Churches sometimes provide settings where the relational marketplace works as well, he added.
Women become disadvantaged in sexual markets as they age compared with men, who typically choose younger women as they grow older. "A man in his 40s will seek a woman who is five to eight years younger than he is," Laumann commented. Besides aging, which makes women less physically attractive, single women who are mothers bring extra "costs" to a relationship because men are often uninterested in dealing with another man's children.
In addition to the market distinctions between men and women, neighborhoods and culture also exert limitations on the way people find sexual partners.
In the South Side African-American community, few people seek sex partners among African-Americans on the West Side, for instance, researchers found. The community also discourages homosexuality and provides few places where homosexuals can gather.
Members of the South Side community, like some people in other neighborhoods, also take part in a "hybrid" strategy in seeking partners somewhere between the transactional and the relational strategies. In the hybrid strategy, people choose to have short-term transactional partnerships, for instance, while maintaining a long-term relationship, or maintain several relationships as long-term polygamy.
African-American men are much more likely than white or Hispanic men to engage in polygamous relationships, the scholars found. About 21 percent of the African-American men had at least two partners at the time of the survey, compared with 6 percent of men overall in Cook County.
Furthermore, the researchers found that polygamy is more common among better educated blac
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Contact: William Harm
w-harms@uchicago.edu
773-702-8356
University of Chicago
8-Jan-2004