What is the state of the cultural debate on teachings about sexuality in American society today? What does social science research have to contribute to this discussion? I will address these questions by providing a sociological context for the Initiative’s consideration of Catholic teachings and traditions on sexuality. Toward that end, I have chosen to focus on the young, and particularly on social and cultural trends shaping youthful sexuality. There are several reasons why I think this is a good place to begin. First of all, our society, like all societies, has a responsibility to prepare and support young people in their passage from adolescence into a flourishing adulthood. Central to that task is the transmission of teachings about sex, marriage and family life. However, in fast-changing post-modern societies like ours, this task is more difficult than in traditional societies. Economic dynamism and cultural diversity confound efforts to forge and sustain moral consensus. A youth-oriented media and marketplace challenge the authority and teachings of traditional youth-forming institutions, such as the family, church and school. The speed and spread of technological innovation reverse the traditional direction of cultural transmission. The older generation no longer confidently passes on its wisdom to a younger generation. Instead, the younger generation passes on its technological know-how to an older generation.

Changing Pathway Into Adulthood

Compared to their parents and grandparents, today’s young people are following a prolonged and often perilous path into adulthood. They are having sex at younger ages, marrying at older ages, living together before marriage, and rearing children solo, outside of marriage, or partnered, within informal cohabiting unions.
Also, today’s young are immersed in a hypersexualized cultural environment where they are bombarded with graphic sexual images and messages, where they face unremitting pressures to be “sexy” and to engage in sex at young ages, and where they are expected to manage these pressures successfully on their own. Not surprisingly, therefore, much of the contemporary anxiety—and disagreement—over sexuality has to do with the question of what we should be teaching the young, who should be doing the teaching, and how best to help young people survive the messages and pressures in this sexually charged cultural environment.
The early life course is undergoing rapid reorganization. The timing and the sequence of milestone events marking the entry into adulthood—completion of schooling, marriage, sexual initiation and the birth of a first child—are changing. So too are attitudes about the meaning and purpose of these early life events. It is important to understand key features of the early life course because they pose a challenge to traditional teachings about the relationship of sex to the institutions of marriage and family.
For today’s young people, preparation for adult life is more prolonged than it has been in the past. This is largely due to two related factors: a longer period of schooling before entry into the work world and the postponement of marriage until older ages. In mid-twentieth century America, a middle class girl was likely to finish formal schooling at age 17 or 18 and enter marriage a few years later. Even as late as 1970, for example, the median age of first marriage for women was 20.8. Today, a middle class girl is likely to go on to post-secondary schooling and then, after the completion of formal schooling, spend several more years as a single working adult before she marries. According the 2000 Census figures, the median age of marriage for women is now 25.1. For college-educated women, the median age is estimated to be closer to 27 or 28. This means that roughly half of college educated women, twenty-eight or older, are single. Though men are somewhat less likely than women to go on to post-secondary education immediately after high school, they are also putting off marriage until older ages. In 1970, the median age of marriage for men was 23.2. In 2000, the median age of first marriage for men climbed to 26.8, and for college-educated men, it is now approaching age 30.
As a result of this trend toward older ages of marriage, the population of never married young single adults has risen dramatically in the past thirty years. The proportion of young women, ages 20-24, who had never married doubled between 1970 and 2000, from 36 percent to 73 percent and tripled for women, ages 30-34, from 6 percent to 22 percent. For men, the pattern was similar. The proportion of men, 20-24, who had never married increased from 55 percent in 1970 to 84 percent in 2000 and more than tripled for men, 30-34, from 9 percent to 30 percent over the same time period.
The increase in the population of young single adults has contributed to the rise of a new life stage. Call it “twentyhood.” This is a period of early adult life marked by residential and employment insecurity. Young adults are pursuing further schooling or work opportunities, trying to live independently, paying off credit card or school loans, and struggling to get a foothold on the job ladder. They often cycle from living with parents to living with roommates to living with a romantic partner to living with parents again. In short, this new life stage combines some of the communal features of living at home or college with some of the new responsibilities of living on one’s own and gaining some measure of financial independence. What makes this distinctive and new is that young women, as well as young men, are pursuing careers and financial independence in their early adult years.


