Mating in Captivity: The Influence of Social Location on Sexual Satisfaction through Phases of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The recent global pandemic provides a natural experiment “intervention” to examine how differing baseline social dynamics such as gender, education, and politics shaped diverging patterns of well-being during rapidly shifting societal conditions. Using married adults from a nationally representative...

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Published inSocius : sociological research for a dynamic world Vol. 9; p. 23780231231173899
Main Authors McElroy, Elizabeth E., Perry, Samuel L., Grubbs, Joshua B.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Los Angeles, CA SAGE Publications 01.01.2023
Sage Publications Ltd
SAGE Publishing
Subjects
Adults
COVID-19
Employment
Gender
Marriage
Original
Pandemics
Parents & parenting
Political identity
Resilience
Satisfaction
Sexual satisfaction
Social dynamics
Social systems
Well being
COVID-19
inequality
natural experiment
gender
sexual satisfaction
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Summary:The recent global pandemic provides a natural experiment “intervention” to examine how differing baseline social dynamics such as gender, education, and politics shaped diverging patterns of well-being during rapidly shifting societal conditions. Using married adults from a nationally representative panel study in the United States from August 2019 to August 2021, discontinuous growth curves reveal a large drop in average married sexual satisfaction in both quality and frequency directly following the pandemic onset. Moreover, sexual satisfaction remained largely suppressed for the subsequent 18 months, apart from a brief “optimism blip” in the fall of 2020. Race, age, income, employment, parenthood, education, and political affiliation all appear as meaningful predictors, but these differ across various phases of the pandemic and by gender. These results reveal evidence of lingering changes in subjective sexual well-being as well as patterns of catastrophe risk and resilience moderated by social location factors.
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Joshua B. Grubbs is now affiliated to University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, NM, USA
ISSN:2378-0231
2378-0231
DOI:10.1177/23780231231173899