All the Single Ladies: Unmarried Women and the Rise of an Independent Nation

by Traister, Rebecca

  In fact, the only thing that is unfamiliar to me when I read the keening over the steady degradation of heterosexual collegiate relationships is that in my day, I don’t recall many—or any—explicit female renunciations of commitment in favor of education or professional life, which is what leads me to believe that it’s the careerism, and not the casual nature of the encounters, that is so rankling.

  Lots of social scientists have backed up that hunch, with evidence that hookup culture is nothing new. University of Michigan sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong argues that sexual habits on campuses have remained largely unchanged since the sexual revolution of the mid-to-late twentieth century, and points out that today’s college students are not having more sex than their parents.20 The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention report that, between 1988 and 2010, the percentage of sexually active teenage girls dropped by 8 percent, from 51 to 43 percent.21 As Rosin writes, “by many measures, the behavior of young people can even look like a return to a more innocent age.” Research conducted by San Diego State University psychologist Jean Twenge and published in 2015 suggests that Millennials are on track to have fewer sexual partners, on average, than their Generation X and Baby Boomer predecessors. Although, interestingly, Twenge’s research compares the number of partners people have had by age twenty-five, a cut-off point that is less final for today’s young people, who are far less likely to be married by twenty-five than any generation before them.22

  Paula England, an NYU sociologist, has done research that shows that students have an average of only about seven hookups, which may include anything from kissing to sex, over the course of their time at college. That means that they’re getting busy with fewer than two people a year. She also found that a rather vast majority of college students, 80 percent, hook up less than once per semester.23 In her story about hookup culture at Penn, Kate Taylor cites research that shows that three in ten college seniors have never hooked up during college, and that four in ten have either never had sex or had sex only with one person. Sociologist Lisa Wade turns up similar findings, estimating that somewhere between two-thirds and three-quarters of students hook up during college, but that about 32 percent of those hookups end with kissing, and 40 percent end with sex. As journalist Amanda Hess interpreted Wade’s research, “that means . . . that [romantically unattached] college students are engaging in as little as one makeout every four years.” Hess also crunched numbers to conclude that “less than fifteen percent of [single] college students are engaging in some form of physical contact more than twice a year.”

  The rest of the women, presumably, are doing different things: Some are in committed relationships; Rosin cites England’s research showing that 74 percent of women, and about as many men, have had a college relationship that lasted six months or more.24 Some are not in relationships. They’re writing their honors theses on erotic art, they’re wondering whether they’re straight or queer, they’re doing work-study jobs at the campus day-care center, or getting up early to work the breakfast shift at a sandwich shop and fantasizing about their shift manager. And a very few of them are planning their weddings, because yes, young people still do marry each other, just in far smaller numbers than ever before.

  Reality

  What everyone is doing, in one way or another, is working out who they are and where they fit. They’re figuring out who they want to be, what they want to do, who they want to do, whether they enjoy only meaningful sex or are excited by meaningless sex, whether they are sustained by the pacific companionship of romantic stability or electrified by the crackle of argumentative tension, or whether they prefer, simply, to be alone, or with their friends or their books or their pets.

  “This is what the hookup trend pieces get wrong,” writes Tracy Clark-Flory. “Women are different. We are not all the same. Some of us learn about ourselves and other people from serial live-in monogamous relationships; some of us gain more from pursuing the cutie at the end of the bar. Some of us want to get married; some of us do not. Some of us are straight; some of us are not. Some of us want kids; some of us do not. Even if we all wanted the same thing, there wouldn’t be any reliable prescription for how to get it.”

  And there would be no reliable prescription for not getting hurt while at it, both as human beings, susceptible to hormones and cracked hearts, and as women who still, despite gains in power and sexual determination, tend to get stuck with the fuzzy end of the lollipop.

