TW for brief mentions of rape.
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.
Thing of Things 
“57% of girls and 46% of boys would be very upset [by a pregnancy].”
I’m surprised that the number is so low! 50% of teenagers don’t think accidentally getting pregnant or accidentally getting someone pregnant is that bad? Is that caused by an astounding lack of perspective or the fact that abortions exist or what?
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I’ll hazard a guess that it’s because they live in communities where teen pregnancy is common, and is not considered a disaster.
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Well, if there’s a pregnancy, at least you know the equipment works!
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“If I say I’d be ‘very upset’ by a pregnancy, that means I’m saying I’d hate my child. That would make me a horrible person! So I won’t say that.”
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I was, while not an accident, a poor life decision that turned out really well in retrospect. My brother on the other hand was a modular arithmetic error. This probably contributes to my not being among those who would have been very upset by a pregnancy.
Both my parents were, among other things, bookish scifi-loving nerds from CT for the record.
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It’s caused by not having thought about it very much, most likely. Teenagers are not famous for consequential reasoning.
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That’s actually one of those things that’s almost necessary in this case, especially since sex is defined as PIV sex. The boys are having sex with the girls. The girls are, in turn, having sex with the boys. The only way you’d see massive differences is if a few boys are having sex with, like, all the girls, or vice versa.
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Baumeister argues that genetic evidence shows this was true historically, so I don’t think it’s an unreasonable hypothesis to have about the present day.
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Well, in Europe, there weren’t that many boys to begin with. Which is why white people are white, if you believe Peter Frost.
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Teenaers have sex with nonteenagers, like, all the time.
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Citation needed ?!?
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“Citation needed ?!?”
Really? A woman used to be an old maid by 20, and these “women” were marrying men in the late 20s early 30s. My great-great-grandparents married when she was 16 and he was 44.
I mean just look at the crime stats for statutory rape if you want a citation.
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Citation: my teenage years, but I’m probably an outlier — I’d expect most of it to go in the other direction.
Other citation: I remember an ex-it’s-complicated telling me about how her [prestigious college in the middle of a big city] roommate their first year picked up a… bouncer at a club she went to, I think. Shaved head, tattoos, that sort of thing. He snorted coke off their kitchen table, they fucked, somehow it came out the next morning that he’d been in both porn and prison and had two kids.
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Re hookup culture: maybe PIV sex is falling but oral and anal sex are rising among teens? I seem to remember an Alan Guttmacher Institute study saying that.
Re almost half of teens being okay with pregnancy: ⓐ people have powerful biological urges to reproduce that are not necessarily in their individual best interest; ⓑ that’s largely the half that isn’t going to college anyway.
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NB: “teenager” = 15-19.
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Okay, but what is slut-shaming rooted in? I doubt the answer is a totally irrational male desire to prevent women from taking the virginity that they, on their own account, want to lose.
OTOH, it makes perfect sense as a female competitive strategy.
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Actually, there’s a loooooong history of people seeking out and having sex with people they otherwise consider inferior (I *really* don’t get it myself, but so it goes). AFAIK, a lot of slut shaming is rooted in the old idea, perpetuated by all genders, that for a woman, being sexual means eschewing romance and commitment, and vice versa.
Interestingly, a lot of what I’ve seen from neoreactionaries is a naked terror that this love/sex split mentality is spreading to women. But that’s another story.
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I think the old idea is closer to: Women offer sex as the price of commitment, and men offer commitment as the price of sex.
That idea is so old and so ubiquitous that it can’t be arbitrary. There are no human societies, past or present, in which the opposite is true, although modernity has attenuated the dynamic (reliable birth control is one possible reason).
Neoreactionaries might be committing the naturalistic fallacy, exalting the old order just because it’s old. They tend to do that.
