Sex and the Census - single women in post-sexual revolution American society - Statistical Data Included

Reason, August, 2001 by Cathy Young

Post-revolution data on toxic bachelors, choice, and children

Singles, according to the latest Census Bureau data released in May, are still on the march. People living alone were the fastest-growing category of households in the 1990s and, for the first time, now outnumber married couples with children. This trend is not due to widowed seniors living longer--people over 65, in fact, were no more likely to live alone in 2000 than in 1990. Rather, more young people are marrying later or not at all.

Is this merely a fact of life or a manifestation of cultural decline--a "titanic loss of family values," as the title of a column in The Washington Times put it? Some conservative social critics, most notably George Gilder--starting with his 1974 book Naked Nomads: Unmarried Men in America--have focused on the perils that dangerously unstable, undomesticated, unattached males pose to themselves and others. (The latest evidence suggests that growing ranks of single men can, after all, coexist peacefully with dropping crime rates and other positive social indicators.) More recently, though, it's the single woman who has become the focus of concern.

According to the now-famous arguments of Wendy Shalit (A Return to Modesty) and Danielle Crittenden (What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us), the post-sexual-revolution landscape is really a free-for-all for men, who don't need to buy the cow when they can have the milk for nothing. And it's a bleak and arid place for women who, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote in a 1999 essay in The Atlantic, "forever remain girlfriends or ex-girlfriends." Sympathy for the plight of the single woman is just another variation on a familiar neotraditionalist theme: The liberation of women from traditional paternalistic restrictions, in this case on sexual behavior, has hurt women themselves.

Much of the evidence marshaled in support of these polemics comes from popular culture--from the obligatory how-to-get-him-to-commit features in women's magazines to single-girl angst in novels such as Bridget Jones's Diary and television shows such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City.

In real life, of course, the vast majority of women do eventually tie the knot (in 1990, only 10 percent of 35-to-39-year-old women had never been married). On the single-girl TV shows, relationships have to fail because keeping the girls single is essential to the show's raison d'etre. (When one of the characters on Sex and the City, the romantic Charlotte, actually got married, her husband was promptly supplied with an embarrassing sexual problem that just as promptly led to a separation.)

What's more, playing up the harshness of the contemporary mating system is probably inherent to these shows' concept. In one Sex and the City episode, the thirty something women were seen perusing the wedding announcements in Sunday's New York Times and fuming that the oldest woman in any of them was 27. That's dramatic license: On a typical Sunday, about half of the brides are in their 30s and at least one is over 50.

There is no question that today's sexual marketplace, in which both men and women tend to stay single longer (the average age at marriage in the U.S. is now 25 for women and 27 for men, up from 20 and 22, respectively, in 1960) has its psychological costs. Multiple relationships and breakups can leave scars and breed cynicism, though presumably they can also help people develop a greater appreciation of true love once they find it. It is also worth noting that the sexual revolution changed the behavior of single women much more than it did that of single men, who were never really expected to abstain from premarital liaisons.

The conservative critique of post-sexual revolution mores incorporates its own version of the "men are pigs" mentality for which feminists have been often taken to task. Men, in this view, have little interest in love, relationships, or families if they can get free sex; the only way to "tame" them is for women to withhold sexual favors until they have obtained commitment.

Most stereotypes have at least a grain of truth; both studies and everyday observation certainly suggest that men are more interested than women in sex without strings. But the same surveys in which men express greater enthusiasm for casual sex also find that most men still regard finding one special person as their highest priority. In a 1990 Virginia Slims poll, 70 percent of single men and women alike hoped to marry some day. And most men do continue to wed, despite the availability of free milk. Indeed, a 1994 New York Times/CBS poll of adolescents found that more girls than boys, 73 percent to 61 percent, thought they could have a happy life even if they never got married.

That female complaints about "toxic bachelors" have become such a cultural staple may seem to validate the conservative social critique. But maybe there's more to the single girl than meets the eye. Occasionally, the same women s magazines that spend so much time deploring male fickleness will also recognize the existence of women with cold feet. In the 1993 book, He's Scared, She's Scared, Steven Carter and Julia Sokol suggest that some women use the male-fear-of-commitment cliche to avoid confronting their own anxieties about being locked into a relationship: They keep selecting the wrong men and rejecting "good ones," and then complain the loudest about the shortage of good men.