IS THIS WHAT ABSTINENCE-ONLY EDUCATION LOOKS LIKE?: Simcha Fisher

at the National Catholic Register:

...I stumbled across this XOJane post, in which thoroughly secular people recount their experiences in school with abstinence-only education. Here's a typical story:

[G]irls were given two glasses of water and told to chew up food and spit it into one of them.

Their teacher -- a guest speaker from an anti-abortion "crisis pregnancy" group, then asked them which glass they'd rather drink. The lesson, in case you haven't guessed already, is that premarital sex makes you a gross glass of regurgitated food.

The readers recounted many variations on the "used food" theme: kids were supposed to lick a Hershey's Kiss and then invite someone else to lick it, too. Or kids were asked to take tape and stick it to their arms or the floor, and then pass it down the line. At the end of the activity, you look at the tape, or the candy, or the cup of water and think, "Ew, this is used. I don't want any."

Is this what a typical abstinence-only education is like? If so, I'm as horrified and disgusted as the XOJane commenters.

What's so bad about this kind of presentation? I'm going to answer as someone who remembers being a teenage girl (maybe men will have a different perspective, and can share it in the comment box).

Here are the problems: First, the message simply won't work for so many girls. What about the girls who have already had sex or "gone too far?" These demonstrations teach them that they are already ruined, worthless, revolting, useless. Many will despair, and throw themselves into promiscuity whole hog out of misery, or out of some desire to compensate themselves by at least getting some pleasure out of their "ruination."

And what about girls who are in love with their boyfriends, or think they are? They'll think, "Well, this is no problem for me and my boyfriend. I can give myself to him and it will be pure and beautiful because we'll be together forever <3 <3 <3" (and meanwhile, the boyfriend is thinking, "Score!").

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Labels: abstinence, adolescence, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, sex, sex education

posted by Eve at 5:07 PM VOTE

MOST U.S. HIGH SCHOOL STUDENTS HAVE NEVER HAD SEX: Carolyn Moynihan

at MercatorNet: Here is some important info from the US that we missed last week. A report from the federal health monitoring agency, the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), brings the news that births to teenagers aged 15-19 are down by 44 per cent on 1990. The 2010 birth rate for that age group of 34.3 per 1000 females represents a 70-year low, and record lows for all racial/ethnic groups.

Actually, by itself a lower teenage birth-rate is an equivocal statistic. It could have been brought down by abortion. It could mean that hundreds of thousands of young women are on hormonal contraceptives that make them vulnerable to diseases and facilitate harmful relationships. It is a matter for ethical evaluation whether it is worse for an 18- or 19-year-old to have a baby than to be subject to these alternatives.

The good news is that the dramatic drop in pregnancies is related first and foremost to increased sexual abstinence among teens. Those reporting (in the National Survey of Family Growth) that they had never had sexual intercourse increased from 48.9 per cent in 1995 to 56.7 per cent in 2006-2010 - a 16 per cent change. Significantly, this increase was greater among 18- to 19-year-olds (from 28.9 per cent to 36.5 per cent, which = 26 per cent increase) than among 15- to 17-year olds (from 61.4 per cent to 72.9 per cent = 19 per cent).

That suggests at least three-quarters of high school teens have never had vaginal sex, and more than a third of those starting college. Well over half of the combined age-groups say they have never had sex. You can believe them or not, but there is no evidence to support a statement like, “Most American teens have had sex by the time they leave high school.” more

Labels: abstinence, adolescence, contraception, culture, premarital sex, race, virginity

posted by Eve at 10:28 PM VOTE

TV'S TORTURED VIRGINS: Willa Paskin

at Salon:

Ever since “90210’s” Donna Martin held on to hers for seven seasons, adult virginity — the state of having it and the act of losing it — has been a recurring plot point on TV dramas, and not just ones set in high school. The rules that apply to virginity in characters of a certain age are more or less the same ones that apply to Chekhov’s famous gun: If it appears in the first season, it will probably go off by the third, or the fourth, or the seventh, just as it did for Donna Martin. There are currently three fictional adults — or two adults and a self-identified “Girl” — grappling with their virginities with varying amounts of shame in big-name TV shows. (Shame-free virginity: not currently a fictional TV offering.)

