The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [127]
It seems to me this trip down the history of television Don and Doña Juans reflects a remarkable shift in the culture. Everything outside the private sexuality of romantic love is increasingly depicted as a species of sadness or mental disturbance. Again, these are not laws or sermons, and if you go against them, you won’t lose your friends, get fired, or be arrested. Still, we know what we are not supposed to be doing. It is remarkable that these television sex hounds are not being warned and scolded about AIDS. Instead, they face this idea that to be fulfilled and happy, you should be with one person at a time, and not in any way that would make a great story. We judge people happy who have a relationship with someone and about whose sex lives, after the first blush of early romance, we don’t hear anything at all.
We might want to say that we have more allowance for homosexuality than has any culture before, but I think we need to be cautious. Gay and lesbian people have more “rights” than they have had through most of recorded history, and one hears many expressions of tolerance, but there have been many periods when people barely noticed homosexuality as something to have an opinion about. Some people have encounters, or set up house, with people of the same sex. Yeah, and some people like scary movies. The question is, do we notice it as a thing to judge? Here is a strange example of what I mean: In the European Middle Ages, over the course of several centuries, there was a cultural bias in favor of fish over meat. The richer you were, the more often you ate fish. Over these centuries, there were many recipes for making animal meat feel and taste like various kinds of fish. There were all sorts of debates about the best ways to do this, and nary a whisper about why everyone was so sure fish was better than meat. They must have thought that someday there might be a paradise where we could all eat only fish all the time, but that is not how their problem was going to be solved by history. Now we love steak. How to make it taste like flounder is really out of the area of concern today. We don’t care about who tongue kisses and who doesn’t enough to encourage the tongue kissers to mark out enclaves for themselves in the larger cities.
How much sex are we all actually having? In the early 1990s the University of Chicago did a sex study of Americans, which today stands as the up-to-date version of Kinsey’s reports. It was done with face-to-face interviews of a random sample of close to thirty-five hundred people, aged eighteen to fifty-nine, using sophisticated modern polling techniques. Sociologist Edward Laumann led the research team. The study shows the frequency of sex in America (with another person) to be as follows: 14 percent of men surveyed had no sex in the past year; 16 percent had sex a few times over the year; almost 40 percent had sex a few times a month in the past year; 26 percent had sex two or three times a week; and 8 percent had sex four or more times a week. The numbers for women are almost exactly the same (10, 18, 36, 30, and 7 percent, respectively). Married couples have the most sex: close to 40 percent of married people say they have sex twice a week, compared with 25 percent for singles; and married couples are the most likely to have orgasms when they do.15 The 5 percent of men with five or more partners do have sex more often than men with one partner, but in all other cases, the more partners you have, the less sex you have.
These stats show a different world than we see on television and movies. For one thing, in a year, 30 percent of men have either no sex or sex a few times. From the media, we might have thought sex at least, say, twelve times a year was more general. The media also suggest that the guy who sleeps with a few different women over the course of the year is a playboy and is having more sex than the average married couple. But no,