Lee poses a question in terms of restaurants. But my question is: with a blood orange and rhubarb tart with a peach-jam glaze coming out of the oven, why go to a restaurant? The next question, of course, must be: are the chicken and the tart metaphors for marriage? Because if so, they are poorly chosen in both Indonesian (ayam — slang for sex worker) and British (tart - ditto).

Assuming for the sake of argument that those alternatives mark the end of a unidimensional scale, and that all (or nearly all) persons can, at any given time, be placed somewhere on that scale, then (once we agree on a protocol to measure that placement, and a standard by which to judge our confidence in our measurements) this is an empirical question, and any attempt to answer it without actually getting one’s hands dirty doing field research (while wearing latex gloves, of course) seems pointless to me. My bias is to assume that, as with so many behaviors, there are both huge inter-individual differences and huge intra-individual differences (diachronically); but that’s just my biased assumption.

(2) “Also I’m not sure that marriage places any constraint on what varieties of experience are available.”

Well, Wm. James’s book on “varieties of experience” was dedicated to religious, not sexual, experience; but if he’d written the latter, my guess is that he’d share your uncertainty. When I said that it was “clearly impossible” to have as wide a variety of sexual experience within a faithful, closed, monogamous marriage as outside one, I was relying on my previous parenthetical remark, about “gustatory experience”, to justify the word “clearly”. Let me draw that analogy (which, remember, I was only bringing to bear to explicate *one possible* meaning of “sexual experience”) out a bit further. … No, dammit, it’s suppertime and I have to take a tart out of the oven and check the state of the chicken. If you like, develop my argument for me, starting with the alternatives of eating at the same (wonderful) Italian restaurant every night, and eating at various different (wonderful) restaurants at different times.

(3) “Before embarking on any strategy, you have to decide on your goals.”

Here’s a good example of the problems caused by equivocal terms. As I understand it, a lot of technical writing (for instance, the stuff that Buss writes about the evolutionary psychology of human sexuality) uses the word “strategy” very game-theoretically, and often (in contexts like these) with the “players” of the “game” being *not* persons but genes (or genomes, or what have you). “Decision” doesn’t enter into it, and the genes’ only “goal” is to perpetuate themselves (but the “goal” is only visible post facto).

Elisabeth put “strategic” in quotes, but I don’t know whether that means she’s quoting the word from the article, or using scare quotes (to distance herself from the word), or both.

…I’d make this more coherent but I really *do* have a hot tart to deal with. (Blood orange and rhubarb with a peach-jam glaze.)

If the study cannot detect significant differences in this span, that is also reason to question its validity.

Elizabeth replies: There’s limited analysis by age group (unconventionally 16-20/ 21-25/ 26-35). But they used respondent driven sampling (a form of glorified snowball sampling) among people who hung out in bars and clubs. So it’s not really attempting to be wildly representative of any wider population. For my part, I’m just impressed that people are still regularly hanging out in clubs at 36…

Also I’m not sure that marriage places any constraint on what varieties of experience are available, unless you’re including group sex and homosexual experiences, but even there married people are not strangers to outside diversions.

Before embarking on any strategy, you have to decide on your goals.

The phrase “sexual experience” is not transparently unequivocal. On many of the possible understandings of it (such as the one under which it is strictly analogous to a “gustatory experience”), it is clearly impossible (in a sufficiently complex social setting; obviously, all bets are off on a desert island) to have “as many sexual experiences” within a (monogamous, closed and faithful) “marriage” as outside one. On at least one other possible understanding of it (orgasm count), one might ask “why aren’t more young people considering masturbation?”, and in fact, I gather that many do.

If the latter, why aren’t more young people considering marriage?

Of course no one bothered to ask any of these same people how many of them practiced safe sex did they? I don’t care if it’s hetro sex or not but when you start talking multiple partners you start talking about increasing the chances of somebody in the chain being infected. There are always people who swing both ways and since we’re talking about people who are drug users the chances of there being one or two among them being IV users aren’t too bad either.