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.
aliarasthedaydreamer
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2020
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No, Seriously, What About Teh Menz? 
Am I misinterpreting table 13 (Consistency of condom use in the 4 weeks prior) or does it seem like there’s way too much error introduced by responders giving socially acceptable answers:
Never used condom over the last month
Male: 23%
Female: 39% (1.7x)
Always used condom over the last month
Male: 67% (1.4x)
Female: 49%
Hmmm… I remember having taken a survey like that, though I don’t know if it was a national CDC-sponsored survey or not. Even if it was, my data isn’t a part of that in any way. Not even the 1988 and 1995 points that appear in a few places for historical comparison, since it only covers ages 15-19. I was 13 in 1988 and 20 in 1995 (and I definitely didn’t take it during the few weeks that year when I was 19). Not that it matters, I just felt like saying it.
Hmm, I just thought of something. If this ever accounts for trans-identified kids, then there won’t be any historical data for comparison for them, and it would be hard to tell whether any apparent changes were caused in part by removing them from the general male/female datasets. That’s not even considering other forms of gender identity. Being more inclusive might be near impossible at this point because it would screw up their data. Maybe they’re getting around it by using current legal sex only rather than gender identity, I dunno ‘cuz I didn’t read the whole thing, but that has some problems in itself.
Also, maybe PIV sex is down in part because gay/bi kids are no longer pressured nearly as much into having unwanted hetero sex to fit in. This also brings up the question of why PIV sex is so special to the “Center for Disease Control”. Maybe other forms were statistically insignificant in the past (or they lacked the imagination to check and see if it wasn’t) and they can’t easily change from that paradigm because it would require them to go all blank-slate on the historical perspective and that’s a big no-no for some people. Or maybe they think teenage pregnancy is a disease or something.
It’s anyone’s guess why people have stopped having sex so much:
A sudden rise in the popularity of oral sex? Who knows?
Bingo. Oral’s the big culprit here. I think I remember reading somewhere that the number of people who report having regular oral tripled between 1990 and now. That’s probably why those figures are so artificially low. I mean, make no mistake; there really are a lot of virgins or at least currently non-sexual young people than people suppose, but 40% seems way too low. Oral sex should count as sex, imo.
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.
Most of the time, “hookup” doesn’t mean sex, or at least PIV sex. Speaking as a recent college guy who’s been around a lot of other college guys, if we got sex (in the PIV sense), we’d damn well use the word sex haha. Out of my handful of hookups during college, only once did it involve (PIV) sex.
In my circles at least, it was similar with girls too. I know the stereotype is that girls use the word to downplay what may have happened while guys do the opposite, but generally the girls I’ve heard use it were the ones who *wanted* that sort of sexually adventurous image. Those who’d want to downplay something would just deny it outright. Makes sense. It stopped working as a euphemism for girls over a decade ago, because everyone’s wise to it.
…holy shit the boys are lucky because 63% of them actually and unambiguously wanted to lose their virginities AMERICA WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU
Erm… what? Something wrong with wanting to lose your virginity?
@pocketjacks: I am pretty sure Ozy means that it is messed up that the boys have the higher rate of having definitely wanted to lose their virginity and that is only 63%. As in, it should be as close to 100% as possible, ideally.
If more boys lost their virginity to strangers, wouldn’t that mean that there is a small subset of girls (or women) who are having sex with multiple male virgins?
It’s certainly easier for a suburban kid to get a sex worker on Craigslist than to get on a bus to find a streetwalker on the seedy side of town. Is that a thing?
Yeah was gonna say… 25% of boys having first-time sex with near-strangers, versus 16% of girls? Where is this extra 9% of unknown vaginas coming from? I guess either girls are doing way more sleeping around with virgin guys they don’t know, or the guys are having way more first-time sex with girls/women outside of the age bracket as outlined by the survey.
I know a couple of girls who had casual sex with virginal dudes, but I didn’t realize before that it was so POPULAR.
To be fair, that group isn’t near-strangers: the CDC folds all forms of non-dating sex (including sex with close friends) into the same category.
“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.”
Why, it’s almost as if sticking a penis into a vagina requires both a penis-having person and a vagina-having person! However would we figure this out without the CDC?
And re: small number of girls having casual sex with virginal males, I’ve deflowered 4 men. It wasn’t casually, though.
I was deflowered by a 29 y.o. woman when I was 26. She was also the very first person other than myself to touch my genitals with any kind of sexual intentions. I wasn’t the least interested in and never bothered trying to figure out how many partners she’d had before me or how many of them had been virgins.
The_L: Well, yes, but it is theoretically possible to have a large number of men having sex with a relatively small number of women, or vice versa, particularly since “sexually active” is defined as “having had sex at least once in the past month” so one vagina-having person having casual sex could easily have sex with four penis-having people. Certain sections of the Internet, in fact, believe that all of the women are having sex with a small percentage of the men.
What do you mean “…are less likely to have their entire lives disrupted by a child…”? They’d both cop it in equally yet different ways.
Well, it’s a bit of a departure from the original topic of virginity loss among teenagers, but statistics show that there is a difference in numbers between how many men and how many women become parents. That difference is increasing as the number of men becoming fathers are decreasing faster than the number of women becoming mothers. Child-bearing are not the same as sex, but they are somewhat related 🙂 and one can ask whether this discrepancy is also reflected in how sexual experience is distributed across genders.
Although all women and a small percentage of men are clearly wrong it still seems like a short cut to dismiss that any discrepancy by quoting the extreme and obviously wrong counter-stance.
On a side-note it’s interesting how it seems somewhat less outrageus a statement If one switch “…all of the women are having sex with a small percentage of men.” around (but keep the meaning): “…a small percentage of men are having sex with all the women”. Gender stereotypes (men as active and women as passive in sex) are deeply entrenched indeed.
When I was a teenager in Sweden (early nineties) we considered oral sex to be somewhat more advanced than PIV. Everyone I knew first had PIV, and than at some later stage did oral. When I started university and met american exchange students I was surprised to find out that it was the other way around for them.
But since Sweden is continuously more and more influenced by American ideas, I wouldn’t be surprised if today’s Swedish teenagers take the American view.
@Tamen: I think that’s because there’s a small, growing trend of single women waking up and realizing that they don’t have to be married or even be in a relationship to raise a child– they’re usually older and pretty financially well-off. (I guess they’d have to be to be able to afford the in-vitro process or to qualify for adoption.)
@L: Those contribute to that, but the number of single women adopting or getting donor sperm are not large enough to make a big impact. And I suspect they are somewhat balanced by men using surrogate mothers to become parents.
In Scandinavia (I haven’t bothered to look for statistics on this in the US) the main reason is an increase in men having children with more than one woman. Which leaves more men without children. It is related to women being more financially secure (both by the economy in general and by an increase in state welfare benefits) which leads to them having a free choice in partners (all good things). However, it seems like an increasing number of women consider a man who already have had children (with another woman) to be a better choice than a man who haven’t had any children. They prefer a “proven and nicely used” man as a researcher put it.
On the pregnancy thing, Amanda Hess featured something on this topic a couple years ago:
http://www.washingtoncitypaper.com/blogs/sexist/2010/03/01/would-your-boyfriend-be-pleased-by-your-surprise-fetus/
Clarice – interesting article. But do we assume it’s a male-image thing? “I have superior man-seed!” or an actual, “I love kids and have always wanted to be a father.”