The non-revolution

In a statistically rich discussion of global trends in family life, Castells notes that in the US “The number of sex partners in the last 12 months shows a limited range of sexual partnerships for the overwhelming majority of the population: 66.7 percent of men and 74.7 percent of women had only one partner; and 9.9 percent and 13.6 percent respectively had none. So, there was no widespread sexual revolution in American in the early 1990s.” This would be an interesting result, but I’m suspicious. Year-long monogamy doesn’t impress a whole lot. He does admit that there are a variety of radical changes in sexual life – teenagers are more sexually active than ever, and living together is increasingly the norm. Yet, the number of people living in terms of a “libertarian-recreational” model of sex is not huge: “25.5 percent of their sample in New England, and 22.2 percent in the Pacific region, could be included under a ‘libertarian-recreational” category: this is about one-quarter of the population is some of the most culturally trend-setting areas of America.”