Wednesday, December 20, 2006

Most Americans have had premarital sex

From the AP via the Houston Chronicle:

More than nine out of 10 Americans, men and women alike, have had premarital sex, according to a new study. The high rates extend even to women born in the 1940s, challenging perceptions that people were more chaste in the past.

"This is reality-check research," said the study's author, Lawrence Finer. "Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades."

And

Even among a subgroup of those who abstained from sex until at least age 20, four-fifths had had premarital sex by age 44, the study found.

Finer said the likelihood of Americans having sex before marriage has remained stable since the 1950s, though people now wait longer to get married and thus are sexually active as singles for extensive periods.

The study found women virtually as likely as men to engage in premarital sex, even those born decades ago. Among women born between 1950 and 1978, at least 91 percent had had premarital sex by age 30, he said, while among those born in the 1940s, 88 percent had done so by age 44.

Click here for the rest.

You know, after yesterday's post about the horrors of freak dancing, it's almost as though I'm favored by God for this study to have dropped in my lap like this. It really does prove my point: the mainstream American culture is, and has been for many years, extraordinarily pro-sex, and all attempts to get people to stop having sex are utterly doomed to fail. Indeed, I think that as long as we have advertising and mass entertainment, we're going to be a pro-sex society, and if you want to take those industries down, you might as well be trying to destroy our entire understanding of business. But I digress. What's important about this is that, even though everybody's doing it, we have an educational system, numerous state governments, and the federal government all operating in a different reality. They're trying to roll back the clock, which is impossible, but along the way they're fucking up real people's lives. All this abstinence bullshit, all these anti-condom lies, the suppression of the morning after pill, and on and on, all this crap gives people STDs, gets people pregnant when they don't want to be. Instead of playing like it's the Victorian era, our leaders ought to get down to the business of making government more sex-friendly. 'Cause what we have now is truly fucked.

$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$$