Reality check: 95 percent of Americans had premarital sex

[Illuminatus Primus]

I'm actually surprised that 95% of all Americans have had sex at all. Especially nowadays I'd assume a larger percentage of the population was Christian freaks or nerdy shut-in permavirgins.

[wolveraptor]

so they needed an unspoiled product for the customer.

See, I don't even understand how that meme survived in culture at all. I mean, a woman who's a terrible love-maker is going to strain what probably is an already unhappy marriage, which affects the diplomatic stance of both states. I can understand keeping women shut away in the home; that's supposed to ensure that they only bear the man's offspring. But this practice of virginity till matrimony seems totally irrational.

[Patrick Degan]

so they needed an unspoiled product for the customer.

See, I don't even understand how that meme survived in culture at all. I mean, a woman who's a terrible love-maker is going to strain what probably is an already unhappy marriage, which affects the diplomatic stance of both states. I can understand keeping women shut away in the home; that's supposed to ensure that they only bear the man's offspring. But this practice of virginity till matrimony seems totally irrational.

Because the woman was nothing more than a piece of property. Her opinion was irrelevant. It was expected more than half the time that she wouldn't enjoy the marriage but that wasn't what mattered —as long as she spread her legs as demanded, bore sons, and didn't cuckold the husband, everything was OK. The kids were invariably raised by others in the household, so even her fitness as a mother was unimportant.

The belief was that her property value held only as long as she was a virgin before marriage: she'd not known another man and had not borne another man's child nor was she pregnant with another man's child while saying her vows —which further ensured the purity of the line. If you couldn't guarantee that, she was worthless.

[Enforcer Talen]

IIRC, she wasnt *supposed* to enjoy sex. It being immoral and all.

No source on hand, but I remember reading manuals on victorian marriage, and the concept was to tease your wife, make her in the mood, then turn her down, cuz she shouldn't be thinking such nasty things.

[Kettch]

Uh so 1/5 of American 5 year olds are having sex? What do they mean 95% of Americans have premarital sex? Are children not Americans?

US Census Bureau

Persons under 5 years old, percent, 2004 6.8%

They should be at least writing 95% of adult americans. And while I'm at it ... by definition you can only have premarital sex, if you get married some time after said sexual activity. And what are they defining as sex? Heavy groping? Mutual genital stimulation? Oral? Only full intercourse? Do they count if there is no orgasm? What about if there is an orgasm with no contact? (i.e. Biloxi Blues).

OK let's looks at the press release (& see how lazy the CNN writer was):

NEWS RELEASE
120 Wall Street, New York, NY 10005
Ph 212 248 1111 Fax 212 248 1951

Rebecca Wind
mediaworks@guttmacher.org
Tuesday, December 19, 2006
PREMARITAL SEX IS NEARLY UNIVERSAL AMONG AMERICANS, AND HAS BEEN FOR DECADES

The vast majority of Americans have sex before marriage, including those who abstained from sex during their teenage years, according to “Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954–2003,” by Lawrence B. Finer, published in the January/February 2007 issue of Public Health Reports. Further, contrary to the public perception that premarital sex is much more common now than in the past, the study shows that even among women who were born in the 1940s, nearly nine in 10 had sex before marriage.

The new study uses data from several rounds of the federal National Survey of Family Growth to examine sexual behavior before marriage, and how it has changed over time. According to the analysis, by age 44, 99% of respondents had had sex, and 95% had done so before marriage. Even among those who abstained from sex until age 20 or older, 81% had had premarital sex by age 44.

“This is reality-check research. Premarital sex is normal behavior for the vast majority of Americans, and has been for decades,” says study author Lawrence Finer, director of domestic research at the Guttmacher Institute. “The data clearly show that the majority of older teens and adults have already had sex before marriage, which calls into question the federal government’s funding of abstinence-only-until-marriage programs for 12–29-year-olds. It would be more effective to provide young people with the skills and information they need to be safe once they become sexually active—which nearly everyone eventually will.”

Indeed, while the likelihood that Americans will have sex before marriage has remained virtually unchanged since the 1950s, people now wait longer to get married, so they are sexually active and unmarried for much longer than in the past. During this period, Dr. Finer concludes, young adults have an especially great need for accurate information about how to protect themselves against unintended pregnancies and sexually transmitted infections.

Well lets take a look at the actual report:

Results. Data from the 2002 survey indicate that by age 20, 77% of respondents
had had sex, 75% had had premarital sex, and 12% had married; by age
44, 95% of respondents (94% of women, 96% of men, and 97% of those who
had ever had sex) had had premarital sex. Even among those who abstained
until at least age 20, 81% had had premarital sex by age 44. Among cohorts
of women turning 15 between 1964 and 1993, at least 91% had had premarital
sex by age 30. Among those turning 15 between 1954 and 1963, 82% had had
premarital sex by age 30, and 88% had done so by age 44.

