Binge drinking increases student promiscuity, as we have seen, but what increases the binge drinking? Sarah and her friends binge drank at home before heading to the bar because age-of-majority laws prohibit many university students from drinking in bars and encourage them to drink excessively at home before heading out for the night. In fact, since July 2008, 135 chancellors and presidents of colleges and universities in the United States have signed a petition asking the government to lower the minimum drinking age because they believe that a minimum age of 21 has led to dangerous behavior among underage students who drink covertly to avoid punishment.
USING SEX TO PAY YOUR WAY THROUGH COLLEGE
Many years ago, when I was an undergraduate student, I frequented a local bar with my friends that we liked because it had cheap Long Island iced tea. It also happened to have strippers, which none of us paid much attention to. (We really were there just for the cheap drinks.) That all ended one afternoon when one of the guys in our group looked up in horror as a girl stepped onto the stage; he slunk into his chair and whispered, “That’s my lab partner!”
Paying your way through school in the sex trades is probably more common than you think; prostitution, stripping, pimping, answering phones at escort agencies, and being drivers/security for sex workers are just a few jobs that students will do to help pay their way through school.
Researchers at Leeds University confirm this view. They spent a year interviewing three hundred British lap dancers and found that one in four have completed a university degree and one in three are engaged in some form of education (including 6 percent who are lap dancing their way through a postgraduate degree). Another, by the Berlin Studies Centre, reports on interviews with 3,200 students that found that 4 percent had used sex to pay for their education. Furthermore, 33 percent of students in Berlin, 29 percent of students in Paris, and 18.5 percent of students in Kiev would consider using sex to pay for school.
Websites in the United States that cater to matching both men and women with men who are looking to be “sugar daddies” offer special programs for students, including upgraded accounts if prospective escorts use a student e-mail account as their contact. One such site in New York claims that 35 percent of its eight hundred thousand escorts are university students paying their way through school on their backs.
If promiscuity has risks that can seriously affect a student’s lifetime income and marriage prospects, participating in the sex trades adds a whole new dimension that, probably, explains why sex work pays so much more than other unskilled jobs that students might consider.
There is another, economic, factor that has contributed to excessive drinking: alcohol prices. Alcohol prices not only influence how people consume, but also how they behave when they are under the influence.
DOLLAR DRINKS AND RISKY SEX
In December 2007, the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, decided that it had had just about enough rowdiness from the students and imposed a citywide minimum drink price, bringing an end to popular dollar drink nights in the bars. The law was intended to reduce partying (and fighting) when students poured out onto the streets after the bars closed. But economic research suggests that laws that increase the price of drinks can also reduce risky sexual behavior. I wonder, though, does it really reduce risky sexual behavior of college students in particular?
SEXY PROFESSORS IN A HORMONALLY CHARGED CLASSROOM
Female and male professors alike won’t be surprised, mostly because they were all students once too, that while students may look like they are hanging on to their every word they are also judging how hot (or not) their professor is. In fact, a popular online professor-rating website lets students rate their professor’s hotness, along with assessments of fairness and teaching ability.
Using data from this website, Canadian economists Anindya Sen and Frances Woolley find that male professors who are hot are financially rewarded, while female professors who are hot are not.
Woolley and Sen consider the productivity and hotness ratings of economics professors in Ontario and find that male professors who are rated as “hot” on the Rate My Professor website are paid more than those who are not. Interestingly, this hotness premium only appears once men are beyond the middle of their career; there is no hotness wage premium for young male professors. This suggests that this “beauty” premium is not paid for what we traditionally think of as hotness, but rather other qualities like confidence, assertiveness, and creativity.
Female professors, regardless of where they are in their career, are paid no more or less for being attractive—apparently students don’t rate their 50-year-old female professors as “hot” because she is confident or assertive.
Academics is a profession in which physical appearance matters little and exuding sexuality, particularly for a woman, can actually undermine a career. Female professors often have to strive to find a balance between looking presentable and not looking like too much effort has been made on their appearance.
Research by social psychologists Stefanie Johnson, Kenneth Podratz, Robert Dipboye, and Ellie Gibbons backs up this assertion. They find that attractive women are considered unsuitable employees in occupations that are considered masculine and in which appearance is unimportant. The study finds no negative effect for men; attractive men are always perceived to be more suitable for jobs, including the ones that are considered to be feminine.
If students judge a more attractive woman as less suitable to be a professor, then women who are rated as being “hot” have more to worry about than their students’ daydreaming. Given how important student evaluations are to promotion in universities, they should be worried about their jobs.
