I’m on hiatus until August 29, but am posting reprints of old popular posts. This post appeared September 28, 2006.
I was talking with a young woman who works as an aide to a colleague of mine. She’s 19, and has a boyfriend the same age. "He cheated on me", she blurted out to my colleague and me yesterday; "We broke up." We made vaguely soothing noises, and listened to her story as best we could. One part in particular struck me:
"He told me he can’t be faithful right now. He’s got too many ‘wild oats’ to sow."
And this made me realize I’ve never posted about "wild oats." Doing five minutes of quick Internet research reveals that the expression "sowing wild oats" to refer to reckless, usually promiscuous behavior on the part of young men, goes back to at least the 17th century. And while many old-fashioned phrases have vanished from the idiom of today’s college-age population, most of them are quite familiar with the "wild oats" notion.
The popular "wild oats" thesis is basically this: young men (usually in their late teens and twenties), have an enormous amount of sexual and creative energy. (Depending on whom you talk to, this is attributed to their "essential masculine nature" or "testosterone" or the "Y chromosome".) It is natural and good and right for men in this age bracket to be a bit wild, a bit irresponsible, and to be unwilling to make enduring commitments. Those who love them — and are wounded by the carelessness of young oat sowers –are given the cold comfort of being told "Sooner or later, they grow out of it. They just have to get them (the oats?) out of their system."
I’ve noticed that the "wild oats" theory is closely linked to the "get it all out of your system" idea. The latter notion is that we men have a finite amount of "wildness" within us. After we’ve sown our oats for three years, or five, or ten, we’ll be "done." After we’ve slept with 5 women, or 25, or 250, we’ll presumably be "all out of oats" and ready to settle down into monogamy and responsibility.
There are a couple of things I loathe about this theory. One, women rarely get to use the "wild oats" excuse. Teenage and twenty-something women who exhibit reckless or sexually adventurous behavior get shamed as sluts. Since we all "know" that "women don’t really have wild oats", a woman who behaves as if she does is "unnatural", "perverse", a "whore."
Now, I spent a fair amount of time on a ranch growing up. I know a bit about oats. Men don’t have them, women don’t have them — be they wild or genetically modified, oats are not found in the human body unless they enter through the mouth and get processed through the digestive tract. Now, both men and women — particularly when young — have adventurous spirits. Both men and women have strong sex drives, though we tend to want to deny that women’s libidos make much of an appearance before 32. But nobody got no "oats" no how. (Not to mention that by definition, “wild” oats aren’t going to be sown anyway).
The other great problem with the wild oats theory is more subtle. It suggests that if we indulge irresponsible and reckless male sexual behavior for a given period of time, young men will just "grow out of it." Remember, the implication is that the number of oats inside each lad is finite. Once he’s sown them, he’ll be "done" and be ready for settling down. Clearly, this isn’t an accurate description of how most of us work! When we do something pleasurable and exciting, the more we want to do it. Rather than getting rid of our wild oats, we become more and more accustomed to the lifestyle of sowing them. If there are oats inside young men, and I don’t think there are, then the better understanding would be to say that the more we sow, the more oats we grow.
We all know many men who have prolonged their adolescence into their thirties, forties, and beyond. Some fellas out there have been sowing their oats fairly consistently since the early days of disco, and their internal barn shows no sign of being depleted any time soon. Pity the poor woman who waited years and years for Johnny to finally "get it out of his system." I can think of half a dozen male friends of mine, all well my senior, whose "systems" keep right on producing the urge to be irresponsible and commitment-phobic.
On this blog, I have argued many a time for the notion that faithful Christians need not automatically embrace chastity as the only acceptable sexual state for the unmarried. (See here, and here, for examples.) At the same time, I reject the notion that young people can easily transition from a world of "random hookups" to the very serious — but infinitely rewarding — challenges of long-term monogamy. We learn to do things by practicing them. If we practice recklessness, we become more reckless, not less. If we practice dishonesty, it becomes easier to lie — not harder. It’s bad psychology to suggest that engaging repeatedly in a pleasurable activity will ever get it "out of one’s system". Rather, the more one does it, the harder it will be to change in the future.
When I was in college, I was encouraged to "sow my wild oats." I sowed them. I enjoyed sowing them. And then I tried to transition seamlessly into my first marriage. I found that, whoops, I still had more oats. So that marriage ended. Back to sowing, in the hopes of getting rid of the last little clusters still lurking. I got married a second time. Wouldn’t you know it? The dang oats were still there! Second divorce (not yet thirty). I went on a wild oats rampage for a couple of years, ending only with a dramatic series of events that led to my complete emotional collapse and spiritual conversion. Trying to get "done" and get all the oats out nearly killed me, and it broke the hearts of quite a few other people in the process!
