Since we are using statistics, consider the bigger picture. At the turn of the century, when women menstruated at 16 and married and 21, they also had an average life expectancy of 47 years. Thus, even with having children at 21, they could expect to die when their oldest kid was 25 or younger and their grandchildren were 3 or younger.

Additionally, with a 47 year life expectancy, they essentially had 26 sexually active years estimating generously, or 55% of their entire life.

Given that life expectancy is now 81 years for American women, even if they get married at 25 the picture is considerably better for them. They will have 55 sexually active years (or so)–30 years more than in 1900–or about (interestingly) 69% of their entire life.

You could look at the statistics and say, well, 15 years is historically too long to wait. You could just as easily say that, even if I wait until I am married, I have 50+ wonderful years of married sex ahead of me, longer than the average woman lived in 1900.

I understand the pressures at a young age from hormones, society, etc. and frankly think that there is some merit your other points regarding culture and expectations. But to use statistics as you have to your impressionable students to provide a demographic justification for the morality of premarital sex seems to be a stretch. One could use the same statistics, taking into account life expectancy, to argue that there is even less justification for it.

Exactly. I have heard that Evangelical/Fundamentalist/otherwise very religious Christians as well as Orthodox Jews have this exact problem when they get married after a lifetime of being told that sex is bad and don’t do it. They often end up with miserable sex lives after they get married because they can’t flip the switch, especially the wives (from what I hear). Many Ultra-Orthodox Jewish men (especially in Israel) are known as some of the biggest customers in the Israeli sex industry (and possibly also in some parts of NYC) and part of it is from being married in a situation where especially the wives have internalized a lifetime of very sex-negative messages in their culture.

I don’t understand some peoples’ obsession with a woman’s virginity. I mean, if you didn’t bother to keep it in your pants, how do you have any right to expect a woman to wait? It just screams double standard to me. I also don’t understand how a woman is supposed to shut down her sex drive completely for, say, 25 years, and then on her wedding night is suddenly able to find some magical switch to turn it on.

I am not the child of immigrants, but the grandchild of immigrants. And along with pounding into my head the importance of my education, my mother managed to pound into me the absolute, utter, all-consuming importance of my not taking the SLIGHTEST possible chance of becoming pregnant while I was still getting that education, because to do so would be to ruin my life…Goodbye to the education, the career, everything, while I got stuck raising a child alone and isolated in a small town for the rest of my life, with everyone knowing my shame…

When you are a teenager and bored to tears and all you can think of is getting out into the world beyond your small town and experiencing some life, you internalize that message but good…”If I weaken and succumb to the boredom and try to dissipate it with sex, it could result in my being stuck here forever.”

Of course, resisting temptation is much easier when no one in that little town thinks of you as desirable to begin with. Or, even if they did, they’d be so afraid of The Wrath of Mom coming down on their heads that they dare not even try.

And while I may not have completely bought into it, the idea that sex before marriage was wrong was also pounded quite thoroughly into my head…my mother would sooner have allowed me to call her by her first name (”You will NEVER call me by my first name. I am your MOTHER, and DON’T YOU FORGET IT!”) than been one of those “modern moms” who carted her daughter off to Planned Parenthood for birth control at 16…

I am now 45 years old, still single, and still trying to deal with the blow that message has dealt to me in terms of my conception of myself as a sexual human being.

‘Tis the last throes of summer, Left blogging all alone…

(sorry, but I’m not poetic enough to finish it.)

Mermade wrote:
“It shocked me when Hugo told me that even James Dobson believes masturbation is okay.”

Well, he *is* a Nazarene, after all! A lot of people buy into stereotypes about folks like Dobson without seeing the whole picture.

And it suggests rather strongly that a woman who was sexually assaulted is “impure” and not worth marrying. Whereas a woman who is a virgin but has engaged in sexual activity short of intercourse is “pure”.

Agreed. However, I don’t think the actual abstinence is the issue, but rather the notion that sex is forbidden until matrimony. I am a virgin, though not for any religious reasons, and while I have no trouble avoiding sexual intercourse, I feel safe with the knowledge that should I ever want to indulge, the option is open to me.

In effect, this dictated “purity” prevents a woman from realizing herself sexually until she finds herself a husband. And while self-imposed chastity is perfectly fine when practiced voluntarily, this outside pressure to commandeer a woman’s life in such a way is, I think, unhealthy.

I also agree with mythago’s above statement. Virginity says nothing about a woman’s nature, especially when it’s due to peer pressure and no personal preference of her own.

Myth- I don’t think my friend Dan*, a 32 year old virgin, is egotistical. He simply wants to marry a woman with a similar history to his. In his shoes I wouldn’t be so demanding, but it’s HIS strong preference. My friend Janice* will not date a man under 6′. She wants room for when she “wears heels.” She also only wants to date men who are white and have dark brown hair with blue or green eyes. I think that she is picky, but who am I to say what floats HER boat?