I’m a huge fan of Friday Night Lights — to the point that when a student makes an especially good point in class, I sometimes intone “Clear eyes, full heart,” emulating the coach in the series.
But it was with some sadness that I watched a couple weeks ago an episode in which Julie, the coach’s daughter, lost her virginity (or at least when her parents learned that she was no longer a virgin). I agree with the discussion on Slate that the episode included one of the best parent/child conversations about sex on television (made all the more interesting because it paralleled a mother/daughter conversation two years ago on the same subject).
Nonetheless, I was somewhat concerned that the last senior on the show lost her virginity. The show has reached what the Supreme Court calls the “inexorable zero.” I am not a fan of “socialist realism,” the idea that art needs to move society toward a better equilibrium. But viewers may get the subtle message that it is really unusual to graduate from high school as a virgin.
In fact, I asked a bunch of adolescents (ranging in age from 10 to 15) who had just seen the episode to estimate the percentage of high schoolers graduating this year in the United States who are virgins, and they came back with estimates in the range of 20 percent to 35 percent.
The truth is harder to determine; but there is a very good chance that the majority of high-school graduates are virgins. According to a 2002 study conducted by the CDC, approximately 54 percent of high-school students are virgins. In 2007, the virgin percentage was still holding at 52 percent.
(Mini-bleg: If you have an adolescent, what does he or she think is the percentage of graduating high schoolers who are virgins? Let us know.)
As I’ll argue in my next post, we might do well to correct the misimpression that it’s unusual to be a virgin in high school.
A high-school diploma is just one of several observable characteristics from which a statistical inference about virginity might be drawn. For example, among high schoolers, which group do you think has the higher proportion of virgins — smokers or non-smokers? Some adolescents I asked said smokers — offering a demand-side story that fewer people would want to have sex with them because of their breath. But I once got in trouble with a beloved relative for arguing a supply-side story: high-schoolers who were willing to engage in one risky, rebellious activity (smoking) were more likely to be willing to engage in another (sex).
There’s a hilarious scene in the Woody Allen movie Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex *But Were Afraid to Ask where Woody inferred the probability of getting lucky from a date’s college. Counterpoint, a monthly campus magazine published by students at Wellesley and MIT, conducted a very non-scientific survey and reported the percent of MIT undergraduates who are virgins, by major:
At least with regard to sex, MIT economics majors are not putting the freak in Freakonomics.
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I’m guessing the high percentage of biology and chem majors at MIT who are virgins are so because they are pre-med and have little time for social activity. Which also explains why I was a humanities major.
Depends what you are meaning by virgin. More kids at younger ages are participating in oral sex on a regular basis than ever have before. Oprah even covered this on her April 9th episode.
“I’m willing to be that if you limited your sample size to football players the virginity rate would be around 0-5% upon graduation.”
Clearly we went to different high schools… I was one of the football players, and at least 25% of the guys on the team couldn’t get any if they paid for it. And we had a good team!
Lying and various definitions of “virgin” can definitely make this a difficult number to obtain.
I’ve always heard, “It’s unrealistic to expect someone to remain a virgin until marriage.” Sure, many more people lose their virginity prior to marriage than after marriage, but the fact is a lot of people (millions even) somehow manage to wait. Some of them are even attractive.
In high school all the guys have had sex with several partners while all the girls are virgins, according to anecdotal research.
Reminds me of the new book, “The Purity Myth: How America’s Obsession with Virginity Is Hurting Young Women,” I recently saw come up on another blog (i.e. I have not read it and am not recommending or criticizing it),
http://www.amazon.com/Purity-Myth-Americas-Obsession-Virginity/dp/1580052533
But I also don’t understand why virginity, however you might define it, is valued or looked at as a virtue. Like anything else in life, sex has benefits, costs, and risks. People here should realize that.
Expecting TV and movie plotlines, even on “reality” shows, to accurately reflect a statistical norm is unrealistic at best, and dangerously silly at worst. Television, and entertainment in general, has always been based on action above-and-beyond the norm, and virginity, by definition, speaks of “lack-of-action”. Normal lives in TV families do not engage viewers to tune in every week, so our TV characters must always embrace the extraordinary — even on realistic dramas like “Friday Night Lights”. I actually don’t think network television’s job is to teach us anything at all, just engage our sense of the world and ourselves.
I think that the idea that a bunch of teens would be truthful to some CDC census taker about what sexual acts they’ve engaged in is probably the most difficult thing to believe in this whole story.