<< Age and Sexual Outlet >>

In physiology, endocrinology, genetics, and still other fields, biologists often go to considerable pains to restrict their experimental material to animals of particular species, to particular age groups, and to individuals that are reared on a uniform diet and kept under strictly controlled laboratory conditions. Different hereditary strains of a single species may give different results in a physiologic experiment; and, in many laboratories, stocks are restricted to the progeny of particular pairs of pedigreed ancestors. In studies of human behavior, there is even more reason for confining generalizations to homogeneous populations, for the factors that affect behavior are more abundant than those that affect simpler biologic characters, and there are, in consequence, more kinds of populations to be reckoned with. Nevertheless, restrictions of psychologic and sociologic studies to clearly defined groups have rarely been observed (McNemar 1940), perhaps because we have not, heretofore, known what things effect variability in a human population and how important they are in determining what people do.

There are at least eleven factors which are of primary importance in determining the frequency and sources of human sexual outlet. They are sex, race, age, age at onset of adolescence, marital status, educational level, the subject’s occupational class, the parental occupational class, rural-urban backgrounds, religious affiliations, and the extent of the subject’s devotion to religious affairs. The effects of these factors on the sexual histories of white males are discussed in the present volume. In view of the conclusions that these analyses now afford, it becomes apparent that generalizations concerning any aspect of human sexual behavior are uninterpretable unless they are limited to populations which are clearly defined in regard to the more important of the eleven items listed above.

In the sexual history of the male, there is no other single factor which affects frequency of outlet as much as age. Age affects the source of sexual outlet only indirectly, by way of its relation to marital status, to the availability of social contacts, to the liability to physical fatigue, and to the psychologic fatigue that comes as a result of the repetition of a particular sort of activity. But age more directly affects frequency of outlet. Age is so important that its effects are usually evident, whatever the marital status, the educational level, the religious background, or the other factors which enter the picture. It is logical, therefore, to begin the present analyses with a consideration of this factor.

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