Teen Sex Trends

More teenagers, young adults abstaining from sex.
The Washington Post (3/4, Brown) reports, "More than one-quarter of people interviewed in their late teens and early 20s had never had sex." According to the National Survey of Family Growth, "among 15-to-24-year-olds, 29 percent of females and 27 percent of males reported no sexual contact with another person ever -- up from the 22 percent of both sexes when the survey was last conducted in 2002." The findings were based on interviews conducted from 2006 to 2008 of a random sample of 13,495 Americans between the ages of 15 to 44.
According to USA Today (3/4, Jayson), the study released Thursday by the National Center for Health Statistics found that among ages 15-17, "58% of girls and 53% of boys said they have had no sexual contact, compared to 48.6% of girls and 46.1% of boys in 2002." For ages 20-24, "12% of women and 13% of men said they have never had sexual contact, compared with 8% for both sexes" in 2002.
The AP (3/4) notes that "Health scientist Anjani Chandra of the CDC Centers for Disease Control and Prevention described the decline in sex as small but significant." However, Chandra "declined to speculate on the reasons. 'It's difficult to look for a trend earlier than 2002 because previous surveys did not gather as much detail about various types of sex,'" she added.
The Washington Times (3/4, Wetzstein) reports, "For the first time, women were asked whether they had oral sex with a woman, as well as whether they had 'any sexual experience of any kind' with another woman." The addition of the oral sex questions indicated that although "12.5 percent of women (about 7.7 million if extrapolated to the whole US populace, ages 15-44), had some kind of homosexual experience, a smaller portion (9.3 percent or 5.7 million) had oral sex with a woman."
Bloomberg News (3/3, Lopatto) reported that the survey also found about 5 percent of men have had a same-sex partner. Overall, about "94 percent of women and 96 percent of men identified themselves as being straight." And while "1.1 percent of women and 1.7 percent of men said they were gay," more women than men, "3.5 percent compared with 1.1 percent," said they were bisexual. The story was also covered by MSNBC (3/3, Mapes) on its website, the Chicago Sun-Times (3/4, Thomas) and the USA Today (3/3, Stanglin) "On Deadline" blog.