548: Immculate ros: Sex sex sex that all you think about?

559: Snowbunny: people who have sex at 16 r sick:

560: Twonky: I agree

564: 00o0CaFfEinNe; no sex until ur happily married—Thtz muh rule

566: Twonky: I agree with that too.

567: Snowbunny: me too caffine!

(quoted in Subrahmanyam, Greenfield, & Tynes, 2004, p. 658)

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Sex is the elephant in the room of teenage life. Everyone knows it’s a top-ranking issue, but the adult world often shies away from mentioning it. Celebrated in the media, minimized or ignored by anxious parents (“If I talk about it, I’ll encourage my child to do it”) (see Elliot, 2012; Hyde and others, 2013), the issue of when and whether to have sex is left for teenagers to decide on their own as they filter through the conflicting messages and—as you can see above—vigorously stake out their positions in on-line chats.

It is a minefield issue that contemporary young people negotiate in different ways. Take a poll of your classmates. Some people, as with the teenagers quoted above, may advocate abstinence, believing that everyone should remain a virgin until marriage. Others probably believe that having sex within a loving relationship is fine. Some students, if they are being honest, will admit, “I want to try out the sexual possibilities, but I promise to use contraception!”

This increasing acceptability (within limits) of carving out our own sexual path was highlighted in sexual surveys polling U.S. high school seniors in 1950, 1972, and 2000 (Caron & Moskey, 2002). Over the years, the number of seniors who decided, “It’s okay for teenagers to have sex,” shot up from a minority to more than 70 percent. But in the final turn-of-the-century poll, more teens agreed that a person could decide to not have sex and still be popular. Most felt confident they would use birth control when they were sexually active, and could wait to have intercourse until they got married. How are these efficacious attitudes translated into action? Let’s begin our exploration at the sexual starting gate—with desire.

David, age 14: Since a year or so ago, I just think about sex and masturbation ALL THE TIME! I mean I just think about having sex no matter where I am and I’m aroused all the time. Is that normal?

Expert’s reply: Welcome to the raging hormones of adolescence!

(adapted from a teenage sexuality on-line advice forum)

At what age does sexual desire begin? Although scientists had long assumed that the answer was during puberty, when testosterone is pumping through the body, research with homosexual adults caused them to rethink this idea. When gay women and men were asked to recall a watershed event in their lives—the age when they first realized that they were physically attracted to a person of the same sex—their responses centered around age 10. At that age the output of the adrenal androgens is rising but testosterone production has not yet fully geared up (McClintock & Herdt, 1996). So, our first sexual feelings seem programmed by the adrenal androgens and appear before we undergo the visible changes of puberty, by about fourth grade!

How do sex hormone levels relate to teenagers’ sexual desires? According to researchers, we need a threshold androgen level to prime our initial feelings of desire (Udry, 1990; Udry & Campbell, 1994). Then, signals from the environment feedback to heighten our interest in sex. As children see their bodies changing, they think of themselves in a new, sexual way. Reaching puberty evokes a different set of signals from the outside world. A ninth-grade boy finds love notes in his locker. A seventh-grade girl notices men looking at her differently as she walks down the street. It is the physical changes of puberty and how outsiders react to those changes that usher us into our lives as sexual human beings. Which young people act on those desires by having intercourse as teens?

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Today, the average age of first intercourse in the United States is age 17.8 for women and 18 for men (Finer & Philbin, 2014). But about 1 in 8 children make a “sexual debut” by age 15 (Guttmacher Institute, 2014; see also Figure 8.6).

As developmental systems theory suggests, a variety of forces predict making what researchers call an earlier transition to intercourse. One influence, for both boys and girls, is biological—being on an earlier puberty timetable. Ethnicity and socioeconomic status (SES) also matter. African Americans and lower-income males are more apt to be sexually active at younger ages (Moilanen and others, 2010; Zimmer-Gembeck & Helfand, 2008; Finer & Philbin, 2014).

Personality makes a difference. Teens who are more impulsive, that is, those with externalizing tendencies, are apt to make the transition earlier (Moilanen and others, 2010). For European American girls, one study has suggested, having a risk-taking personality plus low social self-worth (but not depression) correlates with being more advanced sexually—that is, engaging in pre-intercourse activities such as fondling at age 12 (Hipwell and others, 2010). Conversely, also for girls, having religious parents predicts staying a virgin because it makes it more likely that a teen will be religious and so have friends who agree that abstinence is the way to go (Landor and others, 2011).

This brings up the crucial role of peers. As I suggested earlier in the discussion of early-maturing girls, we can predict a teenager’s chance of having intercourse by looking at the company she (or he) chooses. Having an older boyfriend, or girlfriend (no surprise), raises the chance of a child’s becoming sexually active (Martin, 1996). In fact, scientists can make precise statistical calculations of a teen’s intercourse odds based on the number of people in that child’s social circle who have gone “all the way” (Ali & Dwyer, 2011). So, just as with other aspects of teenage behavior, to understand whether a teen you know is sexually active, look at the values and behaviors of his (or her) group.