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“Actually, there’s a loooooong history of people seeking out and having sex with people they otherwise consider inferior (I *really* don’t get it myself, but so it goes). AFAIK, a lot of slut shaming is rooted in the old idea, perpetuated by all genders, that for a woman, being sexual means eschewing romance and commitment, and vice versa.”
This is so true. This is the “brown sugar” meme that is such a thing in American cultural history. But it’s universal. It’s even the historical basis of our child support laws, requiring gentlemen to support the bastards they had with women who weren’t “marriage material.”
There’s a gender reverse on it too, the Princess and the Frog motif, and this backs up the rest of what you’re saying, because the disgust and opprobrium you mention is part of the plot. And it’s universal too. There’s a famous Chinese opera about a Han princess sent off to marry a Hun prince, and the plot twist is that ZOMG! she actually falls in love with that low creature.
“Interestingly, a lot of what I’ve seen from neoreactionaries is a naked terror that this love/sex split mentality is spreading to women.”
There is nothing I don’t hate about the Madonna/Whore dyad. it is diseased in all its manifestations. I prefer the Virago archetype for, well, everyone.
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“That idea is so old and so ubiquitous that it can’t be arbitrary. There are no human societies, past or present, in which the opposite is true, although modernity has attenuated the dynamic (reliable birth control is one possible reason).”
This claim seems very questionable. Think about, e.g. Renaissance society, where women are frequently depicted as sexually insatiable, and in marriage women offer sexual exclusivity in return for material support. (The gender dynamics in the Decameron are a good example of this.) “Women grudgingly offer sex in order to purchase commitment” is by no means a cultural universal.
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I didn’t say “grudgingly”. My grocer does not “grudgingly” give me food in exchange for money. A transaction can be asymmetric without being unfair.
I haven’t read the Decameron, but let me ask this: were there more male or female prostitutes in Renaissance Italy? I’m willing to bet it was the latter, whatever the literature of the period said. The idea of sex as a female commodity is, if perhaps not completely universal, very nearly so.
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“This claim seems very questionable. Think about, e.g. Renaissance society, where women are frequently depicted as sexually insatiable,”
This goes back a ways. This is the trope underlying Lysistrata that makes it comical – the idea that women would voluntarily forego sex and the character Calonice represents this trope.
This is based on two misogynist tropes. one is that females are irrational, driven by instinct and carnality – sub-human, really. The kind of people who go in for exotic mystery cults. The other misogynist trope is that dick is some kind of special treat to be doled out as the ultimate good.
Interestingly our society has flipped these. Males are cast as brutish animals in the grip of “testosterone poisoning”, the cause of all war and violence and on and on. And likewise we so value sexual access to women that we have people walking around with t-shirts that say “I have the pussy, so I make the rules”. And oh look – we have Valentine’s day coming up with its lopsided rituals of groveling gift-giving. (Thankfully there are lots and lots of women who push back for a range of reasons.)
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Valentine’s is easier if you’re a dyke. I’m buying my g/f some fancy guitar tuner she wants and she’s gonna cook me an awesome dinner.
Cuz like love and stuff.
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“Valentine’s is easier if you’re a dyke. I’m buying my g/f some fancy guitar tuner she wants and she’s gonna cook me an awesome dinner.”
This is what equality looks like! +++++++
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stillnotking– no, you didn’t say the exact word, but you did imply that women have no real interest in sex for sex’s sake. Your grocer may not give you your groceries with a scowl, but he’s certainly not going to give them to you if you can’t pay.
As for the prevalence of male vs. female prostitutes in Italy: 1) Most people are straight. Cultures that value female chastity generally make it difficult for women to have casual sex, which includes seeing prostitutes. 2) Taking money for sex is somewhat different from purchasing “commitment,” which is what you were originally talking about.
I mean, you can construct a just-so story about how men have always had to purchase sex from women and only the currency occasionally changes, but I can equally construct a just-so story about how throughout history, men have devoted a huge amount of paranoid effort to trying to make it really hard for their women to cheat on them. Neither of these would be wholly correct, because they’re only looking at a fraction of human society.
