What the two men had in common was their absolute certainty that single women must have an enormous amount of sex.
And it’s true: Many unmarried women have sex. Some of them, like Kristina, even have “so much” sex. After all, the increased freedom to have socially sanctioned sex with contraception, with a variety of partners to whom they are not obligated to chain themselves for life, is one of the chief reasons that there are so many unmarried women.
When it comes to the stories that women tell (or don’t tell) about sex, the interesting part isn’t necessarily the fact of the sex; it’s the increasing variety of sexual paths open to women, the diversity of choices made by different women, or sometimes by an individual woman, over the course of her adulthood. Some women have multiple partners, some have none. Many, like Kristina, have periods of promiscuity, periods of monogamy, and periods of chastity, all within a span of a decade or two—a decade or two that, a few generations ago, would most likely have been largely given over to married sex with one partner.
And it’s not all juicy. Sex, after all, comprises the great and the abysmal: bad sex and violent sex and sex from which you contract a disease. It’s a muck of physicality and emotion, of excitement and satisfaction and of betrayal and disappointment: The girlfriend who leaves you for a man. The man who leaves you for another woman. Anyone who leaves you. Or who you cut to the quick by leaving, or cheating on, or lying to.
The waggly-eye-browed (often older male) fantasy of single sex as an erotic wonderland rarely takes female discernment or disenchantment—or stretches of inactivity—into account, any more than it encompasses the comprehension that for many of us, sex is intermittently thrilling, occasionally satisfying, sometimes disappointing, but also not always the driving center of our lives. Even Candace Bushnell, the Grand Dame of Purportedly Sexy Single Sex, stated baldly in her first ever “Sex and the City” column that sex “can be annoying; it can be unsatisfying; most important, sex . . . is only rarely about sex. Most of the time it’s about spectacle . . . or the pure terror of Not Being Alone . . .”
The sex lives of single women are studded with stories that can, these days—after centuries in which female desires and sexual predilections were not acknowledged, were a source of shame, and never to be put on public view—finally be told, with bravado or tenderness or humor or regret. Telling them is important, not because it excites the codgers but because, when we take the cover of marriage off the adult erotic lives of women, we learn more about the variety of things that drive and excite and hurt and engage them. We get a far more honest view of female sexuality and its complications and contradictions, its heat and its chills. And, in doing this, we finally begin to break apart the gender essentialist assumptions about “what women want” that have served often to steer too many women toward fates they’ve never desired.
Not So Much Sex
For good and bad, our post-pill, sexually revolutionized era is one in which independent women and their sexual preferences and aversions can be put on display. However, it’s not as though contemporary women invented sex, or the anxieties around it.
Earlier generations of unwed women had sex, sometimes with the approval of families who presumed that young women and their partners would wed.1 Other single women who had sex before marriage, with lovers or otherwise committed men, managed to pull it off without terrible consequence. And then there were many more who lived by choice or need as prostitutes, or who moved through life degraded and in danger because of their sexual reputations. And, of course, enslaved women rarely had ownership of their own bodies or were able to exert control over their sexuality.
For those never-married women of the middle and upper classes, many of them pious, who left written records of their lives and loves, it was far more common to have lived chastely. However, that doesn’t mean that they didn’t think about sex or consider the way that sexual impulse and desire played a part in their lives.
