Red Sex, Blue Sex

In the current New Yorker, Margaret Talbot summarizes the gaping chasm in attitudes toward teenage sex in Red and Blue America:

Social liberals in the country's "blue states" tend to support sex education and are not particularly troubled by the idea that many teen-agers have sex before marriage, but would regard a teen-age daughter's pregnancy as devastating news. And the social conservatives in "red states" generally advocate abstinence-only education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn't choose to have an abortion.

Citing the work of sociologists like Mark Regnerus, Peter Bearman, and Hannah Bruckner, Talbot observes that "evangelical teen-agers are more sexually active than Mormons, mainline Protestants, and Jews". They lose their virginity at a slightly younger age. They are significantly less likely to use contraception. And while virginity pledges delay sex, more than half of pledged students do end up having premarital sex - most often not with their future spouse.

Further, Bearman and Bruckner see a flaw in the virginity pledge system, the sort of paradox that afflicts exclusive social networks:

if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it's hard to imagine how educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it's Sodom and Gomorrah.

Sodom and Gomorrah? Really?

Well, the language may be hyperbolic, but the essay reflects my own experience growing up in a conservative community where premarital sex was absolutely forbidden - yet was absolutely going on. Strangely, once a girl got pregnant, it wasn't as big a social stigma as one might expect. Peers and parents didn't approve, exactly, but they tended to be supportive and sympathetic - certainly more so than toward those girls labeled promiscuous (even those adult women involved in unmarried relationships were frowned upon!)

Talbot goes on to observe with apparent hope that there are some "savvy" young evangelicals who, while disapproving of premarital sex, have more nuanced views on how to talk about it with teens. Consider Lauren Winner, who recognizes that women, even abstinent women, have libidos:

"Rather than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married." Teenagers and single adults are "told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever encourages" them "to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way"--getting to know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food.

Winner goes on, "This doesn't mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their bodies well--so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though they're not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex freely."

Winner is hardly your typical Red state girl: she's got degrees from Duke, Columbia, and Cambridge, including a PhD. She's dealt with personal crises of faith, converting to Judaism, then back to Christianity, and writing about it in a memoir. Yet the bottom line of her book, "Real Sex: the Naked Truth about Chastity," is pretty familiar: sex is meant for marriage. In the book, Winner lumps all premarital sex (apparently regardless of age) into a single, unhealthy category:

The sex of blind dates and fraternity parties, even of relatively long-standing dating relationships, has, simply, no normal qualities. Based principally on mutual desire, it dispenses with the ordinary rhythms of marital sex, trading them for a seemingly thrilling but ultimately false story.

What does Winner consider a "relatively long-standing dating relationship"? A year, two years (as long as some marriages)? Does she honestly feel that sex in that kind of relationship is abnormal simply because it is premarital? In a society where long-term, committed relationships are common, this attitude is hardly realistic. Nor is it the revolutionary approach to teen sexuality that some enthusiasts hope it is - and that seems, based on the sociology, to be urgently needed.

Update: right on cue, today's WaPo describes a study by Anita Chandra at the RAND Corporation tying TV depictions of sex to teen sexual activity:

Among the 718 youths who reported being sexually active during the study, the likelihood of getting pregnant or getting someone else pregnant increased steadily with the amount of sexual content they watched on TV, the researchers found. About 25 percent of those who watched the most were involved in a pregnancy, compared with about 12 percent of those who watched the least. The researchers took into account other factors such as having only one parent, wanting to have a baby and engaging in other risky behaviors.

Predictably, the story has already provoked calls for more abstinence-only education, criticism of abstinence-only education, and questions about the causality of the link.

Read the rest of the New Yorker article here.

An interview with Lauren Winner here.

Hanna Rosin for Slate on Mark Regnarus' book, "Forbidden Fruit: Sex & Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers."

The RAND news release on Chandra's TV/sex study is here.