Via Sociological Images.
That’s why you should become scientists, kids! (Because engineers don’t have sex. You want me to spell it out for you?)
I really should just leave it at that, but the sprawling, multifaceted stupidity of this public service announcement — apparently having sex, like smoking the wacky weed, kills brain cells and will cripple your SAT scores, or something — is difficult to let pass without comment. The immaturity of our cultural attitudes toward sex is flat-out embarrassing. There are real concerns that adolescents should be taught about — disease and the risk of unwanted pregnancy being the obvious ones. But they should also be taught that, as long as you are careful about such things, there is nothing wrong with having sex. Done correctly, it can be fun! Sure, there can be emotional trauma, awkward moments, broken hearts, impetuous late-night phone calls that you wish you could take back the next day. But these are downsides associated with life, not with sex per se.
But as a society, we’re too uptight and hypocritical to say these things. Instead, we get stuff like abstinence-only sex ed, with predictable results. And adolescence, which isn’t going to be an easy time of life for most people no matter how much sensible advice they are given, becomes just that much more agonizing and uncertain.
Except for engineers, of course! They have it figured out.
Fine, so sex can wait. But what about drugs and rock ‘n’ roll? Do we have to wait until tenure to start with the “edible panties, firearms and blow”?
The immaturity of our cultural attitudes toward sex is flat-out embarrassing.
Well, at least it is decidedly weird (much like the US attitude towards alcohol). Otoh, the fertility rate in the USA is higher than almost anywhere else in the so-called developed world. The NYT recently had a very interesting article about the decreasing population in Europe titled No Babies?. Especially in Germany I’ve repeatedly read complaints about young women in academia who don’t properly reproduce (one gets touchy on the issue at some point). Makes me wonder whether one day I’ll get advertisements saying “It’s our Future! Have sex! The paper can wait.”
😉
I’m pretty sure Ijon Tichy’s statistics came from Counterpoint–the MIT/Wellesley journal of rational discourse. Not a high quality or scientific source. The used to do those sex surveys every year or so, and back when the magazine was a least marginally respectable, they got pretty substantial numbers of responses. I’m not saying this is accurate, but one survey they did during that period gave virginity rates at MIT starting at 80% for freshmen and falling about 20% per year, with graduation students at about 15%.
Ijon’s numbers come from here:
http://counterpoint.mit.edu/~webserver/Documents/archives/Counterpoint_V21_I3_2001_Nov.pdf
Anecdotally. back when I went to high school there were a reasonably number of people who put off dating until college applicaitons went in- and they generally were more successful at getting into the 4-year institutions that offer education degrees than were those who were chasing tail since freshman year.
Can somebody please explain to me how “Sex can wait” = “Abstinence only”?
I meant engineering degree, not education. Perhaps I should have interrupted this orgy-in-progress long enough to proofread…
Why is sex seen as something optional? In that the small chance of something unwanted happening (pregnancy, disease) implies that you shouldn’t be doing it at all — unlike, say, drinking, driving, walking down the street and eating peanuts (you could choke, and it’s not like peanuts are necessary or anything).
Luke@22: boy, I sure would not have wanted to become pregnant at 13. But what does that have to do with anything? Did somebody start demanding that 13 year olds should have more sex? I think the point is that US society (not Dutch, luckily) is so unbelievably prudish on this issue, which causes many more problems than it solves. You know people who regret getting sexually active at a young age, I know people who don’t. I also know people who regret not dying their hair purple when they were young enough to pull it off (she looks out of the mirror at me daily, and she’s pissed off). So what? Proof by anecdote still doesn’t hold water.
It is quite clear to me from this that the Cold War is still with us. I bet Vladimir Putin himself dreamed this up: a poster campaign that implies that becoming an engineer is “uncool”. Starved of students, the United States will be deprived of an entire generation of qualified native-born engineers and be forced to rely on immigrants for all the key technical jobs.
Come to think of it – maybe this has happened already.
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Way back when I was a teenager (mid-70s), I read a SF story that had the radical notion (for the time) that the way to get around all those raging hormones was to pair a teenage male with a mid-thirties female for a given amount of time. That way sex drives are compatible and all that energy is put to good use….
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Aramael: who says you can’t pull it off now?
Just find something messy to do no-one in Authority will go near, so they won’t see you until it’s grown out. Or refuse to acknowledge there’s any difference to them. Or any of a dozen other tactics.
