Things were much better when I was young...NOT

Caitlin Flanagan, of The Atlantic has written another essay about the coarsening of sexual culture for our youth!  Waaaaa....Waaaaa, These poor girls are recovering from the land of ubiquitous oral sex and are now revolting to a moral norm of the loving and caring boyfriend. What has happened to the younger generation? How did we let it come to this? When I was a young adult WE didn't do stuff like this blah, blah, blah.  Here's an excerpt:

"What might we expect as the next thing for today’s girls? They just spent the better part of a decade being hectored—via the post-porn, Internet-driven world—toward a self-concept centering on the expectation that the very most they could or should expect from a boy is a hookup...And now the girls have had enough. We’ve sunk pretty low, culturally speaking, when we’ve left it to the 14- and 15-year-old girls of the nation to make one of the last, great stands for human dignity. But they’re making it, by God."

...Barf

Every adult generation bitches and moans about how the kids are "doing it" younger and younger and every time they do they are proven wrong by the statistics that show that sexual activity in adolescents has stayed essentially the same since scientists like Alfred Kinsey began surveying and recording sex statistics in the late 1940s and early 1950s. And the results are...that the average age for loss of virginity worldwide from 1940 - 2010 is between the ages of 15 - 19 years old, regardless of marital status. Culture, no matter how strict and puritan (a la the 1950s) to a "coarse" culture such as our own (the 1990s-00s), has little to no effect on the biological and evolutionary cues of sex and mating practices. Carolyn Butler, of The Washington Post, writes about the new Center for Disease Control survey on sexual behavior in teens:

This survey of more than 2,700 teenagers across the country found that 43 percent of boys and 42 percent of girls between ages 15 and 19 say they have had sex, a figure that's more or less unchanged since 2002 and compares with 55 percent of boys and 51 percent of girls in 1988.

Oh, wait a second. What did I just read there?  Oh, overall sexual activity DECREASED from 1988? Take another look at teenage sexual trends from 1991 to 2009 and you'll find that the only statistics that have increased since 1991 is use of a condom during intercourse and use of birth control.  Sounds like good news to me.  Way to go younger generation.  As we contemplate this information about how this generation is MORE chaste than earlier periods (within that general region of roughly 50% losing their virginity between 15-19), let's hear some more from Ms. Flanagan.

"Unlike the girls of my era, who looked forward to sex, not as a physical pleasure (although it would—eventually—become that for most of us), but as a way of becoming ever closer to our boyfriends, these girls are preparing themselves for acts and experiences that are frightening, embarrassing, uncomfortable at best, painful at worst."

Yes, the world of distant oral sex is much more uncomfortable and painful than having intercourse through their own "Boyfriend Story" as Ms. Flanagan calls it. Here she recounts how even her progressive mother who told her to not get married just so she could have sex, but "just have sex with him" in order to retain her independence and her chance for a career.  According to Ms. Flanagan, her mother could not have envisioned the HORROR of today's youth sexual culture.

"But no matter how forward-thinking, no matter how progressive, those long-ago women might seem to us now, they shared one unquestioned assumption about girls and sex, a premise that, if expressed today, might cast doubt on one’s commitment to girls’ sexual liberation: all of them, to a woman, believed in the Boyfriend Story."

Let me tell you what the "Boyfriend Story" brought Ms. Flanagan's generation.  The "Boyfriend Story" got girls in the 1970s and 1980s PREGNANT, because all of those tender girls did the right thing that didn't hurt their tender souls and they made sweet tender love to their boyfriends - and I'll say it again, THEY GOT PREGNANT.  Some of them got abortions, some of them had shotgun weddings and then divorced in record numbers, and some of those girlfriends watched their "Boyfriend Story" walk out on them when they got knocked up.

Yes, this younger generation performs a lot more oral sex than generations preceding it.  Why?  Because we've learned from our parents that getting pregnant before we're ready can lead to more disastrous results than some oral sex that we may have felt ashamed by.

Are there instances where girls are coerced by corrupt boys and a culture that makes them feel like they have to "hookup" to be cool, or win a guy? Yes, and that is something we need to work on teaching our adolescent boys.  But trust me, if I were a father I'd rather have my teenage daughter be upset about an oral sex encounter that she felt "not pure" about, then be lured by her own perfect "Boyfriend Story" in the back seat of a car and have the rest of her adolescent life be ended by the arrival of a responsibility so big, it could crush her.

The younger generation and sexual culture has evolved to reduce their instances of unwanted pregnancy, we should salute their progress. It's Ms. Flanagan's assertion that certain sex acts are more kind than others just leaves a bitter taste in my mouth.