  Sex and love, especially the sex and love we experience as young people, whose emotional cement is not yet dry, are full of risk, pain, and disillusionment for both sexes. England found that while about 66 percent of women confessed that they wanted their hookup to produce some longer connection, the notion that women are solely being left bereft and abandoned doesn’t hold: 58 percent of men told her the same thing.25

  It’s true that increasing one’s number of sexual partners almost certainly increases the risk of sexually transmitted disease and of unintended pregnancy. It increases the chance of having your soul stomped on, and of having really bad sex. It also, I should add, increases the odds of finding someone with whom you have terrific sex, and of learning more about what turns you on and what turns you off, how your body works and how other people’s bodies work.

  The fact that women experience any more disillusionment or shame than men in hookup culture is at least partly attributable to the remaining pressures on them to measure their worth by the degree to which they can hold male attention. And there is an argument that the lingering, systemic sexual injustices and pressures placed on women in a liberated sexual universe mean, for today’s young women, a version of the unsatisfying sexual objectification that Shulamith Firestone so glumly imagined fifty years ago that, in liberating sexuality from marriage, women will be consigned to be “chicks,” or the modern equivalent.

  Rhaina Cohen, an undergraduate who worked as a researcher on this book, conducted interviews with women, gathered data, and talked endlessly about the subject of hookup culture with her undergraduate friends. She expressed reservations about my putting too positive a spin on a culture of casual sex. “Maybe the subject hits too close to home,” she told me in 2014. “I’ve seen the way friends my age have turned to hooking up not for the reasons Kate Taylor writes about”—a deferment of commitment for professional ambition—“but because they think that’s what’s expected and it’s all men will permit.”

  Are these dissatisfactions and double binds inherently worse than earlier iterations of sexual impossibility? By some measures, that doesn’t matter, if you’re the women living through them.

  But the argument that this pain and disappointment is somehow tied to a biologically determined, as opposed to a culturally encouraged, female preference for long-term commitment has been thrown into question by journalist Daniel Bergner, who recently published What Do Women Want?, a lengthy study on the nature of female desire, in which he argued that gender bias has long made invisible the power of the female appetite for sex. One German study Bergner cited showed “women and men in new relationships reporting, on average, more or less equal lust for each other. But for women who’ve been with their partners between one and four years, a dive begins—and continues, leaving male desire far higher.”

  As Ann Friedman has written, “Women like having sex. They don’t like being socially punished for it.”26 But they continue to be punished.

  The studies quoted by Freitas and the experiences of emotional discontent and disappointment recounted by Rhaina Cohen speak to individual experiences of heartbreak, but also of something more gendered. They confirm that, despite the strides that women have made, they still wield less sexual power than men, are still more likely to feel commodified, to feel pressured into encounters that don’t satisfy them physically or emotionally, to still sometimes feel bad about their sexual boldness, or their sexual acquiescence, then blame themselves for feeling bad.

  As members of the gender that still holds most of the power, men
remain the ones who get to dictate punishing sexual standards to which women are held. Male sexuality is considered normal, healthy; female sexuality is still liable to be viewed as immoral. Heterosexual male abstention from sex, meanwhile, is still often understood as a judgment passed on the desirability of a woman in question, while female abstention from sex is regarded as a symptom of prudishness, perversion, or lack of femininity. Male pleasure—the orgasm—is the accepted conclusion of the sex act; female orgasm is still considered a somewhat mysterious bonus. Young women give far more oral sex than they receive; pornography remains unduly focused on male release and is increasingly driven by an impossible, nearly inhuman vision of female physiology. The majority of sexual assaults are against women; the rape and assault of teen girls often ends with the victims being blamed not only by the alleged assailants but also by communities and media for being loose or “asking for it.” Many of these inequities are on display in contemporary hookup culture. As a study reported by the New York Times in 2013 revealed that “women were twice as likely to reach orgasm from intercourse or oral sex in serious relationships as in hookups.”27

  But that doesn’t make any of them the fault—or the creation—of hookup culture.

