Sex slave co-eds & high school playmates

[Advisory: While this post does not contain any explicitly offensive language, it does deal with a topic that some may find offensive.]

The word is that coital sexual intercourse is down among teens and college students (at least relatively) and that oral sex is up -- even among early teens and pre-teens.

This observation, indeed, is a 'relative' one: according to the Guttmacher Institute, at least three-quarters of teenagers in the developed world have sexual intercourse by age 20, and teenagers in the U.S. are more likely to have sexual intercourse before age 15 and shorter and more sporadic sexual relationships -- and therefore more partners -- than teenagers in Canada, France, Great Britain and Sweden.

The new twist: teenagers seem to be waiting longer to have intercourse. For example, the percentage of U.S Grade 12 students who reported having had intercourse declined from 66.7% in 1991 to 60.5% in 2001.

But before you start applauding the victory of wait-until-marriage chastity ring set, read this: teens are replacing intercourse with more alternatives they perceive as safer. For example more than 50% of U.S. teens ages 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex. This number increases to almost 70% for those who are 18 and 19. In a 2002 study of males and females aged 15-19, 11% of both reported having engaged in anal sex at least once. But the big spike is in oral sex. ("Teen Sex Statistics," About: Sexuality; see also Laura Sessions Stepp, "Study: Half of All Teens Have Had Oral Sex" (Washington Post, September 16, 2005).

One reason for the shift is likely the false assumption (perhaps even promoted by school guidance counselors) that oral sex lacks the health risks that come with coital sex ("Teens and Oral Sex...There are Risks," About: HIV/AIDS). Another reason may be that the disassociation of oral sex from coital sex allows the partners to indulge the fantasy of not being sexually active at all (Lisa Remez, "Oral Sex Among Adolescents: Is It Sex or Is It Abstinence?" Family Planning Perspectives, December, 2000).

Teens and college students today have evolved a new form of relationship -- the sex-only relationship, described in their philistine parlance as "friends with benefits" -- the multiple partners with whom they "hook up" for usually unprotected and mostly oral sex. I know these students. Some are enrolled in my classes. I have had students tell me about such encounters in journaling exercises. I have had students tell me more than I ever wanted to know about their experiences -- one of them about thirteen partners that semester, and so on.

Two things strike me about this phenomenon. On the one hand, the mind-molders who promote this sort of libertinism and promiscuity, and the students who buy into their mealy-mouthed justifications, parrot the confident language of self-mastery and liberation. On the other hand, the students who succumb to a life-style of uncommitted recreational sex invariably seem to end up in exploitive relationships with jaded outlooks on life -- victims either of their own eviscerating and dehumanizing predatory attitudes or of the predation of others.

I wonder especially what's in it for girls and young women.

Oral sex.

Now there's a rip-roaring, sexually free-thinking, good time for your little girl! A real enlightened future for women's liberation in that!

They say you reap the whirlwind. This whirlwind is the yield of the sexual revolution of the sixties, the self-indulgence of the seventies, the affluence of the eighties, the recreational sex culture of the nineties, the "hook up" culture of today . . . and the pervasive indulgence of predatory males.

This is pathetic. Women, wake up! You have nothing but your Monica Lewinsky stains to lose.

If you have children, teach them well. The barbarians are at the gates -- on the inside looking out.