The “no-sex” class on steroids
My non-worksafe blogging friend figleaf likes to turn the radical feminist argument that women are seen as the “sex class” on its head, arguing, instead, that our culture treats women as the “no-sex” class, to the detriment of men and women alike.
Now, there are degrees of this kind of thing. Lots of people (including, to some degree, me) believe that men are on average more interested in sex than women, or more interested in certain kinds of sex. Here, for instance, is my other blogging friend, Steven Barnes, relating that
I didn’t pass rules for seduction to my daughter–I have to
be honest and admit that I love the line from EdTV: ‘Men are the gas. Women are the brakes.
In the comments, as is often the case, he allows for a bit more nuance – men need brakes, too, of course. But in general, men are easier for women to seduce than women are for men to seduce, and women, as the sex that gets pregnant, are more risk averse. (I’m paraphrasing, but I think this is a fair summary of Steve’s views.) Still, though Steve may emphasize male/female differences more, and figleaf male/female similarity, they do both agree that sex tends to be mutually fun. However much easier Steve may feel men are to seduce than women, Steve never says that women, in general, don’t like or want sex.
That is left to one Jacqueline Passey, who takes to her own blog a disagreement that she and I had in the comments of Tyler Cowen’s blog, Marginal Revolution. Tyler Cowen, writing on the economics of the male birth control pill, argues that it won’t increase the amount of sex being had, and that it will not be very marketable. Many of us, in comments (including both Jacqueline and myself), disagree with Tyler on whether men will use the pill. But Jacqueline proves to be off in a land all her own in her beliefs on the effect such a pill would have on the frequency of sex.
First, my modest area of agreement with Jacqueline. Men do, I believe, have good reason to use a male birth control pill. The mistake that Tyler makes in his analysis is that, since he sees pregnancy as a risk born mainly by women, he sees a male pill basically as a device by which men reassure women.
Might there soon be a pill for men? Standard theories of tax incidence (borrowing from the Coase theorem) say that if so, it shouldn’t much affect the quantity of intercourse. Either the gains from trade are there or they are not. The initial burden of taking the pill might change the distribution of those gains across the sexes, but at the end of the night the final result should still be the same.
Only not!
If you are a man who can credibly signal he is taking such a pill, it is like paying the woman for that final result you so desired. The woman no longer has to perform the costly pill-taking action herself. And indeed the typical equilibrium is in fact that the man does the paying. But with the male pill you are paying her in a way that will flatter her, not insult her. Nice, eh?
Now it’s true that removing risk from women (and therefore possibly making them more sexually willing) is one possible benefit of a male pill. And, pace MRAs, I do think it’s fair to say that women bear more of the risk of pregnancy than men. Women have to bear the pregnancy, after all, at no insignificant physical cost, and are likely to do most of the work of child rearing. Child support from the man is going to be forthcoming, in general, only in the case that a) the man was committed to begin with, b) the woman becomes indigent enough that it pays the government to go out and dun the man, or, c) the man is quite well off. (A man has to be richer to make a private paternity lawsuit cost effective than he does to make it cost effective for the government to dun him if the woman goes on welfare, because the government has more resources than the woman, can dun more efficiently, and will lose proportionally less of the money in the collection effort.) So, the woman will virtually always (that is, any time the man isn’t very rich indeed) bear an economic cost to support the child, and always bear a physical cost, while the man will sometimes bear no cost at all. (Add to this the fact that many unplanned pregnancies end in abortion, which, even if a relief to the woman, is inherently a greater cost to her than to the man, and there’s even more reason to see pregnancy as primarily a cost for women.)
Sure enough, this difference in cost from pregnancy is born out in both men’s and women’s behavior. Though some of Megan McArdle’s commenters are eager to assure her, when she opines on the same topic as Tyler Cowen, that, no, men bear a much greater cost from pregnancy than women, because paying child support is oh so much harder than bearing and raising a child, not one of those commenters is able to demonstrate what would be the obvious consequence of a world in which men indeed found pregnancy more costly than women. Namely, not one of them suggests that men are normally more reluctant than women to engage in casual sex.
