Sexuality in Adolescence

As depicted in Figure 1, about 50 percent of girls and 56 percent of boys in the United States age fifteen to nineteen have had sexual intercourse at least once (Alan Guttmacher Institute 1999). Of course the percentages increase dramatically with age. Among fifteen-year-old youths, sexual intercourse experience is still unusual (22% for girls and 27% for boys), whereas more than half of seventeen-yearolds have had intercourse. Among nineteen-yearolds, the large majority (76% of females and 85% of males) are sexually experienced regardless of gender. About 20 percent of teenagers (15% of males and 24% of females) do not have sexual intercourse during their teenage years (Alan Guttmacher Institute 1999). Intercourse among teenagers is most often voluntary but not always welcome. About one in four women report that their first coital experience was unwanted, but the proportion is 70 percent unwanted among those whose first intercourse experience occurred before age thirteen. Adolescent females tend to be involved sexually with young men near their own age: 61 percent have partners who are within two years of their own age, 27 percent have partners who are three to four years older, and 12 percent have partners who are five or more years older. Conversely, teenage males tend to have sexual partners younger than themselves. Among nineteen-year-old males, 76 percent had seventeen- to eighteen-year-old partners, 13 percent had FIGURE 1 sixteen-year-old partners, and 11 percent had thirteen- to fifteen-year-old partners (Alan Guttmacher Institute 1999). Sexual intercourse is sporadic and infrequent for most sexually experienced teenagers. In one study (De Gaston, Jensen, and Weed 1995), half of sexually experienced teenagers had been involved with only one partner, and many of them reported regrets about not having waited. According to Debra Haffner (1998), 65 percent of adolescent girls and 45 percent of boys felt that their sexual debut occurred too early.