“Grey’s Anatomy’s” April Kepner (Sarah Drew) just lost her virginity last week, and will be dealing with the fallout in this one, on tonight’s episode. April’s deflowering would have been a happy event — if the show hadn’t used the mind-bending powers of retroactive continuity to suddenly assert that she had been saving herself because of her religious beliefs. At the beginning of last season, the high-strung, cheery Kepner (a common characteristic of TV virgins is a type-A, neurotic personality) yelled at her colleagues, in an effort to quell their merciless teasing, “I am a 28-year-old virgin, namely because I wanted my first time to be special and then I waited too long, and partially because I’m pretty sure guys find me annoying.” She then spent the next year and a half flirting, making out with and never quite sleeping with a series of guys who weren’t right for her, without once mentioning chastity or a higher power.

Then last Thursday, she threw herself on fellow resident Jackson, assuring him — after he kept repeating to her, out loud, “You’re a virgin” — that having sex with him was really what she wanted to do. The next day, she seemed shell-shocked. When Jackson tried to apologize, she explained, “It’s not you. It’s Jesus. I was a virgin because I loved Jesus. And now Jesus hates me.” Ta-dah! April Kepner had been magically transformed from an accidental, circumstantial virgin into a religious one. In the process she’s gotten stuck in a fun house mirror of TV sex-shaming: Having felt ashamed for two seasons about not having had sex, she now gets to feel ashamed for a few more seasons about having had it.

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Labels: culture, gender, men, premarital sex, religion, sex, virginity, women

posted by Eve at 2:00 PM VOTE

EVERYTHING BUT SEX; EVERYTHING BUT DIVORCE: David French

at The Corner:

I’ve written before about Evangelicals’ collapsing sexual mores, and now I see now that the Religion News Service is on the case and repeating many of the same statistics: Eighty percent of young Evangelicals have premarital sex, and almost a third of pregnancies end in abortion. This is a grave cultural problem within the church (along, of course, with the Evangelical divorce rate). ...

But why are we doing so much worse now? I tend to think it’s a logical result of the “everything but” culture that’s overrun much of the church. In other words, “We Christians live just like you, but without the sin.” Our dating relationships are the same. Our goals for marriage are the same. Our cultural habits are the same. Everything thing is same . . . except (hopefully) for the sin. Let’s take dating. The Christian church has bought hook, line, and sinker the notion that we should wait to marry until either our education is complete or we’ve attained a certain amount of subjective financial stability (whatever comes later). This results of course in a demand for an incredibly extended commitment to chastity — a “15-year gap between the average onset of puberty and the average age of marriage.” Similarly, within the world of Christian marriage, it’s impossible to overstate the extent to which healthy marriage is discussed within secular frameworks of happiness and fulfillment, with scripture providing the holy means for gaining secular ends.

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Labels: abortion, Christianity, culture, evangelical Protestantism, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 12:13 AM VOTE

THREE MISTAKES WOMEN MAKE WHEN DEALING WITH MEN: Gladstone

at Cracked, so all the usual language-and-coarseness cautions apply:

I've wanted to write this column for quite some time, but I was afraid of coming off as some sort of spokesman for angry dudes everywhere. I'm not. Frankly, I'm not a big fan of most men, and I think women have every reason not to trust us, especially when it comes to sex. After all, most guys would cut their own [ahem] off to get laid.

So yes, ladies, you're right. When it comes to sexual interactions, men are mostly awful. But now what? You think you'll avoid all the problems that come from interacting with half the human race just because you know we're not to be trusted? Clearly, that's not enough, because everyone knows that, and yet you keep stepping in it. Here are three of the biggest mistakes women make when it comes to men.

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Labels: culture, dating, feminism, heterosexual couples, men, premarital sex, sex, women

posted by Eve at 12:07 AM VOTE

DAUGHTERS OF THE REVOLUTION: Ross Douthat

blogs:

...It’s also interesting to watch “Girls” in parallel with AMC’s 1960s-set “Mad Men,” which reached a crucial cultural hinge moment this week when Peggy Olson’s journalist boyfriend Abe invited her to dinner at a fancy restaurant and proposed that they … move in together. Abe and Peggy have already been sleeping together, but in the substitution of a cohabitation proposal for the marriage proposal she expected – and the way she was first taken aback by, then justified, and then embraced the idea of moving in together – we can see the beginning of the shift from a world where “premarital sex” tended to be actually premarital (i.e., you would sleep with someone only if you thought you might be on the way to marrying them) to the world we inhabit today, in which there’s no clear script for making one’s way from casual encounters through steady relationships to cohabitation and then (at some point, maybe, but not always, especially down the income ladder) marriage. When Peggy’s mother, a sour outer-borough Catholic widow, tells her daughter that her suitor will use her “for practice” and then discard her, she’s probably being unfair to Abe himself, who seems like a decent enough guy. But her words foreshadow a world in which Hannah Horvath’s awful pseudo-boyfriend floats indifferently from one sexual encounter to the next, secure in the knowledge that “practice” is all he’ll ever be expected to provide.

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Labels: class, cohabitation, culture, heterosexual couples, Marriage, men, premarital sex, Ross Douthat, sex, women

posted by Eve at 11:09 PM VOTE

ABSTINENCE IS DEATH: Storied Theology

blogs:

In an interview with Christianity Today Christine Gardner talks about the language that Evangelicals use to talk about abstinence. Gardner’s book is entitled, Making Abstinence Sexy–a telling encapsulation of how Evangelical abstinence are striving to affirm the culture’s obsession with sex–and visions of abundant, great sex in particular–while giving it a distinctive, Christian veneer:

They are using the very thing they are prohibiting to admonish young people to wait. They are saying, “If you are abstinent now, you will have amazing sex when you are married.”

Holy non sequitur, Batman! Gardner thinks that Christianity has something to offer that has been largely missing from these abstinence campaigns:

Language of sacrifice and suffering can be transformative to those who know that sex sells everything from cars to deodorant and, now, abstinence.

I think she’s getting close. Abstaining from sex is suffering, dying to the desires of our bodies. In a world where people are regularly remaining single into their thirties and beyond, it’s death with no this-worldly promise of new life. Perhaps reframing abstinence as participation in the cross of Christ is better preparation for marriage than the promise of great sex on the other side.

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Labels: abstinence, Christianity, culture, Marriage, premarital sex, religion, sex

posted by Eve at 6:08 PM VOTE

TEENAGE BIRTH RATE IS LOWEST SINCE 1946: NYT

health blog [Why no abortion stats whatsoever? I know teen pregnancy rates are also falling, but still. --E]:

Fewer teenagers gave birth in 2010 than in any other year since 1946, government researchers announced last week, and there is good evidence that today’s teenagers are initiating sex later and using birth control more consistently than previous generations did.

According to a report from the National Center for Health Statistics, birth rates among young women ages 15 to 19 fell in all but three states and in all racial, ethnic and age groups. From 2009 to 2010, the rate of teenage births fell by 9 percent, to 34.9 per thousand, the lowest rate ever reported in the 65 years for which data is available.

“I think the current generation of youth are perhaps more conscientious and cautious,” said Dr. John Santelli, a professor of clinical population and family health at Columbia University who was not involved in writing the report.

Data from surveys conducted by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention back up Dr. Santelli’s assertion. Since 1991, the percentage of teenagers who have ever had sex has decreased by 15 percent, the number who have had sex with four or more partners has decreased by 26 percent, and the percentage using condoms has increased by 32 percent.

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Labels: abstinence, contraception, culture, demographics, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race, sex education, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 4:49 PM VOTE

SAN FRANCISCO TURNED ME STRAIGHT: Anna Pulley

in Salon [rough language and brief graphic sexual descriptions]:

I proposed to my last girlfriend in Lesvos, Greece, at sunset, overlooking the craggy shores of Skala Eresou. I carried the ring 8,000 miles. I wasn’t eloquent, but she cried and I cried and as we walked back to our rented house, we played a game where we guessed the number of stray cats we’d see along the way. We said the loser had to kiss the winner a million times.

Shortly after that, we moved to San Francisco. Shortly after that, I was on a different shore and she was on a boat drifting farther away from me each day. Shortly after that, we stopped having sex. Words were somewhere in the absence growing between us but I couldn’t find them. My only weapon was repetition. I made us dinner. We watched “Glee.” We went to yoga. Shortly after that, she told me she wanted to date men, that our relationship was over.

