The Abstinence Clearinghouse Blog

Public Hedonism and Private Restraint
[New York Times, David Brooks, 05/05]

You see the febrile young teens in their skin-tight spaghetti strap tank tops. You hear the rapper 50 Cent’s ode to [outercourse], “Candy Shop,” throbbing from their iPods. You open the university newspapers and see the bawdy sex columns.

You could get the impression that America’s young people are leading lives of Caligulan hedonism. You could give credence to all those parental scare stories about [outercourse] at bar mitzvahs and junior high school dances. You could worry about hookups, friends with benefits, and the rampant spread of [so-called] casual, transactional sexuality.

But it turns out you’d be wrong.

The fact is, sex is more explicit everywhere in America – on television shows like “Desperate Housewives,” on…music videos, on the Internet – except in real life. As the entertainment media have become more sex-saturated, American teenagers have become more sexually abstemious.

Teenage pregnancy rates have declined by about a third over the past 15 years. Teenage birth and abortion rates have dropped just as much.

Young people are waiting longer to have sex. The percentage of 15-year olds who have had sex has dropped significantly. Among 13-year-olds, the percentage has dropped even more.

They are also having fewer partners. The number of high schoolers who even report having four or more sexual partners during their lives has declined by about a quarter. Half of all high school boys now say they are virgins, up from 39 percent in 1990.

Reports of an epidemic of teenage [outercourse] are also greatly exaggerated. There’s little evidence to suggest it is really happening. Meanwhile, teenagers’ own attitudes about sex are turning more conservative. There’s been a distinct rise in the number of teenagers who think [so-called]casual sex is wrong. There’s ben an increase in the share of kids who think teenagers should wait until adulthood before getting skin to skin.

When you actually look at the intimate life of America’s youth, you find this heterodixical pattern: People can seem raunchy on the surface but are wholesome within. There are Ivy League sex columnists who don’t want anybody to think they are loose. There are foul-mouthed readers of men’s magazines like Maxim terrified they will someday divorce, like their parents. The rapper Eminem hardly seems like a paragon of traditional morality, but what he’s really angry about is that he comes from a broken home, and what he longs for is enough suburban bliss to raise his daughter.

In other words, American pop culture may look trashy, but America’s social fabric is in the middle of an amazing moment of improvement and repair.

The first lesson in all this is we shouldn’t overestimate the importance of the media. People like 50 Cents may produce hit after pornographic hit, but that doesn’t mean his fans want to lead the lives he rapes about. It’s make-believe.

What matters is reality. The reality is that generation of kids have seen the ravages of divorce, are more likely to respect and listen to their parents and their ministers, are worried about sexually transmitted diseases and don’t want to mess up their careers.

Second, it’s becoming clear that we are seeing the denouement of one of the longest and increasingly boring plays on Broadway, the culture war.

Since the 1830’s, America has witnessed the same struggle. One camp poses as the party of responsibility, lamenting the decadence of culture and the loss of traditional morality. The other side poses as the army of liberation, lamenting Puritanism, repression and the menace of the religious right.

No doubt some people will continue these stale kabuki battles on into their graces: the ’50’s against the ’60’s, the same trumped-up outrage, the same self-congratulatory righteousness, the same fund-raising-friendly arguments again and again.

But today’s young people appear not to have taken a side in this war; they’ve just left it behind. For them, the personal is not political. Sex isn’t a battleground in a clash of moralities.

They seem happy with the frankness of the left and the wholesomeness of the right. You may not like the growing influence of religion in public life, but the lives of young people have improved. You may not like the growing acceptance of homosexuality, but as it has happened heterosexual families have grown healthier.

Just lie back and enjoy the optimism.