The Changing Face of Sex. Wayne P. Anderson PhD
was no longer a virgin. They did marry, but it was a demonstration of the strong desire of men to marry only virgins.
As a result, some women would re-virginize because they recognized the need to appear to be a virgin if they wanted to get married. I was told that in some cultures small vials of blood could be purchased to be put on the bed sheet the marriage night so it could be hung out the window the next morning to prove the woman had been a virgin.
When I first started working with rape victims in the ’60s, we found that many jury members believed that a woman who had premarital sex couldn’t be raped. That is, once they had had sex, further sex, even under threats of violence was not rape.
Permissiveness without affection
This was a body-centered, physical-pleasure oriented approach to sex. Sex was separate from love and something done for mutual pleasure. It became very popular in some groups during the late ’60s and early ’70s. The hippies practiced love-ins. Swinging clubs for married couples where partners were exchanged for sex became very popular. This had also been the standard with many male homosexuals, some of whom might have contact with hundreds of people during a year. This has become a standard for some college students where hooking up or one night stands are very common.
Permissiveness without affection became one of the ways in which sexually transmitted diseases increased in number of victims and resulted in the resistance of these diseases to treatment.
Permissiveness with affection or in an ongoing relationship
In this standard, sex is not treated casually. It is person centered and body centered.Given the fact that we now put off marriage during the age when the sex drive is the highest, it is likely this will become the more common sexual standard. Once affection or limerence becomes part of the relationship, jealousy comes into the picture and lovers do not want their partner having sex with someone else.This is probably very deeply seated in our primitive brain given that males of the species do not want to raise the offspring of other males.
The tipping point
Although the major changes in behavior took place between 1968 and 1972, this is an ongoing process with the proportions of people following each of the standards changing over time. The following table gives the percentage of women by class who had had sexual intercourse at my university during two critical years.
| Year | 1968 | 1972 |
| Freshmen | 15 | 50 |
| Sophomore | 26 | 55 |
| Junior | 35 | 55 |
| Senior | 50 | 47 |
The tipping point in changing sexual behavior from an abstinence/double standard came in 1968 (some would say 1969). By 1972 our entering freshmen were considerably more likely to have had sexual intercourse than the freshmen of 1968.
A multitude of factors had led up to this marked change in behavior, particularly among the female students, and it was interesting to see it happening right before my eyes. Of course, it wasn’t only sex behavior that was changing. It was women’s attitudes about what fields should be open to them as careers. Medicine, law and psychology witnessed an increase in applications, and by 1974 the numbers of women in post graduate fields were significantly increased.
Initially, I found myself on the side of the conservatives, who were resisting women becoming professionals. After all, a female psychologist would be taking a job away from a man who was the support of the family. I needed to come to grips with the idea that women were now calling for full participation in the marketplace and that the dual income family was the coming norm.
Earlier I had had no problem accepting a divorced woman with children as a doctoral candidate, but later one of my best undergraduate women wanted to enter graduate school. Taking a single woman as a candidate who might get married and have children and drop out of the job market—was that fair? I did take her, and she ended up not only raising two children, but as a professor and an administrator at a university.
Women’s need to find meaning
On the other hand, there were some other more positive influences on my thinking about women as professionals. In the early ’60s as a Veteran Administration hospital psychologist, I had done some consulting with the personnel division on women volunteers, and had interviewed many of the applicants and published several articles about them in mental health journals.
The volunteers were women who were typically in their forties or early fifties, married with children who had left home. These volunteers were complaining of the boredom and the lack of meaning in their lives. Their husbands were busy with their careers and had a significant life role; these women had lost their most important role, “mother,” and were seeking to find a replacement.
They reported to me that the opportunity to volunteer at the hospital was putting some meaning back into their lives. The talk I gave in 1963 when I applied for the position as a professor at the University of Missouri was on this struggle some women were having in finding meaning in their lives after child rearing.
In 1963 I found that Betty Friedan’s Feminine Mystique captured the problems I had been hearing about, and her conclusions made sense to me based on what the women volunteers had told me.
As Friedan stated, “The problem lay buried, unspoken, for many years in the minds of American women. It was a strange stirring, a sense of dissatisfaction, a yearning [that is, a longing] that women suffered in the middle of the 20th century in the United States. Each suburban wife struggled with it alone. As she made the beds, shopped for groceries … she was afraid to ask even of herself the silent question — ‘Is this all?’”
Her book, of course, was the start of the women’s liberation movement. It was obvious that women needed meaningful work after their children left home and probably earlier. You had to have been a member of my generation to understand why this was such a significant change in attitude and why it was so difficult to sell the idea that women could want a career outside of her family.
Another factor in my growing awareness was my own family. I had four daughters who assumed they would have careers in something other than teaching and nursing, and a wife with a master’s degree in English who was considering going back to get a Ph.D. in psychology.
In the mid ’70s I began to accept women doctoral candidates and eventually 14 of the 37 doctoral committees I chaired were for women. If I were still supervising doctoral candidates at this point in history, the number of women would be considerably larger.
Besides women’s dissatisfaction with their roles, what other factors built up to the tipping point that changed our sexual behavior? Many! I will review what I see as some of the major influences on creating the tipping point in regards to premarital sexual intercourse.
Sex research
For years, masturbation was seen as a practice that would lead to mental illness,physical disabilities and the wasting of precious body fluids.Our coach in the seventh grade had given us what turned out to be the standard lecture on the dangers of this horrible practice, including the message that adultery was a rare occurrence and no decent woman had sex before marriage. Laws still treated both premarital sex and adultery as criminal acts for which you could be arrested.It was some time before these were removed from the law books.
Then came Alfred Kinsey’s books, Sexual Behavior in the Human Male in 1948 and Sexual Behavior