A lengthening time interval Although young people are waiting longer to marry, the majority are not waiting until marriage to have sexual intercourse. Today, the age of first intercourse for women is age 17 and age 16 for men. Consequently, the interval between first sex and first marriage is longer than in previous generations. For women, it is about eight years and even longer for men. The average interval between these two milestone events is still longer for African-American youth—12 years for women and 19 years for men.
During this prolonged period of youthful single life before marriage, young men and women are likely to be sexually active. They are also likely to have several sexual partners before they marry. And even for those young people who aspire to wait to have sex until marriage, the challenge to remain sexually abstinent is greater than it was when there were only a few years of single life before marriage.
Compared to young single people in the past, today’s young singles are more likely to engage in sexual relationships without any plans or expectation of marriage. To be sure, in earlier times, premarital sex occurred, but it was truly premarital: that is, it was closely linked to the timing of marriage. This was especially true for women. For example, 90 percent of women born between 1933 and 1942 were either virgins when they married or had sex only with their future husband. Today, however, sex is far less likely to be an initiatory event closely linked to entry into marriage. Among women born in the 1960s, for example, only 10 percent were married when they first had sexual intercourse. Further, young people today are far less likely to marry their first sexual partner than young people in previous generations.
The normative connection linking sex to marriage has also weakened. According to survey evidence, young adults regard sex as a part of casual dating relationships rather than as an event linked to marriage or to the choice of a marriage partner. In a nationally representative Gallup survey of young adults, ages 20-29, close to eight out of ten (78 percent) agree with the statement that “it is common these days for people my age to have sex just for fun and not expect any commitment beyond the sexual encounter itself.” Over half (54 percent) agree that there are people with whom they would have sex even though they have no interest in marrying them.
Moreover, because young people engage in sex long before they are emotionally or economically ready to marry, their early sexual experiences are more closely associated with the developmental tasks of adolescence than with the entry into adult married life. Thus, young adults tend to characterize their early sexual experiences as part of “growing up,” “learning more about myself,” or just “having fun.”

From marriage to cohabitation

In the past, couples used to marry in order to live together. Today, couples are living together in order to decide whether they should marry, as an alternative to marriage or as an alternative to living alone. The number of unmarried opposite sex partner households is 4.9 million today, compared to fewer than 500,000 in 1970. For young people, cohabitation has replaced marriage as the first living together union. A majority of young women today will live with a partner before they are married, either with the person they eventually marry or another opposite sex partner.
Along with the increase in cohabiting unions has come growing social acceptance of these arrangements. Living together used to be morally disreputable and socially marginal, as the popular terms—“living in sin” or “shacking up”— suggested. Today, however, cohabiting unions have gained moral respectability and social approval. According to the fifteenth edition of Emily Post’s Etiquette, a leading source of opinion on social propriety, millions of cohabiting couples are “conducting lives that fit into more traditional patterns of culture as gracefully as their married neighbors . . .giving testimony to the fact that marriage is not the only structure held together by love.”
More to the point, however, among the young cohabitation is becoming a socially expected precursor to marriage. In Monitoring the Future, a longitudinal study of high school seniors, 60 percent responded that it was “usually a good idea for a couple to live together before getting married.” In the 2001 Gallup survey of young men and women, 20-29, more than four in ten agree that they would only marry someone who agreed to live together first.

