Abstract
Pilar Gonalons-Pons and Shelly Ronen on Cheap Sex.
Keywords
Cheap Sex: The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy By Mark Regnerus Oxford University Press 280 pp.
Reading the news today one cannot help but notice that the gendered sexual order is in crisis. As shockwaves of the #MeToo movement run through different occupational sectors, we scholars of gender, sexuality, and family look on with ample curiosity and cautious hope. The enormous shift in public attitudes toward sexual harassment—dare we remember what happened when Anita Hill testified about sexual harassment by Clarence Thomas in the early 1990s?—provides the backdrop for the release of Mark Regnerus’s Cheap Sex, helpfully subtitled The Transformation of Men, Marriage, and Monogamy. Indeed, Regnerus focuses his book on social transformation that verges on crisis.
But it may not be the crisis that readers expect.
At the heart of Cheap Sex is the argument that contraceptive technologies (i.e., the Pill), the rise of online pornography, and online dating eased access to sex, flooding the modern mating market with “cheap sex.” But more than merely observing this shift, Regnerus raises an alarm: cheap sex, in his estimation, is responsible for declining marriage, men’s falling economic achievement, and women’s relational dissatisfaction. At its core, this book advocates for the return to a conservative social order. Lest this sound too much like the “elegy for a lost era” (p. 6) he denies he is writing, Regnerus at least wants to recast delaying sex until marriage as the true feminist panacea. Cheap sex, he says, is not a reflection of women’s empowerment in society, but a result of women’s “subjugation to men’s interests” (p. 214).
One could (and should) criticize Regnerus’s conservative agenda and marriage evangelism; we would have a lot to say about that. For example, and perhaps most offensive to our taste, was that the text seemed to require the reader to accept a priori moral condemnation of casual and LGB sex. Not to mention that disgraced former editor of alt-right Breitbart News Milo Yiannopoulos makes an appearance as an expert on pornography and social cohesion, introduced only as a “provocateur and British writer” (p. 129)! But, setting aside Regnerus’s political agenda, we chose to evaluate the book’s claims on the merits of its methods and theory. Neither is persuasive.
First, let’s consider the book’s methods. Regnerus frames his assertions with interview data that regrettably suffer from selection on the dependent variable. By interviewing only unmarried individuals who engage in casual sex, he gives the impression that casual sex always leads to “nothing” and neglects that plenty of committed relationships begin with casual sex. Additionally, the book makes sweeping claims about change over time without presenting any data (primary or secondary) from the past about these supposed changes. These sampling methods, as well as the rudimentary analysis of survey data and instrumental use of personal anecdotes, give the impression that Regnerus’s project is more ideological than analytical.
As to theory, the logic of Regnerus’s argument rests on classic sexist ideology that depicts men as overpowered by high sex drive and women as responsible for keeping desire under control. His main story is as follows: Before the Pill, women kept men’s sexuality in check for their own sake (to avoid pregnancy). Sex was expensive because women demanded marriage or commitment before “giving it” and this meant that men had to work hard to become marriageable to “get some.” After the Pill, women no longer had any incentive to keep their legs closed and began—mistakenly thinking they were becoming liberated—flooding the market with inexpensive sex. Thus women inadvertently produced their own misery—and men’s, too. The result is that marriage rates fell and men’s economic position in society declined. An innocent observer might be persuaded by the co-occurrence of the rise in casual sex with the decline in marriage rates and men’s employment. But any well-trained sociologist knows that correlation is not causation.
If Regnerus’s theory is right, we should observe that marriage and men’s careers decline the most with the greatest access to cheap sex. And this is simply not true. Let’s take our own workplaces: elite college campuses. There, young men are pursuing education and careers in contexts that arguably offer the greatest access to cheap sex. We do not observe these men dropping out en masse. Instead, these elite college men go on to careers and get married (in fact, more than any other group of men, as Allison Aughinbaugh, Omar Robles, and Hugette Sun find in a 2013 Bureau of Labor Statistics report). Thus, it cannot be that cheap sex is responsible for the “missing men” (p.11) who fail to pursue stable employment and become “marriageable.” Might we suggest that labor deregulation and the rising precarity of the working class might offer some more valid explanations?
