SEX
- October 12th, 2005
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Recently, The Columbia Journalism Review ran an article about the new study the National Center For Health Statistics had put out which supposedly would show this huge shift in how young people engage in sex. Because teenagers are totally the most reliable sources about their own sex lives!
The two biggest shifts, this bland and superficial “study” show are about oral sex and lesbianism:
The big story is oral sex. Apparently, according to the study, over 50 percent of boys and girls between the ages of 15 and 19 are having it. And of those, a quarter have never had intercourse.
The other news: a spike in the number of woman having same-sex encounters between the ages of 18 and 29, a phenomenon the New York Times refers to in its piece as “LUG’s – lesbians until graduation.”
Of course, as CJR notes, people are waiting in line to make hilarious generalizations from this study. Dr. Jennifer Manlove says that these stats show that we’ve eradicated gender inequality through oral sex!
Dr. Manlove, who works for Child Trends, a Washington research group on children and families, points out that the oral sex statistics have revealed surprising equality as far as who is giving and who is receiving. This is proof, to her, that “there is more gender equality than we expected,” she tells the Times.
Uh, yeah, sure. Because, as noted before, teenagers are totally reliable about this stuff! CJR continues to ponder this later in the article:
None of the sexperts, alas, pose our question: Can a teenage boy be trusted when asked if he’s ever gone to the dugout with a young lady. We think not.
Last spring, I spent a few days engulfed in Emily White’s Fast Girls: Teenage Tribes and The Myth of The Slut. Ask the girls White interviews who, years and years later, are still scarred by the rumors spread about their supposed sex lives. Ask them if there is equality in the sexes just because more boys will go down on a girl these days.
Mercifully, The Los Angeles Times ponders whether these crazy new statistics might just be the function of a society more open about their sexual activities:
There is also the question, taken up thankfully by the Los Angeles Times of whether these new explosive statistics are just a function of a society more comfortable talking about sex, “rather than an increase in activity.” They quote a certain Dr. Claire Brindis of UC San Francisco, who says that kids may now “be disclosing information that had probably occurred for decades.”
NPR did a segment on this story also and discusses how the researchers tried to get honest answers from the teenagers surveyed:
For this study, apparently, respondents received the questions through headphones and answered via laptops, to insure a feeling of total anonymity.
But alas, CJR notes in conclusion-
NPR also warns that teenagers are likely to “overestimate and underestimate their experiences,” and that such a study’s results can’t be fully relied on until they are duplicated.
