Dollars and Sex (2 page)

Oh, and before we begin, you probably want to know the answer to the question I posed at the beginning of this introduction. The answer is yes and no—when it comes to penis size and economic well-being, all the action is in the tails of the distribution, so to speak. Countries in which the average penis size is small tend to be worse off. As penises get bigger, however, national incomes increase but only up until a certain point, after which bigger penises are associated with smaller national incomes. Countries in which penises are large, on average, tend to be worse off, although not necessarily on every dimension (clearly). I like to call this relationship the Boner Curve. I wouldn't put too much stock in these results, though as far as (economic) models go; it is pretty easy to get this one to give you what you are looking for.
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These results are based on a paper written by a courageous doctoral student at the University of Helsinki, Tatu Westling.

CASANOVA USED LEMONS AS CONTRACEPTIVES

It's 2003, and this is what the keynote speaker, an eminent macroeconomist from the University of Pennsylvania, has just said: “Casanova used lemons as contraceptives.” The lunch crowd, a group of attentive economists, is now wide-eyed. While 95 percent of the room (the men) wonder “How the hell does that work?” the other 5 percent of the room (the women) think “Ouch!” I, a member of the latter group, note for future reference the effect of weird sexual facts on audience engagement.

Casanova's seductive behavior aside, the speaker is making a very good point: The liberalization of sexual values during the twentieth century is an economic story. In this case, the Penn economist is arguing that new technologies, in the form of effective contraceptives, have shaken the great cost-benefit analysis of, well, coitus. The analysis, conducted by millions of women and men each day, goes like this: “Should I have sex tonight, or not?”

This new “technology,” along with changes in education and equality, has completely transformed the sexual landscape. If you doubt that it is economic factors that have been at play in the transition to a more promiscuous society, consider the following evidence:

• In 1900, only 6 percent of unmarried 19-year-old women were sexually active compared with 75 percent of unmarried 19-year-old women a century later.

• Contraceptive technology has become increasingly effective at preventing pregnancy over the last half century, and yet the number of births to unmarried women has increased from 5 percent to 41 percent over the same period.

• Despite this trend toward a greater number of births outside of marriage, 66 percent of Americans still believe that out-of-wedlock births are bad for society.

• Premarital sex is strongly tied to family income; girls who live in the poorest households are 50 percent more likely to be sexually active than are girls in the richest households.

• Premarital sex may have become the norm, but it has not become completely destigmatized; only 48 percent of women and 55 percent of men under the age of 35 think that premarital sex is not morally wrong.

• Attitudes toward teen pregnancy are tied to family income; 68 percent of girls in higher-income households report that they would be “very upset” by a pregnancy compared with 46 percent of girls in lower-income households.

• Marriage is increasingly a privilege enjoyed by the rich; in the 1960s, almost equal shares of people with college degrees and people with only a high school education were married (76 percent and 72 percent). Today the marriage rate of less-educated people has fallen to 48 percent while that of college-educated people has stayed relatively high at 64 percent.

• According to the Pew Research Center, young adults in the 19-to- 29-year-old age range, more than any other generation, don't see the point of marriage, with 44 percent reporting that the institution is obsolete and with only 30 percent agreeing with the statement “Having a successful marriage is one of the most important things in life.”

To illustrate how these behaviors and beliefs have come together to transform our sexual landscape, let me begin with a tale of a woman who has lived her life in three parts.

This is the story of Jane who, at the age of 17, ran away from home. Up to that point, Jane had been a good student in an all-girls boarding school. It was not really the type of school that a student leaves to work as a hotel chambermaid and live in a seedy building in an underprivileged neighborhood. But while every other girl in her class went off to university (in search of husbands and degrees), Jane chose another path.

In the year that Jane lived this way, she spent her time with female companions whose perspective on life was very different from hers. Unlike her, they had grown up in poverty. Some were sex workers, having entered the trade in their early teens, following the path of their sex-worker mothers. A few had migrated from different parts of the country to be near their boyfriends, who were incarcerated locally. Others had fallen off the precipice at a very early age and had never been able to climb their way back up.

