Most major newspapers know a good thing when they see it, and therefore prominently displayed the sex survey results carried by the news wires on Sept 15. The New York Daily News version was headlined “Women bi into sex…options.” The Washington Post took a more reportorial approach: “Study: Half of All Teens Have Had Oral Sex” (September 16). Either way, this is a good object lesson in why you shouldn't read the newspaper while eating breakfast.
For readers who are parents, surveys such as this are not about “women,” but about “girls,” and not about “teens,” but about “our kids.” So let's take a look. According to the National Center for Health Statistics study, which questioned over 12,000 subjects aged 15 to 44 about their sexual practices in 2002 and 2003, one in seven women aged 19 to 29 reported having had sex (Bill Clinton, can you clarify?) with another woman, and 40 percent of 16-year-old boys and girls had received oral sex. The authors of the study also broke out separate numbers for those interested in the make-the-religious-right-squirm category, finding that 16 percent of boys and 21 percent of girls intending to march down the aisle as virgins had engaged in oral sex. It seems the technical virgin is back.
You can draw a lot of different and even conflicting conclusions from these survey returns (and what in heaven's name were they doing asking 15-year-olds this stuff, anyway?), depending upon how “progressive” you are. Elayne Rappens, a University of Buffalo professor quoted in the AP story, noted that “same-sex encounters,” especially among women who date only men, are a “badge of honor” on many campuses, so that “to some extent there's more talk than action.”
The Washington Post's Laura Sessions Stepp was apparently grinding another progressive ax in her story, which dwelt on the oral sex figures for women. She quoted Jennifer Manlove (I am not making this up), director of fertility research for Child Trends, who said: “You assume that females are more likely to give, males more likely to receive. We were surprised that the percentages were similar.” Those stodgy old folks at Child Trends! The Post article then referred to unnamed “other national data” showing that high school girls and boys take part in one-night stands and “nonromantic sexual relationships” at equal rates, prompting the president of Advocates for Youth to gush, “This is part of a major social transition. The data are now coming out and roiling the idea that boys are the hunters and young girls the prey.”
Finally, a note of moderation was sounded by physician and chairman of the Medical Institute for Sexual Health Joe McIllhaney, Jr., who doubts claims of a brave new world of unisex attitudes: “I question how much girls enjoy [oral sex]. I'd like to know a whole lot more about the pressure being put on girls.”
And that brings us back to a somewhat more recognizable picture of teenage sexual relations — one in which the girls are being pressured by the boys, and by the desire to hold onto them. Meanwhile, both girls and boys are pressured to conform to “what everybody's doing,” as reported in studies like this one, and are assaulted by a sex-saturated culture which just doesn't give those newly wakened hormones a break.
Opinion polls tell us that this generation of kids is in some ways more conservative than their parents — more opposed to abortion, more determined to make a marriage (if they dare risk one) work, more skeptical about successfully combining professional ambition and family life, and perhaps even wistful about the white bridal gown. But studies also show the debilitating effects of growing up in a culture that exploits sex for motives of both profit and ideology. For these young people, social pressures merge with love and lust and Madison Avenue and Hollywood and what-is-sex-anyway and their ground-down elders' defeatist belief that they couldn't possibly have what it takes to be truly chaste.
No wonder many of them loved John Paul II, who was willing to believe in them, and who had no trouble explaining to them, in words tender and terrifying, just what the meaning of sex is.
(Madame X works in Washington DC for the federal government. Because of her employer, she must write under a pseudonym.)
