hanneblank (![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif){kind=small} hanneblank) wrote,@ 2005-07-13 23:06:00 |
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The Unasked, Unanswered, and Unanswerable Questions vs. What Little We Do Know , and Why It Matters
In working on this book, there have been three things that have repeatedly managed to surprise me: how much we don't know about virginity, how much we cannot know about virginity, and how frequently we manage to ignore the first two things.
The public health, behavioral, and sociological research is paltry and overwhelmingly of a vintage that is no more than my own (i.e., dating from the 60s or later). The empirical medical evidence is skimpy prior to the 1860s, and even then, medical methodologies used in assessing matters sexual have often been pretty iffy. The post-1960 research that does exist is primarily American, tends to approach virginity issues from the perspective of pathology (i.e., approaching it as a matter of "premarital sex" or virginity loss as the cause of STD transmission and unplanned pregnancy), and most studies are pretty limited in their sample size and scope. Regardless of the time period, the information (whether it is structured as research or merely transmitted as cultural truth) we have about virginity often also encodes some pretty overt political or social agendas; depending on the source and the era it also might have an obvious religious or moral agenda besides.
The overall picture is roughly this: prior to the last third of the twentieth century, what we know is very scattered and haphazard. With a few limited exceptions -- early C20th Brazil produced a number of fine and still relevant studies of decently large populations, for instance -- the information about virginity that was published was mostly anecdotal, often based on misconceptions or grounded in bias so overt that the evidence is useless except as evidence of the types of bias that come into play, and many times seems to appear almost at random. Finding information requires a lot of digging and a lot of close reading, and individual nuggets of data can only really be assessed on their own separate merits because the sources and methodologies behind those sources are too diverse and often too informal to allow for comparison.
Some kinds of information don't exist at all, in any real sense, for periods prior to the middle third of the C20th. Big sexological surveys, for instance. Behavioral assays of large groups of people's sexual habits are sporadic at best prior to Kinsey, and even then, questions about non-marital, pre-marital, adolescent, childhood, or virginity-related sex were rare as hen's teeth.
There's a reason that massive sexual information-gathering like Kinsey's work was so revolutionary: for all their flaws, these kinds of studies, now so common that they show up on a regular basis in glossy lifestyle magazines, were daring new inventions. They offered us a view on sex that we had literally never had before, a way of taking a sexual census, a means of polling the populace to figure out what exactly "average" might be and where the extremes of the bell curve might fall. They revealed the things that we did but didn't talk about (for instance, Kinsey's samples revealed higher incidences of same-sex sexual behavior than had been previously presumed) and the things that we didn't do but said we did (fewer men and women remain uniformly monogamous during their marriages than claim that they do).
Since the quantitative sexological revolution of the C20th, we've come to expect statistics about sexual behavior. What's more, we've come to trust them and to rely on them to tell us what is normal and what the trends are if behaviors seem to be in the process of changing. When a survey like the massive American ADDHealth (National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, begun in 1994 and with subsequent waves of survey activity between 1994-1996 and 2001-2002) generates an new report, the news media gather 'round like hogs to the trough for a heaping helping of steaming hot fresh factual evidence of just how much foolin' around our nation's youth are doing. And every time one of these reports, or their many siblings, hit the streets, what happens is that people assume they know more than they do.
It's not just a matter of misinterpreting statistics, though that happens all the time. It's a matter of not accurately representing what such studies tell us because we are only rarely aware of what we don't know by way of comparison. And what it generates is a sense of crisis that may or may not be appropriate or even applicable.
The kernel of the problem is history and historiography, the writing-down of history. When a new study comes out to tell us something about virginity, as so many studies have done in the very recent past, we are, it seems, incapable of taking the study for what it is: a limited representation of a particular group of people being asked a particular set of questions at a particular moment (or set of moments, in the case of longitudinal studies) in time. What neither ADDHealth nor any other sexological, behavioral, or sociological survey can tell us—at least not in isolation—is how those answers compare to what might have been true fifty years ago, or seventy-five, or a hundred and twenty, or four hundred.