Still, less burden from pregnancy isn’t the same as no burden from pregnancy, and, even if the number of men paying child support is smaller than the number of women giving birth, it’s still not so negligible a risk that you can assume men won’t care about it. Besides, dogs though men are supposed to be, some of them do actually have consequences consciences, and aren’t eager to conceive children when they don’t feel ready to act as fathers. And, though the average woman may well be more eager to avoid pregnancy than the average man (until her ducks are in order and she actually wants the pregnancy, that is), that doesn’t mean the man can always rely on the birth control of the woman he’s actually sleeping with. There are several cases, in fact, where a man may feel having control of his own birth control is superior to depending on someone else.
A) He has a steady partner who wants a child and he doesn’t. It’s not even necessary to assume women are, in the normal case, lying snakes who want to entrap men by getting pregnant to see why it’s better that the person who actually wants to avoid pregnancy have some power over the birth control. Even a few lying snakes will do the trick, especially when you consider that, among the non-lying snakes, a pill is still going to be easier to remember for the person more highly motivated to take it. And that, should the non-lying snakes have genuine accidents, it’s much better if the pill was in the hands of the person who didn’t want the child, so that the lying snake possibility is altogether off the table.
B) He’s having sex with lots of women. A large number of women can’t all have been vetted for their care with contraceptives; some with be careful and others careless.
C) Finally, as commenters have already pointed out, some women may experience side effects from the pill – such as, for example, reduced sex drive. A male pill would doubtless also have side effects – but with two people available to take a pill, your odds that at least one will be able to do so without intolerable side effects are increased.
Tyler Cowen’s suggestion that the quantity of sex would be unaffected by the new pill, though, seems plausibly enough reasoned. The benefits of sex remain the same; reliable contraceptives were already available to mitigate the risks. So all the new pill does is to allow the people involved to redistribute the cost – a shift which doesn’t change their collective cost/benefit ratio any.
Jacqueline Passey takes a contrary view, and here’s where we get to the “no-sex” class on steroids.
Just about everybody seems to disagree with Tyler about how many men would use it, and I also disagree about the lack of effect on the quantity of intercourse. Although I think that a male birth control pill would be a great thing, I think it will actually reduce the overall amount of sex in the world. In the comments there, I wrote:
I think the quantity of sex will decrease because women’s chances of trapping a man or securing 18 years of child support payments with an unwanted-by-him pregnancy will decrease, thus lowering the expected value of sex for many women.
Lynn Gazis-Sax asks, “You seriously think that most women find getting court orders for child support from unwilling men a more rewarding activity than having orgasms? Those are some really strange women you know.”
To which I replied:
Many women don’t have orgasms, or enjoy sex much at all — IIRC, various surveys have reported that around 10-30% of women never have orgasms and/or don’t enjoy sex. Most of these women still want children and financial support to raise these children….
Contemplate this for a moment, while your mind boggles at the strangeness of this view of women’s sexuality. All evidence is that most women, most of the time, enjoy sex. Women routinely seek out sex, even when, a) they’ve already reached menopause, and can’t have children, b) they’ve had all the children they want, c) they know that condoms are in play, or, d) they’re ambitious, college bound high school students, who would be headed straight for the abortion clinic if they should get pregnant. A few women, sure, hate sex. Many women may, at some point in their lives, intensely desire a child or two – even perhaps desire that child as intensely as they desire sex. But to seriously argue that women’s desire for sex would actually decrease if they can’t have the great joy of hiring lawyers to get child support from the pockets of unwilling men? And then paying said lawyers a sizeable fraction of said child support? That orgasms and other sexual pleasure are normally in such short supply, for women, that sex holds no lure for them, any more, can they not do the “trick men into fathering a baby” thing?
That, indeed, is figleaf’s “no-sex class” on steroids.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:38 am
“Steve never says that women, in general, don’t like or want sex.
“That is left to one Jacqueline Passey”
You need to work on improving your reading comprehension.
