Abstract
In Cheap Sex, Mark Regnerus uses data from the Relationships in America survey commissioned by the Austin Institute for Family and Culture that he helps run and from interviews with 100 people whom he selected, to explain the collapse of monogamy and marriage in the United States today and how these changes harm us all. Regnerus relies heavily on the exchange model of mating, which holds that women use sex to get resources from men, a view “rooted in stable realities about male–female differences that are not socially constructed and will not disappear.” Men are wired for sex, women to be gatekeepers of sex, but now, Regnerus explains, women give away sex too readily.
When is sex cheap? According to Regnerus, it’s cheap if “women expect little in return for it and if men do not have to supply much time, attention, resources, recognition, or fidelity in order to experience it.” This tendency for what Regnerus also refers to as a “pure relationship” that’s about the individual’s will rather than an enduring bond has emerged primarily because of new freedoms associated with the Pill and women’s wage-earning abilities, with the impossible erotic standards created by the porn to which men are now nearly addicted, and with the sad failure of women to value themselves properly. Again, according to Regnerus.
Regnerus doesn’t just lean heavily on quotes from his chosen interviewees to support his thesis. He chastises those interviewees—indeed he chastises most of us—for failing to grasp what he has figured out. Women “seldom even recognize the quandary they are in” regarding cheap sex, he writes. Even as he judges, he also advises: he suggests to a former graduate student that her friend, wishing marriage, should embark on a “sex strike” with her current boyfriend.
From the perspective of anthropology and the evolution of gender, I offer three primary ways in which Regnerus has got things wrong.
Regnerus describes monogamy and pair bonds as “clearly old, biologically rooted realities.” Yet there’s no convincing evidence to suggest that these structures characterized the mating of our hominin ancestors. Certainly, some models claim a pair-bonded past in which males were producers and women were babymakers in a straightforward exchange view of human evolution. But, these have been revealed by Fedigan (1986) to harbor numerous flaws including hidden (and inaccurate) assumptions about our past. None of our closest living relatives, the chimpanzee, bonobo, gorilla, or orangutan, are monogamous. Regnerus himself acknowledges that “monogamous arrangements comprise a historical minority of the globe’s societies” but presents monogamy as a prerequisite for a society to “flourish.”
Just as biologically determinist is Regnerus’s stance on the dichotomy between women’s and men’s evolved psychologies. “Very little about XX and XY are new,” he declares. Men are “powerfully motivated by competition in sports and business,” for instance, and “Women’s level of interest in casual sex with a stranger is far lower than men’s.” Fine (2017, 56) critiques this latter type of conclusion, however. In experimental studies, women do indeed respond differently to offers of casual sex than do men, but as Fine writes, “Social realities mean that women and men in these studies are simply not participating in the same experiment.” The risk of physical harm to women in casual-sex encounters is real, and there’s the risk too of being considered “a slut,” as Fine puts it. When the experiment is altered to ask about casual sex not with a stranger but instead with a celebrity or close friend, the sex differences disappear.
A third problem is that the categories Regnerus deploys are sociologically inaccurate substitutes for the complexity of gender and sexual orientation in the world. Not all women have XX chromosomes nor all men XY. Transgender women (including those with XY chromosomes) are women, and transgender men (including those with XX chromosomes) are men. Almost 2 percent of the population is estimated to be intersex (including people with other than XX or XY chromosomes).
As Fausto-Sterling (2000, 76) says, we now know that “complete maleness and complete femaleness represent the extreme ends” of a spectrum.
Turning to sexual orientation, Regnerus includes what he refers to as “nonheterosexual people” or “sexual minorities” in his analysis—that is, gays, lesbians, and bisexuals. These categories almost always appear fixed in the text because Regnerus has missed the reality that people may fit all along a sexual spectrum including at asexual and pansexual locations.
Additionally, in a volume touted as evidence based (though I question the quality of the data), it’s disturbing that Regnerus drops in claims without any evidence whatsoever. People who aren’t religious, for instance, he decides dwell in a world “emptier and less mysterious.”
Regnerus tries to deflect anticipated criticism by suggesting that skeptics of his conclusions are mired in liberal ideology. But this is not the cause of my skepticism: what went awry with the peer-review process at Oxford University Press I can’t know, but it’s precisely in the arena of good, reliable scholarship in which Cheap Sex fails. Readers who know Regnerus’s 2012 study purporting to show that children of same-sex parents are disadvantaged compared to children raised in a mother-father household—and the outcry about it including a letter of substantive concerns signed by 200 researchers and a formal reprimand by the journal in which he published—might have a trust issue even before opening Cheap Sex. Certainly, I suspect that many readers will experience (or retain) that issue by the time they close its covers.
At the same time, the issue goes far beyond that of academic scholarship into the arena of human rights. In a time when “sexual minorities” like lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer intersexual and other people (LGBTQI+) are fighting not just for respect and legal protection but also against bodily violence in rising hate crimes, Regnerus’s suggestion that they somehow undermine the fabric of morality in this country is dangerous. And have no doubt, he does very much suggest this when he cites the exchange relationship as “heteronormative” and links “nonheterosexuals” with the “cheap sex” that he fears will ruin us all.