During
the
[2008] campaign, the media has largely respected calls to treat Bristol Palin’s pregnancy as a private matter. But the reactions to it have exposed a
cultural rift that mirrors America’s dominant political divide. Social liberals
in the country’s “blue states” tend to support sex education and are not
particularly troubled by the idea that many teenagers have sex before marriage,
but would regard a teen-age daughter’s pregnancy as devastating news. And the
social conservatives in “red states” generally advocate abstinence-only
education and denounce sex before marriage, but are relatively unruffled if a
teen-ager becomes pregnant, as long as she doesn’t choose to have an abortion.
A handful of social scientists and family-law scholars have recently begun
looking closely at this split. Last year, Mark Regnerus, a sociologist at the
University of Texas at Austin, published a startling book called “Forbidden
Fruit: Sex and Religion in the Lives of American Teenagers,” and he is working
on a follow-up that includes a section titled “Red Sex, Blue Sex.” His findings
are drawn from a national survey that Regnerus and his colleagues conducted of
some thirty-four hundred thirteen to seventeen-year-olds, and from a
comprehensive government study of adolescent health known as
Add Health. Regnerus argues that religion is a good indicator of attitudes toward sex, but a
poor one of sexual behavior, and that this gap is especially wide among
teenagers who identify themselves as evangelical. The vast majority of white
evangelical adolescents seventy-four per cent say that they believe in
abstaining from sex before marriage. (Only half of
mainline Protestants, and a quarter of Jews, say that they believe in
abstinence.) Moreover, among
the major religious groups, evangelical virgins are the least likely to
anticipate that sex will be pleasurable, and the most likely to believe that
having sex will cause their partners to lose respect for them. (Jews most often
cite pleasure as a reason to have sex, and say that an unplanned pregnancy would
be an embarrassment.)
But,
according to Add Health data, evangelical teenagers are more
sexually active than Mormons
[LINK:
Dr.
Chris Foster of BYU],
mainline Protestants [LINK:
Dr. Van Buskirk],
and Jews. On average, white evangelical Protestants make their “sexual début” to
use the festive term of social-science researchers shortly after turning
sixteen. Among major religious groups, only black Protestants begin having sex
earlier.
Another key difference in behavior, Regnerus
reports, is that evangelical Protestant teenagers are significantly less likely than other groups to use
contraception. This could be because evangelicals are also among the most likely
to believe that using contraception will send the message that they are looking
for sex. It could also be because many evangelicals are steeped in the
abstinence movement’s warnings that condoms won’t actually protect them from
pregnancy or venereal disease. More provocatively, Regnerus found that only half
of sexually active teenagers who say that they seek guidance from God or the
Scriptures when making a tough decision report using contraception every time.
By contrast, sixty-nine per cent of sexually active youth who say that they most
often follow the counsel of a parent or another trusted adult consistently use
protection.

Mormonism, one of the
world’s fastest growing
religions.
But unless you were
raised a Mormon...
|

Pick one up for a friend! |
|

Ken's Guide to the Bible
by Ken Smith
With
precision and pig- iron wit, this compact volume lays bare all the sex, gore, and lunacy
in the Bible.
|
The gulf between sexual belief and sexual behavior becomes apparent, too, when
you look at the outcomes of abstinence-pledge movements. Nationwide, according
to a 2001 estimate, some two and a half million people have taken a pledge to
remain celibate until marriage. Usually, they do so under the auspices of
movements such as True Love Waits or the Silver Ring Thing. Sometimes, they make
their vows at big rallies featuring Christian pop stars and laser light shows,
or at purity balls, where girls in frothy dresses exchange rings with their
fathers, who vow to help them remain virgins until the day they marry. More than
half of those who take such pledges which, unlike abstinence-only classes in
public schools, are explicitly Christian end up having sex before marriage, and
not usually with their future spouse. The movement is not the complete washout
its critics portray it as: pledgers delay sex eighteen months longer than non-pledgers,
and have fewer partners. Yet, according to the sociologists Peter Bearman, of
Columbia University, and Hannah Brückner, of Yale, communities with high rates
of pledging also have high rates of S.T.D.s. This could be because more teens
pledge in communities where they perceive more danger from sex (in which case
the pledge is doing some good); or it could be because fewer people in these
communities use condoms when they break the pledge.
Bearman and Brückner have also identified a peculiar dilemma: in some schools,
if too many teens pledge, the effort basically collapses. Pledgers apparently
gather strength from the sense that they are an embattled minority; once their
numbers exceed thirty per cent, and proclaimed chastity becomes the norm, that
special identity is lost. With such a fragile formula, it’s hard to imagine how
educators can ever get it right: once the self-proclaimed virgin clique hits the
thirty-one-per-cent mark, suddenly it’s Sodom and Gomorrah.