I never said that “women in general” don’t enjoy sex. I said that “many” women do not enjoy sex. Various surveys I have read say that 10-30% of women report that they do not orgasm and/or enjoy sex. If that rate is fairly consistent worldwide, then I think 10-30% times 3 billion constitutes “many” women by any definition of the word “many”. Even if that rate is only applicable to the US, I still think that 10-30% of 150 million counts as “many” women.
Given that 10-30% do not enjoy sex, but that there isn’t a 10-30% female abstinence rate, that means that there are many women having sex for reasons other than intrinsic enjoyment. A fairly strong reason to have sex if you don’t enjoy it is because you want a baby.
“Lots of people (including, to some degree, me) believe that men are on average more interested in sex than women, or more interested in certain kinds of sex.”
I agree that “men on average” are more interested in sex than “women on average”. However, I think more of this difference is averages is attributable to a much more uneven distribution of interest in sex amongst women than amongst men. With 10-30% of women being asexual or frigid (but nowhere near as many men being this way), the other 70-90% could have sex interest levels at, near, or even somewhat above those of men yet women “on average” would still be less interested in sex then men “on average”. These averages can be different without it necessarily being true that most individual men are much more interested in sex then most individual women.
“But to seriously argue that women’s desire for sex would actually decrease if they can’t have the great joy of hiring lawyers to get child support from the pockets of unwilling men? And then paying said lawyers a sizeable fraction of said child support?”
I don’t understand why you think that getting child support is such a difficult and costly process. I know someone going through a divorce right now, and all she had to do to get child support was go down to the courthouse, file some papers, and then show up in court on her appointed date and it was awarded to her. Although she has hired a lawyer (because there are other areas of her divorce that are complicated), even her lawyer told her she didn’t need a lawyer to file for child support.
Recent “deadbeat dad” laws have made it very difficult for men to avoid paying child support for very long (their wages are garnished) unless the men go into the underground economy or change jobs very frequently.
“That orgasms and other sexual pleasure are normally in such short supply, for women, that sex holds no lure for them, any more, can they not do the “trick men into fathering a baby” thing?”
I never said that this affected the decision process of most women. However, I think that it affects the decision process of ENOUGH women that it will affect the overall level of sex in the world.
I don’t think there are enough women who both currently abstain from sex from fear of pregnancy AND would be reassured enough by a man claiming to be on the pill to start having sex to offset the number of women who use sex just to get babies with men who would not knowingly impregnate them.
April 16th, 2008 at 6:39 pm
Jacqueline, those survey percentages? Are women self-reporting arousal disorders – that is, they have trouble getting aroused as often or as much as they’d like to. Not at all the same thing as 10-30% of women not enjoying sex at all, to the point where they prefer court cases. I agree that there’s more variability in sexual interest among women than among men, but you’re way overestimating the percentage of women who don’t like or want sex at all, to the point where they’d prefer a court case. It’s as if you took all the men with erection problems and assumed that the same percentage of men are uninterested in sex.
And I’m not convinced that the percentage of women who are largely abstaining, at any given time, is all that much lower than 10%. There are an awful lot of sexless marriages, and an awful lot of not so swinging singles. So if you’re going to argue that the proportion of women having sex regularly is all that overwhelmingly larger than the percentage of women who get at least some enjoyment out of sex, I want cites. Both for the percentage of asexual women (not just women who have some difficulty getting lubricated – as I said, that’s more comparable to men with erectile dysfunction) and for the percentage of abstinent women.
Your friend is going through a divorce. Her husband is already the kids’ father. This is not a contested paternity situation. This is not an ex-boy friend with no incentive to stay in the area. What I hear from lawyers and from single mothers is that getting pregnant and trying to get child support from an unwilling person is a great deal of trouble, and that the money gotten doesn’t generally offset the fact that you’re basically having to take care of the kid all by yourself, and often incurring more child-related expenses than you actually collect in child support.
April 16th, 2008 at 7:14 pm
These discussions so often seem to assume that the male and female pills are an either-or situation. I would expect there would be fairly high incidence of people “doubling up,” with both partners on their respective pills (since neither pill is 100% effective).
