While these women may have not known that their earning opportunities were becoming increasingly limited due to their lack of education, there was a second economic factor that they were painfully aware of: The marriage prospects of underprivileged women had become bleak. Incarceration rates were on the rise and, in fact, no less than three of Jane’s friends had boyfriends who were in prison. Even without a criminal record, the lifetime earning prospects for low-income men were insufficient to make sustaining a family possible. In a time in which more successful men started to seek out wives who would make equal contributions to the household income, higher-income men were out of reach as a possible marriage partner for uneducated and underemployed women.
So, while most women might have feared that promiscuity would affect their lifetime earnings and their prospects for marriage, Jane’s new friends figured they had little to look forward to, regardless of their sexual histories. They lived in a culture of despair where a mistimed pregnancy or “fast” reputation made very little difference to their standard of living—then and into the future.
And so, the answer to “Should I sleep with him tonight?” was fated. “Yes, why not?” They really had nothing to lose.
Part two of Jane’s story begins with a particularly frightening confrontation with a local pimp who had been trying to recruit her. This was about the same time Jane realized that her decision to diverge from the traditional path might have serious repercussions. So, Jane grabbed her purse (and nothing else) and headed to the airport where a kind airline representative took pity on her, handed her a ticket, and allowed her to fly across the country to a sister who gave her both shelter and a second chance.
We will return to the details of that stage of Jane’s life in chapter 6, but right now I want to skip to the third part of Jane’s life. This is the stage of her life in which she finds herself, coincidentally, sitting in the same lunchtime seminar as I am, wondering how lemons make good contraceptives.
The days of waking up to find her roommate’s latest conquest passed out on the living room floor are far behind Jane. While she is now unmarried, divorced in fact, and is parenting a young child with another baby on the way, she is also educated and independent, having recently started a PhD program at a prestigious university.2 The same Jane who had once found herself flailing alongside disenfranchised and promiscuous women was now marching with a generation of highly educated, and (as it turns out) fairly promiscuous twenty-somethings, women on the way up the economic ladder.
Jane’s new academic friends are among those who have benefited from the growing wage gap, earning far more than educated women, or men, did in the past. Not only are they part of a new generation of highly educated women, they are part of the first generation of women who are more educated, on average, than are men. Finding a husband who is as—or more—educated has become more difficult as all women now compete for relatively few educated men.
Jane’s new friends, always on the prowl for the perfect (i.e., educated and high-income) male, are also quite promiscuous. They are perhaps not as promiscuous as the women in the first stage of Jane’s life, but they are far more promiscuous than previous generations of women. Their promiscuity is not the result of a lack of moral fortitude, again, but rather because in the great cost-benefit analysis, there are few compelling reasons to say no.
The reason for this decision is simple: there are few ill effects of promiscuity for these women. Jane’s female peers know how to avoid pregnancy and disease, and they’ve got the bargaining power within their relationships to insist that protection is consistently applied. Should the promiscuity result in a mistimed pregnancy, well, they have the both means to care for the child alone or to terminate the pregnancy.
Most important though, these women do not face the shame and persecution their mothers and grandmothers would have experienced had they given birth outside of marriage, and, as a result, they face none of those costs.
WHY WE’VE HAD TO WAIT FOR MALE BIRTH CONTROL
Scientists may argue that it is harder to control a billion sperm than it is to control a single egg, but there is an economic reason for why male birth control (MBC) has taken so long to arrive, and it can be described with two words: supply and demand.
The cost of an unplanned pregnancy for a man is much lower than it is for a woman, even when we ignore biological costs. A mistimed pregnancy often leads to underinvestment in a woman’s education and wage penalties that can reduce her lifetime income. Some men may have a similar experience, but a career disruption for a man who unexpectedly becomes a father is generally much less costly than for a woman.
Over time, two things have happened that have increased the demand, and the price men would be willing to pay, for protection from accidental pregnancy.
The first is that men who, postconception, would rather opt out of the family plan altogether, are having a harder time doing so as governments have become more effective at forcing men to assume a portion of the economic costs of having a child.
The second is that women are working more and couples are desiring fewer children. Not only does time in the workforce by women increase the overall demand for birth control, but it also puts women in a better position to negotiate away the responsibility for birth control to their husbands.
Will men actually use MBC? A couple of studies have pretended to answer this question, but there is a big difference between asking men to respond to the question “Would you use MBC if it were available?” and asking them “Would you be willing to pay $300 every three months to have drugs injected into your balls?” So I would say the jury is still out on that question.
The drug companies seem to now be investing in MBC, so they must feel there is sufficient evidence of demand. Cynical me wonders if these same drug companies are really hoping to make a return on their investment through the sales of sexually transmitted disease (STD) treatments. This could be a winning strategy, since it is likely that MBC will reduce women’s ability to insist upon condom use during sex. If that is the case, then there are profits to be made on both ends of the market, so to speak.
