Media Makes Up Findings on Negative Effects of Casual Teen Sex

For all that conservative organizations and some media blame progressives for sexualizing teenagers, teen sex is the one topic that they cannot get off of their brains. This is especially true when twisting science and statistics in studies related to teenage sex and its effects.

A new study on the impact that teens' sexual activities had on their academic ones drew conservative media like sharks to a chum-filled cove. Unlike the sharks, however, those who reported on this study were not honest about the findings.

Most news sources reported the same poisonous tripe: While admitting that teens who engaged in bedroom activity in the confines of a committed relationship didn't have trouble with school, and showed no negative effects towards planning a future involving college, they over-emphasized the idea that teenagers who engaged in "flings" tended to be delinquents with no futures.

When I contacted Heather Corina of Scarleteen fame for her thoughts on the coverage of the study, I found out that it is members of the media who are interpreting the findings this way. In her post, she interviewed one of the study's authors, Bill McCarthy, to clear up some of the confusion.

Turns out, words like "commitment," "fling," "hook up," or any word defining the length or depth of a relationship between teenagers is absent from the study. The study's data was self-reported by teenagers who were asked if they had sex in romantic or non-romantic settings, based on a series of statements about various situations regarding those relationships. The projection of adult concepts of relationships onto teenager situations by the media has clouded the actual findings, and shifted the focus from things that could be useful into harmful stereotypes.

I agree with Heather that the statements used to classify the relationships of teenagers could be used to determine love, commitment, and evaluations of the future potential. It can't be assumed, however, that these statements did imply them. You cannot insist that the study found love and commitment, and that they therefore impacted grades, future plans, and behaviors.

This is just another ploy of comprehensive sex ed opponents, distorting science and sex to their own ends and trying to defy years of proof that comprehensive sexual education keeps teenagers safer than pretending they will abstain if we keep them ignorant. Organizations like the Family Research Council say this study confirms the truth about the harm of casual sex. But they would be hard pressed to find that supported by the study. They continue to treat teenagers like non-persons in the face of knowledge to the contrary.

What I can infer from what's really in this study, is that over half of teens have admitted to having sex, in one setting or another, since I was in high school. To me, that means we should be fighting to get as much information as possible out to them to keep them as safe as possible. That should include honest reporting of studies about their sex lives.

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Photo Credit: Lin Pernille ♥ Photography