Ruth Institute Blog

by Terrell Clemmons

Okay, I need to understand this ‘victory,'” Jeannie started in. The governor of our state had just signed legislation stripping abortion giant Planned Parenthood of about $4 million in annual taxpayer funding. “First, you do not want to teach sex-ed and provide condoms in schools. Second, you do not want to fund an organization that provides contraception to prevent pregnancy. And you do not want abortion as an option. Do you really think that more teens will practice abstinence because of this?”

A mother of three, Jeannie’s approach to teens and sex is, They’re going to do it anyway, so you might as well give them birth control so nobody gets pregnant. Setting aside all the loaded presumptions in her diatribe, I was left thinking, We’re talking about people, here, not animals in heat. Why should we accept such a low view of them?

Social commentators point to the sixties as the time when the sex-is-for-marriage dam broke, giving way to this “liberated” sexuality of If it feels good do it—with anyone, anytime, anywhere. Some two generations later, though, observant commentators—and not just religiously minded ones—are suggesting that maybe that dam wasn’t such a bad idea after all.

The Truth for Women

In an op-ed called “Why Monogamy Matters,” New York Times columnist Ross Douthat reports the findings of sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker, authors of Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think About Marrying. Emphasizing the “significant correlation between . . . monogamy and happiness—and between promiscuity and depression,” Douthat distinguishes between relationship sex and hook-up sex. “There’s sex that’s actually pre-marital, in the sense that it involves monogamous couples on a path that might lead to matrimony one day. Then there’s sex that’s casual and promiscuous, or just premature and ill considered.” The latter is emotionally hazardous for women, he states, pointing to extensive research showing that “a young woman’s likelihood of depression rose steadily as her number of partners climbed.”

Whereas Douthat coolly relates research findings, Tracy McMillan speaks hotly from personal experience. In an in-your-face missive called “Why You’re Not Married,” which appeared on the Huffington Post on the eve of Valentine’s Day 2011, the TV writer directly addresses those promiscuous (and likely depressed) young women. “[I]f you’re having sex outside committed relationships, you will have to stop,” she tells them bluntly. For this thrice-married, now single woman in her forties understands something important about the female heart and soul: Women want security and love, and sex is not the way to get either one.

She explains the biology of it for females. “[C]asual sex is like recreational heroin—it doesn’t stay recreational for long,” she writes. “That’s due in part to this thing called oxytocin—a bonding hormone that is released when a woman a) nurses her baby and b) has an orgasm—that will totally mess up your casual-sex game.” It’s why you can be hooking up “with some dude who isn’t even all that great and the next thing you know, you’re totally strung out on him. And you have no idea how it happened. Oxytocin, that’s how it happened.”

Keep reading.