There were a couple of years I made a point of asking what the prospective employer’s attitude to dyed hair would be whenever I went for an interview… I have since made my way through the entire colour range available locally, and feel like I can relax about it. “,)
Aramael: You ask if someone is demanding that 13 year olds have sex. I never claimed that anyone on this blog was making such a demand explicitly. This blog article starts with a picture of a billboard (whose authenticity has not yet been established) with the message is “sex can wait”. Sean and most of the posters here disagree with sending that message, which implies that they oppose waiting and want kids to start enjoying sex at an early age, perhaps soon after the onset of puberty.
Also, I wasn’t trying to prove anything by anecdote. I was trying to introduce another point of view into the discussion here. Of course, that was my mistake. This blog rarely resembles a discussion. People don’t listen to the arguments of others. It’s more like a collection of message scrawled on a bathroom wall.
I agree with another The Almighty Bob’s point. Certainly, if there is no age that is too young for kids to have sex, there is no age too old to dye your hair purple.
I went and downloaded that PDF from the Counterpoint web site. I’m not sure what to make of all of those percentages. I suppose that one could say that it supports the billboard’s message. Perhaps sexual activity in high school is negatively correlated with academic success. That could make for an interesting study. Maybe kids who start having sex at an early age are more likely to drop out of high school and maybe kids who “wait” are more likely to be accepted to elite colleges. Does anyone know if there a sudy out there on this?
Sex is like driving: Because of the huge potential of life-altering consequences for doing it wrong, it’s best to leave it to people whose brains are developed enough to understand and plan for that level of responsibility.
And it’s not just disease or pregnancy. It’s issues of consent, pressuring people to do things they’re not comfortable with, outright assault, lying to people to get them to have sex, not understanding when someone older or with more social power is taking advantage of your naivete, relationship stuff… a whole host of emotional and interpersonal issues that are extremely complex and therefore take a complex brain to cope with.
However, as with driving, it’s reasonable to assume that most people with normal mental and emotional development are ready to do so in a healthy and responsible way about age 15 or 16. Their brains aren’t fully finished developing (the frontal lobe isn’t fully established until age 23 or so) but they’re capable enough of complex reasoning to navigate the issues around sex.
Even as little as 100 years ago, this was not a problem because that’s about when kids started having much in the way of sexual desire. Puberty started at 14 or so, and around 16, they were ready to go. Within a year or two, they were married and making babies.
But our modern life has created two serious problems:
1. Kids are physically developing a hell of a lot faster. A friend who works in education says he’s seen girls as young as 6 with the first stages of breast development. Brain development, however, is not accelerated, creating little kids with a ton of hormones and no concept of how to handle them.
2. We no longer live in an agrarian society in which success in life depends solely on understanding how to take over the family farm. Survival in our complex world requires complex training. Childhood isn’t fully over until college is. And that means that people aren’t in a practical position to marry and raise children of their own until they’re well into their late 20s.
In short: Early puberty + a late start to self-sufficiency = a much, much longer period of time in which a given person is going to have sexual desire without the ability to handle the potential consequences of an unintended pregnancy.
Now, the hardcore anti-sex (and anti-pleasure) Puritans would have us believe that people really are supposed to totally, completely resist any and all expressions of sexual desire for 10-15 years.
Most of us, however, understand that this is ridiculously impractical.
So what do we do instead?
Three things:
1. Work on curbing the environmental factors that are artificially accelerating puberty. This includes things like ensuring that water supplies are free of traces of hormones, getting rid of BPA, hormone-altered food supplies, etc.
2. Work on foolproof, inexpensive contraception and disease prevention options.
3. Promote–yes, promote–masturbation as an acceptable alternative to involving a partner in satisfying one’s sexual needs.
I would be horrified if my 12-year-old were fooling around with the neighbor’s kid. But if she wanted a lot of private time in her room? No worries. Have at it. It’s perfectly safe sex, it’s actually physically healthy (yay pelvic blood flow) and there are no worries of disease, pregnancy or serious emotional damage that may come from someone who doesn’t understand the complexity of mature sexual relationships.
Interestingly, 35% of M.I.T. graduate students are virgins.
Phone numbers, man, phone numbers please.
Regarding the statistics given about college students and virginity- am I the only one who thinks asking a bunch of 19 year olds how much they have sex is going to yield slightly skewed results?
Homosexuality.
Just sayin’.
Yvette (#40),
Well, naturally, all the countervailing cultural pressures to over- or under-report one’s activity cancel each other out exactly.