  Inattention to female gratification and to women’s anatomy extends back centuries; female pleasure has certainly not always been a reliable feature of supposedly serious relationships. According to historian Rachel Maines, it wasn’t until the eighteenth century that doctors bothered to distinguish between the parts of the female reproductive anatomy, before they could tell “the vagina from the uterus,” or were able to recognize a labia, a vulva, or a clitoris. Though it’s true that other cultures and countries have at times been interested in female sexual climax (largely, as for example in the early Modern period in England, because they believed it to be necessary for conception) in more contemporary Western society, Maines points out, doctors and psychologists thought it “both reasonable and necessary to the social support of the male ego either that female orgasm be treated as a by-product of male orgasm or that its existence or significance be denied entirely.” As recently as the 1970s, medical authorities “assured men that a woman who did not reach orgasm during heterosexual coitus was flawed or suffering from some physical or psychological impairment.”28 In addition, marital rape was legal in some states until the 1990s.

  Long before colleges lifted their parietal rules and men and women lived in dorms together, women were raped, were treated badly, and felt shame, regret, and guilt—far more intense shame and regret and guilt than their counterparts today—about their desires and their sexual behaviors.

  The differences were that, until recently, there was less chance that they might be able to safely open up to anyone, a friend or counselor or parent. There was little chance that, if they found themselves pregnant or suffering from an STD, they would have a safe or legal venue to seek help.

  That’s part of what made Helen Gurley Brown’s Sex and the Single Girl so revolutionary in 1962, remembered Letty Cottin Pogrebin. It was, she recalled, “the meeting point between a former era and that next one that came after. It was so liberatory for a woman of my generation.” As undergraduates in the 1950s, Pogrebin said, she and her friends used to gossip about a student who was openly sexually active, but, at a reunion twenty-five years later, they admitted to each other that none of them had been virgins at the time. “None of us were virgins and all of us were gossiping and putting her down,” she said. “You had to live a lie, thinking you were the only one.” Pogrebin, like many women of her generation, had had an abortion before college graduation, but had told no one. “I just didn’t know what I was doing and there was no pill.” Abortion, she said, “was everyone’s deep, dark secret.”

  The cone of silence that shrouded women’s physical and sexual experiences began to crack. “Helen outed us,” said Pogrebin, “Gurley Brown outed the fact that single women have sex.” It helped, she said, that she was “respectable enough and successful enough and old enough to make it not whorish.” Without prompting, fifty years later, Pogrebin remembered that Gurley Brown had been thirty-seven when she got married.

  Today’s college student may indeed feel terrible for having gone home with a wretched guy who rubbed up against her at a frat party, and telling her that it might have been worse fifty years ago won’t alleviate that pain. But the good, in fact, the great, news is that these days, she doesn’t have to spend the rest of her life married to that wretched frat guy, or live in social purgatory should their encounter become public.

  What’s more, none of the inequities cited by hookup culture detractors are addressed, much less solved, by the alternatives they want to proffer. In Hess’s words, “If young women can’t find someone they like making out with just once, the solution is not to make out with the same person over and over again.”29

  Ambivalence about romantic commitment may be more evident today, but what it reveals is not necessarily a brand-new set of impulses, but rather a broader array of romantic and sexual preferences and metabolisms than have previously been on display. Now that we have greater freedom to consider doing other things with our lives, some individuals, women and men, might find they enjoy coupling cozily; others might enjoy sleeping around or being celibate. As with most developed preferences, it’s hard for many of us to imagine desires that diverge from ours: Why do some people love opera and others love Nicki Minaj? Some people want to try every new restaurant and others want to stay home and watch NASCAR. Class, race, age, identity, opportunity, and community figure into these preferences; they shape the options we have available to us and the way the people around us behave; that’s also true of relationship patterns.