Religious belief apparently does make a potent difference in behavior for one
group of evangelical teenagers: those who score highest on measures of
religiosity such as how often they go to church, or how often they pray at home.
But many Americans who identify themselves as evangelicals, and who hold
socially conservative beliefs, aren’t deeply observant.
Even more important than religious conviction, Regnerus argues, is how
“embedded” a teen-ager is in a network of friends, family, and institutions that
reinforce his or her goal of delaying sex, and that offer a plausible
alternative to America’s sexed-up consumer culture. A church, of course, isn’t
the only way to provide a cohesive sense of community. Close-knit families make
a difference. Teenagers who live with both biological parents are more likely
to be virgins than those who do not. And adolescents who say that their families
understand them, pay attention to their concerns, and have fun with them are
more likely to delay intercourse, regardless of religiosity.
A terrific 2005 documentary, “The Education of Shelby Knox,” tells the story of
a teen-ager from a Southern Baptist family in Lubbock, Texas, who has taken a
True Love Waits pledge. To the chagrin of her youth pastor, and many of her
neighbors, Knox eventually becomes an activist for comprehensive sex education.
At her high school, kids receive abstinence-only education, but, Knox says,
“maybe twice a week I see a girl walking down the hall pregnant.” In the film,
Knox seems successful at remaining chaste, but less because she took a pledge
than because she has a fearlessly independent mind and the kind of parents
who despite their own conservative leanings admire her outspokenness. Devout
Republicans, her parents end up driving her around town to make speeches that
would have curled their hair before their daughter started making them. Her
mother even comes to take pride in Shelby’s efforts, because while abstinence
pledges are lovely in the abstract, they don’t acknowledge “reality.”
Like other American teens, young evangelicals live in a world of Internet porn,
celebrity sex scandals, and raunchy reality TV, and they have the same hormonal
urges that their peers have. Yet they come from families and communities in
which sexual life is supposed to be forestalled until the first night of a
transcendent honeymoon. Regnerus writes, “In such an atmosphere, attitudes about
sex may formally remain unchanged (and restrictive) while sexual activity
becomes increasingly common. This clash of cultures and norms is felt most
poignantly in the so-called Bible Belt.” Symbolic commitment to the institution
of marriage remains strong there, and politically motivating hence the drive to
outlaw gay marriage but the actual practice of it is scattershot.
Daily Sex:
365 Positions
and Activities for a Year of Great Sex! |
 |
Every
happy couple knows that sex is an integral part of a healthy relationship -
and that it takes hard work to keep the bedroom routine from getting stale.
But being sexually adventuresome takes a lot of confidence, and sometimes, a
lot of planning ahead. Now, there's Daily Sex - 365 different sex tips and
techniques for every day of the year. Organized into 12 month-long calendars
that can be started at any time, each page consists of thrilling new
positions for intercourse, titillating manual and oral activities, and other
methods of fantastic foreplay. By encouraging daily intimacy, it will also
help to promote love, trust and communication between partners, which only
enhances the sexual experience. This is the ultimate guide to help readers
make great sex a reality - every day of the year! |
Among blue-state social liberals, commitment to the institution of marriage
tends to be unspoken or discreet, but marriage in practice typically works
pretty well. Two family-law scholars, Naomi Cahn, of George Washington
University, and June Carbone, of the University of Missouri at Kansas City, are
writing a book on the subject, and they argue that “red families” and “blue
families” are “living different lives, with different moral imperatives.” (They
emphasize that the Republican-Democrat divide is less important than the higher
concentration of “moral-values voters” in red states.) In 2004, the states with
the highest divorce rates were Nevada, Arkansas, Wyoming, Idaho, and West
Virginia (all red states in the 2004 election); those with the lowest were
Illinois, Massachusetts, Iowa, Minnesota, and New Jersey. The highest
teen-pregnancy rates were in Nevada, Arizona, Mississippi, New Mexico, and Texas
(all red); the lowest were in North Dakota, Vermont, New Hampshire, Minnesota,
and Maine (blue except for North Dakota). “The ‘blue states’ of the Northeast
and Mid-Atlantic have lower teen birthrates, higher use of abortion, and lower
percentages of teen births within marriage,” Cahn and Carbone observe. They also
note that people start families earlier in red states in part because they are
more inclined to deal with an unplanned pregnancy by marrying rather than by
seeking an abortion.