As an undergrad Engr. at the Univ.of Florida in 1973, it was painfully obvious: Engineers were NOT getting laid ! They were just toooo nerdy, & were out of touch with the tenor of the times….I later switched to physics out of frustration with the boring engr. cirriculum, which in turn empowered my already out-of-control ego, and Lo & Behold, I started to get laid !
The `immoral’ of my story: Chix would rather have their Hamiltonians diagonalized, then their shunts short-circuited. Keep this in mind while deciding on your major.
Aramael- You asked if anyone is really demanding 13-year-olds to have more sex.
Sadly, the answer is yes. Just as girls (and boys) receive pressure from peers and the media to wear certain clothes, weigh a certain amount, read certain things, and think a certain way, they also receive pressure from these sources to have sex. (I believe the virgin stereotype has already been deemed uncool by this message board.)
So the propaganda comes from both extremes of the controversy: advertisements like the one above implying that one cannot become an engineer if they have sex as well as social pressure implying that a person is doomed to an eternity of geekiness if they do not have sex by a certain age.
Sadder still is that our education system fails teenagers horribly by offering nothing but abstinence only sex education. The United States Federal Government will pour $50 million dollars this year into grants for states who will provide a 75 percent match in funds for abstinence only education in public schools. (This is 28 states the last time I checked.) This means that the 13-year-old girl mentioned in Luke’s post will not be armed with the information enabling her to make a wise decision about whether or not to have sex. She will have no idea how an abortion is performed or what a traumatic procedure it could be for a girl that young. Many teens are more than smart enough to decide for themselves whether or not to have sex, if only they had a reliable source of information on the truth of the matter with which to base their decision making process on.
The saddest thing of all is that this failure of our public education system turns the personal decision of sexual activity over to media companies and public and religious institutions. When kids do not have information to base a personal decision on, they succumb to outside pressure. When all this pressure goes uncombated by the promotion of education and rational thought, it damages the impressionable psyche of a young teenager and dibilitates independent thinking.
And the saddest of all sad things is that kids have to trust public education for sex education in the first place because teenage sex is such a taboo and controversial subject that kids cannot trust their parents or older role models for reliable and truthful information about sex, birth control, pregnancy, abortion, and the whole shebang.
Luke: it looks like a discussion to me … I did read what you wrote, the second time as well, and I don’t think you made the case that people want people to start having sex younger; the point is that young people are having sex, so how should we approach this? Promoting abstinence has the advantage of teaching a method that is 100% effective at preventing unwanted pregnancy and spread of STDs. Unfortunately, it has one fatal flaw: it doesn’t work.
Acknowledging that young people have sex, and wishing that people were not so prudish about it, is not the same as encouraging them. Indeed, being less prudish and more open gives them a better chance of making the right decision for themselves.
Naomi,
I don’t think it requires any appeal to outside pressure to see that young people might want to have sex. The human sex drive is exceedingly powerful in most people, after all.
Contrary to the Conventional Wisdom, abstinence education appears to significantly decrease early sexual activity & teenage pregnancy.
Paraphrasing the late George Carlin:
“Why is it that people who are against sex education are people you wouldn’t want to fuck in the first place?”
I’m often surprised how much my culture (American) implies that sex is a reflection of a person’s worth. We act as if not having sex until a later age reflects something wrong with the plumbing or a general unattractiveness in the individual. There are immense pressures on young people (especially young adults) to have sex. I phrase things abstractly here, but there are very specific examples.
For example, I myself am a 23-yo male who does not consider sex a priority at the moment. I am waiting for someone with whom I can make the kinds of commitments I am comfortable with. I am aware of the attachment the act will generate in me for that person and I do not want to tread there lightly. I believe there should be something of a ritual surrounding such a profound act.
Yet this attitude is considered deviant! People explain me away by calling me “gay” or not having “the balls” to do it. I am comfortable with my decision, by I won’t pretend that these frequent reminders don’t bother me or cause self-doubt.
Either way, I think it’s crazy that my attitude is so easily scoffed at.
Animals in fable have been used through out the history of the world to express human traits – We City dwellers neuter our pets and have no idea how animals breed or relate to each other- This is too bad; for any person with an imagination; who has had the privilege to ride and handle – say a well mannered stallion can see themselves and *others* in these goings on.
Mostly it is pretty dangerous stuff for everyone involved – in fact most male animals are either eliminated, neutered, kept isolated or trained as engineers.