Settlement House founder and activist Jane Addams argued in her book, The Spirit of Youth, that a redirection of sexual energy could foster engagement with other forms of beauty in the world. “Every high school boy and girl knows the difference between the concentration and the diffusion of this [sexual] impulse,” wrote Addams. “They will declare one of their companions to be ‘in love’ if his fancy is occupied by the image of a single person . . . But if the stimulus does not appear as a definite image, and the values evoked are dispensed over the world, the young person suddenly seems to have discovered a beauty and significance in many things—he responds to poetry, he becomes a lover of nature, he is filled with religious devotion or with philanthropic zeal. Experience, with young people, easily illustrates the possibility and value of diffusion.”2 Addams’s biographer, Louise Knight, described to me how another of her subjects, abolitionist Sarah Grimké, wrote directly about the imagined pleasures and value of sexual congress, as well as about how the ways in which it was practiced by men violated women’s equal rights. Grimké wrote that marriage “finds its most natural, most sacred and intense outward expression in that mutual personal embrace.”3 However, she also argued that women must be afforded “an equality of rights throughout the circle of human relations, before she can be emancipated from that worst of all slaveries—slavery to the passions of man,”4 a signal that while Grimké clearly “believed in marriage’s possibilities,” Knight said, she was “skeptical of its realities,” including marital rape.
Many of the women left single, or who chose to remain single, in the wake of the westward migration in the nineteenth century, spent a good deal of time pondering what they had missed. Emily Greene Balch, a never-married economist and pacifist born in 1867, made no bones about the fact that she was sorry that, in electing to live unmarried, she had missed out on the emotional peaks and valleys of falling in love and having a family. Balch, who would win a Nobel Peace Prize, wrote that as an independent woman, “I am happy in my work . . . I have escaped the dangers of unhappy, or only half-happy marriage and the personal sufferings incident to the most successful marriage.” But, she continued, “I have missed the fullness of life which I would prefer to any calm. . . . [I] have been shut out except in imagination and sympathy from the most human and deepest experiences.”5
And yet, despite her melancholy over missed intimacies, Balch would write to her friend and fellow Nobel recipient Addams, during the period in which psychologists were attempting to pathologize nonconforming single women as perverse, that her peers had survived just fine without the sex that they might have been curious about. Balch wrote, “If the educated unmarried women of the period between the Civil War and the World War represent a unique phase, it is one that has important implications which have not yet been adequately recognized by those who insist upon the imperious claims of sex.”
Sex and love might have been desirable elements in life, Balch believed. And yet, the absence of them, even for those women who wished it otherwise, was not an absence that necessarily deformed the rest of female experience.
The message that an active sex life was not simply a new freedom but, in fact, an imperative, a form of validating the worth of young women, has been one of the more convoluted messages to emerge in the century since Balch objected to the notion that sex had been made to mean too much.
Psychologist Paula J. Caplan has written about how the Second Wave, in combination with the invention of the birth-control pill, created for women “a strange combination of liberation and disturbing pressures with regard to sex.” On the one hand was the revolutionary idea that “women should be as free as men to enjoy sex, and [that] those who did so ought not to be demeaned as a result.” Countering that were the “greater pressures on women and even very young women: ‘You won’t get pregnant, and you’re supposed to be free to enjoy sex, so you have absolutely no reason to refuse,’ came the argument from many men.”6 The invention of the pill meant new carnal possibilities, yes, but also a new culture of public concupiscence and objectificat
ion and with it, new reasons for women—especially those already suspicious of male power—to fear exploitation, abuse, and degradation.
This was the thorny heart of the anxieties laid out by some radical Second-Wave feminists who famously objected to the gendered subjugations of marriage, but also saw unregulated sexual freedom as a new arena of objectification and diminishment for women. Back then, there were so few contemporary models of what unmarried female life might look like that even the most ardent antimarriage agitators had trouble making single sexuality sound terrifically appealing.
Feminist Shulamith Firestone was among those activists who was no fan of marriage, but saw no cheery alternative. In The Dialectic of Sex, Firestone advocated egalitarian partnership and romantic love, both of which she found wanting from the contemporary marital model. But she could not seem to envision actual independence from men, describing unmarried women as “consigned forever to that limbo of ‘chicks,’ ” destined to become the “ ‘other woman’ . . . used to provoke his wife, prove his virility.”7 Firestone also argued that “those who do not marry and have children by a certain age are penalized: they find themselves alone, excluded, and miserable, on the margins of a society . . . (Only in Manhattan is single living even tolerable, and that can be debated.)”8 In this formulation, to not be a wife was to not be one’s self, but to be a wife-alternative who was still defined by abstention from marriage and now also by an identity tied to sexual degradation, still as passive objects of (inherently male) sexual impulse.