  But even given these contextual influences, what today’s world allows is a diversity of romantic and sexual behaviors that we are still tempted to diagnose as aberrant or immature because they are not what we used to expect (or demand) of adults. But what we used to expect and demand is that everyone would get herded into the same conjugal channel. Quite suddenly, people are freer to take off in a number of directions, and they’re taking advantage of that freedom.

  That diversity of behavior is startling. It’s different, uncharted, and admittedly a little scary. It certainly doesn’t end well for everyone. But it’s a grave mistake to argue that the single, narrow sexual chute into which most of us were once packed led more people to a greater number of happy endings.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Horse and Carriage: Marrying—And Not Marrying—In the Time of Singlehood

  Letty Cottin Pogrebin remembers sitting in her garden apartment in Greenwich Village in 1963, having just returned from a work trip that had taken her to seven countries, and thinking “I’m never going to get married.” She was twenty-three, and this recent trip, she said, short-circuited any lingering assumptions that she ever needed to become a wife, dependent on a husband. “Being single in a self-actualized way proves you can do things: I fixed my own toilet; I wired lamps; I changed tires. I didn’t have somebody to do stuff for me. The things you do on your own, they buttress you so that you can’t become poor dear wifey.”

  The next day, Pogrebin got a call from a man inviting her to spend her birthday on Fire Island. She went, and at the beach, first met a labor-and-employment lawyer, Bert. Six months later, they were married. Her husband, she said, is a committed feminist. Together, they came to the women’s movement, reading feminist texts and raising three children on equal terms. The life she’d led on her own, she believes, permitted her to have an equitable marriage; she cofounded Ms. Magazine almost a decade after meeting Bert. “I’ve never had sex with anyone else in forty-eight years,” said Pogrebin. “Which is so astonishing to me, given my past.”

  The great irony is that, as much as conservatives rage against the dying of traditional gender roles, by many measures, it’s the people who are messing with the old marital expectations who might be credited with saving marriage as an institution.

  Des
pite, or thanks to, the fact that Americans are staying single more often and for longer, have enjoyed increases in reproductive freedom and the ability to live promiscuously, engage in hookup culture, and have made gay marriage a reality, despite or thanks to all this: The majority of Americans will wind up married, or seriously committed to another person for some portion of their lives. And, right now, that sets the United States apart from many countries around the world.

  In Japan, a nation with a downward-spiraling marriage rate, in competition with Germany for the lowest birthrate in the world, (with fewer babies born in 2014 than any other year on record) citizens have begun to abandon not just wedlock, but heterosexual sex itself, a trend the Japanese press refers to as sekkusu shinai shokogun, or celibacy syndrome.1 One study found that over sixty percent of men and almost half of unmarried Japanese women between the ages of eighteen and thirty-four are not engaged in any sort of romantic relationship, numbers that are ten percent higher than they were just five years earlier. Yet another study, commissioned by the Japan Family Planning Association, showed that 45 percent of women under twenty-four claimed that they “were not interested in or despised sexual contact.”2 According to the Japanese magazine Joshi Spa!, 33.5 percent of Japanese people polled believe that marriage is “pointless.”3

  The rejection of straight coupling is closely linked to the inflexibility of gender roles in Japan. Japanese women are getting educations and making money, but find domestic expectations unadjusted. The Japanese workweek, designed for a man with a domestically submissive helpmeet at home, is strenuous, impossible to sustain for a woman who has a husband or children she is still supposed to tend with undivided attention. In Japan, working wives are referred to as “devil wives.” And so, according to The Guardian, 90 percent of young Japanese women said, in a survey performed by Japan’s Institute of Population and Social Security, that they would prefer to stay single than to enter into “what they imagine marriage to be like.”4 Guardian writer Abigail Howarth reported that an old Japanese saying “Marriage is a woman’s grave” has today been repurposed to indicate that marriage “is the grave of [women’s] hard-won careers.” As one thirty-two-year-old woman told Howarth, “You have to resign. You end up being a housewife with no independent income.”