like nuns

A few days ago I argued in somewhat colorful language that the main factor behind the current, drastic drop in birth rates in Portugal is the fact that the current generation has less sex than that of their parents. Purposefully I did not elaborate on the argument at the time.

I shall do it now. First, I am aware that the argument is a litlle bit shocking as the current generation talks about sex as never before inspired on newspapers, magazines, TV, the internet and all available media. My point is that it represents too much talk and too little action.

Before going into the argument let me state a personal note. The drastic fall in birth rates we are seeing now in Portugal took place in Protestant countries in the late seventies, early eighties, that is, some twenty-five to thirty years ago. Putting it differently, Portugal is now modernizing in that respect a quarter-century too late. It so happened that I went to live in one of those countries at the time, Canada, and from there I often travelled to the United States.

One of the facts that shocked me then was that women were there much less attractive than in Portugal. There was much less sex-appeal in them. Many of them wouldn't do their hair, their nails and their eyes and they would often dress carelessly. Some would talk and behave like men. After marrying, the situation was even worse. They tended to dress and behave like nuns. Add to this the relative impersonality of Protestant culture which discourages personal touching, such as hand-shaking and friendly kissing, and Canada, even more than the US, looked to me an assexual society. I gained some comfort when in the mid-eighties French sociologist Michel Croizier noted the same thing as I did in one of his books.

As I went back to Canada a couple of years ago, and stayed there for for two months, I noted a considerable improvement in the sex-appeal of Canadian women , and the same observation holds true after my most recent visits to the United States. North American women are, in a sense, becoming more Catholic, that is, more attractive. We can even find there now a coquette woman, something that was very difficult to find some twenty to thirty years ago. Not surprising to me, birth rates are increasing again in Canada and the United States. My own estimate is that we shall do this late modernizing in Portugal in ten to twenty years from now.

Having said this let me go back to my thesis, namely, that young people are having less sex than the generation of their parents. There is in the first place the issue of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases which receive now so much attention in the media so as to make sex a frightful prospect. In my view, this is not an important factor, though. The important factors are three.

First, the drastic increase in divorce rates and the drastic fall in marriage rates that took place in Portugal over the last fifteen years or so. There are now much less couples living together than a generation ago. Obviously, for the most part these unmarried and divorced people do have sex. But theirs is often an occasional sex whose frequency tends to be lower, if not much lower, than that of couples living together in the same house and sleeping in the same bed.

Second, as I have been arguing extensively, our society has been permeated over the last twenty years by mostly Protestant institutions and values. One of them, as mentioned above, is impersonality of social relations with its restrictions on personal touch and a certain repugnance for physical contact. When people are losing the taste for touching each other, the frequency of sexual relations tends to suffer.

Third, the massive increase in Portugal over the last two decades of women's participation in the labour force. It can be said that, in a sense, men are always ready for sex. The same cannot be said about women. I do not intend to elaborate on this point here. Suffice it to ask how ready for sex are women after spending their day at work, often followed by the need to take care of the house and the kids, and with no time left free to take care of themselves? Not much, I guess. This is in my view the most important factor explaining the decrease in the frequency of sexual relations among the present generation.