Teens Appear to Be Putting Relationships Ahead of Sex

“Guys are the ones who push to have sex for the first time with a girlfriend,” said Brittany Graves, a 16-year-old who lives in Santa Monica. “But girls can set boundaries.”

“Girls are more conservative [about sex],” echoed one 16-year-old boy, who asked to be anonymous for fear his girlfriend might object to his comments. “Once you are going out with a girl, it is up to her how far things go.”

“Guys can’t have sex without girls, and most girls just aren’t willing,” said Taylor Gardner, 18, who lives in West Los Angeles and attends an all-girls private school. “It is mostly older guys with younger girls, seniors with freshmen, and the girls just are not going to put out.”

These teenagers’ comments about the shifting gender politics of teen dating reflect what some social scientists see as a growing trend of adolescent girls setting sexual limits and asserting control in their relationships with boys. Teen girls’ power to restrict sexual activity may explain an 8% drop over the past decade in the number of high school boys who reported having had intercourse, according to sociologists Barbara Risman at North Carolina State University and Pepper Schwartz at University of Washington.

“We think that the reason boys are starting to have sexual intercourse later is they are beginning their sexual lives with girlfriends,” said Risman, co-chair for the Council for Contemporary Families, a nonprofit association of family researchers. Such relationships tend to happen for a number of teen boys when they are older rather than younger, Risman said. The sociologists reexamined statistics from a Centers for Disease Control study of 10,000 teens (ages 15 to 17), analyzing the results by gender. They found that the rate of teen boys who reported having had intercourse dropped significantly, from 57% in 1991 to 49% in 1997. High school girls who reported having had intercourse declined only slightly, from 51% in 1991 to 48% in 1997. Nearly half of girls report that they have had sex by the end of their 16th year, said Schwartz. The results of the sociologists’ analysis, which also drew on a number of studies on teen attitudes and behavior, interviews and statistics, appeared in the premier issue of Contexts, a brand-new quarterly published by the American Sociological Assn.

What happened in the ‘90s to explain such changes? “Our speculation is that the meaning of sex has changed,” Risman said. “Boys now think, as girls do, that sex is something that happens inside a relationship.”

What constitutes a relationship can vary from brief liaisons that some teenagers call “buddies with benefits,” according to Schwartz, to more enduring unions. In the past, teenage boys were much more likely to experience first intercourse in a “furtive, casual encounter with someone from the wrong side of the tracks,” Risman said. According to interviews with teenagers and studies examining teen attitudes about casual sex, almost no girls and few boys approve of casual sex, although teen girls still fear being labeled as “sluts” and teen boys say that casual sex is acceptable more often for men than for women and they worry less about “being labeled promiscuous.”

Among teens, 71% of boys and 64% of girls report feeling intense pressure to have sex in a relationship. But when they do, they seem to be acting more cautiously than in the past. Teen pregnancy fell 14%, and teen abortion rates declined by 31%, Sexually transmitted diseases also dropped.

Is the decline in sex-related problems due to teenagers having less sex or are they behaving in more responsible ways? Abstinence sex education programs, not funded by the federal government until 1998, didn’t exist when the data analyzed by the sociologists was collected. Although teen abstinence may be causing some decline in sexual intercourse, the Alan Guttmacher Institute, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization dedicated to reproductive health research, calculated that 25% of the reduction in teen pregnancy could be attributed to abstinence. The remaining drop, its study found, is attributable to more efficient use of birth control. In a widely publicized study on abstinence, the pledges succeed in delaying intercourse for 18 months only “when neither too many nor too few peers pledge,” the authors write. But once pledgers become sexually active, they usually fail to use contraception.

“The reasons that we have seen a decrease in problems with teen sexuality have to do with more safe sexual behavior by teens,” Risman said, adding that it is unclear whether this is due to comprehensive sex education, fear of disease or media reports of AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. “What we do know is that girls are safer sexual players than boys ... and they are asserting more power to influence condom use in sexual encounters with boyfriends.” In a focus group of young men identified as condom users, participants reported that a powerful reason for using a condom was a partner’s request.

“Young women don’t always assume they have so much power in these relationships,” said Tina Hoff, vice president of Kaiser Family Foundation, a nonprofit health care organization that commissioned last summer’s focus group. “But, according to our surveys, increasingly teens are saying that responsibility for contraception is something that should be shared.” Mostly, this is what many reproductive health experts call good news statistics. Still, Schwartz warns, there’s a downside.

“Girls may feel more protected by being in relationships than they actually are, if those relationships are with someone who doesn’t really love and care about them,” she said. “Sex in this kind of relationship may not be what we want for our sons and daughters in that sex should operate in the context of love and caring. But how many 16- and 17-year-olds are capable of that?”

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Birds & Bees runs on Monday. Kathleen Kelleher can be reached by e-mail at kathykelleher@adelphia.net.