Of all variables, the age at marriage may be the pivotal difference between red
and blue families. The five states with the lowest median age at marriage are
Utah, Oklahoma, Idaho, Arkansas, and Kentucky, all red states, while those with
the highest are all blue: Massachusetts, New York, Rhode Island, Connecticut,
and New Jersey. The red-state model puts couples at greater risk for divorce;
women who marry before their mid-twenties are significantly more likely to
divorce than those who marry later. And younger couples are more likely to be
contending with two of the biggest stressors on a marriage: financial struggles
and the birth of a baby before, or soon after, the wedding.
There are, of course, plenty of exceptions to these rules messily divorcing
professional couples in Boston, high-school sweethearts who stay sweetly
together in rural Idaho. Still, Cahn and Carbone conclude, “the paradigmatic
red-state couple enters marriage not long after the woman becomes sexually
active, has two children by her mid-twenties, and reaches the critical period of
marriage at the high point in the life cycle for risk-taking and
experimentation. The paradigmatic blue-state couple is more likely to experiment
with multiple partners, postpone marriage until after they reach emotional and
financial maturity, and have their children (if they have them at all) as their
lives are stabilizing.”
Some of these differences in sexual behavior come down to class and education.
Regnerus and Carbone and Cahn all see a new and distinct “middle-class morality”
taking shape among economically and socially advantaged families who are not
social conservatives. In Regnerus’s
survey, the
teenagers who espouse this new
morality are tolerant of premarital sex (and of contraception and abortion) but
are themselves cautious about pursuing it. Regnerus writes, “They are interested
in remaining free from the burden of teenage pregnancy and the sorrows and
embarrassments of sexually transmitted diseases. They perceive a bright future
for themselves, one with college, advanced degrees, a career, and a family.
Simply put, too much seems at stake. Sexual intercourse is not worth the risks.”
These are the kids who tend to score high on measures of “strategic
orientation” how analytical, methodical, and fact-seeking they are when making
decisions. Because these teenagers see abstinence as unrealistic, they are not
opposed in principle to sex before marriage just careful about it. Accordingly,
they might delay intercourse in favor of oral sex, not because they cherish the
idea of remaining “technical virgins” but because they assess it as a safer
option. “Solidly middle- or upper-middle-class adolescents have considerable
socioeconomic and educational expectations, courtesy of their parents and their
communities’ lifestyles,” Regnerus writes. “They are happy with their direction,
generally not rebellious, tend to get along with their parents, and have few
moral qualms about expressing their nascent sexuality.” They might have loved
Ellen Page in “Juno,” but in real life they’d see having a baby at the wrong
time as a tragic derailment of their life plans. For this group, Regnerus says,
unprotected sex has become “a moral issue like smoking or driving a car without
a seatbelt. It’s not just unwise anymore; it’s wrong.”
Each of these models of sexual behavior has drawbacks in the blue-state scheme,
people may postpone child-bearing to the point where infertility becomes an
issue. And delaying child-bearing is better suited to the more affluent, for
whom it yields economic benefits, in the form of educational opportunities and
career advancement. But Carbone and Cahn argue that the red-state model is
clearly failing on its own terms producing high rates of teen pregnancy,
divorce, sexually transmitted disease, and other dysfunctional outcomes that
social conservatives say they abhor. In “Forbidden Fruit,” Regnerus offers an
“unscientific postscript,” in which he advises social conservatives that if they
really want to maintain their commitment to chastity and to marriage, they’ll
need to do more to help young couples stay married longer. As the Reverend Rick
Marks, a Southern Baptist minister, recently pointed out in a Florida newspaper,
“Evangelicals are fighting gay marriage, saying it will break down traditional
marriage, when divorce has already broken it down.” Conservatives may need to
start talking as much about saving marriages as they do about, say, saving
oneself for marriage.
“Having to wait until age twenty-five or thirty to have sex is unreasonable,”
Regnerus writes. He argues that religious organizations that advocate chastity
should “work more creatively to support younger marriages. This is not the 1950s
(for which I am glad), where one could bank on social norms, extended (and
larger) families, and clear gender roles to negotiate and sustain early family
formation.”
