Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  “My only friend who always claimed he was going to wait until marriage lost his virginity about a month ago,” says Lisa, 21. “The guy had talked and talked about how special it was going to be, and then he just decided to do it! And not even with a girlfriend but with a friend.” Afterward, he described it as “not that big a deal.” Lisa concludes, “And that’s what sex is today to so many teenagers, not that big a deal.”

  THE NEW THIRD BASE

  Many other sexual behaviors are also now more common. Oral sex is now sometimes called “the new third base.” In the mid-2000s, numerous newspaper stories covered a supposed epidemic of oral sex among 12- and 13-year-olds in middle schools. Many kids say that oral sex is common by eighth or ninth grade. In a mid-2000s NBC special, 13-to-17-year-olds agreed that oral sex was “casual” and “not a big deal—it’s not sex.” If that phrase sounds familiar, recall that these kids were in elementary school when President Clinton was impeached: they learned a lot more in third grade than just their multiplication tables. In the 2010s, they’re now in their 20s.

  The results from Brooke’s comprehensive study confirm that oral sex has become more popular, a trend that began long before anyone had ever heard of Monica Lewinsky. In the late 1960s, only 42% of high school and college-age women had engaged in oral sex. By the 1990s, 71% had. These trends have continued: In a 2010 study conducted by Indiana University, 77% of men in their late 20s reported receiving oral sex from a woman in the past year. These numbers drop among GenX’ers and Boomers in their 40s and 50s, to 56% for men and 43% for women.

  Of course, oral sex in college seems quaint now that 12-year-olds are doing it in junior high school bathrooms. Actually, most teens aren’t having oral sex; in the Indiana University 2010 survey, 31% of 16-to-17-year-olds had engaged in oral sex in the past year, along with 12% of 14-to-15-year-olds. But even 12% is a large number when you’re talking about kids who are in eighth and ninth grade. Kids who aren’t doing it still know what it is. Linda Perlstein, the author of Not Much Just Chillin’, relates seeing a note passed in a seventh-grade class that said, “I want to give you oral sex. I really want to suck on your head.” The mid-2000s teen novel Rainbow Party describes a gathering at which high school girls put on different shades of lipstick and provide oral sex to several guys, thus forming a rainbow at the base of the boy’s penis. Because the book was aimed at the teenage market, adults were in an uproar about whether this was appropriate for teens to read, and whether “rainbow parties” were actually common among teens. That’s hard to say, but clearly oral sex is popular among teens because it can’t get you pregnant and it’s seen as less serious than sexual intercourse. That trend is likely to continue.

  Yet you do have to wonder what’s in it for the young women (as oral sex is more often female-on-male instead of the other way around). When Katie Couric posed this question to the girls gathered for the NBC special, several answered “self-esteem.” Giving oral sex to guys, they said, helped them become popular and feel good about themselves. So not only does sex satisfy the needs of the self, but oral sex performed on someone else does too. I’m not sure I believe it, though—this sounds like self-esteem being used as an excuse. It’s tough to see how something so one-sided could truly make you feel better about yourself.

  However, more women are also receiving oral sex. Few women of earlier generations asked for this from men, and many didn’t even know what it was. In Alfred Kinsey’s studies in the 1950s, only 3% of the young women had received oral sex from a man. By the mid-1990s, however, 75% of women aged 18 to 24 had experienced cunnilingus. In the 2010 survey, 72% of women in their late 20s had received oral sex from a man in the last year.

  And then . . . there’s the new fourth base. The 2010 survey found that 46% of women had tried anal sex at least once, up from 33% in 1992. And many have done it recently: 27%—more than 1 in 4—of men in their late 20s had had anal sex in the past year, and 21% of late-20s women had had a partner use the back door. In 2010, members of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity at Yale University stood outside the freshman dorms chanting, “No means yes! Yes means anal!” Their misogynistic chant demonstrates how once-taboo sexual behaviors are now seen as commonplace.

  Why has anal sex surged in popularity? Hugo Schwyzer, a gender studies professor, theorizes that anal sex has become mainstream due to its frequent portrayal in pornography. And porn has, it seems, also become ubiquitous.

