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:
“If you complain of people being shot down in the streets, of the absence of communication or social responsibility, of the rise of everyday violence which people have become accustomed to, and the dehumanization of feelings, then the ultimate development on an organized social level is the concentration camp.... The concentration camp is the final expression of human separateness and its ultimate consequence. It is organized abandonment.”
—Arthur Miller (b. 1915)
“They’re semiotic phantoms, bits of deep cultural imagery that have split off and taken on a life of their own, like those Jules Verne airships that those old Kansas farmers were always seeing.... Semiotic ghosts. Fragments of the Mass Dream, whirling past in the wind of my passage.”
—William Gibson (b. 1948)
“An atheist may be simply one whose faith and love are concentrated on the impersonal aspects of God.”
—Simone Weil (1909–1943)