The numbers are in, and it turns out the “Me Generation” is uniquely bad at being faithful.
Perhaps the progenitors of free love and the sexual revolution mistreat the ones they love more than earlier or later generations.
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Many statistics are open to many valid interpretations. So it’s also possible that the collapse in marriage is weeding out bad husbands: Women don’t feel as much need to get married these days, so they’re less likely to settle for an unreliable man.
Any or all of the above could explain why husbands today are half as likely to cheat on their wives (or admit it to a pollster at least) as men 20 or 30 years ago were.
This is the picture laid out by Wendy Wang of the Institute for Family Studies. She pulled data from the General Social Survey and found that in the 1990s and the 2000s, about 20% of men aged 25 to 54 admitted to having sex with someone besides their wives while married. The heart of this group is the baby boomers, who grew up with free love as a doctrine of liberation.
If marriage is a cage for women, then a good feminist ought to unlock the gates and wander around a bit, no?
These days, only about 10% of men are cheaters, according to the GSS.
Interestingly, the number of unfaithful wives has not dropped — they have held steady at 14%, and that means that men are now more faithful than women.
Here’s another difference between unfaithful husbands and unfaithful wives: The most likely group of men to cheat is those with “high-status jobs,” according to Wang’s research, while for women, an increase in status led to a decrease in likelihood to cheat, with stay-at-home mothers being the most faithful.