As it turns out, Jane's friends (even the ones who were not sex workers) were extremely promiscuous; they had sexual relations with a variety of men, some of whom treated them well and others who did not. Their promiscuity was not the result of a lack of moral fortitude. The economic forces at work made it so their answer to “Should I have sex with him tonight?” was almost always “Why not?”

What are those economic forces?

Well, first of all, education. Starting in the early 1980s and up to the present, workers hoping to be economically successful have needed a college education. This has been true not only because educated workers' earnings are climbing, but also because the wages of workers with lowest education levels are falling. In fact, Jane's one year in the ghetto was near the beginning of a thirty-year decline in real earnings for those with a high school education or less, a decline that would turn the gap between educated and noneducated worker's wages from a narrow crack to a yawning fissure.

While these women may have not known that their earning opportunities were becoming increasingly limited due to their lack of education, there was a second economic factor that they were painfully aware of: The marriage prospects of underprivileged women had become bleak. Incarceration rates were on the rise and, in fact, no less than three of Jane's friends had boyfriends who were in prison. Even without a criminal record, the lifetime earning prospects for low-income men were insufficient to make sustaining a family possible. In a time in which more successful men started to seek out wives who would make equal contributions to the household income, higher-income men were out of reach as a possible marriage partner for uneducated and underemployed women.

So, while most women might have feared that promiscuity would affect their lifetime earnings and their prospects for marriage, Jane's new friends figured they had little to look forward to, regardless of their sexual histories. They lived in a culture of despair where a mistimed pregnancy or “fast” reputation made very little difference to their standard of living—then and into the future.

And so, the answer to “Should I sleep with him tonight?” was fated. “Yes, why not?” They really had nothing to lose.

Part two of Jane's story begins with a particularly frightening confrontation with a local pimp who had been trying to recruit her. This was about the same time Jane realized that her decision to diverge from the traditional path might have serious repercussions. So, Jane grabbed her purse (and nothing else) and headed to the airport where a kind airline representative took pity on her, handed her a ticket, and allowed her to fly across the country to a sister who gave her both shelter and a second chance.

We will return to the details of that stage of Jane's life in
chapter 6
, but right now I want to skip to the third part of Jane's life. This is the stage of her life in which she finds herself, coincidentally, sitting in the same lunchtime seminar as I am, wondering how lemons make good contraceptives.

The days of waking up to find her roommate's latest conquest passed out on the living room floor are far behind Jane. While she is now unmarried, divorced in fact, and is parenting a young child with another baby
on the way, she is also educated and independent, having recently started a PhD program at a prestigious university.
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The same Jane who had once found herself flailing alongside disenfranchised and promiscuous women was now marching with a generation of highly educated, and (as it turns out) fairly promiscuous twenty-somethings, women on the way up the economic ladder.

Jane's new academic friends are among those who have benefited from the growing wage gap, earning far more than educated women, or men, did in the past. Not only are they part of a new generation of highly educated women, they are part of the first generation of women who are more educated, on average, than are men. Finding a husband who is as—or more—educated has become more difficult as all women now compete for relatively few educated men.

Jane's new friends, always on the prowl for the perfect (i.e., educated and high-income) male, are also quite promiscuous. They are perhaps not as promiscuous as the women in the first stage of Jane's life, but they are far more promiscuous than previous generations of women. Their promiscuity is not the result of a lack of moral fortitude, again, but rather because in the great cost-benefit analysis, there are few compelling reasons to say no.

The reason for this decision is simple: there are few ill effects of promiscuity for these women. Jane's female peers know how to avoid pregnancy and disease, and they've got the bargaining power within their relationships to insist that protection is consistently applied. Should the promiscuity result in a mistimed pregnancy, well, they have the both means to care for the child alone or to terminate the pregnancy.

Most important though, these women do not face the shame and persecution their mothers and grandmothers would have experienced had they given birth outside of marriage, and, as a result, they face none of those costs.

This, coincidentally, brings us back to Casanova and his lemons.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF BIRTH CONTROL TECHNOLOGY