  CHOOSING THE RIGHT STRIPPER POLE FOR YOUR HOME

  Watching porn has moved from being a dirty secret to an openly acknowledged, even celebrated, experience. Porn stars such as Jenna Jameson publish bestsellers. Porn star Traci Lords, whose memoir also hit the bestseller list, observed, “When I was in porn, it was like a back-alley thing. Now it’s everywhere.”

  Sex tapes, once a source of shame, are now the key to fame: Paris Hilton and Kim Kardashian both became household names because of sex tapes. Kardashian’s even has its own website: kimkrayjsextape.com, which also advertises a long list of sex tapes featuring other reality TV stars. “Soft” porn has also become more acceptable—as Ariel Levy documents in Female Chauvinist Pigs, college women are apparently willing participants in videos such as Girls Gone Wild (which, if you have not had the pleasure, features young women baring their breasts). “Spectacles of naked ladies have moved from seedy side streets to center stage, where everyone—men and women—can watch them in broad daylight,” Levy writes. In her 2013 book, Masterminds and Wingmen, Rosalind Wiseman found several high school boys who taped themselves having sex with girls and showed the videos to classmates. “For the selfie generation, raised in an era when celebrity sex tapes are commonplace, public sexuality doesn’t always seem particularly taboo,” Wiseman observes. In a 2013 Gallup poll, half (49%) of GenMe’ers said that pornography was morally acceptable, compared to only 28% of GenX and 19% of Boomers. It was the largest generation gap of all of the items in the poll.

  And what self-respecting woman, before the last ten years, even thought to take a pole-dancing class? Pole dancing was once the sole province of strippers, not exactly the highest rung in society. Now middle-class, middle-aged women take classes to learn now to dance like a stripper. A quick Google search led me to the pole-dance studio in San Diego, called Fun Pole Fitness. Its website describes the classes as “a group fitness experience where you will have fun while you get stronger dancing and moving with a pole. Pole dancing is the most fun you can have while building your confidence, strength, flexibility and self-esteem.” The website features pictures of women wearing platform heels, fishnet stockings, and feather boas, posing on stripper poles. And once you’ve learned your moves, several companies will install a stripper pole right in your bedroom. One website even offers “4 tips for choosing the right stripper pole for your home.”

  The influence of porn and strippers is indirect as well. Three times as many women got breast implants in 2012 compared to 1997. Twice as many got a procedure known as a buttock lift. Thong underwear, virtually unheard of before the 1990s, is now common—thongs accounted for 1 in 4 women’s underwear sales in 2012. Spray tanning is featured on reality TV shows.

  And how did I get this far in a chapter about sex without mentioning Miley Cyrus? The video for her song “Wrecking Ball” was porn without the nipples. She showed virtually everything else, saved from complete full frontal only by clever camera angles. Her performance at the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards popularized the dance style known as twerking, or dancing with thrusting hips and a low, squatting stance. Her performance was both widely watched and viciously panned. Cyrus maintained her popularity based on our cultural inability to look away from a train wreck, giving us whiplash in her seemingly instant transformation from Disney-show star to all-but porn star.

  HOOKING UP

  The most striking shift in teenage and twentysomething sexual behavior in the last decade is the disconnect between sex and emotional involvement. An article in the New York Times Magazine by Benoit Denizet-Lewis
detailed the new pastime of “hooking up,” or casual, unattached sex or fooling around. Dating and boyfriend-girlfriend relationships, it noted, were out. “Most of the teenagers I spoke to could think of only a handful of serious couples at their school,” Denizet-Lewis noted. One guy with a girlfriend said that his friends made him feel like a “loser” for being in a relationship. Teens believe that “high school is no place for romantic relationships. They’re complicated, messy, and invariably painful. Hooking up, when done ‘right,’ is exciting, sexually validating and efficient.” An article in the Atlantic by Hanna Rosin came to a similar conclusion about the hookup culture during college. Heather, 24, neatly summarizes the generational change: “Once, sex was something you did with your husband, then it was what you did with the person you love, and now it is more for recreational purposes.”