April 16th, 2008 at 7:50 pm
Yeah, I think that “doubling up” would really be the most rational thing for casual sex situations especially. And even for steady partners who really, really don’t want kids. Pills are actually a good deal less than 100% effective, inherently, once you factor in human unreliability in taking any medication.
Oh, and Jacqueline, your offset? While I seriously doubt that there’s a large enough proportion of women who only have sex to entrap men with babies to affect the quantity of sex all that much, such women of that ilk as there are do have a group to offset them – women in stable, trusting relationships who find that the female pill affects their libido negatively. It’s not an uncommon side effect, and for those couples, trading the female pill for a male one could result in an increased sex life. I don’t expect it to be a huge effect, but still easily big enough to offset the one you’re proposing.
April 17th, 2008 at 7:01 am
Isn’t the 10-30% figure specific not to “sex” in general but to what my friends call CPVI: conventional penile-vaginal intercourse? Which is not all there is to sex by a long shot (even if in the context of a discussion of pregnancy risks, it’s the most relevant one). Doesn’t it often occur in conjunction with other forms of sexual activity which those women do enjoy and seek out, even if that’s not their favorite part?
April 17th, 2008 at 7:37 am
Yeah, 10-30% of women not getting much out of CPVI sounds much more plausible than 10-30% of women not getting much out of sex, period. And, even if the CPVI would be the most relevant to pregnancy risks, a lot of women who aren’t all that into CPVI are still having it because it’s part of a total package that they find hot, rather than for baby making. Like my college friend, not at all eager to get pregnant, who said of CPVI, “It’s nice, it’s a really close embrace, but it’s not for my orgasm.” She was hot for the total package, even if she might have gotten more out of the other parts of the evening than out of the CPVI part.
April 18th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
Just to be clear, the impulse to waive away male indifference sex is part of the
“no-sex” class paradigm. I mean, if you combine asexuality, untreated depression, *treated* depression, excess alcohol and certain other drug use, and various medication-related libido suppressants *including* somatic “erectile dysfunction” it’s not at all a small number either.
At best you can say those men *might not* affect potential male-contraceptive uptake because significant numbers might be older than classic reproductive age. Although you’d have to factor for the incredible popularity of vasectomy among those who *are* still interested in that demographic.
Actually, before you could say men aren’t interested in male contraceptives you’d have to find a way to factor out not just the men who get vasectomies, but the even larger numbers of men who schedule consultations but never follow through or who’d at least enter the system it if they weren’t phobic about needles, pain, bruising, ice packs, and so on.
*Excellent* point, Jean and Sappho, about the distinction between enjoying PIV intercourse and enjoying *sex!*
Oh, and finally? How about surveying over-40 women with over-50 male partners about who on average most wants to step on the gas and who’s stepping on the brakes.
Thanks for the link, Lynn!
figleaf
April 19th, 2008 at 1:24 pm
The especially stupid thing about Jacqueline’s ‘child support’ argument is that it sees sex as having a single value for women – the income associated with child support – and having no costs or offsets. Apparently children don’t actually cost anything to raise; there is no physical or financial toll associated with pregnancy; and the actual rearing of a child is a minimal exercise. Therefore, any rational woman who is not getting orgasms out of sex (“frigid”, in Jacqueline’s charming lexicon) is going to have sex with a man and become pregnant without his knowing agreement to the fact.
I really hate to play the parent card, but do any of these people railing about scheming bitches have children? They seem to be really clueless about the fact that outside of developing countries with farm-based economies, children are not a net financial gain and child support doesn’t change that fact.
April 21st, 2008 at 7:18 pm
I’m curious, in these surveys are no orgasm/not enjoying sex in the same category? Because it’s certainly possible to enjoy sex without reaching orgasm.
April 22nd, 2008 at 11:14 am
I’d imagine it would depend on the survey, but for any survey percentage as high as 30%, I suspect the answer is more likely “no orgasm” than “not enjoying sex at all.”