<p>What that means is in the 20s, five years post-puberty for women pre-marriage. Wherein today it is 15 years (and half of them more than that.) Needless to say, there will (and should be) more “pre-marital/non-marital” sex. The culture has not caught up to either biological or economic realities.</p>
<p>Did someone say this? The onset of puberty has dropped 5 years since 1920. Details depend on the source but average age at menarche 12.5 and declining.</p>
<p>The premarital sexual activity due to the increase in time between puberty and marriage is one thing. That the activity and number of partners are increasing in set time periods is disturbing. The fact of the matter is that the more sexual partners you have, the higher your chances of contracting something. Yes, there are exceptions, but the statistics are pretty clear on that. You can get lung cancer as a non smoker too, but those who smoke three packs a day have much more of a chance. </p>
<p>What is happening with the “hook up” culture and “friends with benefits” is that kids in high school, and certainly young people in college are having more sexual partners at a younger age. That’s where my concern lies. Those are volatile years emotionally. All sorts of ugly mental diseases rear their nasty heads, and throw in sexual activity with all of the emotional possibilities and you have a rather explosive mix there. I suspect a lot of break downs at college are due to some relationship break down. It’s all fun and games until someone gets hurt, badly.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This thread has never been about whether young people have sex now (duh), it is about whether the college <em>culture</em> of engaging in sex has changed. If you went to college 30-40 years ago and were socially aware, and now have college-aged children who confide in you about what it is like now, I think you would agree that the culture appears to have changed. What impact the change has and might have on its participants is what is worth discussing.</p>
<p>"What is happening with the “hook up” culture and “friends with benefits” is that kids in high school, and certainly young people in college are having more sexual partners at a younger age. "</p>
<p>That’s because, as a fact of biology, they are sexually mature on average three years earlier. But the culture around them hasn’t caught up. </p>
<p>" The onset of puberty has dropped 5 years since 1920."</p>
<p>No, three years. But if a woman experiences puberty at 15, and is married at 20, there were only five “premarital” years (on average.) Now there are 15 years on average (half more). (Yet, the rate of STDS has not come anywhere close to triple what it was - in fact, over 80 years, I’m pretty sure it has actually declined.)</p>
<p>“The fact of the matter is that the more sexual partners you have, the higher your chances of contracting something.”</p>
<p>The CDC (above) says you will contract something in any case. (That was weird.)</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>[Adolescent</a> Sexual Behavior: Demographics](<a href=“http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/413]Adolescent”>http://www.advocatesforyouth.org/publications/413)</p>
<p>So, the stats indicate that kids born 15-19 years ago (after 1994) have started having sex LATER, have FEWER partners through high school and are LESS LIKELY to be currently sexually active than those born in the early to mid 1970s. Hooking up in HS in today’s world does not appear to be an epidemic. Statistically it seems the parents of these kids who would have been born in the early to mid 1970s were much more “sexual.”</p>
<p>DS mentioned that he had likely missed
several dating opportunities just because he did not drink. He might have more courage to ask for a date if he drank a little .</p>
<p>Bay-- I attended two universities from 1968 through graduation in 1972. At one, it was the first year that there were open male dorms where females could spend the night. We had coed bathrooms over the weekends. At the other, they handed out written information on the Pill to all freshmen females standing in line to register.</p>
<p>My experience was that there was plenty of drugs and alcohol available and casual sex (especially under the influence) was a lifestyle for many.</p>
<p>I went to law school in 1983-85. By then it did appear that the expressed attitude towards casual sex had become more conservative, but the actual conduct indicated to the contrary. Here is an interesting study. [COUNSELING</a> CENTER](<a href=“http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/Diversity/General/Reading/Sedlacek/tenyear.html]COUNSELING”>http://www.inform.umd.edu/EdRes/Topic/Diversity/General/Reading/Sedlacek/tenyear.html)</p>
<p>My son attended college from 2007-11. At move-in there were coed dorms with bowls of condoms at the desk and sexual safety posters in the stairwells. Not much substantive difference between what I had experienced “in the old days.” Perhaps more information on sexual safety issues now.</p>
<p>I met several girls at his college. They seemed to have moved off campus as soon as possible and all mentioned career paths. Where my son attended had a very weak Greek system and I only met one person who was in one. My son reported that he had a social group that he hung with. </p>
