The results are in from a new survey on teenage oral sex and and it really blows:
More than half of American teens age 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex, increasing to nearly 70 percent for those who are 18 and 19, according to the largest federal study of the nation’s sexual pactices.
The study also found that 11 percent of women age 18 to 44 reported having had at least one homosexual experience in their lifetime, up from 4 percent in the last study, conducted in 1992.
Taken together, the two findings suggest a possible shift in sexual practices, in which women and girls are using oral and gay sex “as a safer alternative than [vaginal] sex with men,” said epidemiologist William Mosher of the National Center for Health Statistics, the study’s lead author.
“If it is seen as a safer alternative, it is an interesting response to the campaigns to reduce teen pregnancy and to reduce sexually transmitted diseases and HIV,” he said.
And protection? Read the rest yourself but it’s as Daffy Duck would say: “Protection, proschmection….”
The New York Times has this:
Oral sex among teenagers has in recent years become a topic of rampant speculation and little solid data, apart from a 1995 Urban Institute study of adolescent boys. The new statistics confirm that study’s findings that oral sex is very much part of the teenage sexual repertory. According to the survey, more than half of all teenagers aged 15 to 19 have engaged in oral sex – including nearly a quarter of those who have never had intercourse.
Among the findings in the new study, “Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures,” were the following:
¶Men age 30 to 44 have had a median of six to eight sexual partners in their lifetimes; women’s median was about four.
¶Among both men and women age 15 to 44, about two-thirds have had only one sexual partner in the last year. Ten percent of the men and 7 percent of the women have had three or more partners in that time.
¶About 4 percent of men and women described themselves as homosexual or bisexual, but in a finding that surprised the researchers, 14 percent of the women aged 18 to 29 reported at least one homosexual experience, more than twice the proportion for young men.
And the New York Daily News sees it this way:
The government has taken its biggest-ever peek into America’s bedrooms – and found that women have become more sexually adventurous than ever. One in seven young women confides she has had a sexual encounter with another woman, a striking rise from past studies, federal researchers said.
“That was surprising to us,” said study author William Mosher, a statistician with the National Center for Health Statistics. “The previous studies had not shown as much.”
The survey found that among women 18 to 29, 14% – or one in seven – say they’ve had a “sexual experience” with another woman, although it didn’t define the term.
Just 4% of women that age said they had had their same-sex encounter in the past 12 months, suggesting the women had been experimenting, Mosher said.
In another sign of the bisexual times, 10% of women say they’re at least somewhat attracted to other women, up from 3% a decade earlier.
Among men, 6% of guys aged 18 to 29 say they’ve had sex with a man, a proportion that hasn’t changed in recent years.
The interesting thing is that this is all happening within the political context of a more conservative social climate in the U.S. Does this mean eventually some kind of generational conflict that’s more a conflict than usual?
UPDATE: Conservative Thinking has some thoughts and more info.
Joe Gandelman is a former fulltime journalist who freelanced in India, Spain, Bangladesh and Cypress writing for publications such as the Christian Science Monitor and Newsweek. He also did radio reports from Madrid for NPR’s All Things Considered. He has worked on two U.S. newspapers and quit the news biz in 1990 to go into entertainment. He also has written for The Week and several online publications, did a column for Cagle Cartoons Syndicate and has appeared on CNN.