It’s not hard to imagine Firestone or her radical colleagues looking with grief on Internet dating apps including Tinder, used by an estimated 50 million people in 2014,9 where the process of erotic coupling has been taken to new consumerist heights. Online dating involves reciprocal evaluation—men and women selecting other men and women from real-time, steadily updating catalogs. But sites like Tinder, and their online buffets of willing partners, can also reduce the search for sex partners to its quickest and most commodified form. “You can swipe a couple hundred people a day,” one young man told the Vanity Fair reporter Nancy Jo Sales in 2015. “It’s setting up two or three Tinder dates a week and, chances are, sleeping with all of them, so you could rack up 100 girls you’ve slept with in a year.”10
On Tinder, and other apps like it, including Hinge and Happn and OkCupid, men and women present versions of themselves that are photographed for maximum impact, describe themselves in just a few words and catchphrases, bringing the mid-twentieth century art of the singles ad or, for that matter, the centuries’ old business of matchmaking, to a new technological age, making the process of pursuit and rejection swifter, the volume of potential choices higher. And because women remain more sexually objectified and less sexually empowered than men, troubled by more double standards and harsher aesthetic evaluations, the dehumanizing impact of dating apps, of sex apps, can be very real. “It’s like ordering Seamless,” another young man told Sales, “but you’re ordering a person.”
That’s big talk, and it sounds pretty horrifying from a gendered perspective except that the sexual supply and demand patterns being reworked by apps and social media do not, in fact, all work in one direction. In a widely circulated 2015 piece, “The Dickonomics of Tinder,” writer Alana Massey chronicled her use of Tinder after a heart-wrenching breakup, describing her approach to Tinder as hinging on one resonant mantra: “Dick is abundant and low value.”11 It was a phrase she cribbed from another woman whose words she read on Twitter, a lawyer and writer, Madeleine Holden, who had written that “there’s this cacophony of cultural messages telling us that male affection is precious & there’s a trick to cultivating it. They’re all lies. To any women reading ‘how to get a man’ franchises or sticking around in stale dissatisfying relationships: dick is abundant and low value.” To Massey, that last sentiment “emerged from the screen with their outer edges glowing like the inscription in the Dark Tongue of Mordor on the One Ring. I was transformed, nay, transfigured, by the message.” It was an idea that enabled her to use Tinder to treat men as disposable, to give her the power of rejection, of being picky, knowing that the technology was presenting her with ample choice, and that “the centuries’ long period of dick overvaluation is over.” Massey knew that some would read her account of giddy evaluative dismissal of men as “evidence as a disturbing uptick in malevolent, anti-male sentiments among single straight women,” but, she wrote, that’s not true. Instead, “it is evidence of us arriving nearer to gender equilibrium.”
For plenty of women, the experiences of sex and dating in the Internet age are somewhere in between objectification and liberation, or maybe comprise a bit of both, which is not so different from the stories of dating and sex in earlier eras. “My feelings about Tinder are complicated,” said Amina. “Dating, period, is horrible. I don’t think there is anything exclusive to Tinder that makes it worse.” Amina said that despite press coverage suggesting that it’s only a mechanism for commodified, brief, zipless erotic encounters, in life she knows plenty of happy “Tinder couples,” “People who’ve gotten married or are in happy long-term stable relationships, and when I consider them, I don’t know how they would have met without Tinder.”
One of the challenges as people remain single later is that the contexts in which they are likely to encounter other singles narrow. There’s not the romantic marketplace of college or fresh-out-of college social life. For people who don’t like to date colleagues, or who work remotely, or who work all the time, there are few places to seek mates. Apps address this need.
