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Sexual Double Standards in White and Asian Americans: Ethnicity, Gender, and Acculturation

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Abstract

This study compares attitudes of sexual double standards (beliefs that grant more sexual freedom to men than to women) in White and Asian Americans. 506 heterosexual participants living in the U.S. (334 Whites and 172 Asians aged 18–45) answered questions assessing their attitudes towards men and women displaying various liberal sexual behaviors. Asian participants also indicated their levels of American acculturation and Asian cultural affiliation. The study found significant evidence of sexual double standards in both Whites and Asians, with certain ethnically different patterns. Whites and Asians did not differ significantly in their levels of sexual double standards when it concerned casual sexual and multiple sexual partners at the same time. However, Asians expressed stronger support for double standards than Whites when evaluating people for taking the initiative in sex and for having a large accumulated number of sexual partners. In both ethnic groups, men demonstrated stronger double standards than did women. Both Whites and Asians, regardless of gender, reported more conservative sexual attitudes for choosing marriage partners than in judging people in general. In the case of Asians, American acculturation and Asian cultural affiliation had limited and gender-specific effects on endorsement of sexual double standards. This study not only addresses an important gap in the sexual double standards literature but also brings new insights to the general discussion of ethnic differences in sexual attitudes.

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Notes

  1. The analyses met the requirements of ANCOVA. The measures of sexual attitudes were approximately normally distributed within each group, as indicated by the Shapiro–Wilk test of normality. All the covariates were linearly related to the measures of sexual attitudes across groups, as indicated by scatterplots and lines of best fit. And the covariates did not interact with either ethnicity or gender. Levene’s test for equality of variances was carried out to determine that the assumption of homogeneity of variances was met.

  2. p values are two-tailed throughout the text.

  3. ANCOVA was not appropriate for this set of analyses, because the double-standard indexes were not normally distributed within the groups and also did not meet the assumption of equality of error variances. The models met the assumptions for linear regression. A scatterplot was plotted of each double-standard index against sexual experience and age. Visual inspection and line-fitting of the scatterplots indicated that the indexes had linear relationships with both sexual experience and age. The independence of residuals was assessed by the Durbin-Watson statistic, the values of which ranged from 1.86 to 2.10 for the models. The residuals were approximately normally distributed with slight positive kurtosis, as indicated by the normal probability plots. There was homoscedasticity based on the results of Koenker test for heteroscedasticity, the p values of which ranged from .1114 to .7851 for the different models.

  4. I checked the assumptions for linear regression and they were met except for the assumption of homoscedasticity. When the models met the assumption of homoscedasticity, the ordinary least square approach to linear regression was taken. And when the models showed heteroscedasticity, the weighted least square approach was adopted instead.

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Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Dr. Jeffrey Lucas for his patient help with preparing the manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology, University of Maryland, 2112 Parren J. Mitchell Art-Sociology Building, College Park, MD, 20742, USA

    Yu Guo

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  1. Yu Guo
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Correspondence to Yu Guo.

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This study was funded by Dean’s Research Initiative Grant (The College of Behavioral and Social Sciences, University of Maryland at College Park).

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There is no potential conflict of interest involved in this study.

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This study was approved by University of Maryland College Park (UMCP) IRB (Project#: 921365-1). All procedures performed in studies involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and/or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants included in the study.

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Guo, Y. Sexual Double Standards in White and Asian Americans: Ethnicity, Gender, and Acculturation. Sexuality & Culture 23, 57–95 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12119-018-9543-1

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