I’m not asking a sociological question here, since the stats can be accessed with a Google search. What I’m asking is on a more personal level-did people at your high school when you were a teen generally have sex or not. If so what types of people did have sex or not?
I’m asking this 'cause from what I know the vast majority of the people I’m fairly close to as friends to at high school (we’re talking juniors and seniors here in general) has had sex or even anything close to it like making out heavily. In fact, they tend to think of teenage sex as stupid and mostly done by the “wrong” crowd and look down their noses on it. BTW, most of my friends are Asians along with some whites and can be classified by and large as “AP students”. Religiously and politically though they are fairly diverse, and most of them are ok with gay marriage and other sexual matters on a moral level.
Schoolwide, though, teen sex is almost certainly more widespread considering the sort of heavy making-out I see as I walk by and the conversations I hear (including that of a teen pregnancy).
When I was in high school I know a lot of people did. The ones you knew whether or not they were having sex, were. Nobody went around saying they didn’t have sex, except one girl who liked to talk about how she was waiting, and then when she decided TO have sex, she was always going around conspicuously taking her birth control pills at school. Attention whores, I swear…
I assume most of the nerds weren’t having sex, but it’s not like they said so. I don’t know of anyone who thought it was STUPID for teens to have sex. Sounds like a fun group though.
Catholic high school, college prep, population about 600. I was in a “middle” crowd. I hung with them at lunch but outside of that we all sometimes hung out with other groups. I tended toward the theater and music people, but my BFF was a cheerleader so I ended up around jocks too. I’d say it was greater than half sexually active among the people I knew. My boyfriend when I was a senior was in his 20’s, so yeah I had sex lots and was on the pill. This was in the 80’s though, and times were different.
Hell, I distinctly remember a girl getting made fun of by other girls in gym class in 6th grade for being a virgin. In this school you at least had to pretend you were having sex even if you weren’t.
When I was in high school (1981-85), I was enough of a social outsider that I couldn’t really tell you what was going on sexually, except that, whatever my classmates were doing or not doing, they weren’t being really obvious about it.
I only knew one or two girls in high school that were definitely sexually active, but I attended high school in Korea, which is pretty conservative compared to most Western countries. A lot of my friends from the US had some kind of sexual experience in high school.
It was co-ed. But back then, even co-ed schools separated their classes into boy classes and girl classes - my year was actually the first to have co-ed classes.
Segregated schools are not the norm anymore; I would say most of the single gender schools are the really old ones. Any school built in more recent times is going to be co-ed.
Anyway. While Korea has become more liberal in the past few decades, they are still way behind when it comes to attitudes about sex.
I went to a strict Christian school that definitely had some kind of effect on the morals of my peers. Most whom I know still claim, 20+ years after graduation, that they waited until they were married, or at least engaged. Most are actually still married to their first loves. It was considered shocking that, when I was 22, I moved in with my 19 year old girlfriend, if that tells you how strict the morals were among my peers. There was a single pregnancy in my high school of which I’m aware, and they actually did that whole “girl ‘goes to live with an aunt’ for nine months, then comes back and nothing is ever said again about what occurred” thing that seems so 50s… this was in 1991. (Overall, she and her sisters were considered amoral harlots in when they were in school, because they dated public school boys.)
I now work with/go to school with/am friends with a large number of kids who are 18-22 and mostly from secular schools, and from what they report, sex was fairly common in their groups from ages 15+, usually in the form of serial monogamy, with girl/girl experimentation encouraged and not looked on as violating monogamy with whomever their boyfriends may be.
I’m a teacher at a university in China. There are several cheap short-time hotels outside the gates of my school, and there is a billboard advertising abortions about 50 feet from the school gate.
Most of my students insist that at age 18 or 19 they are very traditional and are too young to have a boyfriend or girlfriend. Their total focus is on their studies, or so they say.
Do I believe what they tell me ? No.
Most Chinese universities have cheap hotels located on campus, or just outside the school gates.
