Ozy Frantz breaks down the numbers in a CDC report on teenage sex. Spoiler alert: reality does not resemble stereotypes very well.
This post originally appeared at No Seriously, What About Teh Menz?
The CDC has recently released some interesting information about how teenagers lose their virginities, so it is time for a Ozy Reads A Bunch Of Stats and Comments On Them post! It’s been way too long since we had one of those, I’m sure we can all agree.
The money quote is this: 43% of never-married teenage girls and 42% of never-married teenage boys have experienced sexual intercourse at least once. (Note: throughout this post, “sex” means “a penis put inside a vagina.” Blame the CDC.) In addition, a similar number of girls and boys have had sex in the last month. It is almost as if boys and girls are more similar than they are different! Nah. Couldn’t be.
The percentage of teenage girls who have had sex has been steadily declining over the past twenty years; the percentage of teenage boys who have had sex was steadily declining, but has been the same since 2002. So, uh, that hookup culture thing those people who like talking about The Kids These Days on the TV keep talking about? Dooooesn’t really seem to be in evidence. It’s anyone’s guess why people have stopped having sex so much: Internet porn? Abstinence-only sex education? A sudden rise in the popularity of oral sex? Who knows?
The majority of both boys and girls had lost their virginity to someone they were dating at the time. However, about a quarter of boys lost their virginity to a friend or someone they’d just met, as opposed to 16% of girls, which is a fairly significant and interesting difference. I have no idea why that is; perhaps it’s related to the sociologically attested fact that boys tend to see their virginity as a shameful burden to get rid of as quickly as possible, while girls tend to see their virginity as a gift to give to someone special whom they truly love.
Boys were more likely than girls to be happy to lose their virginity: 63% really wanted it, 33% had mixed feelings, and 5% didn’t want it. 41% of girls really wanted it, 48% had mixed feelings, and 11% didn’t want it. “Didn’t want it”, of course, can include everything from “I wasn’t ready and I really shouldn’t have lost my virginity then but I consented” to “my partner raped me”; I do find it interesting that the gender ratio for not wanting to lose one’s virginity when one did is roughly the same as it is for rape.
I think a lot of the girls’ mixed feelings are rooted in slut-shaming; some percentage of those girls who have mixed feelings are going to be ones who actually do want sex, but are afraid that having sex will make them worth less or that giving it up will make him not want to be with you any longer.
…holy shit the boys are lucky because 63% of them actually and unambiguously wanted to lose their virginities AMERICA WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
41% of virginal girls didn’t have sex because it was against their religion or morals, compared to 31% of virginal men. The next most popular among men was not having met the right person yet, at 29%; for girls, not wanting to be pregnant and not having met the right person yet were roughly tied. Again, we see girls tending to see their virginity as a gift to be preserved and men as a stigma to be gotten rid of; men are about ten percentage points more likely to be like “I want to lose my virginity but I don’t have anyone to lose it WITH,” while women are more likely to be all “I don’t want to have sex yet.”
The single result that has left me the most boggled is that 13% of girls and 19% of boys would be pleased by a pregnancy, and 57% of girls and 46% of boys would be very upset. I can only presume it is because boys do not have to give birth, are less likely to have their entire lives disrupted by a child, and are less likely to have babysat. Perhaps I have spent too much time reading what asshole misogynists have to say, because my gender stereotypes were assuming that women would all have The Baby Rabies and men were all Kids Suck, Rawr, but apparently not.
Photo—A portrait of a sweet couple from Shutterstock
The real stereotype buster in that is the previous 12 month data that shows that men are x2 as likely to report a completed rape as women during that period.
http://i.imgur.com/Ps9wW.jpg
Why am I not surprised the “presumptions” all turn out to be rather misandric attacks on boys and masculinity promoted by stereotypes. For example: “The next most popular among men was not having met the right person yet, at 29%; for girls, not wanting to be pregnant and not having met the right person yet were roughly tied. Again, we see girls tending to see their virginity as a gift to be preserved and men as a stigma to be gotten rid of;” I’m uncertain how religion or not wanting to get pregnant constitute evidence of virginity being a gift.… Read more »
Maybe this is why some are waiting? Teen sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) are a serious health concern. Half of all new cases of sexually transmitted diseases occur among teens, with about 1 in 4 teens becoming infected each year. Teens are more susceptible to STDs than adults because their bodies are still developing. Teen sexually transmitted diseases are easily spread by contact with the penis, vagina, anus, or mouth, or with bodily fluids. Abstinence from sexual activities protects teens from most STDs. If a teen is going to have sex, he or she should always correctly use a male latex… Read more »
Slut-shaming and teens! Now there’s something that’s been on my mind for a while. I was a teen in the early 2000s. These are condensed versions of some of the messages I heard growing up. I’ve ordered them by their effectiveness in discouraging me from having sex. (Note that I say discouraging – none of them actually prevented it.) : Don’t have sex because you could get pregnant and you’re too young for that responsibility. Don’t have sex because you might catch an STD that could be with you for the rest of your life, and even if it’s not,… Read more »
“Boys will want you to have sex with them; it’s your job to say no. It’s normal for you to not want to have sex because you’re a girl.” Exactly! These two sentences are sort of the foundation of the sexual morality that came out of the pop-culture and liberation of the 60s and met the pearl-clutching moral panic of the 80s. If we take these two sentences as true, everything we teach teens and young adults about sex makes perfect sense. If we don’t, well, it doesn’t. More than anything, I think it was the idea that women enjoy… Read more »
The power of slut shaming is hard for me as a man to understand, but I accept it as a huge issue. (background: I’m in my 50’s and sexually very unexperienced with women and opposite sex relationships.) Months ago, I was asking my girlfriend unending detailed questions of what pleasured her, interested her, liked and didn’t, etc. and she started to cry and said she’d never had a (male, only males) lover be interested in all that. I’m still dumbfounded by that. Coupled with at times a profound reticence to talk about her sexual experience/pleasure. I take this as the… Read more »
Speaking from the perspective of a former teenage boy, I will definitely say that virginity was our own mark of shame, where bizarrely for girls the lack of it was seemingly the same. But this doesn’t necessarily stop at our 20th birthday. I’ve been meaning to submit an entire GMP article about this, but it boils down to that society has a two-prong stereotype: if a woman is not having sex, it’s because she doesn’t want to, but if a man is not having sex, it’s because no one wants him. We know this because teh TV sez that he… Read more »
Well, to be fair, there are many men where that is the case. Not the whole being a beast thing, but the whole not being able to have sex because no one wants him. I know this because I live it every day.