The quantitative study of sex is new. The quantitative study of virginity, premarital sex, adolescent sex, and preadolescent sex (insofar as it exists) is even newer. There is some quantitative sex research that predates Kinsey, particularly in England, but Kinsey's work is still considered something of a benchmark, the exemplar of a rising tide of quantitative sexology. Kinsey's first major study appeared in 1948, after the end of the Second World War. Research dealing especially with adolescent sexuality and age of first penis-in-vagina intercourse (the usual researcher's criteria for "virginity loss" or "sexual debut") didn't really get rolling until the 1970s; most of the pioneering surveys of adolescent sexual behavior that I've looked at were performed during the decade that I was in grammar school.
This is where the problem starts. For an array of reasons we—parents, physicians, journalists, policymakers, religious authorities, public health workers—want our sex surveys about young people's sexuality to tell us where we're headed. We want to know how things are changing, how they are different from a generation ago, two generations ago, three or four or more. Are adolescents losing their virginity earlier than they did in our parent's generation, as many people seem to suspect? Are kids truly having sex at younger and younger ages, as everyone from the American federal government to Lifeway Baptist Ministries to the Heritage Foundation to worried parents seem to want (and want us) to believe?
Truth is, we don't necessarily know. We can't necessarily know. We don't have the right information to know, for the simple reason that no one was asking those questions of adolescents of my mother's generation or my grandmother's generation. We only just started asking them in mine.
This means that we cansay that we know that in general, the bell curve of virginity loss timing in the industrialized West tends to start somewhere around age 13, goes up slowly until age 16, shoots up dramatically between ages 16 and 20, and then descends at a rather stately pace between the ages of 20 and 30. But we cannot say with any great certainty that this represents a situation that is notably different from what existed for previous generations. Why? Because the data don't exist. They've never existed. They can't be had. No one was asking these questions then.
Yes, we can make educated guesses, and we do and we should. We can look at some of the known variables—the ages of mothers and first-born children, for instance—and extrapolate probable, but not necessarily actual, timings for those mothers' first experience of sex. We can look at ages of people getting married for the first time and assume that this is also more or less representative of when they would've started having partnered sex. These are the kinds of circumstantial evidence from which we've derived the lion's share of the data we say we have about virginity and virginity loss in the decades and centuries before quantitative behavioral surveys on the subject began to appear.
These types of "educated guesses," though, are problematic for many reasons: not all births are registered, not all people get married, not all marriages are recorded, and, most importantly, not all marriages or births coincide even remotely closely with when the people involved began to engage in partnered sex.
They're problematic on other levels too. Socioeconomic class, race, and cultural background often have a lot to do with whether one's marriage or birth is recorded at all, let alone in a source that is likely to have survived. Think about it: how likely do you suppose the births of slave children were to be recorded in the antebellum South? How many common-law marriages, particularly among the very poor and/or very rural, were never dignified by so much as an entry in a census? What about women whose babies were born and immediately put up for adoption, or women who became prostitutes, or women who for one reason or another never married? And they are problematic from the perspective of gender: due to the long history of the sex-based double standard and the fact that men don't get pregnant, we can never assume that marriage or the birth of a child tells us anything at all about when a male began his partnered sexual life.
To put it in the simplest possible terms: when it comes to virginity and particularly to virginity loss, we do not have enough information to make very many meaningful historical comparisons.
Where we do have enough information to make small historical comparisons they are extremely limited and of only circumstantial import. For instance, work by Judith Walkowitz, Ruth Rosen, and Francoise Barrett-Ducroq suggests that on the Continent, in Britain, and in the USA alike in the later C19th, women who became prostitutes and who bore children out of wedlock frequently seem to have begun having active partnered sex lives around the age of sixteen. This is roughly the same age at which teenagers from the 1970s to the present have tended to start embarking upon their own partnered sexual journeys. But does this tell us anything significant? Does it establish a relationship between those two things? Not unless you consider the simple fact that sixteen is typically an age at which human beings are likely to be capable of sexual activity to be a whole hell of a lot more illuminating than it really is.
