Sexual Behavior in the 1970s Part III: Sex and Marriage

To most people, sex liberation signifies increased sexual freedom for the unmarried, the unfaithful and the unconventional. But the Playboy survey reveals that in terms of numbers of persons affected, sexual liberation's greatest impact has been upon husbands and wives, many millions of whom have been freed to pursue and obtain sensuous pleasure in marital coitus. Married people today have intercourse more often, take longer to do so, use more variations and get greater satisfaction from it than did the married people surveyed by Dr. Alfred Kinsey from 1938 through 1949. (In these and all comparisons that follow, we use only the white portion of our sample in order to match Kinsey's--which was all-white--as closely as possible.)

Sexual liberation enters marriage through many gates. Both partners now bring freer attitudes and broader premarital experience to the marriage bed; the pill and the I. U. D. afford increased sensuous potential; discoveries by Masters and Johnson and other clinical researchers have placed effective methods of arousal, ejaculation delay and sensate focus at the disposal of couples; and women's liberation has virtually demolished the archaic image of woman as sexually passive. Above all, husbands and wives continue to be influenced by an influx of information, attitudes and erotic stimuli in the printed word, film and the conversation of friends. Here is testimony from interviews that supplemented the survey:

• Waitress, 37: "What changed our sex life was that a bunch of us girls on the same block started reading books and passing them around. My husband was always ready to try out anything I told him I'd read about. Some of it was great, some was awful and some was just funny."

• College instructor (male), 33: "Our ideas about sex have changed a lot since we've been married, partly from maturity but largely from the influence of the common culture--all the things one reads and hears about."

• Teacher (female), 34: "I kept hearing and reading about this multiple-orgasm thing, and I'd never realized before that it was normal. My husband and I talked it over and decided to make a special try ... and wow! I was really bowled over-- and he felt pretty proud of himself, too."

The fact that marital coitus has become more frequent is the best indication that sexual liberation has had a deep influence; greater frequency is what one would expect if inhibitions had weakened or pleasure had increased or both. Male and female estimates of coital frequency differ somewhat, because of subjective factors, but if we compare our married males with Kinsey's married males to eliminate this variable, we find that the median frequency of marital coitus in every age group has increased by one fourth to one half over the figures of a generation ago. The median frequency as reported by females is likewise higher today (though by a smaller margin) in every age group. If we assume that the truth lies midway between the male and the female estimates, the figures are as follows:

The change is particularly remarkable when we measure it against the decline in marital coital frequency that Kinsey reported in 1953; at any given stage of marriage, the younger women in his study were having less marital coitus than older women had had. The drop apparently was due to the growing power of wives to refuse coitus when they chose to. Their power to do so has increased greatly since then, yet we find an across-the-board increase in coital frequency--clear evidence that today's women find marital coitus more rewarding than their precursors did.

Indeed, nine tenths of the wives in the Playboy survey said that their marital coitus in the past year had been generally pleasurable or very pleasurable; only about a tenth found it neutral or unpleasant. Husbands voted even more affirmatively. A large part of the wives' satisfaction, and some part of the husbands', is undoubtedly due to a high rate of orgasm in the wives. When we compare married women at the 15th year of marriage in Kinsey's sample with married women in the Playboy sample (whose marriages average 15 years), we find a distinct increase in the number of wives who always or nearly always have orgasm (Kinsey: 45 percent; Playboy: 53 percent) and a sharp decrease in the number of wives who seldom or never do so (Kinsey: 28 percent; Playboy: 15 percent).

Equally remarkable is the fact that coital frequency has increased in all age groups, not just among the young. Sexual liberation apparently keeps husbands and wives sexually interested in each other longer than used to be the case. Among the probable causes are greater use of variant practices (which prevents boredom), lessening of shame or self-consciousness about sexual activity in middle age, and control of menopausal and postmeno-pausal vaginal discomfort by means of estrogen-replacement therapy (ERT). Perhaps as important as any of these is the stimulus value of erotic literary and artistic materials; these are vastly more common than they used to be, and for every man and woman who found them sexually arousing in Kinsey's time, there are today two to several men and women who do so. Clinical experiments show that exposure to such materials tends to increase marital sex activity for a day or two.

The increase in the imaginative, voluptuous and even playful aspects of marital coitus is evident throughout the sample population, but it is most notable among those who have no college education. Kinsey found that this group regarded prolonged foreplay and coital variations as particularly suspect.

In general, we find the greatest magnitude of change today in the activities that were most strongly taboo in Kinsey's time. For instance, the increase in manual-breast activity is small because it was so widely used even at the lower educational level a generation ago. However, the increase in mouth-breast contact is larger because it was less widely used: Fewer than three fifths of Kinsey's non-college married males said they frequently used this technique; more than nine tenths of ours do so. Among college-level married males, the proportion rose from just over four fifths to over nine tenths. Similar increases occurred in the proportions of husbands who said their wives touched or fondled their penises. Wives' estimates of the use of these techniques showed smaller differences between Kinsey's time and today, but there were distinct increases in every case.

