Dollars and Sex (6 page)

The next morning she realized, brain hammering on the top of her skull, that not only did she not know his name, but that she had never even seen him before on campus. She tried to laugh the whole episode off and, despite not remembering the sex, told her friends that that he was athletic and attractive—so she must have had a good time. Secretly she was flattered that an older, and more experienced, man had chosen her out of all the hot girls in the bar that night and congratulated herself for her quick integration to college life.

The day of her first midterm, Sarah woke up feeling as if she had run a marathon the day before. She had prepared all weekend for the test and so, unlike her dorm mates, had forgone the all-night study session in favor of a good night's sleep. Apparently, the sleep hadn't paid off—she was still exhausted. Drinking a coffee she had grabbed from the cafeteria and sitting outside on a bench in the sun, it suddenly dawned on Sarah that she was not just tired, something else was wrong. She had a few hours before the exam, so she grabbed her crib sheets in order to study while she headed over to the medical clinic and waited to see the nurse. Within an hour, she knew that she had a problem. Later, she would recall that, at that moment, she felt more sorry for the nurse who had the unfortunate job of telling her that she was pregnant than she did for herself.

Being three weeks pregnant at midterm meant four difficult weeks of missed assignments and failed exams while waiting to have an abortion. She didn't have a medical certificate to explain her poor performance, not because she couldn't get one but because she was too ashamed to ask, and so her professors were unsympathetic. The term ended not with final exams and partying with friends, as she had thought it would, but with a medical procedure and a feeling that she had let herself down.

So here Sarah is again, same bar and same friends, out on a Thursday night. While her friends are starting their second year of college, Sarah is getting a second chance at her first, thanks to the help of a sympathetic dean. She is not about to make the same mistake again and, as I have already said, is out tonight looking for more than one night of drunken sex. But because Sarah still wants to have sex, but with fewer risks, she would really like to have a boyfriend whom she could trust to consistently use protection.

The problem she now faces is that on her campus there are far more women than men. That fact is not only making it hard for her to find a man; it is making it impossible to find one who is willing enter a relationship with a woman who is cautious about having sex. If she meets a man tonight, for example, she knows that not having sex with him in the first few hours after they meet will likely rule out any possibility that he will want to date her in the future. After all, he has to assume little of the risk of a casual sexual experience and, because the market for single men is so competitive on her campus, there are other women who are willing to take the risk—especially tonight, since they are having a hard time seeing the risk through their beer goggles.

What Sarah would know if she was listening carefully in her Economics of Sex and Love class is that an excess of women on the college sex market has driven down the price of sex, making it, essentially, a buyer's market. She would also know that there is a strong correlation between binge drinking and student promiscuity leading to pregnancy. But this last point, I suspect, she doesn't need me to tell her.

A BUYER'S MARKET FOR PROMISCUOUS MALE STUDENTS

Another misperception that my students seem to hold dear is the idea that men like having sex more than do women. I would never try to convince you that is the case, mostly because I just don't believe it myself. So how can I describe a market for casual sex where the desires of men are driving down the price as a buyer's market? It isn't because men want sex and women need to be compensated to be encouraged to have sex with them,
that is, women are sellers; it is because men have a greater preference for multiple sexual partners than do women and women prefer to be assured that the sex they are having is not a one-time experience. Within this context then, the “price” that is being driven down is the level of assurance that a woman requires from the man she is having sex with that he will treat her well—whatever that means to the individual woman.

If you doubt that men have a greater desire for multiple partners, I propose that you undertake the following study. Go and ask your friends, coworkers, and random people you meet on the street the following question: Ideally, how many sexual partners would you like to have over the next two years? I can tell you now that the men will report a desire to have far more partners than will the women. When these studies have been conducted in the past, women, on average, report that they would like only one sexual partner while men report that on average they would like to have eight. When asked if they would like to have sex with multiple partners at the same time, 42 percent of male respondents in a nationally representative survey said that they would, compared with only 8 percent of female respondents.
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Statistically, women do not appear to share men's love of variety in sexual partners. This is a topic we will return to in
chapter 8
, when we talk about infidelity in marriage.

You could also ask this question instead: what is the minimum amount of time you would need to know someone before you had sex with him or her? I am going to guess that few women will say five minutes, but when these questions have been asked in surveys in the past, many men had no trouble with that time frame. Women, on the other hand, often said that ideally they would know a man for six months. In the same nationally representative survey I just mentioned, 31 percent of men reported finding the idea of having sex with a stranger appealing, compared with only 8 percent of women.

The outnumbering of women to men on university campuses not only makes it difficult for women to find partners from a simply numerical perspective (fewer men means each individual woman has a lower probability of finding an available man), but it is also changing the nature of male-female relationships as men have acquired greater sex-market power.

Using data collected from a large number of U.S. students from a variety of different colleges, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker find that in colleges where the ratio of women to men is high (women greatly outnumber men), women have more negative attitudes toward dating and sexual relationships than in those in which the ratio of women to men is low.

Comparing campuses where women outnumber men to those where men outnumber women allows the authors come to the following conclusions. They find that women who have never had a college boyfriend have a 69 percent chance of being a virgin when only 47 percent of all students are female, compared with only a 54 percent chance of being a virgin when 60 percent of all students are female. When there are fewer men available on campus, women who have never been in a committed relationship are more likely to have had sex at least once compared to when there are more men available.

The gap between those who have been sexually active and those who have not is no smaller for women who report having had at least one college boyfriend. These women have a 45 percent chance being a virgin on a campus in which men outnumber women but only a 30 percent chance of being a virgin on campuses in which women outnumber men.

Even women with a current boyfriend seem to have a better chance at postponing sex when there are fewer women on campus relative to men; those women have a 17 percent chance of being a virgin when there are more women than men on campus and a 30 percent chance when there are more men than women.

This evidence demonstrates that when there are fewer men than women, individual women lose some of their ability to negotiate at what point a couple has their first sexual experience together.

Given this evidence, you won't be surprised to hear that casual sex is also more frequent when women outnumber men on a campus. For example, women who have had a boyfriend in the past but are currently single have a 27 percent chance of having had sex in the last month on a high-sex-ratio campus compared with only a 20 percent chance on a low-sex-ratio campus; single women are more sexually active when men are relatively scarce than they are when men are relatively abundant.

Traditional dating is far less common when fewer men are available. This isn't really surprising, of course, as there are simply fewer men to date, but the data suggests that there is far less traditional dating than the mere shortage of men would suggest. In fact, a 1 percent decrease in the proportion of female students increases the probability that a woman will have had six or more traditional dates by an incredible 3.3 percent.

This evidence supports the idea that when women are abundant, there is far less traditional dating and far more “hooking up.” Beyond that, the same authors report in their recently published book that a number of the women who they interviewed were participating in sexual acts they disliked or were having sex more often than would have been their choice.
That says to me that a woman's ability to bargain with her sexual partner over both the timing and nature of sex acts has been eroded on university campuses in the face of increased competition for men among relatively abundant women.

BOTTOMS UP

The behavior of Sarah and her friends in the bar that night wasn't just about male-female bargaining over sexual relationships. Part of the promiscuity on campuses everywhere has to do with binge drinking. How much is an empirical question that we can answer, thanks to research that has been published by economist Jeffrey DeSimone. Using data collected from 136 U.S. postsecondary institutions, DeSimone finds that binge drinking is a major contributing factor to risky sexual behavior on university campuses.