In the past, we might have seen virginity as something that was a natural occurrence until you got married, and as such it was something that didn’t even need to be talked about. If you weren’t married then you were still a virgin, and if you weren’t a virgin but had not married yet that made you ‘sinful’ or a shame to society. Of course, by our modern standards of living, there is nothing wrong with consensual sex between two adults and marriage is not something that even comes into the equation. Perhaps we even got very used to concept of people losing their virginity at a very young age.
There were many social panics in the media that revolved around younger and younger girls getting pregnant. It was also noted that the average age of people losing their virginity was becoming much lower than ever before. It seemed that this inexorable rise of people losing their virginity very early was likely to be that way forever, so it might have seemed that we could forget about the subject. However, it now seems that there may have been a little of a reversal of this trend, and some people are not losing their virginity until they are somewhat older.
There was a new report that was issued by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Center for Health Statistics which takes a look at the sexual habits of the world that we currently live in. The report is based on in-person interviews and look at approximately 13,500 men and women between the ages of 15 to 44. The report describes all the different types of sexual fact such as what age’s people are having sex, who is having sex with each other and a number of other facts. And perhaps the most interesting aspect of the report is that it seems that virginity is making something of a comeback!
The researchers found that between the years of 2006 and 2008 the percentage of 15- to 24-year-old males who had never had sexual contact of any form with another person was up to a surprising 27 per cent. This number was up from 22 per cent in 2002 and shows an interesting upward trend for virginity. During the same period, 15- to 24-year-old females who had never had any form of sexual contact was up to 29 per cent, and this number was again up from 22 per cent in 2002.
Supposedly the majority of this increase was to be found for those people between the ages of 15 and 19, which suggests it is younger people who are making the decision not to have sex earlier on in their lives. This seems to be counter to the media image that we often find that teenagers are sex crazed and that their insatiable lust for sexual encounters knows no limits. This is certainly one of the more interesting and unexpected aspects of the report.
It might be true that when people see these results that will construe them to mean that less people are having vaginal sex. But the truth is that this shows that their younger people are having no sexual contact whatsoever, including anal or oral sex. It seems that many younger people are making the decision to take themselves away from sex altogether until they are a little older. If these seems to contradict the feelings of many of the major news outlets and media companies perhaps it shows that things are not as clear cut as it might seem.
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