Dear Rebecca:

Sorry for the blunt headline. Sorry, also, for my quietness lately. But, say, have you read Rod Dreher lately?

Regnerus says the percentage of women who said they would prefer to have more sex is as follows:

16 percent of “very conservative” women
30 percent of “conservative” women
38 percent of moderate women
44 percent of “liberal” women
53 percent of “very liberal” women

Why is this?

So, he crunched the numbers to account for religious service attendance, importance of religion, “and a unique measure of having become less religious in the past decade” to see if the hypothesis could be grounded in data. What he found was that among young adult women, it’s not really political liberalism that correlates with wanting more sex (no matter how much one is having), but rather one’s loss of religious belief.

He then quotes Mark Regnerus, author of the new book “Cheap Sex”:

Sex does not explain the world. It is not a master narrative. It has little to offer by way of convincing theodicy But in a world increasingly missing transcendence, longing for sexual expression makes sense. It should not surprised us, however, that those who (unconsciously) demand sex function like religion will come up short.

This, it seems to me, is a rather astonishing conclusion to draw from the info at hand. Me? I don’t doubt that “very liberal” women report a lustier sex drive, or that women who’ve lost faith do so either. I don’t assume, however, that it’s a misguided attempt to replace religion with meaningless sex.

Instead, I suspect it has something to do with the fact that lots of religious traditions treat A) sex like it’s something dirty and B) make women solely responsible for keeping a lid on it — traditions and cultures punish women to a degree that they don’t punish men for engaging in precisely the same activity. Freed from those traditions, might a woman decide that she actually A) enjoys and B) wants sex?

I’m just spitballing here.

Anyway, the way this is written certain seems to perpetuate the whole “bad women are sexy women” vibe. Sexy women hate God! Yuck.

Sincerely, Joel