LITTLE ROCK — On Friday Hollywood gave us the latest sequel to American Pie, a movie that made loss of virginity as uneventful as apple pie and just as American.
American Pie (1999), Revenge of the Nerds (1984), Animal House (1978) — three hugely popular comedies that centered on late-adolescent-age men and their hot pursuit of premarital sex with willing women, men totally unencumbered by church or ascetics.
Unlike the earlier movies, American Pie hit at a time when more and more teens received federally funded abstinence-only curriculum from schools and faith-based organizations. They strutted onto the college campus wearing purity rings or carrying abstinence membership cards, some having forsworn sex in middle school.
Did it matter? Has the abstinence “movement” reversed a trend of premarital sex that seemed to be sinking farther and farther down into adolescence?
This year, University of Arkansas at Fayettevillle’s department of health, human performance and recreation professor Kristen Jozkowski hopes to publish her findings on college students’ sexual behavior in a peer-reviewed journal. For chastity crusaders, it doesn’t look good.
The nearly 700 students Jozkowski surveyed aren’t Razorbacks. They’re undergraduates of “a Big Ten school in the Midwest” — Jozkowski’s doctoral work was done at Indiana University — and the median age of the sample is 21. But Jozkowski will report that only 11.6 percent say they’ve never had sexual intercourse. That is, they had maintained their virginity by most folks’ definition. Of those, 14.2 percent were women while only 6.4 percent were men.
Meanwhile, Jozkowski found that more than six in 10 hadn’t abstained from such behavior even in the last 30 days.
Of the students surveyed, more than 40 percent described themselves as in a relationship or living with someone, another 1.5 percent were married, and less than 29 percent were single. The rest described themselves in college cypher — seeing someone, hooking up, friends with benefits.
“Whether or not you engage in the party culture ... the expectation is if you’re a college student you should be,” Jozkowski says, and movies like Animal House and American Pie “characterize the college experience as a party — drinking, experimentation, sex, drug use — so if that’s our perception, having 60 percent engage in sex, I don’t think that [is surprising]. That’s what they’re told they’re supposed to do. They’re following through on that.”
DO WHAT WE’RE TOLD
Is sex the expectation for college kids?
Jozkowski thinks so, and so does Kathleen Bogle, a professor at LaSalle University in Philadelphia and author of the ballyhooed Hooking Up: Sex, Dating and Relationships on Campus.
“If you’re [openly chaste], I think you’re going to be seen as on the margins of campus,” she says.
But Bogle also questioned the low virginity rate in Jozkowski’s survey results. Bogle has never conducted a survey but pointed to several — including one from the American College Health Association — that suggest the actual virginity rate on college campuses is 1 in 4.
The five-year, federal National Survey of Family Growth released in October of 4,662 teenagers found that 57 percent of unmarried teenage girls (15-19) and 58 percent of boys (15-19) had never had intercourse. (When just 18-19 year olds are counted, the number is 37 percent for girls and 36 percent for boys.)
For many of these, the expectation is abstinence. They wear silver wedding bands on their ring fingers that read “1Thes4:3” — “For this is the will of God ... that you should abstain from fornication” — or carry cards from Pure Love Club and True Love Waits, abstinence programs with nationwide reach.
The expectation they will stay chaste isn’t qualitative or anecdotal. It’s incontrovertible. They literally carry the choice around with them.
Denny Pattyn is founder of Silver Ring Thing, a comprehensive, now-international program to get teens to commit to abstinence, have them sign a pledge, give them a ring, and then follow up with them throughout college, their 20s, their 30s — however long it takes to marry — to ensure commitment to an intercourse-free life until marriage.
“It’s [called] Until Marriage — a very sophisticated follow-up. Say they commit to abstinence at 13 and get married at 25. That’s 12 years. We stick with them, stay in touch with them. There’s 12 levels to it. We send out 40,000 texts each month to those in Until Marriage,” Pattyn says.
ABSTINENCE RISING
Most observers tie the modern abstinence movement to the rise of evangelical political activism — the Moral Majority, Christian Coalition and the like — in the 1980s. At a time when contraception and AIDS were getting the nation’s full attention, religious leaders reacted to what they considered the tacit permissiveness of 1980s-style sex education. The earliest federal funding for abstinenceonly-until-marriage dates to the Adolescent Family Life Act in 1981. The concept for True Love Waits curriculum dates to 1987, according to its website.