Several years ago I was teaching at a high school in China, and many of my students had secret relationships. The relationships were secret because they would be punished for “neglecting their studies”.
My friends and I were mostly AP students, athletes, and cheerleaders. Nearly everyone in my crowd was having sex by the end of freshman year, and even the shy kids had caught up by senior year. One teen pregnancy in my graduating class (the reigning beauty pageant winner) but she married before we graduated and raised an awesome kid. All of my girlfriends used birth control obtained via the health department, and most were serial monogamists. Sex wasn’t scandalous; it was fun and what couples did who were in love.
Well, that seems like a *bit *of a rosy view of teenage sex. I mean, sure it can work out fine, but everyone was having sex as a freshman and it was all in good fun? That seems unlikely. Sex in teenagers AND adults can result in a lot of heartbreak. That doesn’t mean people shouldn’t or won’t do it, but there can be painful consequences, particularly with teenage girls.
Forgot to mention: I was the only member of my crowd who didn’t belong to a church. I attended whatever church my boyfriends or friends did when it was expected of me, but the rest of my sexually active friends were very active in Methodist, Baptist, Presbyterian, and Catholic church activities. Sex was denied or hidden from parents, relatives, clergy, and church elders, but every kid I associated with was sexually active and also decent, nice, and diligent about schoolwork. Well, inasmuch as any self-absorbed, lovestruck, hormone-driven teen can be.
Sexually active, sure… but 85% of people didn’t really know what they were doing.
So with that in mind, the amount of teenagers engaging in full on proper sexual intercourse was quite slim.
It was more of a rebellious, let’s try it just cause kinda thing, like cigarettes and beer and nude magazines and ear piercings. No one took it seriously except the low self esteem chicks whom needed attention.
Sure, as it can and usually does in adults. It’s silly to pretend that adults are somehow exempt from heartache and birth control scares because we’re a little more guarded and selective; no amount of experience and perspective guarantees that we’ll get exactly what we want. I can only speak for myself and the friends I’m still in touch with, but most of our memories are fond ones. Nothing like that all-in, nothing held back, unjaded teenage love. Things could have gone badly, but we were goal-oriented smart kids and most of us took pains to be safe and used discretion.
The snippet above is so full of assumptions and stereotypes that I barely know where to begin. But I’ll try to focus: it’s obvious that you want to believe that the real reason that you and your smart-kid friends aren’t having sex is because you’re above it all: sex, more specifically teen sex, is stupid.
Granted, sex can be stupid, when the participants haven’t thought through - and taken steps to manage - the potential physical and emotional consequences. Teens, being newcomers to the world of indulging their sexuality, are almost certainly more likely to have stupid sex than older people. But hey - we all have to start somewhere. Experience is how we learn.
You probably don’t want to acknowledge this, but it’s still true: Smart teens are capable of having smart sex. I know this through personal experience: I became sexually active at age 16, in the context of a reasonably sound relationship, using appropriate protection. My boyfriend was valedictorian and I didn’t do too shabbily either. I have no regrets about our sexual relationship and to the best of my knowledge neither does he. (We moved on to different partners decades ago, but occasionally exchange friendly e-mails.)
I’m going to guess that the reason you and you buddies aren’t having sex is not entirely because of your belief that teen sex is stupid. It’s also because you are rationalizing away the fact that you don’t have opportunities to have sex. How quickly your views might change if those opportunities happen to open up!
It’s fine if you aren’t sexually active; plenty of people don’t start having sex in high school, and turn out as well or better than their copulating peers. It’s the people who forgo honest self-assessment in favor of soothing rationalizations that I’m more worried about. Try not to be one of them.
I went to a boys-only high school (although there was a girls-only one right next door). Some of the boys, in the later years, were certainly having sex, but I am pretty sure it was a small minority. I am also pretty sure, however, that most of the others (including me) would have cut their right arm off if they thought it wold mean they would get to have sex.
Of course, this was a long time ago and sex had only just been invented.