Why Women Have Sex by Cindy M. Meston PH.D. & David M. Buss PH.D

Author:Cindy M. Meston, PH.D. & David M. Buss, PH.D.
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780805088342
Publisher: Henry Holt and Company

When I was in high school, I was the last of my friends to lose her virginity. Most of them had had sex by thirteen and at sixteen I was far behind them. So in order to prove that I was not afraid of sex or intimacy, I had sex—if only to tell them I did.

—heterosexual woman, age 27

Perhaps in reaction to this cavalier attitude toward virginity among many American women, virginity—to be or not to be—has today made its way into the political realm. Former president George W. Bush approved a one-billion-dollar abstinence campaign. Although it was targeted at both men and women, many believe it was primarily intended to reinforce the idea that sex outside of marriage is a bad thing for women—regardless of how safe or consensual it might be. Slogans such as “Would you eat a cookie that already had a bite out of it?” were intended to shame people into remaining virgins until marriage. Young people who completed abstinence programs wore silver rings to display publicly their vows of chastity. But was the program successful at changing young people’s sexual habits? The results released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services in 2007 showed no evidence that the programs actually affected rates of sexual abstinence.

Of course, not every American woman wants to lose her virginity as soon as possible or before she gets married. A woman’s attitude toward her own and other women’s virginity is undeniably influenced by cultural and religious expectations. Cross-cultural studies of sexuality reveal important differences in both these attitudes and the rates of premarital intercourse, even between ethnic groups living in the same country. To some extent, a woman’s feelings depend on how acculturated or enmeshed she has become with the prevailing North American assumption, reflected in mass-media depictions of sexuality and most women’s actual behavior, that women have sex before marriage.

A study conducted in the Meston Sexual Psychophysiology Lab of more than four hundred Canadian university women showed that 72 percent of women of European ancestry had engaged in premarital sex compared with a much lower 43 percent of Southeast Asian women, most of whom were ethnic Chinese. The age of first intercourse also differed among Canadian ethnic subgroups. European-ancestry women lost their virginity at age seventeen, on average, and Southeast Asian women at age eighteen. A study just completed in the Meston Lab among more than nine hundred American university women also found differences, although less pronounced, in rates of premarital intercourse based on ethnic group. Seventy-six percent of European-ancestry, 71 percent of Hispanic-ancestry, and 66 percent of Asian-ancestry women reported having had premarital sex.

North America is not the only place where sexual liberalization is taking hold. Among Chinese women living in Shanghai, a recent survey of five hundred single men and women discovered that only 60 percent said virginity was a requirement for a spouse. While this number is still high compared to Western cultures, it is substantially lower than earlier findings. In fact, results from

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