But it was under Bill Clinton’s watch in 1996 that Congress passed the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act and the Community-Based Abstinence Education program in 2000 that committed substantial federal dollars to abstinence-only sex education: about $1.5 billion. At its core, the curriculum maintains that abstinence is the only culturally and medically acceptable choice. It excludes curricula on contraception.
Pattyn founded Silver Ring Thing in the mid-1990s, an outreach that received federal money as an appropriate abstinence-only program until 2005.
Katlyn Tweedy is a junior at John Brown University in Siloam Springs. She thinks society’s message about sex is that it’s “not that big of a deal” and that it’s “thrown in there all nonchalantly” on TV and in movies, and that’s a kind of pressure to have sex, she says.
Meanwhile, there’s opposing pressure from “my background, parents, friends and the Christian community.” On the JBU campus, abstinence is not an expectation but a rule. All new students sign covenants promising not to drink or smoke (anything) on campus, and not to have sex before marriage.
Tweedy made a commitment while at an all-girls’ church retreat in high school to be chaste, and she grew up being told sex outside of marriage is potentially painful and damaging, and it is a sin.
Modern abstinence has never been strictly about sex, Pattyn says, or avoiding ill-health effects. It has been mostly about church.
“You can’t make logic out of [abstaining] if you don’t believe in God,” he says. “Very few teenagers don’t have sex because they’re scared of getting an STD or getting pregnant, because hormones will wipe that idea out real quick.”
By his estimate, kids taught to abstain but brought up in a secular environment have a one in 20 chance of making it — “That’s how big a difference that makes.”
The average age American adolescents lose their virginity is about 17 years old, according to several surveys. This despite the fact that the National Survey of Family Growth reports that, since 1988, the percentage of teenagers who are virgins has climbed from 49 percent to 57 percent for girls, and from 40 percent to 58 percent for boys.
ABSTINENCE RECESSION
Today, the notoriety of such groups as Silver Ring Thing, and abstinence-only funding itself, appears to be waning. Tweedy has “never even heard of Silver Ring Thing, so I suppose that hasn’t done a very good job of making its presence known.”
“I have heard about True Love Waits, but more so when I was in high school/middle school. So yes, I think the prominence of each of those has gone down dramatically.”
Senior Danielle Wilson agrees, and she’s hoping to publish her qualitative study of abstinence and college women in the Journal of Psychology and Christianity.
‘Moved by her purity pledge, Wilson this year undertook a project to gauge her classmates’ commitment to and satisfaction with their “purity pledges.” She conducted lengthy interviews with 11 female JBU students. All described themselves as chaste, though some girls “had made mistakes,” while others had successfully forsworn kissing, even dating.
Like Tweedy and Wilson, all the women felt satisfied with their abstinence commitments. What Wilson was surprised to discover — though she agrees — is that purity pledges and abstinence-only curricula stymie sex education. It would be counterproductive, after all, to discuss at length the reasons and joy of sex within a curriculum that says abstinence outside of marriage is the only healthy decision.
“They feel like the reason purity movements fail is that, even going into college, [these women] felt very uneducated. They didn’t understand, like, how sex actually happened,” Wilson said. “One girl said she didn’t understand the nature of temptation that she would face. A lot of these girls commit to purity when they’re 12 years old, so, no, there’s not a lot that parents feel like they should tell their 12-year-old daughter about sex, but the problem is that the education sort of stops there. So, then girls get into college, and they don’t have enough sexual knowledge. Their education hasn’t continued.”
Jozkowski, the health educator, says that’s partly because our culture is “sexnegative.” That is, the thing itself is bad, in much the same way as is being fat.
Other Christian schools, like Church of Christ-affiliated Harding University, may have stringent abstinence decrees though none specifically requires students’ signature on a covenant. Harding University spokesman David Crouch wrote that “part of [the] code of conduct is the expectation that a Harding student will refrain from sexual immorality in any form. Students are aware of the code of conduct before they ever enroll at the university,” and if the student breaks the code, “then the student is dismissed.”
The Obama White House has written out funding for abstinence-only curricula in every one of its budgets only to see it revived in compromises with Congress. Today, about $50 million a year goes to such curricula — $619,000 to Arkansas.
Dr. Mary Wyandt-Hiebert, sex assault prevention director at the University of Arkansas, says she encourages students who choose to be sexually active to consider the risks and behave accordingly. She would also tell those considering abstinence not to feel too alone.
“The reality? There are more students choosing to wait, choosing to abstain, than the numbers are giving credit for.”
Family, Pages 32 on 04/11/2012