{"id":57464,"date":"2013-11-09T12:00:21","date_gmt":"2013-11-09T17:00:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/?p=57464"},"modified":"2013-12-04T20:24:50","modified_gmt":"2013-12-05T01:24:50","slug":"half-of-teenagers-remain-virgins","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/2013\/11\/09\/half-of-teenagers-remain-virgins\/","title":{"rendered":"Over Half of Today’s Teenagers Are Virgins"},"content":{"rendered":"

In my lecture about the sex lives of college students<\/a>, I remind students that they didn’t invent casual sex. \u00a0This always prompts some snickers. \u00a0The fact that today’s students have about the same number of sexual partners as their parents did at their age evokes an even stronger response. \u00a0 About 1\/5th of college students will be virgins when they graduate college<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In fact, college students aren’t as sexually active as the moralizing makes it seem. \u00a0And neither, it turns out, are teenagers. \u00a0According to the Centers for Disease Control<\/a>, 57% of girls and 58% of boys age 15 to 19 have never had penile-vaginal intercourse. \u00a0Moreover, the percent of teenagers that have had intercourse has been dropping consistently over the last 20 years.<\/p>\n

\"Screenshot_1\"<\/a><\/p>\n

So, despite the fact that young people are more likely than earlier generations to engage in oral sex before initiating penile-vaginal intercourse (especially fellatio), they continue to take intercourse very seriously. \u00a0This may be, in part, because men are becoming more like women in this regard. \u00a0Men’s numbers have dropped much more sharply. In addition, for the first time the CDC study found that boys’ #2 reason for not having engaged in intercourse was that they were waiting for the right person. \u00a0Men cited this reason 29% of the time, compared to 19% for girls. \u00a0For both boys and girls, the #1 reason is that it’s against their religion (41% of girls and 31% of boys). \u00a0Concerns about pregnancy come in third.<\/p>\n

Cross-posted at Pacific Standard<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\nLisa Wade, PhD<\/a> is an Associate Professor at Tulane University. She is the author of <\/em>American Hookup<\/a>, a book about college sexual culture; a textbook about gender<\/a>; and a forthcoming introductory text: <\/em>Terrible Magnificent Sociology<\/a>.\u00a0You can follow her on Twitter<\/a> and Instagram<\/a>.<\/em><\/span>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In my lecture about the sex lives of college students, I remind students that they didn’t invent casual sex. \u00a0This always prompts some snickers. \u00a0The fact that today’s students have about the same number of sexual partners as their parents did at their age evokes an even stronger response. \u00a0 About 1\/5th of college students […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":51,"featured_media":58755,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[223,387,55,2099,2102,253,42,120],"class_list":["post-57464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-childrenyouth","tag-dating","tag-gender","tag-gender-childrenyouth","tag-gender-history","tag-history","tag-religion","tag-sex"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/files\/2013\/11\/Screenshot_210.png","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/51"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=57464"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57464\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":59711,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/57464\/revisions\/59711"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/58755"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=57464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=57464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thesocietypages.org\/socimages\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=57464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}