This, coincidentally, brings us back to Casanova and his lemons.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF BIRTH CONTROL TECHNOLOGY
It is a common misconception that birthrates within marriage began to fall only when the birth control pill became available in the 1960s. In truth, birthrates began to fall right after the onset of the Industrial Revolution over two hundred years ago as couples chose to have fewer children in response to higher wages for skilled workers (we will return to this later). Oral contraceptives may have made it easier for women to control the timing of their births, but women have found ways to control their fertility for centuries.
In the United States, for example, the average woman in 1800 had given birth to seven babies by the time she turned 40. That number fell every decade in the nineteenth century and right up until the end of the 1930s, when the average woman had given birth to only two children. So, thirty years before the pill was available on the market, birthrates had already fallen to today’s low level.
Throughout most of human history, the only way to have sex and avoid pregnancy was coitus interruptus—a.k.a. withdrawal. Marrying later in life also helped to reduce a woman’s childbearing years (in a time in which extramarital childbearing was virtually unheard of) and was actively promoted by Thomas Malthus, whom I mention in the Introduction. High rates of spinsterhood also helped to lower average birthrates (and, in fact, the main contributor to the increase in children during the baby boom was not families that had four or five children, but rather the increase in women who had just one child rather than none at all). Anal sex and nonejaculation were also used to control fertility but apparently were techniques more commonly used by sex workers.
Condom use appears to go back three thousand years, but the first really useful technology to control pregnancy was the cervical cap, introduced around 1838. As we have already heard, Casanova (who live
d from 1725 to 1798) had a similar idea, using lemons as a barrier, but that didn’t appear to catch on to any degree (perhaps because only a man as charming as Casanova could convince a woman to insert half of a lemon into her vagina).
In the 1850s, Charles Goodyear learned how to vulcanize rubber, making possible the production of condoms that were more comfortable, fairly inexpensive, and effective at preventing pregnancy. At roughly $34 per dozen (measured relative to today’s real wages), they were still expensive for frequent usage by the average worker; they were so expensive, in fact, that it was common for men to wash and reuse them.
Diaphragms became available in 1882, followed by the intrauterine device (IUD) in 1909. Latex condoms were produced in 1912, making them, thankfully, disposable and much cheaper.
SO, THE PILL IS RESPONSIBLE FOR INCREASED PROMISCUITY, RIGHT?
It seems that ever since women could predictably control their fertility, more and more women have been deciding that the benefits of having premarital sex outweigh the costs. It would be easy to argue that the availability of contraceptives, particularly the availability of the birth control pill, is directly responsible for this change in behavior if there weren’t a confounding factor: if women are simply having more sex now because it is less risky to do so, then why have out-of-marriage pregnancies increased over the same period when contraceptives have been improving?
Improvements in birth control technology are a decrease in the “cost” of promiscuity in the probabilistic sense. In economic thinking, the cost of premarital sex is determined by the probability that a woman will become pregnant and/or contract a disease multiplied by the costs associated with pregnancy and/or disease. So any factor that decreases either the costs or the risk will decrease the expected costs of premarital sex.
For example, imagine that it is 1930 and there is an 85 percent chance that a woman will become pregnant while repeatedly having unprotected sex with a man who is not her husband. Also imagine that if this woman becomes pregnant she loses the opportunity to marry a man with a good income (since she now carries the stigma of having borne an illegitimate child), and that as a result of this lost opportunity, she misses out on $50,000 in future income that she would have gained had she not become pregnant and married a man with a good income instead. Her cost of premarital sex without protection, then, is:
Now instead imagine that latex condoms are available and she is able to convince her partner to use one when they have sex. If the chance of becoming pregnant is 45 percent with a latex condom, which was actually the failure rate of condoms in 1934 (reported by Kopp), then now the expected cost of premarital sex is:
0.45 x $50,000 = $22,500
Giving her the option of sex with a condom has reduced the cost of premarital sex by $20,000.
Any economist will tell you that the quantity demanded of a good or service will increase when the price falls, which is why a standard demand curve is downward sloping when drawn on a graph with quantity on the horizontal axis and price on the vertical axis. So, it isn’t that surprising that when contraceptives became more effective at reducing pregnancy and disease, more women (and men, of course) chose to have sex before marriage. And, of course, some of these women will still become pregnant because even with contraceptives the risk of pregnancy has not dropped to zero. In fact, statistically speaking, 45 percent of sexually active women will become pregnant.
Despite improvements in contraceptive technology, the number of pregnancies to women who are not married has not fallen; it has increased dramatically, which suggests that there has to be more to this promiscuity story than individual women making rational choices to have premarital sex based on the efficiency of contraceptive technology.
