Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, October 18, 1994 TAG: 9410180074
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: ELLEN GOODMAN
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
O, ye of little faith.
It turns out that the report, and the book released last week, presents a portrait of ``Sex in America'' that is anything but X-rated. Our national sex life is rather staid, especially compared to our sexual fantasies about this life.
Sex is by and large married and monogamous, and if it's not hot, it's warm enough to please 88 percent of the couples. Some 75 percent of married men and 85 percent of married women remain faithful. Singles who have to pursue sex actually have it less often than married people who only have to roll over in bed and bump into it.
Based on a sample of 3,432 Americans from 18 to 59, it appears that the average American has sex once a week in positions that would be familiar to their missionary forebears. Men have had a median number of six partners over their lifetime, women have had two.
Moreover, sex does not appear to be an animal instinct on the rampage, barely checked by willpower and fear of AIDS. It exists in a wide social context, not in an elevator, and by and large obeys a series of social rules. Americans meet, date and mate people from their own socioeconomic circle. If they see someone across a crowded room, it's likely to be a room crowded with friends and colleagues and people like them.
In short, we are not all Sharon Stone. In fact, Sharon Stone probably isn't Sharon Stone.
Now staidness shouldn't be so shocking. Yet the University of Chicago researchers who have put ``Sex in America'' between hard covers have a good many myths to debunk. ``We are not teakettles full of hot sexual steam.''
It seems that we have had years of flawed research from Kinsey to Hite to Playboy. More to the point, we've had decades of what amounts to propaganda from Hollywood, television and advertising suggesting that we are teakettles. Or, rather, that everybody else is a teakettle and we're just tap water.
For decades now, the boys and girls in the Calvin Klein ads, the zipless sex in the movies, the endless couplings on soap operas and talk shows, the gyrations on MTV, have all added up to an American counterlife. In this counterlife, somebody, maybe everybody-but-us, is going at it full steam ahead.
Now it's good news of a sort that this propaganda hasn't actually changed behavior. The sexual lessons from the media, the chief teaching tool of our times, haven't produced a generation of students practicing what the media preach. The soft porn on the movie screen hasn't spawned soft-porn lives any more than the slim waistlines of stars have made us a thin nation.
But it seems to have affected our minds. Until now, the propaganda has made many Americans believe their private norm is abnormal. That they are living on the tame side.
The selling of sex has surely also contributed to the deep conviction that there really is a moral decline in America. That we really do live in a country where sex is recreational and marriage is a vow to break. This fantastic counterlife has become the licentious twin of real life.
All through the book, the researchers present their statistics against this pulsating backdrop of the dominant cultural images. It's hard for us to separate American life from American image. Just imagine what it must be like in other countries where our movies and television shows are sent like ambassadors of ill will.
Now come the facts. ``America is not the golden land of eroticism where everybody who is young and beautiful has hot sex,'' conclude the researchers. ``Nor is it a land where vast hordes of miserable people, kicked out of the sexual banquet, lick their wounds in silence and resentment.''
It turns out that we live in a land where sex has its place in the social order. Mostly married, mostly monogamous. It's a land where sex has its moments in a busy life - somewhere between 15 minutes and an hour, maybe once or twice a week.
Funny, but you'd never have guessed it by looking around.
The Boston Globe
by CNB