The most dramatic changes, however, have occurred in the area of oral-genital contact, which was almost unmentionable in Kinsey's time. Here we find wide discrepancies in Kinsey's data (though not in ours) between what males reported and what females reported. For instance, fewer than one out of six high school-level husbands in Kinsey's sample said that their wives had ever fellated them, but close to half of the high school-- level wives in his sample said that they had fellated their husbands. The explanation may be that many high school-- level girls marry college-level men and become more sophisticated sexually, while the opposite is not true. Despite these discrepancies, there are impressive increases for both sexes in oral-genital practices in marriage. The following data for cunnilingus are typical:

The change is of historic dimension. Fellatio and cunnilingus suddenly have become part of the American repertoire of marital sex acts for a majority of the high school-educated and for a large majority of the college-educated. The figures are yet higher in the younger half of our sample, and even when we combine the two educational levels, nine tenths of husbands and wives under 25 report at least occasional fellatio and cunnilingus.

The growing (concluded on page 256)Sexual Behavior(continued from page 91) freedom to engage in traditionally shunned or forbidden forms of fore-play within marriage even extends to anal stimulation, which was so rare a generation ago that Kinsey published no detailed data on it. Today, more than half of the married males and females in the younger (under 35) half of our survey sample have experienced manual anal foreplay, and more than a fourth have experienced oral-anal foreplay. Some of this accumulated experience took place before or outside of marriage, but most of it occurred as part of marital coitus. We can gauge the generational change from the fact that fewer than half as many people in the older half of our survey sample have ever had either kind of experience.

Contemporary husbands and wives spend more time at foreplay than did those of a generation ago. Our interviews reveal that the aim often is enjoyment of the foreplay process itself, not just arousal of the wife to the husband's level of sexual readiness. Kinsey's female data indicate a median duration of 12 minutes; ours show a modest increase to 15 minutes. The male data offer more striking comparisons: Kinsey reported that the foreplay of less-educated husbands was very brief or even perfunctory, while that of the average college-bred male was more likely to continue for five to 15 minutes or more (this suggests a ten-minute median); in our sample, the median for non-college and college-educated husbands alike is 15 minutes. Younger married people in our sample spend somewhat more time at it, on the average, than older people.

Today's married couples make much more use of variant coital positions. Nearly three quarters of our married sample use the female-above position occasionally to very often; only a little more than a third of Kinsey's did. More than half use the side position at least sometimes; only a little more than a quarter of Kinsey's did so. Two fifths engage in rear-entrance vaginal coitus occasionally or more often; a little over one tenth did so in Kinsey's time.

A generation ago, the use of such variant positions was much less common at the noncollege level than at the college level; today, it is equally common at both levels. Age is the important criterion: Younger married couples use every variant position more widely and more frequently than older ones do. Some of the contrasts are extraordinary. Consider the percentages of married people who often use rear-entry vaginal intercourse: 21 percent of those under 25, nine percent of those between 35 and 44 and fewer than one percent of those 55 or older. While very few married people 45 or older engaged in anal intercourse at all in the past year, about one out of seven people between 35-44 and about one out of four under 35 did so at least once.

All of the foregoing changes seem minor when we compare them with the startlingly impressive increase that Playboy found in the typical duration of coitus. Kinsey's estimate was that perhaps three quarters of all married males reached orgasm within two minutes or less of intromission. Today, according to our married males and our married females, the median duration of marital coitus is about ten minutes. An increase of this magnitude signifies a major shift in the outlook of married people concerning their sexual relations. The median duration of marital coitus is greatest among the youngest married couples (13 minutes for under-25s) and shortest among the oldest (ten minutes for those 55 and over). The data suggest that today's young men (and their seniors) can hold themselves back because the sexual goal encompasses the entire process, not just its culmination.

The greater enjoyment of marital coitus is valuable not just in itself but because, as the Playboy survey finds, there is a strong connection between sexual pleasure and marital success:

• A large majority of married men and married women who found marital coitus very pleasurable during the past year rated their marriages emotionally very close. In contrast, few of those who found marital coitus lacking in pleasure or actually unpleasant rated their marriages very close or even fairly close.

• Three out of five women and two out of five men who rated their marriages distant or not close found marital sex lacking in pleasure or actually unpleasant in the past year.

One can argue either that sexual pleasure is the cause of marital success or that sexual pleasure is the effect of marital success: Sexual success tends to create emotional closeness, but emotional closeness permits many people to be sexually successful. Probably there is no one answer; in most cases, both things are true, each phenomenon being both cause and effect, in a reciprocal interaction.

In any case, the survey data make it clear that the husband and wife who have a liberated, intensely pleasurable sex relationship are much likelier to be emotionally close than the husband and wife who do not, and that the emotionally close marriage is much likelier to include liberated, intensely pleasurable coitus than is the cool or distant marriage. In sum, contrary to popular opinion, sexual liberation has enhanced marriage rather than harmed it.

This is the third in a series of articles reporting the results of a comprehensive Playboy Foundation--funded survey of sex in America. Morton Hunt's full report will be published us a book, "Sexual Behavior in the 1970s," by Playboy Press