Weakening links between marriage and parenthood

The social and cultural links between parenthood and marriage are increasingly attenuated for young people. One social indicator of this trend is the steep rise in nonmarital childbearing among the young over the past four decades. The unwed teen birth rate increased sharply between 1960-1990 before the trend began to shift downward. Since the early 1990s, the rate of unwed teenage childbearing has declined steadily; between 1994-2000, for example, unwed teen birth rates dropped by 13 percent without any increase in abortions. Even so, rates of unwed teen pregnancy and unwed births in the U.S. remain the highest among industrialized western nations. Today, four out of ten teenage girls will become pregnant, and four out of five teen births will be outside of marriage. And though the unwed teen birth rate has gone down, the percentage of unwed births to women, ages 20-24, reached a historic high in 1994 and has barely budged since.
Another social indicator of the weaker connection between parenthood and marriage is the growing percentage of children born to couples in cohabiting households. Since 1960, there has been a nearly 800 percent increase in the number of cohabiting couples who live with children. Forty percent of unwed births today are to women in cohabiting unions, with the majority of cohabiting parent households made up of one biological parent (usually the mother) and a “stepparent,” a romantic partner who is not the biological parent of the child. These cohabiting parent unions have a high rate of breakup, at least in part because one or both adults have other problems that make the relationship unsustainable over the long time. Nevertheless, one careful study of unmarried cohabiting parents found that one-third of these couples faced no major health or economic obstacles to marriage, yet they did not marry.
Indeed, in the minds of many single young adults, getting married and becoming a parent seem to be entirely separate life pursuits, with different requirements and timetables for each. Recent qualitative studies of dating and cohabiting young adults suggest that young people tend to be far more exacting and idealistic in their requirements for the person they marry than for the person they create a child with. Further, the moral connection between marriage and parenthood is eroding. Only a minority of young people—less than 44 percent in the Gallup survey—believe that unwed childbearing is morally wrong.

Ethnicity, Race and Religion

Black teens are more likely than White or Hispanic youth to have had sexual intercourse, to begin sexual activity at an earlier age, and to have had more than four sexual partners. Black children are at high risk for early and traumatic sexualization. Black teens currently have the highest rate of teen pregnancy among all major racial/ethnic groups and are more likely than other adolescents to have children outside of marriage. Over the past decade, however, Black teens have also seen the sharpest drop in teen birth rates of any racial or ethnic group. Since 1991, the birth rate for Black teens has declined by more than 40 percent while the decline for Whites has been 30 percent and for Hispanics, 27 percent.
Qualitative studies point to the harsh and exploitative sexual culture for many inner city youth. A recent Ford Foundation-funded study of sexual attitudes and beliefs among low-income Black urban youth ages 16-20, including one third of whom are already teen parents, offers a portrait of mutual gender suspicion and antagonism. For many, sex is a brief and casual transaction. Boys say that they keep at least one partner (a “shorty”) primarily for sex and another partner (a “wifey”) for a steady relationship. Girls say that they feel devalued by boys and degraded by the image of women in their peer culture. There is little trust between partners. Boys and girls mistrust each other equally and feel that either one is likely to be unfaithful. Few have seen successful relationships or marriages. In an environment where there are no examples, and little hope, of successful marriage, the goal to wait to have sex until marriage is irrelevant. The peer belief that “everyone is doing it” is widespread and unchallenged by those who are not “doing it.”
Young people from immigrant families face other challenges. Though children of recent immigrants represent a diverse and dissimilar group, they share one thing in common: they are indoctrinated into American popular culture far faster than their parents. Even more than most teenagers, they may see their parents as embarrassingly out of touch with the “real” world. On matters affecting sexual behavior, the gap between the generations can be profound. Immigrant parents may adhere to traditional values about sex and marriage while their children are coming of age in a media and marketplace culture that encourages them to reject traditional values. These culture clashes make it even harder for immigrant parents to influence their children and express their concerns about sex—a problem compounded by language barriers parents face when they try to communicate with teachers, school nurses or other English-speaking professionals.
Social science studies of religiosity and adolescent sexual behavior, though flawed in a number of ways, consistently point to a positive relationship between religious attendance and delay in sexual initiation. Further, studies consistently find that teenage girls who are either Catholic or fundamentalist Protestant are more likely to delay sexual intercourse than girls of other religious denominations or those who were not religiously affiliated or observant. These studies also find that both Black and White females who are Catholic or fundamentalist Protestant are less likely to use contraception once they do initiate sex. The relationship of religiosity to sexual behavior among young males has been less frequently studied and findings are inconclusive, according to a recent meta-analysis of the social science literature.

