Item from the Smart Marriages Archive, reproduced in the Divorce Statistics Collection
The Bergen Record

Casual sex loses its appeal for youth

Wednesday, December 8, 1999

By RUTH PADAWER Staff Writer

Twenty years ago, Eric Nielson would have been an oddity on the Rutgers
University campus, speaking unabashedly as he does about choosing to
remain a virgin. But these days, Nielson, 18, figures half his male
friends are virgins, and none has been teased for his choice.

"For me, it's a matter of waiting until I find the right girl," said
Nielson, a freshman. "It's not a moral thing; it's just what feels right
inside. I want to feel very emotionally attached to someone before I have
sex with her."

A generation after the sexual revolution dazzled young people with the
promise of freedom and excitement, the culture of liberation has lost
some of its luster. Not only has the level of sexual activity among
unmarried young people slackened in the past decade, after years of
increase, but attitudes have shifted as well.

Group dates are now de rigueur, a way to avoid pressure for intimacy.
Virginity, a source of humiliation since the 1960s, is now more often a
badge of honor. And casual sex is not as widely accepted as it once was.
College students today are more likely than their 1970s counterparts to
view such dalliance as immoral -- this at the same time that other
adults, even senior citizens, have become more easygoing about sex
outside of marriage.

"There's a real awareness on campuses these days that sexual choices are
serious choices, that they involve people's emotions and bodies in
serious ways," said Meryle Kaplan, who runs the women's center at William
Paterson University. "It's not just about AIDS, either. A generation ago,
sex was about personal expression and liberation. Now there's more
awareness of sexual violence and consequences -- the idea that it's your
body; take care of it."

Consider these findings from large-scale studies by the University of
Chicago, the University of California at Los Angeles, and the Urban
Institute:

The proportion of adolescent males who approved of premarital sex when a
couple does not plan to marry increased from 55 percent in 1979 to 80
percent in 1988. By 1995, it had dropped to 71 percent.

A record low 40 percent of college freshman agree that "if two people
really like each other, it's all right for them to have sex even if
they've known each other for a very short time." That's down from 52
percent in 1987.

The proportion of 18- to 24-year-olds who frown on sex before marriage,
calling it "always" or "almost always" wrong, has jumped more than 50
percent since 1972, to more than one in four.

Rates of sexual activity have flattened and even declined after climbing
steadily from the 1950s through the 1980s. The proportion of 17- to
19-year-old males who reported they were still virgins, for example,
jumped from 24 percent in 1988 to 32 percent in 1995.

"I have two much older brothers and I used to hear them say that losing
their virginity was the biggest goal they had in college," said Taina
Rodriguez, 18, a student at Rutgers University. "Now the biggest goal is
just getting through college."

Market researchers are calling the trend "neo-traditionalism." They
predict that patterns of dating, marriage, and child-rearing among
today's young adults may turn out to be more like those of their
grandparents than of their parents -- even as they reject traditional
gender roles and are more open to gay and interracial relationships than
their predecessors.

Said one observer, "Picture Eisenhower but with a pierced eyebrow."

Barbara Devine is a sophomore at Fairleigh Dickinson University's Teaneck
campus. She sports a navel ring but dresses conservatively because she
doesn't want to look, in her words, "provocative."

"In my freshman year, I saw how the girls who slept with different guys
had a really bad reputation," she said. "I would never put myself in that
situation. But it's a double standard for guys and girls, and I resent
that."

To some, the predictions of a broad culture shift seem far-fetched. True,
the level of sexual activity among 15- to 19-year-olds has eased, but
it's still well above what it was before the "free love" culture of the
1960s and 1970s. Four of 10 girls still get pregnant at least once before
they turn 20. And although premarital sex may be less acceptable than it
was a decade ago, the number of cohabiting couples under age 25 doubled
from 1980 to 1996.

Moreover, according to a national study released Tuesday, teenagers who
drink or take drugs are much more likely to have sex at a younger age and
with more partners than teens who avoid alcohol and drugs. However, they
are just a portion of the teenage population.

Culture watchers are convinced that the nation is in the midst of a
significant shift, with more young people rejecting the sexual-liberation
legacy of their baby-boomer parents than anyone would have foretold 10
years ago. The reasons are complicated, but AIDS and AIDS education have
no doubt been instrumental in changing sexual behavior and attitudes.

"The cost of getting carried away has gotten much higher," said Stan
Henshaw, a researcher at the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a leading
reproductive-health research group.

"AIDS made people more cautious and that changed the norm," Henshaw said.
"After a while, the cautiousness stopped being linked to AIDS and started
being about morality, because the ethic shifts as the behavior shifts. I
suspect that once a cure for AIDS is found, sexual behavior will become
less restrictive, and the prevailing morality will change to catch up to
that."

Conservatives say the cautiousness will be longer-lasting -- a mark, they
say, of their own success. They credit the spread of abstinence
education, the growing critique of abortion, and the popularity of such
campaigns as True Love Waits, which has prompted millions of teens to
take virginity pledges. Sexual behavior, they argue, was so extreme in
the 1970s and 1980s that it set off a backlash.

"A lot of people attribute the change to AIDS, but I think that's only a
small part," says Wendy Shalit, 23, author of the recent book "A Return
to Modesty." "There is an emerging consensus that things have gone too
far."

Still others say the shift reflects the vantage point that young people
have today, which was less available to their parents: a more realistic
picture of the pleasures as well as the dangers of sexuality, compared
with the unbridled optimism of the 1960s.

"I'd suggest the change reflects less a moral backlash than a
highlighting of the contradictions and stalled debate [over personal
liberation] in America," said Stephanie Coontz, a history professor at
Evergreen State University in Washington who has written books about
families and cultural myths. "Young people know that things are a lot
more complicated than their peers of 1972 ever thought."

They have grown up hearing about or experiencing skyrocketing rates of
teen pregnancy. They have felt the instability from divorce, family
disruptions, and the uncertain economic prospects of the late 1980s and
early 1990s.

"They've seen mistakes made everywhere, and they're far less willing to
take the risks that previous generations were," said Kirsty Doig, 28,
vice president of Youth Intelligence, a market research and
trend-forecasting group in New York City. "They've seen that risks have
huge consequences: death, divorce. Young people are saying they're not
interested in dating just anybody. They want to find The One, the soul
mate, to create structure and stability in what feels like an incredibly
unsure world."

Consider Samantha Lugo, 20, a junior at William Paterson University and
executive vice president of the student government. Lugo's parents split
up shortly after they married, before she turned 1, forcing her and her
mother to move in with relatives in North Bergen to make ends meet.

"I come from a divorced family and I've been subjected to instability and
I know what pain it can cause," Lugo said. "I'm trying to decide what I
want to do with the rest of my life, where I want to work. I have classes
and extracurricular activities and I'm trying to make enough money to get
through it all. I'm not interested in sleeping with everyone that walks
past me. My mom set my mind early on, big time, to pursue my goals and
not let a guy -- or a mistake -- get in my way."


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