long did it last or maybe it ended prematurely? Was double penetration within the realm of possibilities as well or is that maybe taking things too far?