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[Reason without restraint] Rates of risky sexual behaviors by race and sex in the United States
Reason without restraint is perhaps my new favorite HBD blog. While the topics that he writes about are nothing new (race & IQ, race & crime, etc.), he does a valuable service of marshaling all of the evidence in one place in an easy-to-consume format.
Here, he tackles the topic of racial differences in sexual behavior. He uses survey data taken of high school students where they report on various aspects of their sexual activity. The data starts in the year 1990 and extends to the present day. There are five sections to the article:
(1) Lifetime sexual intercourse (2) Sexual intercourse before 13 years of age (3) Sexual intercourse with 4 or more partners (4) Use of condoms (5) Use of birth control pills
Of the five sections, the first three are the most interesting. Based on the survey data, a couple things stick out:
The young people aren't having sex.
I am a bit, um, obsessed with the "sex recession": the dramatic decline in sexual activity in high school and college-aged people. Sex is perhaps the most human activity there is--the physical enactment of our Darwinian imperative, the raison d'etre of so many hormone-drenched adolescents. And yet: young people aren't having sex. Why?
Based on one of the graphs: in 1990, 65% of white 12th graders report having had sex. While in 2021 only 50% of white 12th graders report having had sex. This drop in sexual activity is not limited to white students, of course. It's a large drop across the board. Why?
Black people used to have a lot of sex but not anymore?
Look, I'm not stupid. At this point, I've had enough experience with the "stereotype literature" to know that, overwhelmingly, stereotypes tend to be true. But even I wasn't prepared for how much sex black teens were having in the 90s. I could cite a lot of different numbers, but just to choose one example: apparently, in 1990, more than 80% of black male 9th graders reported being non-virgins. Over 80%! And even if you rightfully suspect some exaggeration due to male ego, more than 65% of black female 9th graders report being non-virgins.
This is just incomprehensible to me. I'll admit that I grew up sheltered and nerdy, but still: none of my friends were having sex or really even close to having sex in middle school. Maybe the 90s were better after all?
What's interesting though is that there has been a rather dramatic decrease in black sexual activity. By 2021, only 30% of black male 9th graders report having ever had sex. And it's the same story for the other statistics as well: in 1990, black people were way more sexual active than Hispanics and Whites while by 2021, they have mostly converged, especially in the case of black females.
Asians don't have sex.
Not too much to say about this one. Pretty self-explanatory.
Condom usage seems... kinda low?
The survey reports that 60% of teenagers report using a condom during their last sexual encounter. Is that not kinda low given teenage pregnancy rates? I am a prude in real life who dislikes salacious talk, so I haven't talked about condom usage with my friends. So I don't really have a strong intuition here.
Overall, a fun article with lots of great graphs. What do I personally think explains the decline in sexual activity? I basically favor the consensus view as espoused by Jonathan Haidt and others: it's the phones (and social media). I think a lot of sex used to happen because people had nothing to do except each other.
Thank you for the link. Interesting blog. Scattered Thoughts:
-- I need to crunch the numbers, but to what extent is the "Sex Recession" narrative oversold after looking at this data, a reverse of the Coming Apart argument about economics/social class? It seems like what's really happening isn't that middle-class white kids are having moderately less sex than they used to, it's that impoverished Black kids are having massively less sex than they used to and middle class white kids are having a little less sex, and it all adds up to the total sample having moderately less sex.
Murray in Coming Apart argues that if you tease apart economic data and QoL data, the US white lower/middle/working class has not progressed at all since the 1960s, has in fact regressed for a variety of reasons, and that the positive trend of the data over that time is driven by bringing impoverished racial minorities towards parity with whites. In the same way, Blacks used to have a lot of teenage sex, now they are close to parity with white rates of teenage sex, and that shows up in race-neutral data as a big ol' sex recession, when really we're seeing a very mild sex decline.
That doesn't mean the sex recession isn't concerning, a mild decline is still a bad thing to my values, but it should impact the way we think about this more than it does. None of the responses to "What is causing the sex recession?" tend to have much to do with inner-city Black kids and their transition to the lower middle class over the past thirty years. All the responses about helicopter parenting, College Admissions min-maxing, etc seem to be asking entirely different questions.
-- I wish we had cross-cutting class data, as I always do with racial data.
