Social and Cultural Aspects
"We've gone though a 30 year period when sexuality was the solution; it has now become the problem. It's like a drug in our culture. Kids look upon it as a way of managing how they are feeling as opposed to of a way of expressing intimacy. We have such disturbed family systems that kids have impairments of their ability to regulate their affective lives;... naturally enough they look at these things as their solutions."
Adolescents who are better students initiate sexual activity later than those who are poor students. Despite their behaviors, 90% of adolescents "agree that most young people have sex before they are really ready".
With regards to oral sex, experts have noted that casual attitudes towards it have made it so common that "we're talking about a major social norm. It's part of kids' lives." Along those lines, adolescents with personal and perceived peer norms that encourage adolescents to refrain from sex are less likely to engage in it. Girls as young as junior high age "with pitiable self-esteem... give oral sex sex to boys while insisting that they are not sexually active - an astonishing redefinition of sexual activity shared by most of their generation."
Read more about this topic: Adolescent Sexuality In The United States
Famous quotes containing the words social, cultural and/or aspects:
“I was like a social worker for lepers. My clients had a chunk of their body they wanted to give away; for a price I was there to receive it. Crimes, sins, nightmares, hunks of hair: it was surprising how many of them has something to dispose of. The more I charged, the easier it was for them to breathe freely once more.”
—Tama Janowitz (b. 1957)
“All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The North American system only wants to consider the positive aspects of reality. Men and women are subjected from childhood to an inexorable process of adaptation; certain principles, contained in brief formulas are endlessly repeated by the press, the radio, the churches, and the schools, and by those kindly, sinister beings, the North American mothers and wives. A person imprisoned by these schemes is like a plant in a flowerpot too small for it: he cannot grow or mature.”
—Octavio Paz (b. 1914)