My ex-girlfriend now has a boyfriend and lives in Minnesota. My yoga teacher, who announced to her mom at age 8 that she was a lesbian, now exclusively dates men, and has been in a committed relationship with a man for more than a year. My straightest guy friends have all at least made out with other men, while others are now dabbling in full-on dude sex. Whatever norm you came in with, San Francisco eventually takes it and turns it right on its (uncircumcised, pierced) head. It shouldn’t have surprised me that the City wanted to have its way with me too. Still, I was the last person who thought I’d be a lesbian who spent the next year and a half of her life sleeping with men. ...

...I went home with my friend and we had sex for hours. We didn’t discuss anything or stop to wonder if this was a good idea. We just kept moving to the rhythm of each other’s particular hungers. Afterward I felt so relieved. The months of frustration and rejection that led to my breakup were all released during this one marathon night of hetero sex. “I’m OK,” I thought. “I’m going to be OK.” While waiting for the bus outside his house, I burst into tears.

Then there was another friend, a new one. We went to a bar and he told me to tell him my life story, starting from birth. It took 12 hours, and he didn’t once let me ask him any questions in return. We held hands on the way back to his apartment and I remember thinking, “This is so wrong. Our hands don’t fit together. Our hands are just grasping at anything.”

San Francisco’s not an easy city to live in. Everyone is struggling a little, to pay the exorbitant rents, to stand out in a lasting way, to grow up as slowly as possible. I was unemployed the first five months I lived here, then took an internship that paid $6.25 an hour. Without the relationship luxury of shared expenses, I was barely surviving. But I was writing and I was having sex, which somehow made my financial and emotional woes more bearable. After a while, being straight felt more subversive to me than being queer, even more so when I was having queer sex with straight men.

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", bisexuality, culture, lesbians, premarital sex, sex

posted by Eve at 1:13 AM VOTE

I HAVE AN ARTICLE IN THE CURRENT "AMERICAN CONSERVATIVE"

on the culture of fear of divorce. It's subscribers-only for now, but here's the opening:

If America has endured a “divorce revolution” since California passed no-fault divorce in 1969, we've now entered the counterrevolutionary phase. Divorce rates have fallen from their peak in the early '80s, the deep pain often felt by children of divorce is openly acknowledged and respected, and young Americans typically express both fear and a kind of moral horror at the thought of divorce. They are determined not to repeat the mistakes of previous generations; avoiding divorce is a constant anxiety and even obsession.

But as with most purely reactionary cultural movements, the revolt against divorce has been much better at targeting what it rejects than figuring out what it's for. In a strange, sad twist, the divorce counterrevolution has only weakened our marriage culture more.

Here are three things we've ignored as we make divorce (and divorced people) the scapegoat for broader problems of family breakdown.

pdf for subscribers

Labels: age at first marriage, children, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Eve Tushnet, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, relationship dissolution, weddings vs. marriage

posted by Eve at 8:02 PM VOTE

YOUNG MOTHERS DESCRIBE MARRIAGE'S FADING ALLURE: NYTimes

feature:

LORAIN, Ohio — Marriage has lost its luster in Lorain, Ohio.

Sixty-three percent of all births to women under 30 in Lorain County occur outside marriage, according to Child Trends, a research center in Washington. That figure has risen by more than two-thirds over the past two decades, and now surpasses the national figure of 53 percent.

The change has transformed life in Lorain, a ragged industrial town on Lake Erie. Churches perform fewer weddings. Applications for marriage licenses are down by a third. Just a tenth of the students at the local community college are married, but its campus has a bustling day care center.

The New York Times interviewed several dozen people in Lorain about marriage here. What follows are their stories.

Young parents spoke of an economy that was fundamentally different from in their parents’ time, and that required more than a high school education for fathers to be stable breadwinners. They talked of how little they trusted each other to be reliable mates, and of how the government safety net encourages poor parents to stay single. ...

Many women described a lifestyle of dating in which relationships sometimes resulted in children, but less often in fathers deeply involved in their families. Judge David Basinski of Lorain County Domestic Relations Court, in Elyria, said he recently had a case in which a man who had nine children by six women owed $55,000 in back child support. Child support cases have become so common among unmarried parents that the court now gives seminars on parental responsibilities.

