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:
“Growing up human is uniquely a matter of social relations rather than biology. What we learn from connections within the family takes the place of instincts that program the behavior of animals; which raises the question, how good are these connections?”
—Elizabeth Janeway (b. 1913)
“A culture may be conceived as a network of beliefs and purposes in which any string in the net pulls and is pulled by the others, thus perpetually changing the configuration of the whole. If the cultural element called morals takes on a new shape, we must ask what other strings have pulled it out of line. It cannot be one solitary string, nor even the strings nearby, for the network is three-dimensional at least.”
—Jacques Barzun (b. 1907)
“I suppose an entire cabinet of shells would be an expression of the whole human mind; a Flora of the whole globe would be so likewise, or a history of beasts; or a painting of all the aspects of the clouds. Everything is significant.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)