Hum this is intresting, from page 2:

The primary stated goal of these efforts is to encourage
all Americans to abstain from sex until they marry.5
It follows that such programs consider it an achievable
goal to make abstinence until marriage a normative
behavior.6 However, the median age at first marriage
increased from 22.1 to 25.8 for women and from
24.4 to 27.4 for men over the past 25 years,7 and the
proportion of the population 18 and older that had
never married increased from 16% to 25% between
1970 and 2004,8,9 suggesting that many individuals
have a long interval after puberty and before marrying
during which they may become sexually active. The
median age at menarche is 12.6 and at spermarche is
14.0,10 so this interval is now typically about 13 years
for both men and women. That 70% of adolescent
females and 65% of adolescent males have had sex
by age 1911 and few have married suggests that a large
percentage do so before marrying. The first goal of
this analysis was to quantify current normative behavior
by calculating the proportion of Americans who have
had premarital sex.

Let's take a look in the Methods section:

I constructed a measure of premarital sex by combining
measures of the age (in years and months) at which
the respondent first had vaginal sexual intercourse (if
the individual had ever had sex) and the age he or she
first married (if the individual had ever married). A
previously published cross-sectional analysis indicated
that in the 2002 NSFG, 85% of ever-married women had
had sex before they married,17 but this measure fails to
take into account women who had never married but
had already had sex. A better methodological approach
(used in the current study) is event history analysis,
which allows one to take into account the experience
of people at all ages and of all marital statuses.

In the current analysis, an event was defined as
having sex for the first time before ever having married.
Individuals whose month of first sex was earlier than
their month of first marriage, or who had had
sex but had not married by the time of interview, were
considered to have experienced the event. Those who
had had sex for the first time in the same month as
(or after) their first marriage and those who had neither
had sex nor married contributed their months
of nonexperience of the event to the analysis and
were “censored” at the time of marriage (for those
who had married) or at the time of interview (for
those who had not married), since they ceased to be
at risk of the event at that point. I then calculated the
proportion of individuals who had had premarital sex
by each age, or event curves, using Kaplan-Meier lifetable
procedures.19 For comparison, I also calculated
proportions for the occurrence of sex (premarital or
otherwise) and marriage.

Hum so that is intresting..... What about Gay men who never had hetero-sexual intercourse? Also the method does not compensate for intercourse with some one other that a fiance in the same month as a marrage. So the stag (hen) night effect drops out. But atleast we have the defionition of what they mean by sex.

Unfortunately I couldn't get the really intresting part to copy & paste. So take a look in the report at the data break down on page 4 and the pretty charts. While 'premarital' sex has stayed steady .... the age which it occurs has droped up markedly ... from 20.4 in the turned 15 in 1954–63 group to 17.3 in the 15 in 1984–93 group.

[SirNitram]

Uh so 1/5 of American 5 year olds are having sex? What do they mean 95% of Americans have premarital sex? Are children not Americans?

US Census Bureau

Persons under 5 years old, percent, 2004 6.8%

I really wish we could throw people this stupid out of the forum. Because this kind of bullshitting of knowledge of how to apply statistical results gets on my nerves.

[Junghalli]

See, I don't even understand how that meme survived in culture at all. I mean, a woman who's a terrible love-maker is going to strain what probably is an already unhappy marriage, which affects the diplomatic stance of both states. I can understand keeping women shut away in the home; that's supposed to ensure that they only bear the man's offspring. But this practice of virginity till matrimony seems totally irrational.

Think of it in terms of evolution. If you're a male and your part of a species that invests huge amounts of energy caring for their offspring (like humans do) you want to make sure that energy is being spent on offspring that are actually yours. The last thing you want is for your mate to go sleep with somebody else and you to be stuck unknowingly raising somebody else's child. Ideally want to keep your mate faithful to you for their entire reproductive life, so all their children will be yours.

[Kettch]

Uh so 1/5 of American 5 year olds are having sex? What do they mean 95% of Americans have premarital sex? Are children not Americans?

US Census Bureau

Persons under 5 years old, percent, 2004 6.8%

I really wish we could throw people this stupid out of the forum. Because this kind of bullshitting of knowledge of how to apply statistical results gets on my nerves.

