A teen sex guru speaks

Kids -- and their parents -- need to tackle taboos, says psychiatrist Lynn Ponton.

By Amy Benfer

Jan 10, 2001 | It has been a hot and heavy season for studies on teen sex. American teenagers have been prodded to provide, in graphic detail, the who, what, where, why and even -- perhaps especially -- the how of their sexual desires and practices to curious (and sometimes salacious) journalists, talk show hosts and researchers. Adults, one-time teenagers who betray a haunting self-loathing about their own adolescence, wring their hands and debate issues of morals and values, while a new presidential administration prepares to make its mark on the country's always impressionable, always malleable and frequently demonized youth.

At the moment, there is a great deal of support -- cultural and institutional -- for programs that suggest adolescents should not have sex lives. Forty-eight states use federal funds for abstinence-only education -- that is, programs that teach abstinence from sexual activity outside marriage. And last week, a federal study splashed down in media large and small to claim that the "virginity pledge movement," a campaign initiated by the Southern Baptist Church in 1993 that requires teens to abstain from vaginal intercourse until marriage, is effective in delaying sexual activity among adolescents.

But what, exactly, counts as abstinence? Last month, the Alan Guttmacher Institute published the first national study to look at the sexual practices of adolescent boys, ages 15 to 19. Researchers found that while 55 percent of boys in this age group claimed to have had vaginal intercourse, two-thirds of the boys surveyed said they had engaged in oral sex, anal sex or "masturbation by a female." More than one in 10 boys had engaged in anal sex, half had received oral sex from a girl and slightly more than a third had performed oral sex on a girl. What's more, many of these teens said they do not consider oral or even anal sex to be sex -- some even called it "abstinence."

Lynn Ponton is a San Francisco psychoanalyst and adolescent psychiatrist who has spent more than 20 years talking directly to teens about their school, family and, yes, sex lives. She is the author of "The Romance of Risk: Why Teenagers Do the Things They Do" and "The Sex Lives of Teenagers: Revealing the Secret World of Adolescent Boys and Girls." She is also the mother of two teenage girls.

"All adolescents have sex lives," writes Ponton in "The Sex Lives of Teenagers," "whether they are sexually active with others, with themselves, or seemingly not at all ... If more people could view adolescent sexuality as a potentially positive experience, rather than sanctioning it as one fraught with danger, young people would have a better chance of developing healthier patterns and making more positive choices."

Salon interviewed Ponton about the current American (adult) obsessions with teenage sexuality.

The recent Alan Guttmacher study tells us more than we've ever known about the sex lives of boys. Are they getting the kind of sex education they need to deal with the activities they are engaging in?

Put simply, conversations with boys -- as reflected in "Sex Lives" -- indicate that they function with very little information and many myths about sexuality.

The most obvious risk comes from the myth that boys won't -- or can't -- transfer HIV to girls via oral sex. You could say that they create this myth out of self-interest; but the truth is, they've never really had discussions. Many of the boys I talk with say they've had fewer than two hours of sex education in their entire middle school and high school lives. So they have a very limited amount of sex education of the sort that would be useful.

Next Page: "Many girls see their first sexual episode as being forced"

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