A new study that analyzes the costs of risky sex has found that the sexual revolution actually began during the 1950s, a decade earlier than popular culture concedes.
Emory University economics researcher Andrew Francis analyzed data from US health agencies from the 1930s to the 1970s and found that between 1947 and 1957, the syphilis death rate dropped by 75 percent, while the syphilis rate of incidence dropped a staggering 95 percent.
Penicillin became medically popular for treating troops during World War II, after first being discovered in 1928.
‘The military wanted to rid the troops of STDs and all kinds of infections, so that they could keep fighting,’ Francis said. ‘That really sped up the development of penicillin as an antibiotic.’
Following the end of the war, penicillin became a standard course of treatment for the general population and syphilis went from a potentially fatal disease, to virtually eradicated in a relatively short amount of time.
From an economic perspective, Francis compared the change in common health practices to the economic law of demand: When the cost of a good falls, people buy more of the good.
The good, in this case, was casual sex.
‘As soon as syphilis bottoms out, in the mid- to late-1950s, you start to see dramatic increases in all three measures of risky sexual behavior,’ Francis said.
The historical data analyzed in Francis’ research parallels the spread of syphilis with the contemporary AIDS epidemic.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
Source: Francis, A. (2012). The Wages of Sin: How the Discovery of Penicillin Reshaped Modern Sexuality Archives of Sexual Behavior, 42 (1), 5-13 DOI: 10.1007/s10508-012-0018-4
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