NEW YORK, NY — One can only imagine the shock wave that would ripple throughout the U.S. education system were the results of a recent Guttmacher Institute survey on American sexuality to be taken seriously. In spite of claims in abstinence-only education and other “Traditional Family Values” focused programs, the study revealed that 95-percent of Americans have had sex prior to marriage.”This is reality-check research,” proclaimed study author and research director Lawrence Finer, according to the Associated Press. “Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans — and has been for decades.”
So much for the idea that the morality of America went to hell due to hippies, the Pill, feminism, rock music, or the availability of porn.
According to the study, which appeared in the most recent issue of Public Health Reports, more than nine out of 10 Americans, regardless of sex, have been going all the way before marriage even as far back as the segregated, hyper-patriotic, and supposedly sexually pure 1940s.
Finer and his team conducted more than 38,000 interviews — 33,000 of them with women — in 1982, 1988, 1995, and 2002 for the National Survey of Family Growth, in an attempt to learn how sexual behavior prior to marriage may have changed over time. The results were surprising, with 99-percent of the participants having had sex by the time they were 44 and 95-percent of those having done so before they married. Even four-fifth those who had remained virgins until at least 20-years-of-age had engaged in pre-marital sex by the time they were 44. At least 91-percent of women born between 1950 and 1978 reported having had pre-marital sex by the age of 30, whereas 88-percent of those born in the 1940s had managed to do so by the time they reached 44-years-of-age.
Because of the information gathered, Finer concludes that chances are good that the rat of people having sex before marriage has actually been fairly consistent over the decades. The big difference appears to be that today’s singles wait longer to get married than they did during the 1950s, thus providing them with more pre-marital time for sexual relationships.
The Guttmacher Institute is a private New York think tank studying issues related to sex and reproduction, which disagrees with government sponsored abstinence-only based courses.
