The Happiness Myth_ An Expose - Jennifer Hecht [128]
Consider one last note on the historical nature of sex. The researchers of the sex study I have been discussing published a book in 1994 detailing the results and what they thought it all meant, and tellingly called it The Social Organization of Sexuality. Their close study led them to believe that the sex lives of various Americans—grouped by gender, age, class, and ethnicity—were all heavily determined by social rewards and pressures.16 Cultural changes, they found, alter sexual practices a great deal. For instance, “The proportion of men experiencing oral sex in their lifetime increases from 62 percent of those born between 1933 and 1937 to 90 percent of those born between 1948 and 1952. The significant increase in lifetime experience occurs for cohorts coming of sexual age (twenty to twenty-four) just prior to 1968.”17 Where Kinsey saw the low numbers of oral sex as a reflection of social constraint, the researchers of this new study see society as creating the expectation of oral sex. The act seems to have become more mainstream on college campuses in the 1960s, and to have remained more prevalent among the well educated. “The current prevalence of oral sex in the United States is the product of a sociohistorically based shift away from the traditional script of the sexual event between women and men.”18 So that’s why you do it—and here I bet you thought it was your idea. Indeed, get this: we can predict how much you and your partner are having sex based on three things: your age, how long you have been together, and whether you are living together (either married or shacking up); these are the only things that help predict your frequency of sex. Race, religion, class—none of it means anything. Everyone, across the board, who has been married twenty years and is fifty years old is having about the same amount of sex, whether you are a rich blond religious woman in Georgia or a secular African-American professor in Massachusetts. What race, religion, and class can predict, by contrast, is what you do in bed. Professionals and “white” people engage in varieties of sodomy much more than people in working-class and African-American communities. It is fascinating that cultural myths do not control frequency of intercourse but the myths do control the rest of what goes on in bed.
The 2005 biannual study “Sex on TV 4,” by the Kaiser Family Foundation, found that the number of sexual scenes on television has nearly doubled since 1998. The study examined a representative sample of more than one thousand hours of programming including all genres other than daily newscasts, sports, and kids’ shows. All sexual content was measured, including talk about sex and sexual behavior. The study found that 70 percent of all shows include some sexual content, at about five sexual scenes per hour, compared with 56 percent and three scenes per hour in 1998. Guess what percentage of movie scenes include some sexual content. The study put it at 92! Sitcom scenes were sexy 87 percent of the time; 87 percent of drama-series scenes; and soap operas came in at 85 percent. The genre with the lowest sexual content was “reality shows”; it is clear that reality has less sexual content than television shows do. On reality shows, sex shows up in 28 percent of the scenes. It is enlightening to see how much more stamina we seem to have for watching a show about sex, as compared to the real thing. This seems to be something we have accepted. It would be hard to imagine many people’s real lives keeping pace with the amount of sex and sex talk in movies or sitcoms.
Note how strict our cultural judgments