Thread by @Noahpinion

1/A brief thread about sex, partially in response to this Ross Douthat article: nytimes.com/2018/05/02/opi…

...but also in response to everyone who laments the Sexual Revolution of the 1960s.

2/A lot of social conservatives seem to think that modern sexuality - delayed marriage, more lifetime partners, etc. - was a social choice that we made, rather than a natural and inevitable consequence of economic growth.

I think that's wrong.

3/Presumably if modern sexuality were a social choice, some other country would have made a different choice.

But they didn't, really. Check out the average number of sex partners for various countries around the world: statista.com/statistics/248…

4/Now, people do lie to surveys.

But look at all the countries that report more sexual partners than America.

Turkey
Australia
New Zealand
Iceland
South Africa
Finland
Norway
Italy
Sweden
Ireland
Switzerland
Canada

Did they all have "the 60s"??

5/Are you telling me that Turkey, Ireland, Switzerland, and South Africa all made the same collective social choice about sex that America made?

Not to mention Thailand, Japan, Chile, and the other countries that report only slightly less promiscuity than America?

6/Or look at the age when people have sex for the first time.

Not a lot of variation around the world. China and India, which are still relatively poor, have a slightly later age of first sex.

7/Now look at age of first marriage: It's the rich countries where people get married later.

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_c…

8/Delayed marriage and premarital sex with a variety of partners seems like a universal thing that happens to every country that gets wealthy.

Economists would say that sexual promiscuity looks like a normal good or a luxury.

It probably comes from leisure time.

9/Explaining social changes as the result of intentional collective choices ("We could have stuck with the morality of the 50s!") is a way to maintain the illusion of control. The illusion that we can reshape our society as we see fit, by force of will.

10/The truth is, people want what they want, and as technology improves and economies grow and people get more rich, they GO GET MORE OF WHAT THEY WANT.

11/America had the 60s, but Japan found a totally different route to sexual modernity. Taiwan found another. Romania and Mexico and Vietnam and Pakistan will each find their own. But they'll all get there.

12/Instead of pretending that people don't want sexual modernity, and that sexual modernity was forced on them by "the 60s", we should recognize the universality of the phenomenon, and find ways to make it work in a healthy, positive way.

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Oh, and in case you think it was the birth control pill that did it, think again. Practically no one in Japan uses the pill, yet...same overall sexual modernity.

cbsnews.com/news/japanese-…

Oh and I guess I should have tagged @DouthatNYT here. I'm still really bad at tagging people in. Still mentally stuck in the blog era, probably.

Also: At the individual level, religious differences are correlated with attitudes about premarital sex, but at the country level, GDP per capita is very important as a predictor of attitudes. journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

This guy looked at Pew data and found that GDP per capita explains over 50% of country-level variations in the acceptance of premarital sex: huffingtonpost.com/nigel-barber/p…

MODERNITY.

Sexual modernity is a bit like puberty - it's going to come and whack you upside the head whether you like it or not.

(actual end)