Married Couples Sex – Less Now Than In The 1940s
Disclaimer: When I make a post like this, a certain percentage of readers assume that I love the repressive, conservative 1950s where everyone voted Republican and women were held down by their male masters. No.Â
I believe the 40s and 50s would have been a horrible time to live, for men and women both, even without World War Two. I very much doubt I would be able to have the lifestyle I now enjoy, personally, financially and sexually, if I lived in the 1950s. Even with the severe problems of the modern era that I often complain about, I’d happily take 2011 over 1952 any day. Disclaimer over.
I’ve read these findings in other places before, but Ray Kurzweil in his book Transcend, which has nothing to do with marriage or relationships (it’s book on longevity), sums it up well:
…yet the frequency of sexual intercourse among married couples has fallen in recent years. When Alfred Kinsey preformed his studies on married couples in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the average frequency of intercourse was twice a week. Social scientist Morton Hunt found that it had increased to approximately 3.25 times weekly by the end of the mid-1970s, which he felt was due to societal changes related to the availability of the birth control pill and the sexual revolution. More recent studies, however, have found that the frequency has fallen and now averages less than twice weekly…
Like I’m at all surprised.
It’s worse than it sounds. “Less than twice weekly” is a very nicey-nice, politically correct and safe way of saying “around once or twice a month”. Even that does not take into account the huge but temporary spike of sexual activity in a newly married couple. (I love people who brag about how much sex they’re getting after they’ve only been married five months. Uh yeah, wait three more years then let me know how much you’re getting.) Remove that from the averages, and the stats get even worse.
I get why people were fucking more in the 1970s. Duh. Sexual freedom and a lack of ASD is one of the few things about the 70s I like. (The problem is just about everything else in the 70s sucked.)
Why then are married couples having less sex now than in the repressive, ultraconservative 40s and 50s? My theories:
1. Feminism had not yet happened. Back then, most women, not all, but most, actually liked being dominated by their Alpha husbands to some degree, keeping attraction strong and wildly improving the sexual experience, even in those married couples that had been together quite a while. Today in a post-feminist world the issue of women being dominated by men and liking it has become…muddled, to say the least.
2. Somewhat the reverse, men were more masculine back then. Beta males were few, Alphas were commonplace. Alpha behavior was not only celebrated, it was expected. Today? No. Also, sexual substitutes, like jerking off to porn (internet or otherwise) were far less prevalent back in those days. I strongly suspect men had higher testosterone levels back then. More testosterone and more Alpha behaviors means 1) higher male sex drives, 2) more men brave enough to confidently sexually escalate more often (instead of being scared of making the little wife mad), and 3) better sexual performance and thus enhanced enjoyment for men and the women they fucked.
3. Cheating was more stigmatized back then than now. Less cheating means more sex within a marriage, unless you’re talking about two low-sex-drive people. Also, though men have always cheated on wives throughout history, I have a strong feeling that women back then didn’t cheat nearly as much as today. I have read several studies that show cheating rates for married women working outside the home are much higher (as in double and triple) than those for stay-at-home married moms. Back in the 1940s-50s, almost all married women were stay-at-home wives. Now the opposite is true.
I’ve said it before, I’ll say it again. TMM (traditional monogamous marriage) was fine many decades ago when the world was a very different place. Today it’s a ridiculous thing to do unless both man and woman are very boring, low-sex-drive people. A long term live-in OLTR or OLTR marriage is a far superior option.
Side Note: I just can’t resist. This is a quote from another book I just finished, one of R.A. Salvatore’s less juvenile fantasy novels, Road of the Patriarch. The scene is a king and queen arguing with each other.
It was such a coy little game, she thought, this relationship called marriage. They both knew the issue at hand, but they would dance around it for hours, even days, rather than face the volatility head on.
Even fucking fantasy authors know what traditional marriage is. Yeah, sounds GREAT. Sign me up for that!
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What’s even more depressing is that the 40’s and 50’s didn’t have viagra/cialis etc. I think that the sexual frequency rates for older adults are significantly impacted by pills nowadays. Without these pills, the average frequency is probably more around once a month.
Oh yeah, and if you like BJ,s kiss those goodbye in long term marriages….
A likely reason that you missed for the decline in copulation frequency: people are too frickin’ fat on average nowadays to get it on. Rampant obesity also explains the mysterious decline in violent crime rates over the past two decades. T levels are still implicated, of course, because obesity causes lower T levels, so that’s part of it. But mainly, it’s the excess lard that’s directly responsible for the decline in both sex and violence.
Good point. Your point about crime rates is also interesting; I never considered that angle.
All point mentions so far are valid, even the comment about obesity. Factor in something called industrialization as well. I’ll give you a very real example.
My grandfather and grandmother on my dad’s side were Mennonites. My family is traditionally farm folk from Germany. My grandparents had a small family of 10 kids, that’s right small at 10.
Typically farm folk had lots of kids as this was an easy way to create a work force and you could hire less farm hands over time saving some money as the kids worked for free as it was chores – they got to live in a home and eat in exchange for the work they put in. City folk have never had a lot of kids particularly where any form of safe sex was available – or abstinence was encouraged or enforced not compared to transional farm folk.
All of my uncles and aunts, got married, and had about 3 kids each. None of them stayed and worked on the farm, all of them went to the big industrialized city.
One could equate it this way, and it seems to bear out. Lower tech countries have high birth rates, thus more sex. High tech places, less sex. As an example is Japan which is on a population decline and will likely lose half of its population in about 50 years. As America is very high tech it will likely go that way more slowly as there is far more space and there is still a small but significant portion of the society that has a large number of children (single mothers on welfare).
I have met a woman that was in welfare and had 8 kids (she did this because in Canada we have a baby bonus that mom’s get in order to have kids, unfortunately as most women work they only want at most one kid – those that want more go on welfare as they aren’t capable people.
Other than that we are more and more going high tech and I am suspecting that this, along with the easy access to food, reduces the need to procreate (add in porn as well as that interferes with the need to create real sexual relationships) and the result is a diminishing population. I don’t think if there was any immigration there would be much of a population left.
I live in Vancouver Canada and here, we have such a high immigration rate that currently half of the population don’t even speak English at all, or very minimally if they do, just enough to get by on the street. One city is largely Chinese and you would be hard pressed to find signage that caters to English speaking people, whereas 20 years ago, the signage would have been mostly half and half and 10 years before that almost all of it would be English.
I think that In 10 to 15 years the majority language of the area will either be Punjabi or and this is more likely Mandarin Chinese. English will actually become a minority language and in 50 years likely will be non-existent. Interestingly enough as housing here is ridiculously high and there is space galore in Canada, people are moving away, young people particularly.
I’m guessing that Vancouver will be a bunch of old people in 20 years that have moved away from China to get away from the totalitarian government.
You sound like those “think like me folks” that believe in their minds they are liberal yet don’t even know the meaning of the word. How irritating is that!?