Years ago, not long before my final collapse, I had a particularly spectacular "oats sowing" experience. No details, save for this: I was walking a young woman to her car afterwards, a woman I had only met hours earlier. As we made the kind of awkward small talk that often seems to follow these sorts of encounters, I looked into her eyes and said "You know, I can’t keep doing this." "Why?", she asked. "Because I want to be a father someday, and when you’re a Dad, you can’t do this sort of thing." The gal took a step back as if I had slapped her. Her eyes welled up, and she stared into the distance. She shuddered once, and then looked back at me with a firm gaze, saying with great intensity: "No, you can’t keep doing this. Not if you want that." She kissed me on the cheek (an odd thing to do, considering what had just happened between us) and climbed into her car. I never spoke to her again.
I don’t know why I said what I did. It wasn’t because I felt "done" with my oats-sowing. But I knew that as much fun as I was having, it was slowly killing me. Having the same experience over and over again with different people was as fun as ever — but it was making me progressively more and more miserable. I had just assumed, you see, that I would "grow out of it" naturally. But at the time I said this to this nice young woman, I was over thirty and showing no signs of "slowing down." If my life changed, it would have to be because of God’s grace — and, of at least equal importance, my commitment to changing my behavior despite the enduring desire to "sow oats" until the cows came home. (The cows, in my experience, never came home.)
So the point of this rambling, personal essay is simple: we do a great disservice to both young men and women when we encourage and indulge the reckless sowing of wild oats. While adolescents and twenty-somethings should have new and interesting experiences, we make a mistake in assuming that all of them will inevitably outgrow the desire to behave wildly. Put another way, if there are wild oats inside us, then it’s pretty clear that a lot of young women have them too. And it’s pretty clear that some of us have an inexhaustible supply, one that is endlessly replenished. What we practice at 19, I’ve found, becomes what we still want to do at 29, 39, 49, and beyond. That may not be true for all, but it’s true for enough to make the "just let him sow his oats" remark a very dangerous bit of advice indeed.
Good to see some of these reprints on the hiatus. They cover some interesting topics that might not come up more recently in the general ebb and flow of salient blogging.
My thoughts about this is the extent to which relationship and sexual norms are contextualized by social expectations, something that was only somewhat brushed on here. The “sowing the wild oats” phase (and did you ever go a few rounds with that metaphor!), as you pointed out, has been an expectation of young men going back to at least the 17th century, or at least the metaphor has existed since then. Perhaps something similar has at least partially arisen for young (and not so young, ala “Sex and the City”) women in recent decades, fraught as it may still be with double standards. Or perhaps not. Others have shown themselves more qualified to address the relative position of young women on this score.
The “wild oats” phase appears to have been and to be something that is tacitly tolerated, if not condoned, for a particular phase of a young man’s life. At some point, at least historically, religion, reputation and social standing, the expectations of parents and of the community, and legal and economic structures (the legitimacy of and provision for offspring, inheritance, extension of insurance coverage, vagaries of the tax codes, et cetera ad infinitum) collectively represented the social expectation of eventual monogamy.
Much of that has broken down in the last 50 years or so. The mores that demanded monogamy arising from religion and community norms receded in cosmopolitan settings. Contraception and abortion made illegitimacy and single-parenthood in the absence of marriage a wholly avoidable outcome for many (and, for others, an affirmative choice). The law changed to reflect new circumstances, to make dissolving marriage easier and to extend previously the exclusive benefits of marriage to others. And the rising costs of living, of time and money invested in careers, and of raising a family further pushed back that choice for many, and made it a decision worthy, at the very least, of greater preparation and consideration.