Demoralization of Sexuality

Today’s young adults have come of age in the aftermath of the sexual revolution, the divorce revolution, the contraceptive revolution, the women’s rights and gay rights revolutions. Separately, each of these revolutions challenged traditional understandings and teachings about sex. Together, they prepared the cultural groundwork for a transformation in cultural attitudes about sex and sexuality.
Historian Joan Jacobs Brumberg calls this transformation the “demoralization of sexuality.” By this, she means two things: one, that cultural attitudes shifted from moral norms to health and legal norms; and two, that primary cultural authority on matters of youthful sexuality shifted from family, clergy and other moral educators to sex educators, health professionals, and teenagers themselves. Correspondingly, the system of social protection for adolescents that had prevailed during most of the twentieth century gave way in the last third of the century to a new system of self-protection. This new system calls for children and teens to acquire the knowledge and skills to protect themselves from the risks and perils of sex.

rise of expressive sexual ideology

The sexual revolution challenged traditional sexual morality and the cultural codes governing youthful sex, love and courtship. The new sexual ethos rejected what it saw as repressive and guilt-ridden Victorian attitudes toward sex, and especially the sexual double standard, with its cultural imperative of female virginity until marriage and its implied fears of female sexual desire.
Further, this expressive sexual ideology called for greater frankness and openness about sexual practices, including those that were once considered deviant or immoral. Finally, and perhaps most significantly, the ideology disconnected sex from marriage, procreation and parenthood, all of which were viewed as obstacles to the uninhibited pursuit of sexual pleasure and freedoms. This last change was seen as a major cultural breakthrough for young single women who were no longer bound to “save themselves for marriage” and who were free to enjoy sex outside of marriage without the social stigma once attached to sexually liberated but unmarried women.
Though this sexual ideology was first championed by adults and for adults, its values rapidly trickled down the age scale. As the spirit of sexual expressiveness and openness spread through the media and the popular culture, the strict boundaries between an “adult-only” world of liberated sexuality and a “child-only” world of sexual innocence dissolved.

a new theory of adolescence

For most of the twentieth century, the passage from adolescence to adulthood—marked by the advent of puberty—was considered a moral as well as a biosocial event. Pubertal development was linked to beliefs and norms of sexual innocence, modesty and purity. Similarly, virginity was a moral as well as a physical status, closely identified with feminine virtue, good character and marriageability. Consequently, parents, clergy and other adults saw adolescence as a time of moral as well as sexual vulnerability. Thus, families, schools, and faith communities mobilized to protect young people—especially young women—through what was widely seen as a morally perilous stage of life.
Parents supervised courtship and held suitors responsible for their daughters’ virtue, sometimes under threat of physical violence. Schools acted in loco parentis, overseeing social events, providing chaperonage, and separating the sexes for gym classes, sex education, and college residential living. Doctors, nurses and other health professionals provided moral guidance. Even liberal sex educators like Dr. Mary Calderone, founder of SIECUS and medical director of Planned Parenthood, insisted that the “permanent man-woman relationship” of marriage was the proper context for sexual pleasure and fulfillment. As Calderone famously counseled Vassar students in 1964, “Now girls, keep your affections wrapped in cotton wool until marriage.”
The sexual revolution, with its new technology of birth control and its ideology of sexual rights and freedoms, challenged this system. With access to the pill, the new thinking ran, young women could take control of their bodies themselves. And the new sexual ideology argued for a single standard of sexuality—one that gave women as much sexual freedom as men—at least in theory, if not in practice. In this new climate of sexual freedom, moral strictures and social supervision seemed increasingly ineffective and outmoded, especially as the rates of teen pregnancy and unwed childbearing soared during the l970s and 80s.
During the decades following the sexual revolution, a new theory of adolescent development emerged. It held that people were sexual from birth; that one’s sexuality was central to one’s identity; that sexual experience was healthy, pleasurable and a normal part of adolescent development; that adolescents should be free to experiment with sex without fear or guilt; that sexual intercourse before marriage was normative for women (as it had been historically for men), and that teenagers should be empowered with the facts, skills and tools to make “responsible decisions” on their own. Some educators went even further, advocating a “sex positive” approach that would teach adolescents how to practice outercourse, body massage, masturbation and other forms of pleasurable but “safe” sex.
Sex educators and health professionals who embraced this theory contended that the chief obstacle to teenagers’ healthy sexual development was the lack of knowledge, skills and tools to prevent disease, pregnancy or unwanted sex. Armed with technocratic knowledge, they claimed, teenagers would be able to make responsible, informed decisions for themselves. The goal, therefore, was to empower teens by giving them earlier, more explicit instruction in how to protect themselves—through sexual refusal skills as well as through regular and proper condom use.
The model of the educated, sexually competent teenager became the dominant model in education and the law. For example, by 1981, 94 percent of school districts agreed that the major goal of sex education should be “informed decision-making.” The law moved in similar direction. In 1976, Missouri v. Danforth affirmed the right of minors to have abortions without parental consent. After the 1970s, states passed laws allowing minors to seek abortions or contraception without parental notification. Confidentiality rules for professionals involved in adolescent health or counseling also shifted toward “informed decision-making.”
It is important to note that the model did not discount the values of virginity, modesty, or sexual abstinence. In fact, these values remained widely shared and supported among parents, teachers and health professionals. But what the new theory did do was to take values that had once been normative and redefine them as optional—as “choices.” Thus, each teen had the responsibility of deciding for herself/himself whether or for how long to remain abstinent, whether and when to have sex, whether or when to use contraception, and so forth.
The theory of the sexually empowered teen was a benchmark in the “demoralization of sexuality.” It rejected the view that religious or moral teachings had any place in adolescent sexual development. Indeed, some proponents of this theory held that moralizing or religious preachments about sex could harm adolescent health and happiness. And it sought to replace moral norms with health and legal norms as the guiding principles governing sexual behavior. According to the new theory, it was the law and medicine, not moral teachings and social protections, that empowered young people to successfully manage their sex lives. Since the medical profession controlled access to the pill and later to the most effective hormonal contraceptive devices, cultural authority over sexuality passed from parents, clergy and schoolteachers to sex educators, doctors and health professionals. Their goal was to prevent disease and promote sexual and reproductive health, not to make moral judgments.