Evangelicals could start, perhaps, by trying to untangle the contradictory
portrayals of sex that they offer to teenagers. In the Shelby Knox documentary,
a youth pastor, addressing an assembly of teens, defines intercourse as “what
two dogs do out on the street corner they just bump and grind awhile, boom boom
boom.” Yet a typical evangelical text aimed at young people, “Every Young
Woman’s Battle,” by Shannon Ethridge and Stephen Arterburn, portrays sex between
two virgins as an ethereal communion of innocent souls: “physical, mental,
emotional, and spiritual pleasure beyond description.” Neither is the most
realistic or helpful view for a young person to take into marriage, as a few
advocates of abstinence acknowledge. The savvy young Christian writer Lauren
Winner, in her book “Real Sex: The Naked Truth About Chastity,” writes, “Rather
than spending our unmarried years stewarding and disciplining our desires, we
have become ashamed of them. We persuade ourselves that the desires themselves
are horrible. This can have real consequences if we do get married.” Teenagers
and single adults are “told over and over not to have sex, but no one ever
encourages” them “to be bodily or sensual in some appropriate way” getting to
know and appreciate what their bodies can do through sports, especially for
girls, or even thinking sensually about something like food. Winner goes on,
“This doesn’t mean, of course, that if only the church sponsored more softball
leagues, everyone would stay on the chaste straight and narrow. But it does mean
that the church ought to cultivate ways of teaching Christians to live in their
bodies well so that unmarried folks can still be bodily people, even though
they’re not having sex, and so that married people can give themselves to sex
freely.”
Too often, though, evangelical literature directed at teenagers forbids all
forms of sexual behavior, even masturbation. “Every Young Woman’s Battle,” for
example, tells teenagers that “the momentary relief” of “self-gratification”
can lead to “shame, low self-esteem, and fear of what others might think or that
something is wrong with you.” And it won’t slake sexual desire: “Once you begin
feeding baby monsters, their appetites grow bigger and they want MORE! It’s
better not to feed such a monster in the first place.”
Shelby Knox, who spoke at a congressional hearing on sex education earlier this
year, occupies a middle ground. She testified that it’s possible to “believe in
abstinence in a religious sense,” but still understand that abstinence-only
education is dangerous “for students who simply are not abstaining.” As Knox’s
approach makes clear, you don’t need to break out the sex toys to teach sex ed you
can encourage teenagers to postpone sex for all kinds of practical, emotional,
and moral reasons. A new “abstinence-plus” curriculum, now growing in
popularity, urges abstinence while providing accurate information about
contraception and reproduction for those who have sex anyway. “Abstinence
works,” Knox said at the hearing. “Abstinence-only-until-marriage does not.”
It might help, too, not to present virginity as the cornerstone of a virtuous
life. In certain evangelical circles, the concept is so emphasized that a girl
who regrets having been sexually active is encouraged to declare herself a
“secondary” or “born-again” virgin. That’s not an idea, surely, that helps
teenagers postpone sex or have it responsibly.
The “pro-family” efforts of social conservatives the campaigns against gay
marriage and abortion do nothing to instill the emotional discipline or the
psychological smarts that forsaking all others often involves. Evangelicals are
very good at articulating their sexual ideals, but they have little practical
advice for their young followers. Social liberals, meanwhile, are not very good
at articulating values on marriage and teen sexuality indeed, they may feel that
it’s unseemly or judgmental to do so. But in fact the new middle-class morality
is squarely pro-family. Maybe these choices weren’t originally about
values maybe they were about maximizing education and careers yet the result is
a more stable family system. Not only do couples who marry later stay married
longer; children born to older couples fare better on a variety of measures,
including educational attainment, regardless of their parents’ economic
circumstances. The new middle-class culture of intensive parenting has
ridiculous aspects, but it’s pretty successful at turning out productive,
emotionally resilient young adults. And its intensity may be one reason that
teenagers from close families see child-rearing as a project for which they’re
not yet ready. For too long, the conventional wisdom has been that social
conservatives are the upholders of family values, whereas liberals are the
proponents of a polymorphous selfishness. This isn’t true, and, every once in a
while, liberals might point that out.
Some evangelical Christians are starting to reckon with the failings of the
preaching-and-pledging approach. In “The Education of Shelby Knox,” for example,
Shelby’s father is uncomfortable, at first, with his daughter’s campaign.
Lubbock, after all, is a town so conservative that its local youth pastor tells
Shelby, “You ask me sometimes why I look at you a little funny. It’s because I
hear you speak and I hear tolerance.” But as her father listens to her arguments
he realizes that the no-tolerance ethic simply hasn’t worked in their deeply
Christian community. Too many girls in town are having sex, and having babies
that they can’t support. As Shelby’s father declares toward the end of the film,
teen-age pregnancy “is a problem a major, major problem that everybody’s just
shoving under the rug.”
Source:
newyorker.com
|