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Labels: children, class, culture, economics, Fathers, incarceration, Marriage, marriage penalty, men, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, single parenting, welfare, women

posted by Eve at 4:27 PM VOTE

FOR WOMEN UNDER 30, MOST BIRTHS OCCUR OUTSIDE MARRIAGE: NYTimes

reports:

LORAIN, Ohio — It used to be called illegitimacy. Now it is the new normal. After steadily rising for five decades, the share of children born to unmarried women has crossed a threshold: more than half of births to American women under 30 occur outside marriage.

Once largely limited to poor women and minorities, motherhood without marriage has settled deeply into middle America. The fastest growth in the last two decades has occurred among white women in their 20s who have some college education but no four-year degree, according to Child Trends, a Washington research group that analyzed government data.

Among mothers of all ages, a majority — 59 percent in 2009 — are married when they have children. But the surge of births outside marriage among younger women — nearly two-thirds of children in the United States are born to mothers under 30 — is both a symbol of the transforming family and a hint of coming generational change.

One group still largely resists the trend: college graduates, who overwhelmingly marry before having children. That is turning family structure into a new class divide, with the economic and social rewards of marriage increasingly reserved for people with the most education. ...

The forces rearranging the family are as diverse as globalization and the pill. Liberal analysts argue that shrinking paychecks have thinned the ranks of marriageable men, while conservatives often say that the sexual revolution reduced the incentive to wed and that safety net programs discourage marriage.

Here in Lorain, a blue-collar town west of Cleveland where the decline of the married two-parent family has been especially steep, dozens of interviews with young parents suggest that both sides have a point.

Over the past generation, Lorain lost most of two steel mills, a shipyard and a Ford factory, diminishing the supply of jobs that let blue-collar workers raise middle-class families. More women went to work, making marriage less of a financial necessity for them. Living together became routine, and single motherhood lost the stigma that once sent couples rushing to the altar. Women here often describe marriage as a sign of having arrived rather than a way to get there.

Meanwhile, children happen. ...

Almost all of the rise in nonmarital births has occurred among couples living together. While in some countries such relationships endure at rates that resemble marriages, in the United States they are more than twice as likely to dissolve than marriages. In a summary of research, Pamela Smock and Fiona Rose Greenland, both of the University of Michigan, reported that two-thirds of couples living together split up by the time their child turned 10.

In Lorain as elsewhere, explanations for marital decline start with home economics: men are worth less than they used to be. Among men with some college but no degrees, earnings have fallen 8 percent in the past 30 years, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, while the earnings of their female counterparts have risen by 8 percent.

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Labels: children, class, cohabitation, culture, divorce, economics, Marriage, marriage penalty, men, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, race, unmarried parents, women

posted by Eve at 4:02 PM VOTE

WHAT I DID FOR LOVE: This American Life

interview:

Ira Glass
Kurt Braunohler met his girlfriend on the third day of college. And in all of the ways that we think of what makes for a good relationship, I think that they were doing better than you, or me, or most people. They had a lot of fun together. They could talk about anything. They didn't really fight. Happy sex life.

Kurt Braunohler

We really just got along very well together. We traveled well together. We were the place that friends would come when they are having hard times, and they would stay with us. It felt like very adult. Even when I was 23, it felt like, I'm kind of married, even though neither of us had ever, ever discussed getting married.

Ira Glass

So what happened?

Kurt Braunohler

Well, after we had both turned 30, one day I just kind of was thinking about why we had never talked about getting married. We had never, ever talked about it, seriously or otherwise. And whenever anyone would ask us, we would always just kind of brush it off and say, oh, we'll get married when we have kids. That's what we would always say.

And I remember, we were sitting in the living room and it was October. And I just said, hey, I want to talk. And I said, why do you think we haven't gotten married yet, or even talked about it? And she just kind of like looked at me and thought for a second. And then she said, well, I think that before we get married, we should probably sleep with other people.

And you would imagine that that would come as a huge shock to me, like hit me hard. But for some reason it made sense to me. I was like, OK, very calmly. And I guess the reason-- ...

Kurt Braunohler

The next part of that conversation was the logistics. Do we break up? Do I move out? Do we just do this while we're living in the same house together? And we kind of came up with this idea of borrowing this Amish concept called rumspringa. And rumspringa in the Amish world is when you're 16, you're allowed to be not Amish for two years. And then when you turn 18, you decide whether or not you come back to the fold. ...

They still are very, very close. They talk a few times a week.