Gingko– oh sure, I’m not saying that the Lysistrata/Decameron tropes about female sexuality aren’t misogynist. I’m just pointing out that “women aren’t interested in sex for itself, but only as a means to get material things from men” is not actually a cultural constant.
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Out of curiosity, is “testosterone poisoning” still a live trope? I think I last heard it in the media in the mid-Nineties.
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We trans gals talk about it a lot, but that’s kind of a personal thing.
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“Okay, but what is slut-shaming rooted in? I doubt the answer is a totally irrational male desire to prevent women from taking the virginity that they, on their own account, want to lose”
I see this kind of thinking a lot in younger people, who assume the male in the equation is going to be some randy young stud rather than a protective father of daughters. Trust me, there is a lot of male sexual policing of women.
OTOH I agree that most slut-shaming is a F>F type of policing. And there is an element of policing the class hierarchy to it too.
http://www.slate.com/blogs/xx_factor/2014/05/28/slut_shaming_and_class_a_study_on_how_college_women_decide_who_s_trashy.html
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The class connection is unsurprising. Status competition and class perception are closely related things.
I’m skeptical of the extent to which overprotective fathers actually influence their daughters’ sexual behavior, especially if it’s untangled from the heritability of various personality traits bearing on sexuality. Peer groups seem to have a lot more to do with this kind of thing, at least if you subscribe to Judith Harris’ take on twin studies.
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“I’m skeptical of the extent to which overprotective fathers actually influence their daughters’ sexual behavior, ”
I said they police. I know better than to think they influence it. in fact they spend most of their time painting boys as insatiable sex monsters and their little princesses as blameless in everything. That may have an effect, but it is not going to have the effect of restricting the girls’ behavior.
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Your model seems to be like this: all teenagers are virgins, then slut-shaming happens, then they have sex. That’s a bit too simplistic.
Try this instead:
– teenagers have various amounts of sexual experience
– a boy and a girl have sex
– the boy doesn’t want a serious relationship
– the boy can either feel guilty, or decide that she was a “slut” anyway
– bonus: if she’s a “slut”, it’s OK to brag to classmates and friends, and gain some sweet status points!
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Also, some virgin guys slut-shame because they don’t want to have sex with sexually experienced girls. They want someone as new to sex as themselves, and perhaps even more “innocent”.
So, by choosing to have sex with someone else, a girl both removes herself from the set of desirable partners, and becomes a symbol of everything that’s wrong with the world — a perfect target!
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” the boy can either feel guilty, or decide that she was a “slut” anyway”
Or he may feel boastful and brag about it and she still gets dubbed a slut.
And so he wouldn’t be the one or the only calling her a slut. That’s the reputation aspect of it.
The Madonna/Whore dyad must die.
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I think we’re talking on two different levels here. I don’t disagree with your characterization of what happens; I’m asking why it happens that way, and not, say, the reverse. Why don’t men get slut-shamed, but women do? Someone must have an interest in slut-shaming women. Cui bono? Not the men, for whom slut-shaming makes sex less likely.
Let’s say there are apple farmers and orange farmers, and they trade with one another. We observe that there is a strong stigma attached to apple farmers who trade their apples too cheaply. Would we expect the orange farmers to be behind it?
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Woah now, lets not get ahead of ourselves! My naieve evo-psych knowledge suggests men have an asymmetric interest in discouraging female sexual promiscuity due to the asymmetries of genetic lineage in regards to sex.
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@ stillnotking
I just explained what non-virgin and virgin guys get out of slut-shaming (bragging, venting). I agree that women also use slut-shaming and benefit from it.
So, why don women, and not men, get slut-shamed? Well, in a stereotypical heterosexual encounter, who gets fucked? And what connotations does getting fucked have in our culture?
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My attempt to answer stillnotking:
Let’s say you belong to a small tribe with no access to birth control.
