The Bill Clinton Syndrome
An article on the front page of the Washington Post website today, titled “Study Looks At Teen Sex Levels”, suggests that slightly more than half of all teenagers engage in oral sex before they turn eighteen. Between age eighteen and nineteen, the percentage rises to 70%.
What really got my attention, however, was the following quote from a doctor.
“Oral sex is far less intimate than intercourse. It’s a different kind of relationship,” said Claire Brindis, professor of pediatrics at the University of California-San Francisco. “At 50 percent, we’re talking about a major social norm. It’s part of kids’ lives.”
I’m a man, and even I would disagree with that statement. I’ve always thought of oral sex as being far more intimate than any other kind of sex. I mean, you’re taking another person’s sexual organ into your mouth, or in the case of a man, you’re putting your mouth and tongue on the sexual organs of a woman. To me, that is the most intimate you can be with another person. Agree, or disagree?
Now, I’ve got to deal with the fact that I was in the lonely minority of High School students when I was a teenager. I’ll be brooding over here when you finish discussing.
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Let me post an addendum to this story: I don’t trust these numbers. Any time you poll teenagers about sex, you have to take into consideration the impetus to make one’s self out to be more sexually experienced than one actually is. Now you might ask, why would a teenager lie on an anonymous poll? Well, I would ask in return, why do people lie to themselves? People want to feel better about themselves.
Comment by Matthew — Thursday, 15 September 2005 @ 12:45 pm
People also sometimes lie on polls to deliberately skew the results.
I don’t understand the perception of oral sex being different from penetration. It’s a lie kids might tell themselves, ala pregnancy, but you’re right… I consider that act to be far more trusting than simple penetration.
Comment by Mel B. — Thursday, 15 September 2005 @ 6:39 pm
This is pretty damn intimate, in my book. If you really don’t care, it’s pretty easy to just do penetration, get it over with, move on with life. Now, oral sex–I agree, a lot of it is trust. Nothing goes into most people’s mouths that they don’t want there. And it can be far more physically demanding. The planning, the stamina… Frankly, from my point of view, if I’m going to put that much effort into you, you have to be worth my time.
Comment by Heather — Thursday, 15 September 2005 @ 10:33 pm
I think you’re both right on the money here, Heather and Mel. Trust is an angle I hadn’t thought about, but it makes sense. When you allow someone to give you oral, you are allowing them to see your genitals up close, smell you, taste you, take you in their mouth…that does indeed require a certain amount of trust. Same with the person performing the oral: is the person you’re doing this to clean? Do they have any diseases? Trust is what makes it intimate.
On the other hand, if we’re talking about oral between a prositute and a john, or two people who just met in a bar and don’t even know each other’s last names, then I’d agree with the good doctor, that’s not very intimate.
Comment by Matthew — Friday, 16 September 2005 @ 9:52 am
I find myself wanting to say that what these statistics seem to show, at least in the sense that they indicate a decreasing number of teens engaging in intercourse and an increasing number of them engagin in oral sex (whether the numbers are exactly correct or not, the trend seems to be indicated), is that there is a redefinition of oral sex and sexual intercourse going on. I would guess there’s always been some general disagreement among people about the specifics, but that in general we used to see oral sex as more intimate than intercourse, but that this is becoming less true nowadays.
The NPR story on the results focused extensively on methods used to avoid errors in the stats because people lie on polls and such. I tend to think, of course people lie but presumably the kinds of lies and the numbers of liars are probably fairly consistent over time. So what’s important is not so much the exact number as a representation of fact (OMG! 55% of teens engaged in oral sex!) but the statistic as an indicator of a trend (the number used to be 30% or whatever and now it’s 55%–neither number may be exactly accurate but the fact that a lot more teens are engaging in oral sex now than they used to is probably correct).
Comment by Scrivener — Friday, 16 September 2005 @ 1:18 pm