Kurt says he would not want to do a rumspringa again. But he came out of this experience believing that it is important to force things to a decision with someone. And that it's healthy for any relationship to be evaluated now and then.

Kurt Braunohler

I do have a theory now. I do have a theory about if I do get married in the future. What I think I would want to do is have an agreement that at the end of seven years, we have to get remarried in order for the marriage to continue. But at the end of seven years, it ends. And we can agree to get remarried or not get remarried.

Ira Glass

Why?

Kurt Braunohler

Because I think you get to choose and I think it would make the relationship stronger.

Ira Glass

I don't know what I think of that. Because I think, actually, one of the things that's a comfort in marriage is that there isn't a door at seven years. And so if something is messed up in the short-term, there's a comfort of knowing, well, we made this commitment. And so we're just going to work this out. And even if tonight we're not getting along or there's something between us that doesn't feel right, you have the comfort of knowing, we've got time. We're going to figure this out. And that makes it so much easier. Because you do go through times when you hate each other's guts. You know what I mean?

Kurt Braunohler

Of course you do. Yeah.

Ira Glass

And the no escape clause, weirdly, is a bigger comfort to being married than I ever would have thought before I got married.

Kurt Braunohler

Really?

Ira Glass

Yeah.

Kurt Braunohler

I had never thought of it that way. I like thinking about it that way, you just see so many examples of where people don't think that way.

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Labels: culture, Marriage, open relationships, premarital sex, relationships

posted by Eve at 11:59 PM VOTE

TIME TO ADMIT IT: THE CHURCH HAS ALWAYS BEEN RIGHT ON BIRTH CONTROL: Michael Brendan Dougherty and Pascal-Emmanuel Dobry

in Business Insider:

...Many people, (including our editor) are wondering why the Catholic Church doesn't just ditch this requirement. They note that most Catholics ignore it, and that most everyone else finds it divisive, or "out-dated." C'mon! It's the 21st century, they say! Don't they SEE that it's STUPID, they scream.

Here's the thing, though: the Catholic Church is the world's biggest and oldest organization. It has buried all of the greatest empires known to man, from the Romans to the Soviets. It has establishments literally all over the world, touching every area of human endeavor. It's given us some of the world's greatest thinkers, from Saint Augustine on down to René Girard. When it does things, it usually has a good reason. Everyone has a right to disagree, but it's not that they're a bunch of crazy old white dudes who are stuck in the Middle Ages.

So, what's going on?

The Church teaches that love, marriage, sex, and procreation are all things that belong together. That's it. But it's pretty important. And though the Church has been teaching this for 2,000 years, it's probably never been as salient as today.

Today's injunctions against birth control were re-affirmed in a 1968 document by Pope Paul VI called Humanae Vitae. He warned of four results if the widespread use of contraceptives was accepted:

General lowering of moral standards
A rise in infidelity, and illegitimacy
The reduction of women to objects used to satisfy men.
Government coercion in reproductive matters.

Does that sound familiar?

Because it sure sounds like what's been happening for the past 40 years.

As George Akerloff wrote in Slate over a decade ago,

By making the birth of the child the physical choice of the mother, the sexual revolution has made marriage and child support a social choice of the father.

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Labels: Catholic Church, cohabitation, contraception, demographics, Fathers, Marriage, out-of-wedlock births, population control, premarital sex

posted by Eve at 12:35 AM VOTE

TEEN PREGNANCY RATE HITS 30-YEAR LOW: KJ Dell'Antonia

at the NYTimes parenting blog:

Between 2006 and 2010, the number of unmarried teenagers between the ages of 15 and 19 who reported to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention that they’ve had sex dropped below 50 percent. The C.D.C. described this as an actual drop in the number of teenagers having sex; the cynical addition of the word “reported” is mine: obviously the only way for the C.D.C. to determine whether those teenagers were sexually active (and how) was to ask them, and I’ve expressed my doubts about the resulting data.

Now the Guttmacher Institute is backing up those teenagers with hard facts: in 2008, the pregnancy rate among teenagers dropped [pdf] to its lowest point in more than 30 years. In 1990, when the rate was at its highest, 116.9 out of every thousand girls between the ages of 15 and 19 became pregnant; in 2008, only 67.8 did. Among young women under 15, the pregnancy rate fell even more. ...