A hypersexualized media culture

Television had been around for decades, of course, but during the eighties and nineties, the advent of new media—particularly cable television and the Internet—swiftly led to a more toxic, exploitative, rapacious media environment. And with the widespread penetration of cable and the Internet into family households, even the youngest children were exposed to the pervasive presence of the media. Sexual images filtered in from outside the home as well, with the soft pornographic images of Calvin Klein, Abercrombie and Fitch and Victoria’s Secret dotting the landscape, sex scandal tabloid headlines looming over supermarket check-out counters, and thong ads appearing in preteen magazines.
But the media influence extended well beyond images and messages about sex and sexiness. More than any other single cultural force, the media cultivated and exploited adolescent dreams and desires for love and acceptance. The entertainment media, especially soap operas and reality shows, offered a story line about sex as the steppingstone to fame, success and lasting love. This message proved irresistible to teenage girls, who, more than teenage boys, connect sex to love and commitment.
More globally, the media environment contributed to a casual, desensitized, objectified view of sex. The sheer quantity, insipidity and sensationalism of its offerings pandered to feeling, pushed instant gratification, and treated people as objects in the pursuit of pleasure and the fulfillment of one’s desires. Finally, and most troublingly, the media treated sex as a commodity, its value measured in its ability to captivate, entertain, generate “buzz,” boost ratings, and sell advertising. Beyond its marketplace value, according to the media view, sex had no larger meaning or purpose. Sadly, for some teens, this view fit their reality. Sex had become a transaction without emotional resonance, without love and without any real connection to another human being.