The point is that the norm that people were to eventually settle down into staid monogamy, and that “sowing oats” was, at most, a phase, occurred in a very specific cultural context that, in many ways, no longer exists. It cannot be definitively said to represent or to have ever represented any generally applicable and appropriate life-plan fulfilling genuine basic human needs for all people. Absent the cultural demands for eventual monogamy and marriage, the choices of some today, including perhaps those who “have been sowing their oats fairly consistently since the early days of disco”, may better and more nearly reflect and fulfill their own personal and social needs and preferences. This isn’t an excuse for reckless or irresponsible behavior. The modern age presents new norms of responsibility, particularly in the age of AIDS, “deadbeat dads”, and sex scandals, that carry serious consequences if violated (more serious in many ways than, say, having a scion or two born below the bar sinister would have been 400 years ago). And certainly we all ought to be as considerate of the needs and desires of the people in our lives, for the time that they are in our lives, to the extent that our own needs and desires as autonomous individuals permit. But a disinclination towards or the impracticality of the “Ozzie and Harriet thing” does not necessarily itself recklessness or irresponsibility make. At the very least, there is a good argument to make, given longer life-expectancies and the rising cost of living, career and family formation, that a longer period of adolescence and young adulthood, with all the experimentation and freedom from later commitments that come with these, ought to be considered a natural and unsurprising reflection of the contemporary state of affairs.
That’s absolutely spot-on about women. I consider myself fairly normal and civilized (”well brought up”). Yet it’s frustrating to look back on my 20s, when I married basically because it was expected and someone asked me, then felt trapped to the point that I had a brief (2 week) fling just to see what it was like. And then “getting religion” afterward, thinking it would be good to confess.
Wrong. Wrecked marriage, with aftershocks continuing 22 years after the affair and 12 years after the divorce. Now my college-age son has jumped on board the condemnation bandwagon (having recently been told by his still-vindictive father), and he didn’t even come along until three and a half years after the event, so it’s not like his paternity is in question or anything.
I can’t help but think, would a man be going through this? Doubtful. It would be written off as “just another little adventure in the life of a normal young man.” But a woman? Oh, perish the thought. We’re either Madonnas (the one in the Raphael paintings, not the one on MTV) or whores.
Nuts to that, y’all. You don’t like the way I behaved, go find someone else to send you checks.
Harumph.
I’m glad you’re addressing this. I’ve long been nauseated by the “sow your oats” phrase, and in more way than one. First, there’s the aesthetic gross-out image of a man “sowing oats” into the soil by — well, you know. Second, and more importantly, is the implication that men (or people in general) simply HAVE to get all this random sex out of their systems before they can think about getting married. It’s an anti-male slur (as well as unfair to women) to perpetuate this double standard, and, I point out again, if you’re a sexually INactive male, people then imply that there’s something wrong with you. I never had any oats to sow, and, if I had, I’d probably follow the metaphor to its logical end and figure that my “oats” are there for nature’s reproductive purposes.
To be frank, I never liked the phrase “settling down,” either, as I’m not sure exactly what it’s supposed to mean. Does it suggest that everyone is out “sowing oats” until he gets tired of it, and then and only then he can think about marriage, wife, and family? Or does it have a non-sexual context?
It does, in the sense of getting a job, raising a family, not going out and partying with your friends until 3 a.m. like you did when you were young, that kind of thing - but yeah, largely in the sexual context. And it is true that for many people, early “settling down” means a lot of wondering later on if they missed something or didn’t have all the fun they could have.
That’s different, though, from justifying irresponisble and selfish behavior. Hugo’s young friend’s boyfriend could have just as easily had a whirlwind dating life while behaving responsibly towards his girlfriend; not cheating, for example. (Of course, this rather common scenario is one reason I think serial monogamy in dating is idiotic.)
I always thought the expression bizzare “sowing oats” phrase, especially in the random sex context (rack up the numbers scorecard). The people I knew used it solely to justify irresponsible and selfish behavior, including some women. I read the phrase actually dates back to the fifteenth century, and refers to folly rather than excesses. Wild oats are not as profitable as domesticated oats, so if you’re sowing them, you’ll get little return. All the oat sowers that I knew had STD’s and passed them along, unless they got lucky. Usually the self-centered oat sowers had drug and alcohol abuse problems and tried to influence others into their unhappy lifestyle. Generally the self-centered oat sowers created a lot of chaos and excelled at destructive alienating behaviors spreading misery and unhappiness to everyone around them. This reminds me of a guy I met who ran with the party crowd. He worked for the ski patrol and said the crowd he ran with liked to party til they puked and skiied till they died. He indulged in this type of lifestyle until he was 40, married a woman around 20 and divorced within a year or so. He lived with another more responsible woman mooching off of her goodwill while manipulating other women into sexual affairs. He’s living with another woman (her idea) claiming he isn’t the marrying kind and then finally last time we spoke said he “was lost” and unhappy and pushing 48 years. I suppose he wanted to call me to inquire if I was available….NO WAY!