The tribe has no formal marriage, but there’s a norm that fathers should help take care of their kids, feed them, &etc.
Two things (I think) will fall out of this: 1) Men will try to deny paternity when they can and 2) mothers will discourage fathers of their children from sleeping with someone else (to avoid resource-splitting)
Add up those vectors, and I think you roughly end up with how shame forms around sexual behaviour.
Another thing we might predict: with low paternity investment (ie. alloparenting), these dynamics don’t show up.
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roe,
“Two things (I think) will fall out of this: 1) Men will try to deny paternity when they can and”
This happens but it’s not that simple, because the situation you describe only occurs when there is general peace and size of the community is not a factor in the survival of a man’s own children. There’s a reason why anyone can wear any clan’s tartan – in former times it was a uniform and it meant you were fighting on that clan’s side, or that you would be attacked by the opposing clan.
This is the real mechanism underlying adoption and even raids to kidnap neighboring tribes’ children. This was a formal policy of the Five Nations.
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Ginko – Oh, very much agree in reality it’s not simple and contingent on a lot of complicating factors – but simplicity was the point – I was only trying to design an intuition pump.
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“The idea of sex as a female commodity is, if perhaps not completely universal, very nearly so.”
And yet there were laws on the books across Europe permitting women to divorce if their husbands denied them sex. In early Massachusetts a woman took her husband to court over the issue. Those laws codified sex as a male commodity that women had a right to and could litigate if they didn’t get it.
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My wife and I were just talking about baby-wanting, in the context of Seinfeld. There are scenes where both Kramer and George are super exited (in the sense of happily shouting at Jerry) when their partner is late.
We don’t get that at all. Back in my dating days, I was super stressed out whenever we had a scare – I’m not personally comfortable with abortion, I wasn’t ready for a lifetime relationship with my partner, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to stay in the city I was in, but it seemed to me that if there was a pregnancy, there were a lot of potentially bad outcomes.
Are there a lot of guys who are exited by the possibility of having an unplanned child with a short to medium term partner?
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They’re excited, not exited, and I am dumb, not smart, but would still be interested in reading people’s thoughts. 🙂
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Holy shit I remember watching that episode recently and finding it bizarre in the context of current cultural givens. Similarly, there’s an episode where Elaine is very unapologetically in favor of abortion (just looked it up: “The Couch”), which would be unthinkable on network TV these days.
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There’s another side to the “slut-shaming” coin – our culture in many way valorizes promiscuity as adventurous or sophisticated. Which could also drive teenage girls to have sex before their 100% ready, if (maybe) having a strong emotional connection is important. Mixed messages seem to be a specialty of modernity…
There’s another side to the “I’m a male teenager who lost his virginity! Yay!” coin where if you’re a male teenager with no interest in casual sex who wants to wait for the right person kinda feels anxious about defying cultural expectations.
I think neo-reactionaries nostalgia for the “old way” is rooted in the fact that teenagers were shepherded through their sexual development in a fairly consistent way – the culture (for all it’s flaws) set clear boundaries. I know – there were trade-offs, NRxer’s have highly romanticized the past and we live in a different world now.
I’m not sure I have a point. Sexuality is emotionally fraught, and I’m skeptical that it can be made less so.
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Male. I can think of reasons why someone would want a child but for the life of me I can’t understand how they would think those reasons are worth the tradeoff. Maybe I will as I get older.
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I think it’s a resource thing. Sometimes I figure I ought to have children by now, but I know that’s not realistically possible for another five to ten years because I don’t have the resources for it: a house of my own, an income large enough to support a family, etc. If you’re going straight from high school to work, you have a four-year head start on the people who go to college, your expectations probably won’t be as high as those of college graduates, and so on, so it’s less of an issue.
(Only sometimes. Most of the time I figure the sort of lifestyle I don’t believe should be talked about [but the relevant reasons don’t really apply to the comments section of this particular blog] suits me well enough.)
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