"Free love" or "Love waits"?
In a time where movies are made about pregnant teenagers and virtually anyone can access pornography, one may wonder whether Generation Y is engaged in more premarital sex than previous generations.
The answer is yes said Donna Sollie, assistant provost for Women's Initiatives and director of the Women's Resource Center.
"There has been a fairly steady increase in the numbers of both males and females who engage in premarital sexual intercourse, and in oral-genital sexual behaviors, over the past several decades," Sollie said. "Studies in the 1990s indicated that 82 to 94 percent of college-aged students are sexually active."
Sollie said she would like to clarify that being sexually active could refer to engaging in oral-genital sexual behaviors, but not sexual intercourse, as some think oral-genital behavior is a way to engage in sex but retain virginity.
However, don't assume being sexually active before marriage is a modern concept.
Paula Backscheider, professor in English and women's studies, said she does not think people were ever less sexually oriented according to historical clues from literature.
"Every literary period I know has a lot of writing about sex and sexual ad- ventures," Backscheider said.
Similarly, "A Midwife's Tale" by Laurel Thatcher Urlrich, a non-fiction book based on the diary entries of Martha Ballard, a midwife in Hallowell, Maine, shows premarital sex was prominent, even in the late-eighteenth century.
According to "A Midwife's Tale," "Between 1785 and 1797 Martha delivered 106 women of their first babies. Of these infants, 40, or 38 percent, were conceived out of wedlock."
The book speculates that there were high premarital pregnancy rates in America at that time because it was "not only an era of political revolution but of medical, economic and sexual transformation."
Ruth Crocker, director of the Auburn Women's Studies Program, said she agreed that the description sounds similar to the current social situation today.
"People's morals are shifting and people's ideas of what is right and wrong are shifting," Crocker said.
Within the topic of premarital sex also lies the cultural value of virginity.
While it could be assumed religion would be a dividing factor, Sollie provided data proving otherwise.
Sollie said that data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health indicates that premarital sex is widespread even among religious Americans, proving religion is not the sole factor in determining one's premarital sexual behavior.
"A longitudinal study that matched youth who took a virginity pledge with non-pledgers, found that five years later, 3/4 of both pledgers and non-pledgers had had intercourse, with the mean age at first sex for both groups being 21," Sollie said. "Pledgers who were sexually active were less likely to use condoms or birth control."
Backscheider explained that historically, virginity was not solely valued because of religious morals, but economic ones which may come as a shock to modern audiences. "(Virginity) was so important in Great Britain because the oldest son inherited everything and a family wants to be sure a legitimate heir inherits family property," Backscheider said. "There are also lots of documents that suggest that men think it is really important to be the first. I could also add that it's a lot easier to catch women than men, because women get pregnant."
This was not a British phenomenon.
Similarly, Crocker said
New England had the Elizabethan Poor Law in which each community had a responsibility for its own poor.
Since single mothers and their children would fall under that category, villages wanted to avoid having to provide finan- cial aid.
"For this reason, there was great pressure for women to have a husband to support them," Crocker said.
"A Midwife's Tale" sums up Hallowell's view of premarital sexual behavior in the late-eighteenth century and the results may be surprising.
"...nearly everyone in the town agreed with certain fundamental propositions. One was that marriage should certainly follow, if it did not always precede conception. Another was that fathers as well as mothers were responsible for children born out of wedlock. In courtship, sexual activity was connected with a comprehensive transition to adulthood, to good citizenship and economic productivity."
Looks like Generation Y isn't so wild after all.
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