In order for an increase in drink prices to reduce risky sexual behavior, all of the following must be true:
1 The sexual behavior of some people is riskier when they have been drinking.
2 Higher drink prices cause some people to drink less.
3 Those same people who drink less when prices increase are the same people who engage in alcohol-induced risky sex.
The first point we have already established: as far as students are concerned, it appears that drinking increases not only promiscuity but also sex without a condom and unplanned pregnancies. (I haven’t forgotten about disease, by the way; we will get to that shortly.)
The second point requires an economic interpretation. If people reduce their alcohol consumption when prices go up, then economists would say demand for alcohol is price elastic. Not everyone’s demand for alcohol is price elastic though. For example, people with a high income probably don’t change their consumption just because drinks are a buck more than they had been in the past. Elasticity not only depends upon income but also on the alternatives drinkers have to buying drinks in the bars, and in this case there is an almost perfect substitute to drinking in a bar—to go to the store, buy some cheaper alcohol, and load up on cheap drinks at home before heading out for the night.
If students have enough income so that they don’t really care about the price of a bar drink or if they simply substitute the cheaper alternative of drinking at home, an increase in the price of bar drinks won’t decrease drunkenness. And if an increase in drink prices doesn’t decrease drunkenness, then there is no reason to expect that the same increase will decrease rowdiness or risky sex.
The final point is that the same people who reduce their alcohol consumption would need to be the same ones engaging in risky sex. As I have already said, my students certainly believe that they are getting more action than anyone else. Regardless of whether or not that is true, students, particularly those on campuses with a high female-to-male ratio, are having sex.
So the real questions are: do students drink less when prices are higher and how does their change in alcohol consumption affect their sexual behavior?
Recent research by Canadian economists Anindya Sen and May Luong seeks the answer to these questions by testing to see if there is a relationship between beer prices and th
e rate of sexually transmitted diseases. They find that a 1 percent increase in the price of beer lowers gonorrhea and chlamydia rates by about 0.8 percent. So it would appear that in Canada, higher beer prices do reduce risky sexual behavior.
A second study by Harrell Chesson, Paul Harrison, and William Kassler using U.S. data also finds striking evidence that people respond to increases in alcohol prices by reducing both their consumption of alcohol and their risky sexual behavior. Taking advantage of state-by-state differences in taxes on alcohol, they find that a $1 increase in the liquor tax reduces gonorrhea rates by 2 percent and that a tax increase of just $0.20 per six-pack reduces gonorrhea rates by 9 percent and syphilis rates by 33 percent.
To put these results into context, the authors’ calculations suggest that an increase in beer taxes of just $0.20 per six-pack in the United States would annually reduce new HIV cases by 3,400, cases of infertility caused by pelvic inflammatory disease by 8,900, and new cases of cervical cancer by 700.
Finally a third study, by Bisakha Sen, finds that an increase in beer taxes has no effect on births to adolescent mothers, but that a 100 percent increase in beer taxes reduces teen abortion rates by about 7 to 10 percent—suggesting a small but still significant reduction in the number of unwanted pregnancies.
When talking specifically about college student behavior, however, there is a reason to be a bit skeptical that an increase in drink prices would change student sexuality as dramatically as in the general population. The reason goes back to what I said earlier about income and price elasticity: the percent change in demand for drinks when the price increases by 1 percent.
Students may not have high incomes, but they tend to consume like people who earn much more than they actually do. The reason why they spend more is that university students expect to earn more in the future than they do in the present and, as a result, they consume more today relative to other people with similar current income levels; they essentially eat (and sometimes drink) part of their future income, today. This makes me think that students don’t reduce their alcohol consumption by as much as other people in their income group when the drink prices increase.
If students don’t reduce their drinking in bars, or if they just drink at home before heading out, then it is unlikely that higher drink prices have much of an effect on their sexual behavior.
SEXUALLY STIMULATED MEN ARE IMPATIENT TO CONSUME
Several studies by marketing professors have found that men who are sexually stimulated by pictures of scantily clad women, the type of pictures that surround us every day, are not only impatient to consume but more willing to accept unfair offers.
One such study by researchers Bram Van den Bergh, Siegfried Dewitte, and Luk Warlop asked participants to choose between receiving €15 today or some other amount one week in the future. The monetary amount chosen in the future then gave researchers a measure of how impatient the participant was to consume. Someone who is very impatient, for example, would want far more than €15 in one week’s time—maybe even €30. Someone else who is more patient would need very little more to encourage him or her to wait—perhaps close to €0 more.
Students in general are impatient to consume because they expect to have higher incomes in the future and are, therefore, less concerned about saving today. It is this fact that explains why students are less likely to respond to an increase in alcohol prices the same way as other people with similar incomes.