-- I'm always curious about the impact of "last name sex" (oral sex, anal sex, manual sex [the technical name for the handjob/fingerbang], intercrural sex, and even I can't come up with a technical name for titty-fucking) on the data. I suspect that much of the gap between female and male reported numbers can be explained in that way. Men who have gotten a blowjob or a handjob or fingered a girl briefly but inconclusively are more likely to report it as sex, women who have given a blowjob or a handjob or been fingered briefly but inconclusively are more likely not to, to think of it as "fooling around" not as "sex." This could also explain some of the sex-recession data: oral sex was once seen as perverted, and hence "more" serious than vaginal intercourse, many youth today treat vaginal intercourse as more serious than other forms of sex, so they may be under reporting for that reason. Because that is largely a cultural question, I suspect it could have a larger impact on racial spreads, but I have no idea if there is any racial gap in sexual taxonomy. Any evidence for this one way or the other?
-- A lot of people point to an overall lack of independence in teens today, with fewer having jobs in favor of mix-maxing college admissions extra-curriculars. The obvious solution is to, by colleges engaging in best practices if possible but by government requirement if necessary, to make the college admissions min-maxing option to get a serious part time job. Make it priority for kids to have a work record in their application, with preferences given to employed students for admission and for financial aid. If it was well known that the best thing to put in your Princeton application essay is stories about your time as shift-lead at Taco Bell or working on a roofing crew in the summers, our talented upper class kids will be managing Taco Bells and nailing up shingles, instead of interning or doing ineffective traveling altruism. The incentives point away from youth independence, but we have the power to straighten out those incentives.
Getting a part-time job is the very best way to foster independence and freedom in youths. Having obligations and responsibility to adults outside of your family and school, having independent sources of money, having relationships to coworkers on a basis of equality outside the natural hierarchies of family and school systems, getting out of the house. All positives!
-- How much turnover has there been in the racial groupings outlined? To what extent are today's Black teenagers descendants of yesterdays Black teenagers, versus replacement by West Indian and African immigrants? I'm sure this data is available but I'm not sure how to look it up.
Your point about the "sex recession" being mostly driven by decreased sex among black people is an interesting one. However, black people are only 13% of the population. I would have to crunch the numbers to be exactly sure how much the decline is attribute to each ethnic group, but my default assumption is that US population trends can be safely substituted for white population trends as whites are still approximately 60% of the population (and a lot of the other 40% of the population are Hispanics who don't deviate that strongly from whites in their behavioral indicators).
I don't think social class data would be as interesting as one would think. For one, we can't measure social class directly, but only proxy it by income. There is a strong correlation between income and social class, but not a perfect one: this would cause attentuation.
Also, looking at data like SAT scores by parental income made me realize that there is a large difference between say the 90th percentile income and the 99.9th percentile. Basically, there is a small percentage of people who are upper class such that I worry that wouldn't be enough sample size to say anything interesting about them.
Also, because of (a) social media (b) the top-down nature of educational policy, I'm not sure that there are large differences in the school experience and media environment of teenagers across different socioeconomic backgrounds. Indeed, the decreasing gap between blacks and whites in risky sexual behavior constitutes strong evidence that there is an increasing homogenization of teenage life: everyone goes to school, goes straight home to Snapchat and play Fortnite with their friends. As virtually all households, regardless of wealth, have smartphones, gaming consoles, and WiFi, the social experience of teenagers is in the broad strokes the same across different income brackets. A big difference between different income brackets is I suspect the prevalence of extracurricular activities: lacrosse practice, piano lessons, starting a non-profit foundation, etc. But I don't think any of these activities have an impact a student's sexual life.
I agree that some proportion of the male-female reported sex gap is that men tend to include "third base" (non-penetrative "sex") as sexual partners while women tend not to. If I had to make up numbers, it would that the gap is 50% attributable to differing definitions of sex, 50% attributable to lying (I'm agnostic about which sex is lying more often. If I had to guess, it would be men though).
I agree that the current extracurricular rat race is both a waste of time and detrimental to the healthy development of teenagers. I don't think you're proposed solution would work, however. I could try and outline a detailed critique, but it comes down to the fact that colleges neither have the institutional resources nor the incentive to audit employment claims closely. So by default, I would expect any employment requirement to be gamed and manipulated by upper class parents just as masterfully as they've manipulated the extracurricular pageant show.
A more feasible solution would be to (a) make college admittance solely be based on grades and test scores and (b) make it a lottery for the top X%. This would reduce incentives to compete endlessly to perfect your profile, but would create problems in that there would be no way for a one in a million student to distinguish themselves. This runs the risk that an alternative signalling ecosystem would emerge to replace the function that college currently performs.
Also, I think even with all of these changes, you wouldn't see the return of part-time jobs. It's not just that the opportunity cost of having a job is higher now, but the actual benefit (disposable income) isn't all the beneficial. Disposable income is useful so that you can buy a car and have money to spend at the mall. But if all your friends are at home playing video games, what's the point?
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