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You also might want to look at what a child watches on TV. In one fascinating study, researchers were able to predict which virgin boys and girls were likely to become sexually active from looking at their prior TV watching practices. Teens who reported watching a heavy diet of programs with sexually oriented talk were twice as likely to have intercourse in the next year as the children who did not (Collins and others, 2004).

Since sexual experiences (affairs, and so on) are a common media theme, we might predict that simply watching a good deal of television would promote an earlier transition to intercourse. We would be wrong. Teens are at special risk when they watch sexually suggestive programs in mixed gender groups (Parkes and others, 2013). With any media, it’s the content that matters—whether a child prefers sex-laced cable channels (Bersamin and others, 2008), gravitates to Internet porn, or avidly consumes magazines like Cosmo rather than sticking to Seventeen (Walsh, 2008).

Should we blame Cosmo reports such as “101 Ways to Drive Him Wild in Bed” for causing teenagers to start having sex? A bidirectional influence is probably in operation here. If a teenager is already interested in sex, that boy or girl will gravitate toward media that fit this passion. For me, the tip-off was raiding my parents’ library to read the steamy scenes in that forbidden book, D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Today, parents know that their child has entered a different mental space when she abandons the Discovery Channel in favor of MTV. Swimming in this sea of media sex then, naturally, further inflames a teenager’s desires.

Internet pornography celebrates anonymous sex. Many intercourse episodes on TV involve one-night stands (Grube and others, 2008). Are children imitating these models when they start having intercourse? With most U.S. teens (70 percent of girls and 56 percent of boys) reporting they first had sex with a steady partner, the answer is no. But as roughly 1 in 5 teens report making the transition to intercourse outside of a committed relationship (Guttmacher Institute, 2014), let’s pause to look briefly at what these nonromantic encounters are like.

Do adolescents who have sex with a person they are not dating hook up with a stranger or a good friend? For answers, we have an interview study in which researchers asked high schoolers in Ohio about their experiences with “noncommitted” sex (Manning, Giordano, & Longmore, 2006).

Of the teens who admitted to a nonromantic sexual encounter, 3 out of 4 reported that their partner was a person they knew very well. As one boy, who lost his virginity with his best friend described: “. . . I wouldn’t really consider dating her . . . but I’ve known her so long . . . anytime I feel down or she feels down, we just talk to each other” (quoted in Manning, Giordano, & Longmore, 2006, p. 469). Sometimes, the goal of having sex was to change a friendship to a romance: “After we started sleeping together . . . having a relationship came up.” Or, a teenager might fall into having sex with an ex-boyfriend or girlfriend: “Well, it (sex) kind of happened like towards the end when we were both friends” (quoted in Manning, Giordano, & Longmore, 2006, p. 470).

So far, I have painted a benign portrait of these more casual, “friends with benefits” experiences. Wrong! Especially for girls, as you will read in Chapter 10, having one-night stands is a serious risk factor for getting depressed. This brings me to the supposedly clashing sexual agendas of women and men.

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In summary, the news about teenage sexuality is good. Teenagers today feel more confident about charting their sexual path. Most sexual encounters occur in committed love relationships. The decision to have teenage sex is not typically taken lightly, but in a climate of caring and mutual decision making for both girls and boys. Girls have far more control in the sexual arena than we think!

These changes are mirrored in the encouraging statistics in Figure 8.7: fewer U.S. teenagers are having intercourse, and most teens report they use condoms when they do have sex. In fact, over a decade spanning the late 1990s to the early twenty-first century, teen pregnancy rates in the United States dipped from more than 5 to 4 per thousand girls.

Still, with regard to teenage pregnancy, the United States ranks near the pinnacle of the developed world. While European teens have comparable levels of sexual activity as U.S. adolescents, E.U. pregnancy rates put the United States to shame (Guttmacher Institute, 2014; McKay & Barrett, 2010). Compared to Western Europe, the prevalence of gonorrhea and chlamydia among U.S. adolescents is very high (Guttmacher Institute, 2011b).

Question 8.11

around age 10, before the physical signs of puberty occur

Question 8.12

1. Are your daughter’s friends having sex?

2. Is your daughter’s school teaching abstinence?

3. Is your daughter watching sexually explicit cable channels with her male friends and reading Cosmo?

4. Does your daughter have an older boyfriend?

b

Question 8.13

1. Today, sex often happens in a committed relationship.

2. Today, the United States has lower teenage pregnancy rates than other Western nations.

3. In recent decades, rates of teenage births in the United States have declined.

4. Today, boys are still the sexual initiators.

a and c

Question 8.14

1. encouraging abstinence

2. providing information about birth control and STDs

3. discussing how to have loving relationships

c, discuss how to have loving relationships

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