In a similar vein, we know from work by a variety of anthropologists and social historians that various European and American cultures have permitted courting couples of various ages (the age would depend upon expected age of marriage in most cases) to engage in "night courting," also known in English as "bundling" or among contemporary Amish as "bed dates," a custom where a young man and young woman would be permitted to share a bed for the night, fully clothed, under her family's roof. (This occasionally took place with several such couples sharing several different beds in one room, depending on local custom.) These couples could kiss, touch, talk, snuggle, canoodle, and potentially quite a bit more, depending on their daring and the vigilance of whoever else might've been around. We also know that twentieth-century teenagers have incorporated various levels of non-intercourse physical intimacy into dating, a phenomenon which was being criticized by horrified journalists and clergy all the way back in the wee years of the twentieth century and is still being decried today. What we don't know is whether teenagers in the 1990s were doing substantially different things, or more or less of them, than their bundling great-great-grandparents might have done a century or more before them. No one ever inquired too closely of them what they got up to, you see, unless someone ended up needing a shotgun wedding.
In this information vacuum it become easy to manufacture crises based on the data we do have. All one really needs to do is compare it to the data that we don't have: data that we don't actually have can be anything at all that we want. Sixteen-year-olds having intercourse can be shocking, appalling, and a moral and cultural crisis if we stick our fingers in our ears and la la la la-ignore the possibility that just maybe it's actually nothing particularly new. Fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds wanting to explore kissing and touching and caressing can be a horrifying proof of the detrimental effects of our sex-saturated media culture if we're willing to pretend that great-grandma never ever would've gone to a public park to dance to the community band and perhaps enjoy the frisson of a few stolen moments of "sparking" behind the bandshell.
I'm not saying that we do not have social crises in the arena of adolescent sex. We do, and here in the USA we have some doozies. What I'm saying is that blaming the crises solely on behavior, which is an incredibly common strategy and is the strategy at the core of the "abstinence-based" sex education movement, is historically and scientifically bankrupt. A lack of information does not grant anyone license to create a history that is, in its 20/20 rose-coloured hindsight, engineered to mire the present-day situation in irrevocable ignominy. It's a cheap trick, it's ahistorical bullshit, and it's that much worse when it's used as the basis for shoving a reactionary social agenda down the throats of people too young (and too ignorant even if not too young) to know any better.
I have more thoughts on this, but this is already awfully rambly and it's getting late. Still, it's helping me organize my thinking a bit and do some strategizing about some of the ways I want to try to talk about this stuff in the book. I might try to continue with this here at a later date, we shall see.
-- Hanne
In working on this book, there have been three things that have repeatedly managed to surprise me: how much we don't know about virginity, how much we cannot know about virginity, and how frequently we manage to ignore the first two things.
The public health, behavioral, and sociological research is paltry and overwhelmingly of a vintage that is no more than my own (i.e., dating from the 60s or later). The empirical medical evidence is skimpy prior to the 1860s, and even then, medical methodologies used in assessing matters sexual have often been pretty iffy. The post-1960 research that does exist is primarily American, tends to approach virginity issues from the perspective of pathology (i.e., approaching it as a matter of "premarital sex" or virginity loss as the cause of STD transmission and unplanned pregnancy), and most studies are pretty limited in their sample size and scope. Regardless of the time period, the information (whether it is structured as research or merely transmitted as cultural truth) we have about virginity often also encodes some pretty overt political or social agendas; depending on the source and the era it also might have an obvious religious or moral agenda besides.
The overall picture is roughly this: prior to the last third of the twentieth century, what we know is very scattered and haphazard. With a few limited exceptions -- early C20th Brazil produced a number of fine and still relevant studies of decently large populations, for instance -- the information about virginity that was published was mostly anecdotal, often based on misconceptions or grounded in bias so overt that the evidence is useless except as evidence of the types of bias that come into play, and many times seems to appear almost at random. Finding information requires a lot of digging and a lot of close reading, and individual nuggets of data can only really be assessed on their own separate merits because the sources and methodologies behind those sources are too diverse and often too informal to allow for comparison.