The cornerstone of Regnerus’s theory, which he spends most of his book on, is the idea that men have higher sex drives than women. That is, men want sex more than women do, and women want relationships more than men do. To convince readers, Regnerus uses survey data showing that men report masturbating more often than women. He also uses studies comparing gay men and lesbian couples that suggest gay men have more sex than lesbians. He asserts that women who pursue casual sex do so either because they feel it’s the only way to attract men’s attention or because they have erroneously bought into liberal lies about the sexual revolution. By his account, expressing sexual desire makes women unhappy and depressed, and he concludes that this is evidence that sex drive doesn’t come naturally to them. We argue that these pieces of evidence are not, as Regnerus holds, conclusive proof of inevitable biological destiny, but proof of how cultural ideas about gender shape our sexuality and sexual relations. A wealth of feminist scholarship shows that men are not inevitably trapped in the urges of their sex drive, rather, they are trapped in our beliefs that they are. This idea is foundational to how we think masculinity differs from femininity, as scholars Raewyn Connell and Anne Fausto-Sterling have argued.
Because we as a society believe that men have higher sex drives than women, we encourage and expect them to express and pursue their sexual desires with a lot more leeway than we allow women to do the same. Because we also believe high sexual drive is a core feature of masculinity, men feel compelled to continually express their desire for sex in doing masculinity: by masturbating, making aggressive advances on sexual partners, or displaying availability for sex 24/7. And because we believe that men’s sex drive is more brutish and difficult to control, we burden women (who are understood as having little sexual desire to begin with) with the responsibility to control it, to be “gatekeepers” in interaction, deciding when the time is right.
When it is women’s responsibility to hold men’s sexuality at bay, these same women are more likely to be blamed for violence perpetrated against them. That is rape culture. And the myth of men’s insatiable sexuality harms men as well as women. Recent research by sociologist Jessie Ford found men sometimes engage in unwanted sex because it is an expected way to perform masculinity.
All in all, if the accomplishment of masculinity wasn’t so reliant on enacting a myth of high sex drive, these gendered divergences in sexual behavior would soften greatly, likely receding into an insignificant source of population diversity. Why would Regnerus ignore how social forces shape gender differences in sexual expression? We suspect it is because it would contradict his ultimate political project, which is to claim that there is only one way forward out of this crisis and it is for women to lock up the gates on sex!
According to Regnerus, if women refuse access to sex, men will regain their interest in work, careers, and marriage (so that they can leverage these things to “get” sex). The economy will bloom again. And this is to women’s advantage too, Regnerus writes, since they will see their true desires for relationships realized. Not only is denying men sex better for their prospects of becoming marriageable, but it will allow for true female solidarity—bringing up the price of sex requires a collective, Lysistrata-style strike. This mélange of collective action with a return to regressive gender politics is very troubling. We believe a real remedy would look very different. We should stop exaggerating whatever differences biology might produce in sex drive and behavior; we have to defend against the misuse of biological legitimacy for social-political ends. We must fight against essentialist justifications for sexual violence against women. We need to reconstruct masculinities in a way that is not focused on demonstrating sexual voracity, and reconstruct femininity in a way that acknowledges sexual desire.
For the first time in a long time we have a real opportunity to tilt the levers of social change towards greater protections for women from sexual violence. This is a transformational moment precipitated by a crisis in masculine entitlement and impunity. Cheap Sex’s argument, troublingly packaged as scientific findings, represents ideas that encourage a backlash against #MeToo. Regnerus is grasping for the wrong crisis in masculinity. Rather than holding men accountable for their transgressions, Regnerus would have us let them continue hiding behind their uncontrollable sex drive, and women’s failure to gatekeep appropriately. Rather than putting educational and marital shifts in political economic context, Regnerus would have us blame women’s growing enjoyment of sex.
Mark Regnerus is grasping for the wrong crisis in masculinity.
We don’t need gatekeeping. We don’t need books like Cheap Sex with their cheap analyses.
We need norms that guarantee that all sex is mutually consensual, and fun, and desired. We need better education, accountability, and non-punitive penalties for violations of consent. And while we’re at it, we need good jobs that provide everyone with a sufficient living that can facilitate economic independence and individuals’ ideal family formations. It won’t be cheap, but it will be worth it.