Double Standard Myths Debunked

When it comes to sex, your mother and Elvis may have been right: Men don’t buy the cow when they can get the milk for free.

But neither do women. At least that’s one of the implications of a new study that suggests the more sexually active a man or a woman has been, the more negatively they’re viewed by both sexes.

Lucia F. O’Sullivan surveyed 256 young men and women on their attitudes toward men and women with varying levels of sexual experience. Both men and women described as having more sex partners were judged as being significantly less well-adjusted, less moral, more aggressive, “less desirable as a dating partner and less desirable as a spouse” than people with less sexual experience, O’Sullivan wrote in the journal Sex Roles.

Her research is just the latest in a series of studies that cast a skeptical eye on notions of a sexual double standard. It echoes, for example, the results of another study. In this one, of 750 students at three universities, it was found that men and women rated sexually experienced men as being less desirable as friends or potential husbands than those who had fewer lovers. Likewise, both sexes rated more promiscuous women as poorer bets as pals or wives.

Reputations aren’t just made and lost in bed. Another research team found men and women who hadn’t much experience kissing or breast-fondling were rated as better potential dates and marriage partners than those who had gotten to first and second base more often.

Researchers do consistently confirm that most people still embrace traditional views of sex roles for men as initiators and women as receivers and moderators.

(Guys should work the accelerator, women work the brakes, theoretically speaking.)

But they’ve generally failed to find support for the persistent notion that men who have had lots of bed mates are applauded while sexually experienced women are condemned.

“Instead, most researchers have noted a general bias against both men and women depicted as having greater degrees of sexual experience,” said O’Sullivan, a researcher at the Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center in New York City.

Career vs. family

The overwhelming majority of women still don’t have it all. But the chances of getting a big chunk of it are improving for women who seek careers and families.

Only one in seven women currently between the ages of 38 and 51 has managed to “have it all” - a successful career and a family - reports Claudia Goldin, a research associate at the National Bureau of Economic Research.

Goldin analyzed U.S. Census figures as well as data collected from thousands of women who participated in the National Longitudinal Survey, a massive study that began tracking the lives of thousands of young women beginning in 1968.

Among middle-aged women with successful careers, only half had children. And among women who had children, fewer than one in five had achieved professional success, Goldin said.

She defined professional success for a woman in several ways, including “exceeding the income of the male college graduate at the top of the bottom 25 percent of male graduates in two or three consecutive years.” Her definition of family was more straightforward: having at least one child. “Career still entails large costs,” Goldin concluded. Still, “No cohort of college graduate women in the past had a higher success rate in combining career and family.”