  Older adults may be surprised by the idea of sex as “recreation,” as if it were tennis or jogging. But many young people see relationships as too emotionally fraught, a dangerous world of feelings and closeness. “Guys can get so annoying when you start dating them,” says Caity, 14, in the New York Times Magazine article. Young people’s behavior and beliefs reinforce the shift toward casual, or at least nonrelationship, sex. In an NBC/People poll, almost half of young teens said their sexual contact was outside of a relationship. A survey conducted between 2005 and 2012 found that the average college student hooks up with eight people over four years.

  Boys seem especially thrilled with this state of affairs. “Being in a real relationship just complicates everything. You feel obligated to be all, like, couply. And that gets really boring after a while,” says Brian, 16, in the New York Times Magazine article. “When you’re friends with benefits, you go over, hook up, then play video games or something. It rocks.” If the girl wants to date you, some guys say, you simply stop hooking up. Says high school student Haris, “Now that it’s easy to get sex outside of relationships, guys don’t need relationships.” The trend has now reached adults: 38% of US adults in 2010–12 said they’d had sex with “a casual date or pickup” in the last year, up from 28% in 1988.

  That often means more sex partners—a lot more sex partners. In 1988, the average American adult reported having 7 sex partners; by 2010–12 this had risen to 11. Jack, now 20, wrote that he was popular in high school and had sex with sixteen girls before he turned 18. Denizet-Lewis found that this was one of the reasons boys disdained steady relationships: it kept them from sleeping with many different girls. Boys would only date if they weren’t hot enough to get lots of girls. Or, as a character on Law & Order: SVU put it, “Only ugly people date.” When Hanna Rosin asked a 19-year-old Yale University student in 2011 what she wanted instead of a hookup, she said, “Some guy to ask me out on a date to the frozen-yogurt place.” As Rosin puts it, “That’s it. A $3 date.”

  Yet many young women are willing participants. Sociologist Elizabeth Armstrong observes, “The ambitious women calculate that having a relationship would be like a four-credit class, and they don’t always have time for it, so instead they opt for a lighter hookup.” One young woman Rosin interviewed said she wanted to be “one hundred percent selfish.” Another was stringing along a guy she didn’t want to marry: “He fits my needs now because I don’t want to get married now. I don’t want anyone else to influence what I do after I graduate.”

  The Hookup Handbook provides a more lighthearted look at the sexual mores of the new millennium. Young authors Andrea Lavinthal and Jessica Rozler say that hooking up has definitely replaced dating, which, they say, “has gone the way of the dinosaurs, eight-track players, and stirrup pants. Extinct. Vanished. Kaput.” Features of the hookup, they say, often include “drunk dialing” (what used to be known as a booty call) and “the walk of shame,” which is what happens when you have to walk home from his place the next morning still wearing your attire from the night before: “a boobalicious top, a skintight pair of jeans (or an ass-cheek-exposing miniskirt), open-toed shoes, and a teeny-tiny purse that barely fits a tampon.” Types of hookups include “The Fall-Down-Drunk Hookup,” “Oops, I Did It Again (The Ex-Boyfriend),” and “The Snuffleupagus” (“the hookup you deny but everyone else knows really exists”). Occasionally, a series of hookups with the same guy leads to a relationship and skips the dating stage entirely. One woman says she knew she and her hookup were finally in a relationship when “they just hung out at his apartment and watched TV instead of going out, getting drunk, and hooking up.”

  Hooking up has been facilitated by technology, especially cell phones. It’s pretty simple—you can text your potential hookup even if he’s blocks away at another bar. As The Hookup Handbook puts it, “If we didn’t have these instant forms of communication (like text messaging and IM), hooking up would be dating because you’d actually have to put more than just minimal effort into making something happen.” The Internet helps too, with its myriad hookup sites; phone apps such as Tinder and Grindr can even tell hookup seekers who’s available in proximity. Interviewed on NPR, Clinton Fein says he uses Grindr because it’s “quicker and more efficient. The whole premise of going to a bar is to drink. And you don’t have to necessarily drink to have sex now, because there’s technology.”

