Girls aren’t “going wild” after all

I was really glad to see that The New York Times picked up on the misplaced moral panic over teenage sex.

Parents have worried for generations about changing moral values and risky behavior among young people…
…The talk show host Tyra Banks declared a teen sex crisis last fall after her show surveyed girls about sexual behavior. A few years ago, Oprah Winfrey warned parents of a teenage oral-sex epidemic.
The news is troubling, but it’s also misleading. While some young people are clearly engaging in risky sexual behavior, a vast majority are not. The reality is that in many ways, today’s teenagers are more conservative about sex than previous generations.

But what reporter Tara Parker-Pope left out is that this isn’t just about panic over teen sex – it’s about about panic over girls having sex.
After all, it’s not boys who are being called prostitots and “girls gone wild.” It’s not boys who are targeted by abstinence only education and purity balls. And it’s definitely not boys who have been the subject of books like Prude, Unhooked and Girls Gone Mild. It’s us.
But that aside, it was refreshing to see a story about how well young people are doing. And they are. Teenagers are using contraception more (if they haven’t been privy to abstinence only education, of course, in which case they don’t use contraception and have increased rates of oral and anal sex) and more effectively.
Now if we could just get the media (and conservatives, and anti-feminist authors) to stop obsessing over young women’s sex lives…

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