Media reports on the sex lives of America’s young people often tend more to exaggeration than explanation. Depending on the perspective of the writer, college campuses are portrayed as either sexual Somalias or oases of free love. In their new book Premarital Sex in America: How Young Americans Meet, Mate, and Think about Marrying, sociologists Mark Regnerus and Jeremy Uecker assemble a vast body of research to argue that while today’s sexual culture may be more permissive, it is anything but lawless. Rather, today’s “emerging adults” embrace sex and delay marriage in response to a set of powerful social scripts as comprehensive, and often constraining, as the ideals of courtship that guided their grandparents.
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