The reality is that Tinder probably hasn’t invented a new level of awful for women in dating. Rather, it has simply brought the human heartbreak and gendered inequities long threaded through heterosexual encounters to a new technological platform. “I don’t think it’s worse than sitting at a bar or even going out with people my friends have introduced me to,” said Amina.
No Sex
Today, in a culture that has more fully acknowledged female sexuality as a reality, it is perhaps more difficult than ever to be an adult woman who does not have sex. But there are plenty of such women out there, who feel varying degrees of pride or shame about their sexual inactivity. It may not define them any more than it did earlier generations of abstinent women, but it certainly occurs to them.
“I feel that it’s one hundred percent worth waiting for [sex] to be within marriage,” said Sarah Steadman, the twenty-nine-year-old Mormon schoolteacher from Utah. “I feel that sexual intimacy is a very sacred thing, and it’s a beautiful gift we’ve been given to be able to express love and closeness with the person that we’re married to.” Yes, she acknowledged, “I sometimes think, ‘Ah! Why do I have to wait?’ Sure. I’m human and I have hormones. Lots of times I’ve even thought, ‘Maybe I should marry this guy just so that I can.’ ”
Sarah has set guidelines as to how far she’s willing to go, physically, within a relationship, and said that any time she’s ever violated those guidelines, her relationships have been ruined. Some of that damage, she said, is based on self-recrimination and guilt about not having lived up to her own standards. But more, she said, the relationships suffer because “I see the act of waiting as caring enough to be completely committed to the one person. And [sex] is the final act that shows your complete commitment.” Sarah said that she feels “a greater love for my boyfriend when we can control ourselves, as opposed to when sometimes we take things a little too far. Sure, taking things a little too far is pleasurable. But when we can control each other I know that he respects me, he loves me, and that we both have the desire to wait.”
Meaghan Ritchie, the twenty-year-old undergraduate from Kentucky, is also holding out for marriage for religious reasons. “I do plan on saving myself for my husband,” she said. “And I pray that my husband saves himself for me. That is just for marriage. Why give yourself away like that, emotionally and physically, especially when it can lead to pregnancy?” Meaghan’s take on chastity echoes Jane Ad
dams’s; she sees her commitments and desires as rechanneled in other directions. “As a Christian,” she said, “I feel that I am having a relationship with Christ. My number-one goal in life would be to bring glory to him. I’m very involved with my church, very involved with campus organizations. I just enjoy life.” Ritchie has considered the possibility that she might never marry and thus, based on her beliefs, never have a sexual relationship. When this crosses her mind, she said, she comforts herself with two reminders: “First,” she said. “I don’t feel like God would give you desires if he wasn’t going to fulfill them.” But also, “If I were to be single, he would fill in that need. He’s not going to make your life miserable if your goal is to glorify him.”
For many women, the pressures to remain celibate come not from their own devotion, but from the religious beliefs enforced by parents and community.
Ayat, twenty-one, is the daughter of Palestinian immigrants and remains a virgin, though a sexually curious and experimental one. When asked if her parents knew about her sexual life she replied, “Oh, my God, I’d be shot in the face. They would go nuts. They definitely expect virginity first.” She recalled a childhood conversation with her mother about whether she might have lost her virginity after slipping off a bicycle, and how her mother flipped out! She was like, ‘This is a disaster!’ It’s definitely important to them. I would never say any stuff [about sex] to them, ever. Ever. Ever.” But the cultural linking of adult femininity to sexual activity and identity plays on Ayat. Considering the question of what it means to be a woman versus a girl, she quickly returned to the subject of sex. “I would like to think I feel like a woman, but I haven’t had sex yet,” she said. “When I think about the fact that I haven’t had sex, I feel like the process isn’t complete yet or something. So, I guess, intellectually I think I’m a woman, but because of pop culture [its messages about sex] I don’t feel like it.”
All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation Page 26