I was thumbing through an old issue of Newsweek and I found this article, which is still available online. Veeeery interesting -- finally someone's talking some sense.
The study followed 534 sets of same-sex twins (I suppose boys and girls are just way too different, right?) and monitored who had sex first. Apparently, the person that had sex first had lower levels of "delinquency" and "anti-social behavior" in the next few years of their life.
Thus, there is little to no connection between age of virginity loss and level of delinquency. The article goes on to talk about other things, but the study really interested me.
I was pretty disappointed that "delinquency" and "anti-social behavior" were never defined in the article. At least sex wasn't defined as patently delinquent. Still... I think the premise of the article is right on -- having sex earlier doesn't doom a teen to a future of crime and turmoil -- but I couldn't help but think that there are probably a million other reasons that why these results came about.
Overall, I was kind of overwhelmed by the study -- do we really need explanations for delinquency (which is never defined and leads me to believe it is a perceptive thing)? Do we need explanations when teenagers have (safe) sex? I guess what I'm getting at is what I think we'll end up seeing in a lot of our articles... this facination with teenagers as an alien entity worthy of big, important studies done by grown-ups.
BONUS!! I wish I had time to talk about this article, too -- it links "aggressive," "teenage" behavior to sizes of parts of the brain. Look our for these key words: "sassy," "chaperone," and "poorly supervised." Barf.
1 comment:
Great analysis... I think I should use that Newsweek article in class next time I teach this. Augh!
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