A representative of the Guttmacher Institute just let me know that it did, in fact, draw some conclusions. “A large body of research has shown that the long-term decline in teen pregnancy, birth and abortion rates was driven primarily by improved use of contraception among teens.”

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Labels: abortion, adolescence, contraception, culture, pregnancy, premarital sex, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 12:32 AM VOTE

UNIVERSITY SELLING MORNING-AFTER PILL IN VENDING MACHINE: WTAE

reports:

Vending machines at one Pennsylvania University doesn't just dispense soda and snacks -- it sells the morning-after pill.

At Shippensburg University, getting access to Plan B, the emergency contraception pill is as easy as getting a soda. Students can now buy the pill at a vending machine on campus. ...

Dr. Serr says that somewhere between 350 and 400 doses are sold each year to the female population. The pill can be legally sold over-the-counter to anyone 17 or older.

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Labels: abortion, contraception, culture, premarital sex, universities

posted by Eve at 9:32 PM VOTE

MATCH.COM SURVEY GIVES A SNAPSHOT OF SINGLES IN AMERICA: USA Today

reports:

So many singles appear to be enjoying their unencumbered and unmarried state that two-thirds aren't even sure they want to marry, suggests a broad national survey of the dating habits, sexual behaviors and lifestyles of 5,541 single adults across the USA.

Almost 40% of singles 21 and older surveyed were uncertain about wanting to marry; overall, 34.5% say they do want to marry, but 27% don't.

This second annual Singles in America study, conducted online and completed in December by market research firm MarketTools for the Dallas-based dating website Match.com, was developed by the Institute for Evolutionary Studies at Binghamton University, along with biological anthropologist Helen Fisher and sex therapist Laura Berman.

Attitudes about relationships also show decidely mixed views: 21.3% report they don't have time or prefer to stay unattached. Only 12.7% are actively seeking a relationship. Just under half (46.8%) are not actively looking for a relationship but say that if they met the right person they would consider it, and 16.9% are dating someone. Another 2.2% like to play the field.

The nationally representative sample of single adults not in a committed relationship is largely heterosexual (90.5%) and includes 56.5% who have never married, 30.9% divorced, 10.2% widowed and 2.4% separated. ...

Almost a quarter said they typically have sex after one, two or three dates; 25% said “when the other person is ready,” and 19% said “when we agree to an exclusive relationship.” About 13% said “when we are married.”

Among other sex-related findings:

-- 58% of singles have had a one-night stand (65% of men and 51% of women).
-- 44% had not experienced infidelity; of those who had, 36% said a partner had been unfaithful, 8% had personally been unfaithful, and 13% said both were.
-- 60% said a partner having a series of one-night stands was “more unacceptable” than a three-month affair with one person; 40% said a three-month affair was worse.

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Labels: committed relationships, culture, dating, Marriage, premarital sex, religion

posted by Eve at 1:05 AM VOTE

TUCKER MAX GIVES UP THE GAME: Michael Ellsberg

in Forbes [rough language, obviously]:

If you’ve been anywhere near an airport bookstore in the last five years, you’ve probably seen the face of Tucker Max leering out at you from one of his two uber-bestselling books. ...

The books recount Tucker’s endlessly repetitive nights throughout his twenties (he’s 35 now), drinking extreme amounts of alcohol, having utterly drunken, meaningless, uninspired (and uninspiring) sex with a parade of random strangers, acting in a cocky, testosterone-fueled, belligerent way to those who come across his drunken glare, and saying the most insulting, vile, vicious, mean, sexually-degrading things you could possibly imagine to everyone around him, both men and women.

The narrator seems to be doing everything possible to ensure that his photo appears not only in mugshots, but under the dictionary definition of the word “prick.”

But, love Tucker Max or hate him—it is very likely someone you know has paid money for his writing. His books have sold a staggering 2 million copies combined—around 1.6 million for the first one, and around 400,000 for the second. ...

Perhaps more interesting, Tucker is not just retiring from writing about his hard-drinking, hard-partying, and hard-womanizing, whose recounting made him famous and earned him millions. He is also retiring entirely from that lifestyle of his twenties.

Or, I should say, he already has. Unbeknownst to his legions of fans, his legions of critics, or the legions of publishing professionals who want a piece of him, this most public of “I-don’t-wanna-grow-up” males is in fact now in the midst of a serious, intentional and devoted period of cleaning up and growing up.