  All of this means a whole lot of fun. Think about it: you can make out with that cute guy in the bar or the guy from your psych class, and nobody has to worry about who’s going to call whom the next day. It’s acceptable to hook up with someone you’d never actually date, so you can satisfy your urges with younger guys (what The Hookup Handbook calls “pass the sippy cup”), cute but dumb guys, older guys, whatever. There’s no turning down dates for Saturday if they’re not made by Wednesday; no rules say how many dates you have to go on before you’re “allowed” to kiss him or have sex with him. Just do what you want to do—how many other generations of women (or men) have had that privilege? As The Hookup Handbook notes in its last line, “Your mother never had this much fun.” Whether you think this sounds like fun probably depends on your generation.

  ART IMITATES LIFE, OR VICE VERSA?

  Sex outside of marriage is common on TV and in movies. “It was no big deal to me or my friends that we had sex before we were married,” said David, 19. “We see it on TV and in the movies all the time.” Monica, 16, said on the Today show, “If you just turn on MTV one day, you’re going to see sex everywhere.”

  Portrayals of teen sex have become more common and accepted in the two decades since GenX’ers were teens. Most 1980s movies showed teenagers talking about sex, but not actually doing it. In 1985’s The Breakfast Club, one character claims she slept with her therapist, but then later admits she made that up. Another says that he slept with a girl, but “you don’t know her—she lives in Canada.” But this is just a lame lie—he’s actually a virgin.

  Nearly all of the characters on Glee lost their virginity during high school. The O.C. portrayed teen sex as commonplace and relatively casual. Ryan talked about hookups at parties. Seth and Summer, both 16, had sex even though they had never been on a date together. Summer confesses to Seth afterward that she was a virgin, explaining that she didn’t tell him before because “I had this reputation to uphold, and I figured you’d think less of me or something.” Not so long ago, a high school girl with a “reputation” was a bad thing—now it’s a good thing. This is art imitating life; according to Tunesia, 16, interviewed on the Today show, “Any publicity is good publicity when it comes to girls and sex.”

  But life also imitates art quite a bit. A study of almost 2,000 teens found that those who watch TV with a lot of sexual content are twice as likely to engage in intercourse as those who watch less. “The impact of television viewing is so large that even a moderate shift in the sexual content of adolescent TV watching could have a substantial effect on their sexual behavior,” said study author Rebecca Collins. Watching sexually explicit TV led to teens having sex two to three years earlier, with media-savvy 13-year-olds acting the same as more sheltered 15- or 16-year-olds
. Another study found that young black women who watch many rap-music videos are more likely to have multiple sex partners and to acquire a sexually transmitted disease.

  Fashion reflects the shift toward freer sexuality. Although it makes me feel old to say it, girls did not wear belly-exposing shirts when I was in high school in the late 1980s. Well into the mid-1990s, the fashion was to wear big, blousy shirts (gather round, children, and let me tell you about the wonderful days of stirrup pants). This look covered your body pretty well, which is perhaps why it’s now so out of fashion. Now the style is the more skin, the better, and bonus if your T-shirt says something provocative. Thirteen-year-old Maya, interviewed for a mid-2000s People magazine story, said she’s going to “wait until I’m twenty” to have sex. In the picture accompanying the article, however, she’s wearing a T-shirt ripped into a V-neckline that declares in large letters HOT N’ NAUGHTY.

  Some of the worst offenders are in advertising and music. Sex sells, and “barely legal” is a theme. Pediatrician Meg Meeker calls it the “very aggressive marketing of sex to our kids. Everywhere they go they are saturated with visual and auditory messages about sex.” Linda Perlstein, the author of the book on middle schoolers, says that at teen dance clubs many kids imitated “freaking,” something they’d seen in music videos, where a boy rubs himself against a girl’s butt. “Children as young as eleven simulate sex on the dance floor as rappers bleat about oral gratification,” Perlstein reports. The lyrics, she notes, “made great use of the fact that ‘motherfucker’ and ‘dick sucker’ rhyme.”