Sexual Attitudes

In the minds of many individuals, love and sex share an intimate connection. In fact, most men and women view sexual intercourse as most appropriate when it occurs within the context of a committed, long-term, and love-based relationship. As we discuss in this chapter, a large and growing body of research suggests that people are most accepting of sexual activity between engaged or married partners and are least accepting of sex between uncommitted partners or those at very early relationship stages.

Beliefs about Sex in Dating Relationships

In one of the first empirical investigations of sexual standards, sociologist Ira Reiss (1964) reported that men and women from a national probability sample of the U.S. population as well as students from five high schools and colleges were increasingly more accepting of premarital sexual intercourse between two people as their relationship became characterized by correspondingly greater amounts of affection and commitment; in other words, as the relationship progressed from relatively little affection to strong affection, and then to love and engagement, people believed that intercourse was more acceptable. Similarly, the majority (80%) of the participants in Anne Peplau, Zick Rubin, and Charles Hill's classic (1977) study indicated that it was “completely acceptable” for couples who love each other to engage in sexual intercourse, whereas only 20% found sexual intercourse with a casual acquaintance to be completely acceptable. More recently, sociologists Susan Sprecher, Kathleen McKinney, Robert Walsh, and Carrie Anderson (1988) surveyed a group of men and women and reported that increasing numbers of participants viewed sexual intercourse between two people as acceptable as their relationship stage moved from the first date (28%), to casual dating (41%), to serious dating (72%), to pre-engagement (77%), and finally to engagement (82%).

Cross-sectional research indicates that American society is becoming more sexually permissive (for a review, see Willetts, Sprecher, & Beck, 2004). In particular, although men and women continue to view sex as most appropriate when it occurs between committed relational partners, there is a trend toward greater acceptance of sexual activity in casual dating relationships. Robert Sherwin and Sherry Corbett (1985), for example, examined normative expectations about sexual activity in [Page 177]various types of dating relationships on a college campus. Three groups of students—the first surveyed in 1963, the second in 1971, and the third in 1978—were asked to indicate the extent to which various sexual activities generally were expected to play a part in the relationship between casually dating, steadily dating, and engaged couples. The results provided evidence for increasingly liberal campus sexual norms among both men and women over the 15-year period. For example, none of the men and women in the 1963 sample expected sexual intercourse to occur in a casual dating relationship; by 1978, however, 17% of the men and 9% of the women viewed intercourse as a normal part of casual dating.

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