95?

80?

91?

105?

a couple years ago, i served on a county-wide teen pregnancy prevention board, composed of 30 or so members of social service agencies and nonprofits in the greater pittsburgh area.

we’d meet bi-monthly, eating catered jimmy johns while cementing happy hour plans and discussing new and unique ways to convey “stop f*cking!!!!” to all of the teens in allegheny county.

although i’d usually spend most of my time there devising theories on why women with, ummm, “relaxed” sexual standards seem to be disproportionately represented in social service occupations (my best theory? guilt), i did pay enough attention to be able to recite and recall a few surprising statistics. one in particular stood out above the rest.

the four numbers at the beginning represent the usual answers i receive when asking someone…

“if you had to guess, what percentage of high school students would you say are sexually active?”

obviously, in this oversexualized era of bust-it-babies, club window skeet, lug’s (lesbians until graduation), pregnancy packs, exposed snizzle backfat, and mclovin, those numbers should be astronomical, right? i mean, when we were in school, teachers taught you how to read right…not how to lay pipe. sh*t, nowadays kids are probably running trains in 3rd grade, using the fruit-rollups their 15 year old mothers packed for their lunches as makeshift edible condoms. right?

wrong

the answer (48%) is just more evidence that our perception of us being “oversexed” is a stark contrast to the reality, a concept further addressed in tara parker-pope’s “the myth of rampant teenage promiscuity”, an article published in the new york times debunking a few commonly-held notions.

“there is a group of kids who engage in sexual behavior, but it’s not really significantly different than previous generations,” said maria kefalas, an associate professor of sociology at st. joseph’s university in philadelphia and co-author of “promises i can keep: why poor women put motherhood before marriage” (university of california press, 2005). “this creeping up of teen pregnancy is not because so many more kids are having sex, but most likely because more kids aren’t using contraception.”

although this focuses on teens, i believe that this commonly held idea of rampant promiscuity transcends age. it seems like promiscuous adults assume that everyone else is promiscuous, and, for whatever reason, unpromiscuous adults assume that theyre the only one who arent promiscuous, despite factual data that proving the contrary.

also, despite what many of us would like to believe, sex was not invented in 1998. the few of us who are “gotdamning” every night aint the first, and certainly wont be the last people on the planet to do it. sh*t, baby-boomers are called baby-boomers because there was a baby-boom as a result of all the f*cking our grandparents were doing!!

so, people of vsb, do you agree? is our perception of what’s happening in the bedrooms and bar bathrooms of america deeply flawed? if so, why? what factors have contributed to this line of thinking?

—the champ