If That 70’s Show and Dazed and Confused are to be believed, teen sex was commonplace in the 70’s. from experience, I can tell you that we weren’t exactly chaste during the 80’s. but I know nothing about what those Gen Y kids and Millenials were up to. Has anyone scientifically studied and charted teen promiscuity through the ages? If so, have the numbers been pretty consistent through the decades?
You have to define your terms carefully. Before the Pill came along there was probably less penis-vagina sex, but no lack of other methods to bring one or both partners to orgasm.
Another factor was the lack of privacy yesteryear’s teenagers had compared to now. They shared bedrooms with their siblings, having one’s own car was uncommon, college dorms were heavily chaperoned with curfews, etc. Still, where there was a will, teenagers usually found a way.
Lipstick parties, or so I’m told.
In the late 60’s, my mom just had to get used to the idea that sometimes she’d come out and find one of my older brothers having breakfast with a girl she’d never met.
Wagering my own humble opinion, I’d guess that prior to the 60’s, with the advent of the Pill and the free love movement, a smaller percentage of people were sexually active, but maybe that percentage was more active (having sex more often with the relatively small pool of available partners), whereas starting in the 60’s, more and more people were experimenting in high school & college, but probably having fewer liaisons over the course of time.
Many years ago, I knew, socially, a husband and wife who were both family and sex therapists. The husband decided to do an informal survey of his clients’ teenage sexual habits, so over a period of months, he asked all of them, “How old were you the first time you had sex, and where did it happen?” He found that over the decades, the age didn’t change much - mid to late teens for the most part - but the location did.
After about 1970, the most common location was in the home of one or the other’s parents. Before 1970, the most common location was - hang onto your seats, this one’s a doozy - CHURCH CAMP. :eek: :eek: :eek: Makes sense, though - lots of hiding places and no parents around.
I actually believe it, because at the church I attended when I was a teenager in the late 1970s, a boy and girl were caught Doing It in a Sunday School room. I didn’t believe the story then, but now I’m pretty sure it’s true.
Another therapist told me about her master’s thesis, which had a title that was something like “Sexuality in the 1960s: Revolution or Revelation?” It had to do with things like all the old family Bibles where people got married and had their first child 5 or 6 months later, all the 9-pound preemies born 7 months after the wedding, people who told their children that they were married one year earlier than they actually were, etc.
And my father was born in 1933 to a 17-year-old mother. Everyone thinks that never happened back then, but that’s not true. It happened all the time.
The sexual revolution didn’t make a big difference in teen sex; it just made it more open. The pill helped, but few teenagers were on the pill. Teens had sex, but condoms were the method of birth control, and it was a rite of passage for a teenage boy to buy them (especially since they were kept behind the counter of drugstores and you had to ask*).
But from the turn of the century on, the most common location for teen sex was in a car. Often at the drive in or at a “lover’s lane.”
*I had to drive to a town where I wasn’t known, since the druggists in our area all knew me and I was worried it might get back to my parents.
I believe you. I did my share of fooling around with girls (but no intercourse) at church-related things (albeit in the 80s).
Where those actually a thing? I always thought those were an urban legend.
Statistics seem to indicate that their is plenty of fornication in the Millennial generation. However there is (relatively) little such behaviour among those kids I know relatively well.
One factor not mentioned was that many teens were having sex prior to the 1960s…to their spouses. Average age of marriage was much younger then than now. Heck, going back before my generation (married at 26)…
My parents, both sets of grandparents and all of my great grandparents were married before they turned 20. Heck, my sister did that, too. I was the odd one out.
One side effect: a five generation photo of women in my family.
I haven’t read it, but there’s a fairly recent book by Faramerz Dabhoiwala called The Origins of Sex: A History of the First Sexual Revolution, about the sexual revolution of the late 18th/early 19th century. According to his research, “By 1800, about a quarter of all women [in Britain] who gave birth for the first time were unmarried…by 1800, almost 40 percent of women who did marry were already pregnant.”
As one data point, colleges started doing away with restrictions on people of the opposite sex in dorms around 1970. MIT did in 1967-68, just before I got there. William & Marry did in 1972. College freshmen are teenagers, so this qualifies, I think.
Before the automobile were horse drawn carriages and buck boards. The nice thing about those were that horses often knew the way back home and didn’t need to be ‘driven’.
The clients of a sex therapist! That is about as far away from a random, unbiased sample as you could get.
Why am I not surprised? 
The bad thing is that they were a lot less common. The great majority of people didn’t have any such thing. Cars are different; cars became nearly ubiquitous and gave far more young people the chance to go off unsupervised.
Pfft, the cinnamon challenge is so, like, yesterday! These days the cool kids are all doing the condom challenge.
I suspect things didn’t change much until well into the 80s, and then the change may only have been the way it’s discussed more openly. In the 70s most girls were more circumspect about the subject, doesn’t mean they weren’t doing it, just more quiet about it. The other girls were quite popular though. It seems like they all wanted to lose their virginity before they graduated, just like the boys, but it’s just about impossible to get any actual figures, adults aren’t all that honest on sex surveys, teenagers never are.
I remember when I got my first prescription for BC pills filled. The druggist had known me since I was 7, I got a raised eyebrow. When I went to the counter to pay, the cashier was horrified until she saw the ring on my finger and said, ‘Oh! You’re engaged! That makes it okay then’.
Attitudes were very different in the 70’s.