<p>After college he and one girl were roommates in Taiwan during a job they had there. He and another girl from the group spent a long week at a beach in Thailand on a break she had in her teaching job. He’s gone to visit two of the girls he hung with in college when they were in the US. He’s going traveling with another girl from college in Peru and Colombia this summer.</p>
<p>I was never interested in what “everybody else” was doing, but his experience seems to be more monogamous like than what your kids apparerntly describe to you. </p>
<p>Question–do any of you who have students reporting the active hook-up scene in HS and college have that student admit to having been part of that scene? I ask because I know that some kids have always used “you would not believe what other kids are doing” as an overblown way to keep the peeps placated with them.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Bay, I respect your personal experience, but I went to college 30-40 years ago, and was socially aware, and I have children (one of each gender) who confide in me about what it is like now, and I absolutely do not agree that the culture has changed in a meaningful way. Their experience, and that of their friends, seems much more like mine than different from mine. Including, by the way, the dynamic of freshman and sophomore women feeling empowered by their ability to make choices about sex, and then deciding after a few years that the sexual smorgasbord is not as satisfying as it once seemed. And the dynamic of everyone trying to balance sexual desire, emotional desires, current workload, and career ambitions.</p>
<p>I know nothing about the hook-up culture these days, except what I see on the media. I’m assuming what I see on Jersey Shore and the Spring Break specials is probably not the norm.</p>
<p>As basically a hippie living on the Northern San Diego county beaches in the early 70s, I always assumed things were about the same then as now. I do know one thing, with the amount of casual toplessness (and sometimes casual nudity) that went on around our residences in those days, I don’t think there would have been much of a market for a thing like “Girls Gone Wild.” We would have probably spent our scant resources getting into trouble by other means, or buying “Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers” comics and expensive Doctor Bronner’s soap.</p>
<p>But like I said, I don’t know what really goes on today.</p>
<p>The CDC stat is flawed or is not properly defined, Clearly not everybody is going to get a STD. And the chances of someone with just one partner getting it are far less than someone who has 100. </p>
<p>I am not looking at the total number of partners before marriage as a definitive statistic here, but the number of partners per year before marriage. Even that is an elusive stat There is a huge difference between a 15 year old having multiple partners (not to mention the legality of the situation) in a year vs a 25 year old.</p>
<p>And, yes, the culture has changed. I believe the age for marriage for college grads has gone up. Our kids are not growing up as quickly on many counts, and marriage being considered an indicator (and I won’t go into how accurate of one it is), is certainly not a commitment being made at as young of an age, though demographics do have a lot to do with that. This was happening even when I was in college With the Woman’s Lib movement and the lustre beginning go from a lot of the once very prestigious all female schools, so was the whole idea of getting a MRS degree immediately after graduation. Eyebrows were raised at my school if anyone was getting married while in college or immediate thereafter as it was not the norm at all. Very tiny number of students married while in college or even the next five years after graduation. But most were married by age 30. Here in the Northeast, I’m finally going to weddings of friends of mine, and every single one of them has been with someone post 30, closer to 35 in many cases. At my son’s highschool, the 10 year reunion, which made the ages of those involved 28 less than 10% were married. No one from my son’s graduating class at a independent school has yet married and he is 26. Zip. None.</p>
<p>You would expect a woman unmarried between the ages of 12 and 27 would have more sexual partners than those unmarried between the ages of 15 -20 eighty years ago.</p>
<br>
<br>
<p>That’s a lot lower than I’d expect given what I see on TV shows.</p>
<p>
That’s because the TV shows only depict the cool kids, and the cool kids are getting all the action.</p>
<p>. . . to add to the mix, there are a growing number of woman in North America (and Europe) who are not going to college, not marrying, are sexually active and are having and raising children.</p>
<p>Though the age at which college educated women are marrying has climbed, a woman who is college educated is far more likely to marry than one who is not - or so the demographers tell us.</p>
<p>The scene my older daughter describes is pretty much what it was in my college days.</p>