To understand what has happened, consider a very simple model in which there are two distinct groups of unmarried people who are reluctant to participate in premarital sex in a society in which sex outside of marriage is very much frowned upon. The people in the first group avoid premarital sex because they are worried about unplanned pregnancy but not because of the stigmatization of premarital sex. In the second group, the people avoid premarital sex because they are worried about the stigmatization of premarital sex but not about an unplanned pregnancy. Of course, in reality, everyone will worry a little bit about both pregnancy and stigmatization, but this distinction into groups will make clearer the following explanation as to how attitudes have changed.
Now let’s introduce effective birth control to these two groups of previously celibate people. Premarital sex is still stigmatized, but now a small number of people, those who care only about the risk of pregnancy, will decide to become more adventurous. They form a small group of relatively promiscuous people. Over time, others begin to join this group. They do this not because of the reduced risk of pregnancy but because the behavior of the group has changed what society sees as socially acceptable. The people in the first group join because the pregnancy risk has fallen, and the people in the second group join because the act of premarital sex is now less stigmatized.
So, everyone is having more sex outside of marriage because it has become less risky and more socially acceptable. Where there is always a chance of pregnancy when a man and a woman have sex, an increase in the number of sexual “events” between unmarried couples is bound to increase the number of births outside of marriage. Add to that the fact that birth control effectiveness has decreased births within marriage, then the rise in the share of births to unmarried woman is not only unsurprising—it was a mathematical inevitability.
According to Jeremy Greenwood and Nezih Guner, whose research this whole section is based on, the availability of the birth control pill has played only a small role in the increase in premarital sex. They estimate that less than 1 percentage point of the 75 percent of unmarried teenagers having sex in 2002 is the result of the availably of the birth control pill. They argue that we shouldn’t take this to mean that contraceptive technologies are unimportant, but rather that the pill is only one of several effective birth control options, all of which have contributed to the social change that has led to an increase in promiscuity.
YOU PROBABLY KNOW THE BENEFITS OF SEX, BUT WHAT ARE THE COSTS?
In Jane’s story, we met two distinct groups of women. The women in the first group, those who had little education or hope of a bright economic future, were promiscuous because the costs of promiscuity for them were not high. The women in the second group, those who were both well educated and economically independent, were promiscuous not because the cost was low, in fact the cost was quite high, but because they could afford these costs.
These specific costs that I am talking about don’t include the daily wear and tear that raising children alone imposes on a woman; those costs are significant but vary from individual to individual. The costs I am talking about are very specific—they are costs incurred by women and men who fail to complete their education and/or are unable to invest as much in their careers as they might have had they not had a mistimed pregnancy. These costs are important to our story, as they have evolved over the past fifty years as promiscuity has become more common.
HOW THE SEX MARKET PRICES RISK
On the market where sex is explicitly bought and sold, economists have observed that when the risk of sexually transmitted disease is high, the price paid for sex without a condom is very low. That observation seems counterintuitive; after all, wouldn’t sex workers need to be compensated for exposing themselves to a high risk of infection? But there is a straightforward economic explanation as to why we observe this particular relationship between risk and price on the sex market.
Imagine a buyer on the sex market who has the option of buying unprotected sex from two different sellers. He knows with absolute certainty that the first seller is free of STDs and that unprotected sex with that seller bears no risk of infection. He also knows that the second seller is not free of STDs and that if he has unprotected sex with that seller, he will become infected. Whom do you thi
nk he will pay more to have the privilege of having sex without a condom? Obviously, it is the seller who exposes him to no risk. In fact, what rational person would be willing to pay for the privilege of being infected with a disease?
As strange as it might seem, when a buyer is negotiating the price for unprotected a sex in a market where infection rates are high, he gets a discount price on that service to compensate him for taking the additional risk—despite the fact that he is the one arguing against protection.
On the supply side, it seems like an increase in rates of infection should increase the compensation sellers would need to encourage them to supply sex without a condom. That is true for a seller who is free of infection; in fact, that seller probably cannot be compensated to take the risk and so will only sell sex with a condom. For sellers who are already infected, though, they will be willing to supply condom-less sex and at a low price, since there is no cost to them; they are already infected.
Buyers on the sex market should remember the old adage: you get what you pay for. Or perhaps it would be more suitable on the sex market to say you get what you could have avoided for the price of a condom.
The first important economic factor is the increasing importance of university education. According to the U.S. Department of the Census, the share of 18- to 24-year-olds enrolled in postsecondary degree programs increased from 24 percent in 1973 to 41 percent in 2009. Much of that increase in enrollment was due to the increased university attendance of women; between 1999 and 2009, the number of full-time female students increased by 63 percent compared to an increase of only 32 percent for full-time male students. This more rapid enrollment of women wasn’t just because women were catching up to men: since 1988, women have made up the majority of postsecondary students. In the past forty years, the share of university students who are female has doubled from 30 percent to 60 percent, and by 2010, 36 percent of women between the ages of 25 and 29 had completed a bachelor’s degree compared with only 28 percent of men.
Dollars and Sex Page 2