Costs and Consequences

The liberation of sex from its connection to marriage and the family has come at a high cost. It has led to an epidemic of STDs among the young. It has exposed children to the stresses and hardships of growing up in fragile single and cohabiting parent households. It has left children and women vulnerable to poverty, violence, and crime. It has contributed to male flight from children, marriage and family responsibilities. Worst of all, its burdens and hardships have fallen most heavily upon the poor, and especially upon those in the inner city, and the vulnerable young. Indeed, the social cost of greater adult sexual rights and freedoms has been disproportionately borne by children who have lost their right to be free from the burdens and pressures of precocious sexual knowledge and experience.
Not only has sex been separated from its place within the institution of marriage and the family; it has also been separated from romantic love. Sexual liberation has done much to derail and frustrate the achievement of love. This is a revolutionary cultural development, because, classically, youth is the season of love. In typologies ranging from Shakespeare’s seven seasons of man to Erik Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development, the successful formation of romantic love attachments is the chief task of the young. In the western Christian tradition, moreover, the youthful quest for love has been linked culturally to marriage and to the free, mutual and affectionate choice of a marriage partner. But today’s young are struggling to accomplish this formative task. They can easily find sex but they are having a harder time finding commitment and fidelity. They can easily find someone to share a bed but they are having a harder time finding someone to share a life.
Because sex has been separated from the pursuit of love and the commitment of marriage, it has been emptied of much that is truly consequential, which is why a culture of sexual freedom has been accompanied by a culture of pornography, with its ceaseless quest for sensation and novelty. The teleological orientation of sex to love and marriage has eroded as well, emptying sexuality of much of its meaning and purpose as a source of mutual communication, care and commitment within marriage. The absence of these deeper meanings helps explain why sex is so fraught with disappointment, mistrust and confusion for young people today.
Nor has the model and vision of youthful sexual empowerment fulfilled its early promise. Recent experience suggests that teenagers are not always equal to the task of “informed decisionmaking.” Sexual experience itself is not as tamely subject to skillful self-management as some once believed. And greater frankness and openness about sex has not led to more respectful or affectionate gender relationships, as some once hoped. Indeed, sexual boasting, exhibitionism, fondling, teasing and assault are common events in the today’s school and peer culture. Perhaps those who seek to empower teens with skills and condoms have forgotten what it is like to be a teenager. Perhaps they have forgotten how inchoate youthful feelings of physical attraction, romantic love and sexual desire can be, how often sex is confused with the search for affection and acceptance, how deeply young people want stricter rules and firmer guidance from adults, and how bored they are with adult talk of sexual mechanics, body parts, and disease and pregnancy risk management.

Reconnecting Sex to Love, Marriage and Family

I want to conclude with a tentative thought or two about the challenges these trends pose to the church and its teachings.
The church has an important, indeed, central role to play in responding to the pressing need of the young: namely, to reconnect sex to its larger purpose and place within marriage and the family. To do so, as I have suggested above, is to respond to the longing among young people for sex to mean something more than a transaction.
The effort to demoralize teachings about sex has not been successful. In fact, if there is any lesson to be learned from recent history, it is that a cultural climate of sexual normlessness leads to more widespread confusion, unhappiness, and disappointment than a cultural climate of strong sexual norms. More to the point, it’s clear that many teens resist the effort to strip sex of its moral or religious meaning. Even in the absence of norms, guidance, and supports, they strive to create their own “rules” about sex. In fact, according to a number of recent surveys, the subject of sex for teenagers is almost never exclusively a matter of sound information, good health practices or sensible contraceptive skills. Young people’s views about sexuality are suffused with moral principles, reasoning and judgments. Many religiously observant teens cite their religious beliefs and faith traditions as a reason why they are virgins.
Clearly, then, the traditions and teachings of faith play a key role in young people’s thinking and reasoning about sex. Indeed, one of the great cultural contributions that religion brings to human sexuality is a rich body of thought and teaching on the moral nature and aims of love, both human and divine. The teachings and traditions of the Catholic Church place sex within the relational framework of spousal love, procreation and parenthood. These teachings provide the source of meaning and purpose that so many young people seek.
At the same time, however, the church faces a challenge. Changes in the early adult life course, and particularly the lengthening time between the onset of puberty and entry into marriage, are not likely to be reversed. The now prevalent behaviors of sex before marriage, cohabitation and unwed parenthood are, in part, responses and adjustments to a prolonged period of single life before marriage. The challenge is: How best to guide young single people through the long passage from adolescence to marriage in ways that are consistent with Church teachings? What kinds of practical supports would help young people remain faithful to such teachings? What should the message be to couples who are cohabiting and perhaps contemplating future marriage? These are questions for which we need good answers.

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