<p>[My kids don’t like Dr Bronner’s, though.]</p>
<p>What does it mean to “not believe in” the “hook up culture”? College students hook up. It’s a fact, not a unicorn.</p>
<p>I don’t think the girls are jaded. They’re growing up, is all. When they’re 18 or 19, they don’t want to settle down yet. They are having fun; they want to experiment and explore, which - as long as they are protecting themselves and being safe - is fine. As they get older and their thoughts turn to careers and moving on past college, they start to want to settle down. There is nothing surprising or shocking about this. The average age of marriage is currently 26 years old for women; young women are spending more time experimenting in all areas of life, and their love life and relationships is one of those areas.</p>
<p>It’s also silly to assume that boys are the only ones who want no strings attached relationships. That’s all stereotyping. I advise undergraduates and I also serve on crisis response for the university I work at (an elite university comparable to Yale). I know young men who want relationships and young women who don’t want to get serious. Women probably want it more than men do, but that’s likely more due to socialization than anything else. Experimenting with sex and love and relationships can benefit the young women, too, if they want to have sex but don’t want to date someone monogamously or settle down with one person yet (which is completely understandable at 18 years old).</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Yes, it’s a fact. The real question is whether anything of significance has changed in recent decades. It would stand to reason that if women felt compelled to submit to hook-up culture in order to compete, that this change would show up in statistics as a sharp increase in the number of sexual partners. So let’s look at the evidence:</p>
<p>–> Median number of female sexual partners in lifetime, for men 25-44 years of age, 2006-2008: 6.1
That sounds pretty much on target with what I observed in the mid-70’s to early 80’s.</p>
<p>–> Median number of male sexual partners in lifetime, for women 25-44 years of age, 2006-2008: 3.6
That sounds a bit low from my observations during the same time period; I would have estimated 4.7-5.2. But perhaps many women no longer count oral sex as “sex”? It’s the new shut-up-already sex substitute. </p>
<p>–> Percent of women 15-44 years of age who have had 15 or more male sexual partners, 2006-2010: 9.0%
It’s pretty hard to get to 15 partners though serial monogamy with perhaps one or two drunken flings. So the stats seem to indicate that one woman in 11 engages in “hook-up culture.” That’s enough to conduct a detailed study and such free-thinkers are likely to be the first to volunteer to answer such survey questions. But it’s hardly an epidemic.</p>
<p>–> Percent of men 15-44 years of age who have had 15 or more female sexual partners, 2006-2010: 21.6%
This sounds way high to me. Again, it’s pretty hard to get to 15 partners though serial monogamy with perhaps occasionally being in the right place at the right time – you actually have to create a repeatable approach method that works (or look like Brad Pitt). Your typical college male either gets tongue-tied when talking to women; or tries to fake being “cool” with stupid pick-up lines; or presents himself initially as asexual and then tries to switch gears once he has established a rapport. This last approach doesn’t usually work too well: a woman is understandably not enamored when “Big Brother” one day suddenly decides to grab her butt.</p>
<p>Then, of course, there is the discrepancy between the male and female stats. Are 9% of the women accommodating 21.6% of the men plus the 2.5 male-female medium overage? </p>
<p>[NSFG</a> - Listing N - Key Statistics from the National Survey of Family Growth](<a href=“http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/nsfg/abc_list_n.htm#numberlifetime]NSFG”>Referral Page - NSFG - Key Statistics)</p>
<p>Thoughts?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>So you don’t think there may be significant biological differences between men and women which influence their behavior and drives? It’s mostly socialization?</p>
<p>Veteran of the sixties at Woodstock. I think the hook-up scene at college is sedate compared to the scene then.</p>
<p>I think economic pressures drive the reluctance to settle down when it’s hard to get two careers going when a couple needs to travel in tandem.</p>
<p>I would not proscribe any behavior to my D. She is an adult with a good head on her shoulders. That said, I think she is more conservative than I am in some ways, less in others.</p>
<p>She is in an ongoing monogamous relationship but doesn’t want to seal the deal in any way. Her choice, and I applaud that, too.</p>
<p>Gender differences in sexual behavior are tied to the advent of agriculture, and as agriculture is no longer the dominant lifestyle of most humans, these gender differences will disappear over the next decades.</p>
<p>The issue is and always will be who raises kids. I have run into a lot of young men lately who do want committed relationships but don’t want kids, a sticky wicket for young women.</p>