Intimate

Relationships

Rowland S.Miller

习读专用，不作商用，如侵联删。

C H A P T E R 9

Sexuality

Sexual Attitudes ◆ Sexual Behavior

◆ Sexual Satisfaction ◆ Sexual Coercion

◆ For Your Consideration ◆ Chapter Summary

I have two questions for you. First, if a mischievous genie offered you a con- stant supply of compelling orgasms but required that you experience them alone and never again have sex with another person, would you accept the offer? Second, if you discovered on your honeymoon that your new spouse had been secretly taking a drug like Viagra to enhance his or her sexual response to you, would you be hurt?

Different people will undoubtedly answer these questions in different ways. Those who have not had sex with an intimate romantic partner for a long time may find compelling orgasms, even solitary ones, an attractive option. But I suspect that most people would be reluctant to give up a potential future of physical connections with a lover or lovers. Orgasms are more fulfilling when they are shared with someone (Bensman, 2012), and most of us would be dis- appointed were we no longer able to share sex with someone we love. And we want our lovers to find us compelling and to want us in return. So, it may be hurtful to learn that a partner’s apparent desire for us is the result, at least in part, of some drug (Morgentaler, 2003).

As these questions may imply, there’s a lot more to human sexuality than great orgasms. For some of us, sex need not always involve romantic intimacy, but for most of us, romantic intimacy involves sex. Our close romantic relationships often have a sexual component, and our sexual behavior and sexual satisfaction are often dependent on the nature, and health, of those relationships. As we’ll see in this chapter, there’s a close connection between sexuality and intimate relationships.

9.1 SEXUAL ATTITUDES

Attitudes about Casual Sex

Times have changed, and you’re probably more accepting of premarital sex- ual intercourse1 than your grandparents were. Fifty years ago, most people disapproved of sex “before marriage,” but these days, fewer than 25 percent of us think that premarital sex is “always or almost always wrong” (Wells & Twenge, 2005). The circumstances matter. Most of us hold a permissiveness with affection standard (Sprecher et al., 2006): We believe that sex between unmarried partners is fine as long as it occurs in the context of a commit- ted, caring relationship. We’re more ambivalent about hookups—sexual interactions with nonromantic partners that usually last one night and do not involve any expectation of a lasting relationship (Lewis et al., 2013). On the one hand, both men and women usually have more positive than nega- tive feelings after a hookup, but mixed feelings are common, particularly when intercourse occurs (Garcia et al., 2012). And hookups aren’t actually as popular as they seem to be: Both sexes enjoy hookups less than they think other people do (Reiber & Garcia, 2010), and big majorities of both men and women, as it turns out, prefer dating someone to just hooking up (Bradshaw et al., 2010).

1 Not all people will marry, of course. But “premarital” is a more familiar, more convenient term than “unmarried” is.

Do men and women differ in their sexual opinions? On average, they do: Men hold more permissive sexual values and attitudes, although the difference is shrinking over time, and how big it is depends on the particular attitude being measured (Hyde, 2014). One of the larger sex differences is in attitudes toward casual premarital sex; men are more likely than women to think that sex without love is okay, so they usually feel better the morning after a hookup than women do (Halpern & Kaestle, 2014). This difference undoubtedly influ- ences the things that men and women regret about their past sexual behavior: Whereas women are more likely than men to regret things they’ve done (such as having a hookup), men are more likely than women to regret things they didn’t do (such as not having sex when they had the chance). When it comes to casual sex, women tend to regret their actions, but men regret their inactions (Galperin et al., 2013).

A person’s sex may be involved in other sexual attitudes, as well. Tradi- tionally, women have been judged more harshly than men for being sexually experienced or permissive. Whereas men who have multiple sexual partners may be admired as “studs,” women with the same number of partners may be dismissed as “sluts.” This asymmetry is known as the sexual double standard, and years ago it was quite obvious, but it appears to be more subtle today: We tend to disapprove of anyone, male or female, who hooks up “a lot” (Allison & Risman, 2013). But the double standard still exists, especially among men (Rudman et al., 2013). Women expect more disregard than men do if they accept an offer of casual sex (Conley et al., 2012), a woman with a sexually transmitted infection (or STI) is judged more harshly than a man is (Smith et al., 2008), and a woman who participates in a threesome is liked less than a man is (Jonason & Marks, 2009).2 So, a strong sexual double standard no longer seems to exist, but a person’s sex can still influence others’ evaluations of his or her sexual experiences.

2 And no, it didn’t matter if the three participants were two women and one man or two men and one woman; female participants were judged more negatively in both cases.

Attitudes about Same-Sex Sexuality

A person’s sexual orientation matters to some people, too. A noticeable minor- ity of adult Americans—about 38 percent—feel that sexual relations between adults of the same sex are “morally wrong.” However, most Americans do not hold that view; a clear majority of them—59 percent—consider same- sex relations to be “morally acceptable” (Newport & Himelfarb, 2013). This hasn’t always been true, of course, but our attitudes about same-sex sexuality are changing, and changing fast. In March 2014, for instance, an impressive 59 percent of Americans supported legal marriage between same-sex partners and only 34 percent were opposed (Craighill & Clement, 2014)—and that was both a new record and the reverse of what people had opined only 8 years ear- lier. Take a look at Table 9.1: Few issues have elicited such a dramatic shift in attitudes in such a short period of time as “gay marriage” has, both in the United States and in several other areas of the world (such as England, Uru- guay, New Zealand, and Argentina; see Pew Research, 2014a). Even most of those Americans who oppose gay marriage see legal recognition of same-sex marriage as “inevitable” in the United States in the years to come (Pew Research Center, 2013a).