This book is great for recovering from all kinds of abuse.
http://www.amazon.co.uk/Victims-Longer-Second-Edition-Recovering/dp/006053026X
I am a very attractive man, and right now I am not having sex because I don’t want to. ALL of the women in my life understand and respect this position.
“I can only presume it is because boys do not have to give birth, are less likely to have their entire lives disrupted by a child, and are less likely to have babysat”
Or it could be because they know that they don’t have as much of a say in it and have resigned themselves to make the best of a bad situation if it ever came up.
“It’s anyone’s guess why people have stopped having sex so much: Internet porn? Abstinence-only sex education? A sudden rise in the popularity of oral sex? Who knows?” Excellent questions one and all. It’s best to be cautious about jumping to a lot of conclusions one way or the other without finding a way to exclude some of the variables. If “sex” here only refers to PIV, then it could be that teens are having more other kinds of sex instead of less sex on the whole. I’m not sure how common the “saving my virginity for someone special” really is… Read more »
I felt sickened by being a virgin for so long. I finally managed to get rid of it at the age of 20. The unfortunate part is that remains my one and only experience and that is all the more depressing. I can think of few fates worse than involuntary celibacy.
Trigger Warning. It took me ages to lose my adult virginity, I kept running away from women, and self sabotaging. This was because I was raped repeatedly, by an adult women, for about a year when I was eight years old, I and had pushed the experience out of my mind because I couldn’t deal with it. If you had asked me a year ago weather I had been raped, I would have said no, because I had no conscious memories. (Like 84% of men with documented histories of sexual child abuse) Now that I have had a lot of… Read more »
Yes, it’s certainly something to think about. And I’m glad you brought it up. The statistics, which I totally believe are that roughly 25% of children are sexually abused by age 18 (which means a lot of different things) and these discussions of teen sexual behavior almost never allow for it. So, it becomes kind of a discussion of what cultural myth do we wish to polish, rather than deal with the realities of who we are. Even in CDC studies, the “experts” do this. The “no conscious memories” seems almost by choice or cultural design. Perhaps you could write… Read more »
The big thing is not to jump into the first relationship that comes alone. Take it from someone that endured ten years of constant emotional abuse. There is something worse than not getting laid.
Honestly, I’ll take absolutely anything I can get. I have no standards at this point; I just want to feel like someone — anyone — feels affection toward me. I’d rather be an abusive relationship than none at all. I can handle abuse. Abuse and I are very well acquainted.
Seriously, I’ve been in abusive relationships, being single is better. I really would recommend hiring a therapist, and talking to them.
Been there, done that. (therapy) Obviously, I’d prefer a non-abusive relationship but something is better than nothing!
Amen. Single trumps abusive every time. Single, you may tell yourself no one wants you, but what you tell yourself is something you have some minimal control over. Abusive relationship, you’re hearing it not from yourself but from someone else who is trying to keep you unhappy. There’s no comparison. I’m a long way from the finish, but every step I take toward not measuring my self-esteem in women is a positive step. While you’re at it, don’t get into a relationship with someone who isn’t abusive but doesn’t see all the value you have. If you can’t conceive of… Read more »
Value is a relative term. Nothing has value unless others acknowledge that such value exists. A dollar is only a piece of paper and its value is derived from the collective belief of what it is worth. The same is true for everything. A person can only have value in so much as others believe them to have value. If no one thinks or demonstrates you have value, to believe that you do would be ridiculous. I understand that contrarian opinion can be right sometimes, but generally if the whole world thinks one thing and you think another, you are… Read more »
I hear you. People telling me that self-esteem “has to come from within” always pissed me off, because it isn’t true; as you say we are all affected by how others value us, and to say otherwise is a cop-out. What that means, though, is that we can try to expose ourselves to those influences and people that lead to us valuing ourselves, and shutting out those that don’t (for which digging into your past is almost certainly going to be a requirement). I’ve got people in my life and stuck in my own head who push me both ways,… Read more »
when some one is reach near the age of 16/ adult they can sex. they know every things.
Well, excluding homosexuality, who else could guys be doing it with? Girls! So of course the percentages should be the same!
That only means the frequency of sex acts would be the same, it says nothing about how many times each person has had sex.