OK, I'll bite on your Troll by breaking my point down for you. The article says that 95% of americans have had premartial sex. Not that Americans will have a 95% chance of likelyhood of having premarital sex. The persons under 5 years was the easiest retreivable from the Census Bureau. (Now I did miss write my comment about the 5 year olds having sex, it should have read under five years old, etc.) Why is all of this important? Because the range of the survey includes those who are not adults. Further the 95% stat. does not show up until 40 yr olds.

Pulling from: "Table. Percentage of various groups who had had premarital sex by specific ages, and median age at first premarital sex" on Page 4 of "Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954­–2003"

Group 15 18 20 25 30 35 40 44
All 16 58 75 89 93 94 95 95

[Gil Hamilton]

Uh so 1/5 of American 5 year olds are having sex? What do they mean 95% of Americans have premarital sex? Are children not Americans?

US Census Bureau

I really wish we could throw people this stupid out of the forum. Because this kind of bullshitting of knowledge of how to apply statistical results gets on my nerves.

OK, I'll bite on your Troll by breaking my point down for you. The article says that 95% of americans have had premartial sex. Not that Americans will have a 95% chance of likelyhood of having premarital sex. The persons under 5 years was the easiest retreivable from the Census Bureau. (Now I did miss write my comment about the 5 year olds having sex, it should have read under five years old, etc.) Why is all of this important? Because the range of the survey includes those who are not adults. Further the 95% stat. does not show up until 40 yr olds.

Pulling from: "Table. Percentage of various groups who had had premarital sex by specific ages, and median age at first premarital sex" on Page 4 of "Trends in Premarital Sex in the United States, 1954­–2003"

Group 15 18 20 25 30 35 40 44
All 16 58 75 89 93 94 95 95

Wingus, you miss the obvious problem. The sample does not include 5 year olds. Therefore they are irrelevant. What the 95% refers to is not all Americans, but Americans who match the criteria of the sample group. Thus, the servey means 95% of people in that age range.

[Kettch]

OK, that wasn't supposed to post yet... Sigh. And great, the link runs back into the edit URL. The link to the actual report should be this: http://www.publichealthreports.org/user ... _73-78.pdf

Well, as you can see the 15 year olds ... 16%. Now it jumps to 58% by 18 and really levels off at age 30 at 93%. But the point is that 95% of those surveyed that reached or exceeded 40 years old have had premarital sex.

My complaints are
1) The press release was poorly worded.
2) The the CNN was a copy & paste job from the press release with some fair and balanced quotes from the opposite side for filler.
3) Reading the article it did not seem like the reporter actually read the report.
4) "95 percent of Americans had premarital sex" should have read "95 percent of 50+ year old Americans had premarital sex"
5) Terms in the article and the press release were not well defined.

Did anyone here actually go and find the report and read it? Come on, you don't let a Space Baby get away with Trek handwaving, and are willing to calculate the energy to destroy Alderaan, but can't be bothered to actually read a six page (including happy graphs) report ? Besides there is alot of interesting information in the report, heck on that one Table about changes in ages for premarital sex through different age groups.

[Kettch]

Wingus, you miss the obvious problem. The sample does not include 5 year olds. Therefore they are irrelevant. What the 95% refers to is not all Americans, but Americans who match the criteria of the sample group. Thus, the servey means 95% of people in that age range.

Does the CNN article define the age range of the sample group at all? No. Does the press release define the age range of the sample group? No. The only definitions were that the participants were Americans and the # of males to females. Thats it. I went into the report to dig the information out. And then it is important to note that the age ranges start at 15, so the term American Adults, (had they chosen it ) would not have been valid.

My complaints are of sloppy & lazy reporting of The Associated Press. (This is an AP article reprinted CNN, so replace AP for CNN in my reporter complaints.)

[Edi]

Are you just trying to troll, you stunted furry? According to the study, 95% of Americans will have had premarital sex by the time they are 44 years old, and that figure is reached through reliable statistical analysis. It does not mean that they have the sex as 5-year olds. Your idiocy and lack of understanding in this regard is simply breathtaking.

I actually fucking FAILED probabilities and statistical math in engineering school and even then I understand enough of this shit to see how and why there is nothing wrong with the conclusions or even with the wording of the press release.

You don't have a fucking leg to stand on and I'll thoroughly enjoy seeing Nitram tear you to tiny little shreds.

Edi

[SirNitram]

OK, I'll bite on your Troll by breaking my point down for you. The article says that 95% of americans have had premartial sex.

And thus you fail. The article says 95% have premarital sex by age 44. To beleive this includes 5 year olds is to be an inbred fucker, and to pompously try and prove yourself right without pausing to stop and look back to see if there was something that might, ohhhh, expose you for the bullshitter you are... Well, it just proves you're a fucking twat.