sex is a social activity: it requires the involvement of other people. If I am, for instance, a young female student looking for a boyfriend at my twenty-first-century university, and I don’t want to have sex before marriage, then I will find my options limited in a way that they wouldn’t have been seventy years ago. When sex before marriage is expected, and when almost all of the other women participating in my particular sexual market are willing to ‘put out’ on a first or second date, then not being willing to do the same becomes a competitive disadvantage. The abstinent young woman must
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