Sex and the Census.

• Author: Young, Cathy
• Position: Single women in post-sexual revolution American society - Statistical Data Included

Post-revolution data on toxic bachelors, choice, and children

Singles, according to the latest Census Bureau data released in May, are still on the march. People living alone were the fastest-growing category of households in the 1990s and, for the first time, now outnumber married couples with children. This trend is not due to widowed seniors living longer--people over 65, in fact, were no more likely to live alone in 2000 than in 1990. Rather, more young people are marrying later or not at all.

Is this merely a fact of life or a manifestation of cultural decline--a "titanic loss of family values," as the title of a column in The Washington Times put it? Some conservative social critics, most notably George Gilder--starting with his 1974 book Naked Nomads: Unmarried Men in America--have focused on the perils that dangerously unstable, undomesticated, unattached males pose to themselves and others. (The latest evidence suggests that growing ranks of single men can, after all, coexist peacefully with dropping crime rates and other positive social indicators.) More recently, though, it's the single woman who has become the focus of concern.

According to the now-famous arguments of Wendy Shalit (A Return to Modesty) and Danielle Crittenden (What Our Mothers Didn't Tell Us), the post-sexual-revolution landscape is really a free-for-all for men, who don't need to buy the cow when they can have the milk for nothing. And it's a bleak and arid place for women who, as Barbara Dafoe Whitehead wrote in a 1999 essay in The Atlantic, "forever remain girlfriends or ex-girlfriends." Sympathy for the plight of the single woman is just another variation on a familiar neotraditionalist theme: The liberation of women from traditional paternalistic restrictions, in this case on sexual behavior, has hurt women themselves.

Much of the evidence marshaled in support of these polemics comes from popular culture--from the obligatory how-to-get-him-to-commit features in women's magazines to single-girl angst in novels such as Bridget Jones's Diary and television shows such as Ally McBeal and Sex and the City.

In real life, of course, the vast majority of women do eventually tie the knot (in 1990, only 10 percent of 35-to-39-year-old women had never been married). On the single-girl TV shows, relationships have to fail because keeping the girls single is essential to the show's raison d'etre. (When one of the characters on Sex and the City, the romantic Charlotte...