Sexual revolution is in reverse gear?

Peter Fournier and Catherine Fournier

Poplars grow fast, but they rot out from the centre and die young. So may it be with the so-called sexual revolution.

Take sexual liberation (ie:promiscuity.) As recently as 1989 the Centers for Disease Control found that 59 percent of high schoolers had had sex. In subsequent years, similar CDC studies showed the numbers dropping: 54 percent in 1990, and 43 percent in 1992. In 1994, the Roper Organization released a study done in conjunction with SIECUS (the Sex Information and Education Council of the U.S.) which found that only 36 percent of high schoolers had had sex.

While rising numbers of teens are saying no to sex, the most telling evidence against "liberation" comes from the kids who said yes. A survey published in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine in 1991 asked sexually experienced inner-city junior and senior high students what they thought was the ideal age to begin having sex: 88 pecent suggested ages older that they had been. Twenty-five percent of these sexually experienced kids also said that they believe sex before marriage is wrong. (This point of view has continued to grow in popularity. The UCLA Higher Education Research Institute surveys 250,000 new college freshmen every year. In 1987, 52 percent of the students said that casual sex was acceptable; only 42 percent of the 1996 class agrees.)

In the 1994 Roper survey cited above, 62 percent of sexually experienced girls, and 54 percent of all experienced high schoolers, said that they "should have waited." And, most poignant, a study published in a 1990 issue of Family Planning Perspectives described a questionaire distributed to one thousand sexually active girls, asking then to check off which item they wanted more information about. Eighty-four percent checked "how to say no withour hurting the other person's feelings."

The above items were taken from "Now For Some Good News" by Frederica Mathewes-Green, published in FIRST THINGS, August/September 1997.

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