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:
“But look what we have built ... low-income projects that become worse centers of delinquency, vandalism and general social hopelessness than the slums they were supposed to replace.... Cultural centers that are unable to support a good bookstore. Civic centers that are avoided by everyone but bums.... Promenades that go from no place to nowhere and have no promenaders. Expressways that eviscerate great cities. This is not the rebuilding of cities. This is the sacking of cities.”
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