The XX Factor: Slate women blog about politics, etc...

Girls, Sex, and Stepping Back

I think Juliet is right: We do worry more about girls and sex, as I've argued here and here in Slate. Although I share Emily's impression that my teenage peers most confused about their sexuality were girls, I don't think we should rely on anecdotal evidence or our personal histories to try to understand the broader realities of teen sexuality today. After all, one of the reasons girls can seem more confused about sex than boys is that our cultural rhetoric routinely casts them as victims rather than lusty conquerors. Of course there's another good reason girls might be more confused: They bear the consequences of unprotected sex (i.e., pregnancy) in ways that boys just don't and never will. But being alarmist on their behalf doesn't serve a clear purpose; yet you see this kind of scare-mongering over and over in the media (especially the conservative media). The American Family Association Journal spotlights an alarming statistic about girls and sex ("46% of teen girls become infected with an STD during their first sexual encounter") next to a supposedly gender-neutral 2003 piece about teen sexuality; there's no comparable stat for boys.