In this study the male participants, after being exposed to different types of visual stimuli, were asked to choose how much money they would need to be given to encourage them to postpone consumption to one month in the future. The authors found that men who were exposed to images of women posed provocatively (in swimsuits and lingerie) were significantly more impatient to consume than those who were exposed to visually appealing, but nonerotic, landscapes—in other words, they were more likely to behave impulsively when aroused.
A second study by the same authors found that, using an experiment in which men could choose to accept or reject an offer to split $10, men who were exposed to erotic images were far more willing to accept unfair offers. This was particularly true for men who were deemed high testosterone. This suggests that men who are aroused are far less concerned with whether or not the price they are paying for a good is fair than a man who is not aroused.
So do men, at least, drink less in a bar when the drink prices are higher? If attractive women surround them, they probably care very little what the drinks cost.
Last year in one of the buildings where I teach, I saw a poster that was recruiting students to participate in an on-campus psychology study. The poster’s heading posed the question: “Why do you drink?” Below this heading, someone—presumably a student and not a faculty member—had written, “So I can get laid.”
This story raises a third possibility, and that is that students don’t get drunk and make poor choices because they are drunk, but rather that students get drunk so that they can make poor choices. If this is the case, then the question is not how elastic is the demand for drinks, but rather how elastic is the demand for sex in response to an increase in drink prices. Given how much people are willing to pay for sex on the market (i.e., the market where sex is explicitly bought and sold), it is unlikely that a few dollars for a drink will do much to reduce the demand for random sex for those who want, and can afford, it.
SEX FOR THE PRICE OF A JÄGERBOMB
I like to play the following game with my students: I give them a scenario in which two people are having a sexual relationship, and they tell me whether or not the individuals are involved in prostitution. I start with the obvious: one party gives the other party money in exchange for sex. Of course, they all feel that that is prostitution. I then move on to more subtle cases: a woman has sex with her landlord instead of paying him rent. Most students, male and female, feel that is also prostitution. A woman has sex with a man in exchange for being taken to New York for the weekend. Fewer students agree that is prostitution, with a growing divide between male and female students. The game always ends with: a man buys a woman drinks all night in a bar, and she has sex with him because she feels obliged to do so.
Well, at this scenario my class protests loudly. The female students look horrified and say “No!” When I ask them why, they tell me that the woman is not contractually bound to have sex and could walk away if she wanted. I remind them that in each of the scenarios the woman could do the same, but this does not sway them in their belief that this behavior is not in any way prostitution.
What I find interesting, though, is the response of my male students. They are largely undecided, and before they are willing to answer, they generally have one question: how expensive were the drinks?
The results of a recent experiment conducted by psychologists Susan Basow and Alexandra Minieri is consistent with the observation from my simple classroom exercise that female students feel less obligated to have sex following a date than male students feel they ought to be. The most interesting result in this research, if you ask me, is that while the female participants in the study may not feel that paying for an expensive dinner entitles a man to sex, they do feel that his entitlement increases with the price of the date. If this is the case, then this explains why my male students want to know how much the man had laid out for the drinks before deciding how obliged the woman was to having sex with him.
In this experiment, university students were asked to read a vignette in which a man (John) and woman (Kate) go out on a date. In the story, the man returns to the woman’s apartment at the end of the night and has sex with her despite the fact that she has clearly rejected his sexual advances.
After reading the story, the students participating in the study were asked to respond to a series of statements, including “Kate should have expected John to insist on sexual intercourse” and “John should have expected Kate to desire sexual intercourse.” The responses to these statements were indicated on a scale
of 1 to 6, where 1 indicated strong disagreement and 6 indicated strong agreement.
In order to tell if the price of the date mattered to whether or not Kate should have felt obliged to have sex with John, and if John was right to have expected sex from her, the students were split into four groups. In two of these groups, the date was expensive and either paid for by John or split between Kate and John. In the other two, the date was cheap and again either paid for by John or split between the two.
The average response by male participants to the question that asked if Kate should have expected to have sex with John when he paid for the expensive date was 3.21 (where 6 denotes strong agreement), while the average response for female participants to the same question was only 1.85. Not surprisingly, men feel more strongly than women that Kate should have expected John to want sex when he has paid for a pricey date.
The response to the question as to whether or not John should have felt entitled to sex, however, was closer for males and female students: 2.93 for male participants and 2.15 for female participants. When John paid for the expensive date, the men in the study clearly thought that Kate should have felt that she owed John access to sex at the end of the night, and both the men and women in the study, to varying degrees, felt that he was right to have expected it.
The economic implications of this research become interesting when we consider how these results change with the price of the date, specifically when the date is cheap, and John and Kate split the bill. The average response by male students to the question that asked if Kate should have expected to have sex with John when they split the bill for the cheap date was 2.27 (down from 3.21 with the expensive date) and for female students was 1.37 (down from 1.85 with the expensive date).
Dollars and Sex Page 5