Sex (and Drugs) By the Numbers: Intercourse Down, Other Stuff Up

Last week the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released the latest analysis on sexual behavior and drug use from the National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey, a project that has been going on since 1999. These are arguably the most reliable statistics we have on the sexual behaviors of Americans (which neither means they are perfect or that we know exactly what they mean). Of course there are many questions that don’t get asked, but there are still many fascinating results buried in the data. Over the next few weeks I’m going to excavate some of some of the numbers for sexual behavior and see what we can make of them.

One of the questions they asked about was age of first sex. Here’s some of the data:

• 16% of adults first had sex before they were fifteen years old.
• 15% of adults reported not having sex until they were age twenty-one or older.

Younger respondents were more likely to report having had sex before they were fifteen than older respondents. For example 20% of respondents who are now 20-29 years old said they had sex before they were fifteen, but 12% of respondents who are 50-59 said they had sex before they were fifteen.

At first glance these data seem to contradict earlier CDC findings about teen sexual behavior that indicated young people are waiting longer to have sex (the percentage of grade 12 students who had intercourse dropped from 67% in 1999 to 61% in 2001).

One possibility for the discrepancy may have to do oral sex, or anal sex, or both. In the recent CDC survey "sex" was considered to include vaginal, anal, or oral sex. In the previous study with grade 12 students "sex" only meant intercourse.

If people are waiting longer to have intercourse and people are having “sex” (including anal and oral sex) at a younger age, one reasonable way to interpret the data is that youth are having oral and/or anal sex at a younger age. This may be good news for editors who are happy to run hysterical pieces about out of control teen sexual behavior (which means its bad news for those of us not interested in more sexual hysteria). In fact the most recent data don't include an analysis of whether the change in sexual behaviors are statistically significant. So while the difference is an interesting one to note, its premature to make much more of it. Of course editors are rarely concerned about premature publication when it comes to sex.

Read more – CDC: Drug Use and Sexual Behaviors Reported by Adults: United State, 1999-2002

Read more – Teen Sex Statistics

Read more – Teenage Sexuality, Separating Reality and Hysteria