I found this blog on the N.Y. Times website and while it is written in a dense style, it makes some interesting points.
The main one is that college students assume their peers are having more sex than they actually are and that leads to them having more sex. It's called "pluralistic ignorance.''
To quote, "Plenty of college students think they don't have sex as much as other people do and aren't as comfortable with uncommitted sex as other people are, but generally don't wish to appear prudish, which strikes many as a social kiss of death.''
This leads to, "one or both sexual partners to act according to the perceived norm rather than to their own convictions.''
It also says, "Male and female comfort levels diverged sharply when the options moved from what people used to call "heavy petting' to oral sex and intercourse -- men were reasonably comfortable with everything, women weren't -- but the women surveyed mistakenly assumed that other women's preferences looked much more like the male preferences than their own. So, significantly, did the men. In other words, in our sexual culture, the male preference gets treated as normative even by women who don't share it, and whose own comfort levels with sex outside a committed relationship is actually substantially lower.''
It also says, "the risk of depression is much lower for women with stable relationships and a low number of overall sexual partners, a correlation which doesn't appear to anything like the same degree for men.''
Here's a link to the whole article:
http://douthat.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/12/17/sex-sociology-and-the-single-girl/?_r=0
I am interested in which women think about these comments if you are young or what you thought when you were young. Were you comfortable with uncommitted sex and did you engage in it because you thought it was expected?
I found it interesting that young people assumed other people were having more sex than they were even if they weren't.
FD
