The virginity hoax

A federal study reveals the terrible failures inherent in teen vows to chastity.

By Jennifer Foote Sweeney

Jan 8, 2001 | Whomp, there it is: a 63-page report on teen sex and virginity derived from the survey of nearly 100,000 adolescents at 145 schools by a handful of researchers funded with money from 19 federal agencies. Talk about tasty media chum. Toss out words like "sexual behavior of teenagers," "virginity" and "highly effective" and the parents of adolescents claw their way to newsstand and keyboard in a panicky search for enlightenment, looking, always, for relief from the kind of angst they heaped on their own elders just long enough ago not to remember.

So what did they -- we -- learn from the study of "virginity pledges" by the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development?

Nothing new -- all of it depressing. And the stuff that wasn't there, the data between the lines? So infuriating, so heartbreaking, that it makes me want to cry.

Not that the titles, subtitles, conclusions and comments by interested parties in this report won't flirt with the vulnerable sensibilities of parents in denial and their poor, innocent children. The big news, the juicy part of the recently released study, was very high-concept. The virginity pledge movement, brainchild of the Southern Baptist Church and favorite fad of teen mags ("Virginity is hot," said Young and Modern magazine in an issue featuring the 100 secrets of Leonardo DiCaprio), has been a resounding success, according to the study's chief researchers. This in an introduction that opens with a line from the Madonna song "Like a Virgin." Pledgers, announces the study, postpone first-time sexual intercourse for an average of 18 months longer than non-pledgers.

This is heavenly news for Jimmy Hester, coordinator of the True Love Waits campaign. He told the New York Times last week that the report was great news since it proves that pledges do make a difference. On first reading -- if it is a quick skim with frequent interruptions -- there is a hint of the positive for those who might disagree with Hester about sex out of wedlock. "Surely," even the most liberal parents will mutter, "it is best if a teenager postpones sex for as long as possible, even if true love doesn't wait for the sanctity of marriage."

Ah, but this wishful thinking must die -- gruesomely -- in a hail of caveats, I'm afraid, once the report is fully digested.

The first, elephant-in-the-corner type caveat concerns why teenagers take, or don't take, the virginity pledge. According to the report, kids will only pledge to stay virgins until marriage if it is "cool," which usually means that other kids are taking the pledge. But kids won't take the pledge if so many other kids are pledging virginity that it is "uncool." Say the researchers: "The pledge works because it is embedded in an identity movement. Consequently, like other identity movements, the pledge identity is relatively fragile and meaningful only in contexts where it is at least partially non-normative." My favorite description of this conundrum? "The pledge effect is largely contextual."

In other words, a virginity pledge, like glitter powder and Abercrombie & Fitch sweatshirts, is based on the painfully self-conscious surrender of self and not, as Hester wants to believe, on the early adoption of family values. It ceases to be attractive when Leo expresses a preference for sex or when virginity is no longer "hot" or so "hot" that it becomes "uncool."

(Nothing is said in the study about the troubling possibility that the respondents to the survey, wishing, as always, to be "cool," might have lied on their questionnaires about making the pledge or breaking the pledge or anything else, for that matter, in order to follow the non-normative rules of the day.)

The average delay incurred by the virginity pledge, reports the study, tends to be about 18 months -- marriage appears not to be a factor. And then there's the part about how the pledge works best among 15- to 17-year-olds (not so well among 18-year-olds) and that it helps if the pledger is religious, of Asian ancestry, in a romantic relationship or less advanced in pubertal development. (Pause here for the adolescent -- pledger or non -- to utter, "Duh.")

And finally -- whoops! -- when pledgers break their pledges they have a tendency to have unsafe sex. Researchers suggest that since the pledgers promised not to have sex, when they finally do, they haven't done much planning and are unlikely to use contraception. (Another favorite footnote here: "That pledgers who have sex are likely to be contraceptively unprepared is to be expected, for it is hard to imagine how one could both pledge to be a virgin until marriage and carry a condom while unmarried.")

Next Page: The kids weren't asked about oral or anal sex

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