Outmoded Virginity

Common gossip says that youngsters are engaging in sexual intercourse earlier these days than they used to, but there has been precious little statistical evidence to back it up. Now Johns Hopkins Demographers Melvin Zelnik and John Kantner have come up with some firm data. After studying the sexual habits of unmarried teen-age girls, they announced last week that virginity is indeed outmoded. If the study sample is representative, almost half of all single American girls become non-virgins before they are 20.

Basing their findings on interviews with 4,611 girls living at home or in dormitories in 1971, Zelnik and Kantner reported to the Commission on Population Growth and the American Future that nearly 14% of the 15-year-old females they questioned had experienced intercourse, and that the percentage rises rapidly beyond that age: 21 % at age 16, 27% at 17, 37% at 18 and more than 46% at age 19. Their report also discloses marked but unexplained racial differences that are presumably due much more to social class than to race. For whatever reason, teen-age blacks at every age level are more likely than whites to have had premarital sex. At age 15, for example, 32% of blacks have had intercourse, compared with 11% of whites; by age 19, the percentage has risen to 81% for blacks compared with 40% for whites.

Although it confirms widely held convictions about virginity, the Zelnik-Kantner study shatters the generational myth that young people are engaged in a perpetual orgy of promiscuity. In fact, the investigators report, "the picture is not one of rampant sexuality." Most teen-agers do not have sex frequently: 40% had had none at all during the month before they were questioned, and of the remainder, about 70% had had intercourse no more than twice in that month. Moreover, 60% of the non-virgins had made love with only one male in their lives, and half of them were planning to marry that man. Here, too, there was a racial difference. "It is the white non-virgins who have sex more frequently and are the more promiscuous," the study shows. Among whites, 16% reported four or more partners, while for blacks the figure was only 11%.

Another popular misconception is that contemporary teen-agers are sexually sophisticated. Not so. According to Zelnik and Kantner, "the pervasiveness of chance taking" is remarkable. More than three-fourths of the non-virgins questioned said that they never or only occasionally used contraceptives. Some youngsters said they considered birth control "no fun" or "inconvenient." Many were so ill-informed that they believed they were too young or had sex too infrequently to get pregnant, or that they could not conceive if they avoided intercourse just before or just after menstruation.

As a result of such neglect and naivete, 41% of the blacks, 10% of the whites and 26% of both races had been or were pregnant. For this reason, the population commission has recommended that birth control information be freely provided for the nation's teenagers. To support the recommendation, the executive director of the commission, Charles Westoff, quotes a Manhattan teenager: "Refusal to provide education will not prevent sex, but it will certainly prevent responsible sex."

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