Sexed but Not Sexed
David Brooks has an interesting op-ed at NYT this morning. He says the teen culture is perhaps trashier than ever, but teens aren't. A few excerpts:
Young people are waiting longer to have sex. The percentage of 15-year-olds who have had sex has dropped significantly. Among 13-year-olds, the percentage has dropped even more.
They are also having fewer partners. The number of high schoolers who even report having four or more sexual partners during their lives has declined by about a quarter. Half of all high school boys now say they are virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990.
Reports of an epidemic of teenage oral sex are also greatly exaggerated. There's very little evidence to suggest it is really happening. Meanwhile, teenagers' own attitudes about sex are turning more conservative. There's been a distinct rise in the number of teenagers who think casual sex is wrong. There's been an increase in the share of kids who think teenagers should wait until adulthood before getting skin to skin
In other words, American pop culture may look trashy, but America's social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair.
What matters is reality. The reality is that we have a generation of kids who have seen the ravages of divorce, who are more likely to respect and listen to their parents and their ministers, who are worried about sexually transmitted diseases and who don't want to mess up their careers.
Brooks' point? Let's be optimistic and not worry too much about trashy pop culture because it doesn't appear to be having an effect on teen behavior. We like his optimism, but can't agree that trashy culture doesn't have an effect. When trash is normalized, people are more likely to behave like trash. Nonetheless, he's probably right that the effect isn't as great as conservatives tend to fear.