Why has this occurred? I’ll touch on two contributing reasons. First, gays and lesbians are more visible in public life than ever before—consider the influence over the years of very popular TV shows such as Will and Grace, Glee, and Modern Family—and the more contact people have with gays and lesbians, the more favor- able their feelings toward them tend to be (Cunningham & Melton, 2013; Merino, 2013). Young adults in the United States have much more favorable attitudes toward gays and lesbians than elderly people do (Craighill & Clement, 2014), but they’re much more likely to know (and like) openly gay or lesbian people, too.

A second stimulus is that we understand same-sex sexuality much better than we used to. For instance, our judgments of same-sex relationships have much to do with our beliefs about why someone is gay or lesbian, as Figure 9.1 shows. By a very large margin, people consider homosexuality to be acceptable when they believe that sexual orientation results from biological influences that occur before we are born. On the other hand, by a substantial margin, people find homosexuality unacceptable if they believe that it is a lifestyle one chooses to adopt. So, it’s important that for the last 20 years the number of people who believe that one’s sexuality is already set at birth has been gradually increasing and the number of those who believe that people choose to be gay or les- bian has declined. It’s important because the first group is right and the second bunch is wrong. In just the last few years, psychological and biological science has determined that “preference in sexual identity and partnerships is appar- ently irrevocably etched in the developing fetal brain and cannot be changed. Who we are sexually, and who and how we love sexually, seem in most cases to be hardwired, beginning even before birth” (Horstman, 2012, p. 60).

10.

Sexual orientation is complex, involving one’s emotional and sexual attrac- tions to others, one’s actual behavior, and one’s identity (Priebe & Svedin, 2013), and we humans aren’t just gay or straight: Researchers are finding that at least five categories of sexual orientation—heterosexual, mostly heterosexual, bisex- ual, mostly gay/lesbian, and gay/lesbian—are needed to capture the range of sexual behavior people display (Savin-Williams et al., 2013). And to some degree (more for women than for men), our behavior and self-concepts can change over time (Dickson et al., 2013). But we don’t “catch” same-sex attractions from our friends (Brakefield et al., 2014), and our upbringing doesn’t teach us to be gay (Långström et al., 2010). Most gays and lesbians feel that they’ve had no choice whatsoever about their orientations (Herek et al., 2010), and there are a variety of physical differences between straight and gay men (Myers, 2013). The bottom line is that there’s no longer any doubt that same-sex sexual behavior is based, in part, in one’s genes (Långström et al., 2010), and “clearly, sexual orientation is not a matter of conscious, moral choice” (Myers, 2013, p. 90). Slowly but surely, more of us are coming to understand that—and greater tolerance often follows.

As part of this process, social scientists are going public with the con- clusion that there is no empirical justification for denying gays and lesbians access to the legal benefits (involving, for instance, taxation, health insurance, pensions, and property rights) that heterosexual spouses enjoy (Myers, 2013). Indeed, the American Psychological Association has resolved that because (a) same-sex relationships operate in much the same manner as heterosexual partnerships (Balsam et al., 2008), (b) sexual orientation has nothing to do with a person’s ability to be a loving, nurturing parent (Goldberg & Smith, 2013), and (c) marriage is good for people, including gays and lesbians (Riggle et al., 2010), it is ill-informed, unfair, and discriminatory to deny gays and lesbi- ans legal recognition of their relationships. (The formal resolution stating the psychologists’ position is intriguing reading [and only four pages long]; it’s available at http://www.apa.org/about/policy/same-sex.aspx). The American Sociological Association and the National Council on Family Relations have taken similar, scientifically grounded, public positions.

So, we’re seeing dramatic changes in attitudes about same-sex sexual- ity. American laws about gay marriage are following suit, and you can keep up with the changing legal landscape at http://www.washingtonpost.com/ wp-srv/special/politics/same-sex-marriage/.

12.

Cultural Differences in Sexual Attitudes

In general, then, sexual attitudes have become more permissive over time. And if you’re an American witnessing these changes, you may be tempted to think of the United States as being more permissive than most countries. But you’d be wrong. In fact, the sexual attitudes of Americans look surprisingly conservative when compared to the opinions expressed by people in many other countries. Denmark was registering gay and lesbian relationships as civil unions in 1989 and Norway started doing so in 1993. Full-fledged marriages are now available to gays and lesbians in those countries and in Canada, South Africa, France, Argentina, and several other countries (Pew Research 2014a). So, the United States certainly isn’t leading the pack on that issue. Indeed, a large cross-cultural survey found that the United States held more conservative beliefs about premarital sex, extramarital sex, and same-sex relations than did Australia, Germany, Great Britain, Israel, Russia, Spain, and Sweden (Widmer et al., 1998). Canada was more permissive than the United States, too, so countries that are close neighbors do not neces- sarily share the same sexual attitudes. Things may be changing, but Americans still hold relatively conservative sexual attitudes.

13.

Within the United States, African Americans hold more permissive sexual attitudes than whites do, with Hispanic Americans and Asian Americans being more conservative, in that order (Fugère et al., 2008). However, African Americans hold more negative attitudes toward gays and lesbians than whites do (Vincent et al., 2009), and Republicans, religious fundamentalists, and older folks are more opposed to same-sex marriage than Democrats, nonreligious people, and young Americans are (Pew Research Center, 2013b). Sexual attitudes are evidently shaped by a variety of historical, religious, political, and other societal influences: They clearly differ from country to country and from group to group.