Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The myth of sexual permissiveness∗

1973; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 9; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/00224497309550776

1559-8519

Jon P. Alston, Francis Tucker,

Gender, Labor, and Family Dynamics

There exists a current of thought which accepts the belief that most Americans increasingly hold more permissive values in relation to premarital sexual behavior. Similarly, there is the popular idea that the attitudes of males and females toward premarital sex are becoming more congruent, thus gradually eliminating the double standard in terms of both sexual behavior and attitudes held by the general population. However, much of the research dealing with attitudes toward premarital sex has been limited to local samples, generally using respondents from a college population (Cannon and Long, 1971 and Rubin, 1965). As a result, many of the findings cannot be generalized especially to the adult population even though some authors have suggested that the college populations in various regions differ little in their attitudes from other more normal social groups (Kinsey et al., 1953; Robinson et al., 1968). The main objective of this paper is to examine the attitudes towards sexual permissiveness before marriage, using a recent (1969) representative sample of white American adults. This will enable us to determine whether adults equally acceptand to what degreethe value of premarital sex. The major independent variables used are age, sex, education, occupation, and region of residence. As a consequence, we will be able to measure the extent of premarital permissive values among the total adult white population rather than among a more limited and probably less representative sample. We then present data on which categoriest of adults tend to be more or less permissive. This presentation is limited to the white popula-