He is changing his ways of the past, and—gasp!—becoming a mature adult male, one is who seeking a committed, long-term relationship, leading to marriage, with an intelligent, substantive, accomplished woman.

What you are about to read is the most in-depth and personal profile of this bestselling and infamous author ever written, based on the most access he has ever given a fellow writer.

It should be abundantly clear from what follows that I’m not a fan of Tucker Max’s writing, nor of his behavior in his twenties.

So why am I writing this? I felt Tucker had an interesting story to tell here, and I wanted to help tell it (no, it’s not another drinking story.) I also have my own personal interest in this story, having to do with how I spent my own twenties. I’ll reveal that towards the end.

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Labels: "emerging adulthood", childhood, culture, divorce, gender, heterosexual couples, hooking up, Marriage, men, mental health, parenting, premarital sex, sex, women

posted by Eve at 8:39 PM VOTE

THE FIRST SEXUAL REVOLUTION: LUST AND LIBERTY IN THE 18TH CENTURY: Faramerz Dabholwala

in the Guardian:

We believe in sexual freedom. We take it for granted that consenting men and women have the right to do what they like with their bodies. Sex is everywhere in our culture. We love to think and talk about it; we devour news about celebrities' affairs; we produce and consume pornography on an unprecedented scale. We think it wrong that in other cultures its discussion is censured, people suffer for their sexual orientation, women are treated as second-class citizens, or adulterers are put to death.

Yet a few centuries ago, our own society was like this too. In the 1600s people were still being executed for adultery in England, Scotland and north America, and across Europe. Everywhere in the west, sex outside marriage was illegal, and the church, the state and ordinary people devoted huge efforts to hunting it down and punishing it. This was a central feature of Christian society, one that had grown steadily in importance since late antiquity. So how and when did our culture change so strikingly? Where does our current outlook come from? The answers lie in one of the great untold stories about the creation of our modern condition. ...

Indeed, the first sexual revolution was characterised by an extraordinary reversal in assumptions about female sexuality. Ever since the dawn of western civilisation it had been presumed that women were the more lustful sex. As they were mentally, morally and physically weaker than males, it followed that they were less able to control their passions and thus (like Eve) more likely to tempt others into sin. Yet, by 1800, exactly the opposite idea had become entrenched. Now it was believed that men were much more naturally libidinous and liable to seduce women. Women had come to be seen as comparatively delicate and sexually defensive, needing to be constantly on their guard against male rapacity. The notion of women's relative sexual passivity became fundamental to sexual dynamics across the western world. Its effects were ubiquitous – they still are.

A crucial reason was the rise of women as public writers, which introduced into the cultural mainstream powerful new female perspectives on courtship and lust.

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Labels: adultery, class, culture, Europe, gender, homosexuality, men, premarital sex, race, religion, sex, women

posted by Eve at 12:20 AM VOTE

CDC: MANY TEEN MOMS DIDN'T THINK THEY WOULD GET PREGNANT: USA Today

reports:

A new government study suggests a lot of teenage girls are clueless about their chances of getting pregnant.

In a survey of thousands of teenage mothers who had unintended pregnancies, about a third said they didn't use birth control because they didn't believe they could pregnant. ...

The researchers interviewed nearly 5,000 teenage girls in 19 states who gave birth after unplanned pregnancies in 2004 through 2008. The survey was done through mailed questionnaires with telephone follow-up.

About half of the girls in the survey said they were not using any birth control when they got pregnant. That's higher than surveys of teens in general, which have found that fewer than 20 percent said they didn't use contraception the last time they had sex. ...

Only 13 percent said they didn't use birth control because they had trouble getting it.

Another finding: Nearly a quarter of the teen moms said they did not use contraception because their partner did not want them to. That suggests that sex education must include not only information about anatomy and birth control, but also about how to deal with situations in which a girl feels pressured to do something she doesn't want to, Gavin said.

The findings are sobering, Albert said. But it's important to remember that the overall teen birth rate has been falling for some time, and recently hit its lowest mark in about 70 years.

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Labels: adolescence, contraception, culture, motherhood, out-of-wedlock births, premarital sex, sex, teenage pregnancy

posted by Eve at 1:26 AM VOTE