95% of Adults Have Premarital Sex, So Can We Have Comprehensive Sex Ed Now?

Turns out, as Jill from Feministe so aptly put it, people in the United States are great big hypocrites.

According to a Gallup poll, 38% of people in the U.S. think that getting it on before you tie the knot is a big moral no-no. However, according to a study done by the Guttmacher institute, a whopping 95% of people in the U.S. have sex before getting married anyway (if they ever get married, that is). Even among people who chose to abstain until at least 20, 81% of them still did the deed by the time they were 44.

This, of course, isn't really big news in 2010, but the study finds that this has actually been going on for decades, like since the 1950s. The study derived its findings from data from several rounds of research from the National Survey of Family Growth.

The study only covers heterosexual, penis-in-vagina penetrative intercourse, which leaves a whole realm of possibilities open, and makes me wonder what the numbers would have looked like if they had included things that many young people don't consider sex when they are desperately trying to "save themselves" for (heterosexual, of course) marriage. It does, however, note that people are getting married later these days, which is probably one reason why people are less willing to wait until marriage (not that I am a huge advocate for the whole "wait for marriage" trope).

This data indicates, as Lawrence Finer at Guttmacher points out, that there are some serious problems in the push for abstinence-only-until-marriage sex education going on in schools across the U.S. With so many people opting to not choose abstinence, it seems that the wiser choice would be to get as much information about sex and protection into the hands of young people as possible.

Since we have seen that sex isn't destroying people, and now that it is far more common than conservatives would have us believe, maybe we could focus our energy on making factual information accessible to as many 12- to 29-year-olds as we can.

Maybe we could get age appropriate sex ed into schools long before kids start thinking about sex, so by the time that comes around they actually have the life skills to protect themselves (because, let's face it, many children don't encounter sex for the first time willingly as teenagers or adults, something ab-only education seems to erase). We seem to start too little too late, because of this whole "abstinence until marriage is the best thing EVAH!" idea.

I would prefer young people to be safe rather than shamed.

Photo Credit: pedrosimoes7