Some kinds of information don't exist at all, in any real sense, for periods prior to the middle third of the C20th. Big sexological surveys, for instance. Behavioral assays of large groups of people's sexual habits are sporadic at best prior to Kinsey, and even then, questions about non-marital, pre-marital, adolescent, childhood, or virginity-related sex were rare as hen's teeth.
There's a reason that massive sexual information-gathering like Kinsey's work was so revolutionary: for all their flaws, these kinds of studies, now so common that they show up on a regular basis in glossy lifestyle magazines, were daring new inventions. They offered us a view on sex that we had literally never had before, a way of taking a sexual census, a means of polling the populace to figure out what exactly "average" might be and where the extremes of the bell curve might fall. They revealed the things that we did but didn't talk about (for instance, Kinsey's samples revealed higher incidences of same-sex sexual behavior than had been previously presumed) and the things that we didn't do but said we did (fewer men and women remain uniformly monogamous during their marriages than claim that they do).
Since the quantitative sexological revolution of the C20th, we've come to expect statistics about sexual behavior. What's more, we've come to trust them and to rely on them to tell us what is normal and what the trends are if behaviors seem to be in the process of changing. When a survey like the massive American ADDHealth (National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, begun in 1994 and with subsequent waves of survey activity between 1994-1996 and 2001-2002) generates an new report, the news media gather 'round like hogs to the trough for a heaping helping of steaming hot fresh factual evidence of just how much foolin' around our nation's youth are doing. And every time one of these reports, or their many siblings, hit the streets, what happens is that people assume they know more than they do.
It's not just a matter of misinterpreting statistics, though that happens all the time. It's a matter of not accurately representing what such studies tell us because we are only rarely aware of what we don't know by way of comparison. And what it generates is a sense of crisis that may or may not be appropriate or even applicable.
The kernel of the problem is history and historiography, the writing-down of history. When a new study comes out to tell us something about virginity, as so many studies have done in the very recent past, we are, it seems, incapable of taking the study for what it is: a limited representation of a particular group of people being asked a particular set of questions at a particular moment (or set of moments, in the case of longitudinal studies) in time. What neither ADDHealth nor any other sexological, behavioral, or sociological survey can tell us—at least not in isolation—is how those answers compare to what might have been true fifty years ago, or seventy-five, or a hundred and twenty, or four hundred.
The quantitative study of sex is new. The quantitative study of virginity, premarital sex, adolescent sex, and preadolescent sex (insofar as it exists) is even newer. There is some quantitative sex research that predates Kinsey, particularly in England, but Kinsey's work is still considered something of a benchmark, the exemplar of a rising tide of quantitative sexology. Kinsey's first major study appeared in 1948, after the end of the Second World War. Research dealing especially with adolescent sexuality and age of first penis-in-vagina intercourse (the usual researcher's criteria for "virginity loss" or "sexual debut") didn't really get rolling until the 1970s; most of the pioneering surveys of adolescent sexual behavior that I've looked at were performed during the decade that I was in grammar school.
This is where the problem starts. For an array of reasons we—parents, physicians, journalists, policymakers, religious authorities, public health workers—want our sex surveys about young people's sexuality to tell us where we're headed. We want to know how things are changing, how they are different from a generation ago, two generations ago, three or four or more. Are adolescents losing their virginity earlier than they did in our parent's generation, as many people seem to suspect? Are kids truly having sex at younger and younger ages, as everyone from the American federal government to Lifeway Baptist Ministries to the Heritage Foundation to worried parents seem to want (and want us) to believe?
Truth is, we don't necessarily know. We can't necessarily know. We don't have the right information to know, for the simple reason that no one was asking those questions of adolescents of my mother's generation or my grandmother's generation. We only just started asking them in mine.
This means that we cansay that we know that in general, the bell curve of virginity loss timing in the industrialized West tends to start somewhere around age 13, goes up slowly until age 16, shoots up dramatically between ages 16 and 20, and then descends at a rather stately pace between the ages of 20 and 30. But we cannot say with any great certainty that this represents a situation that is notably different from what existed for previous generations. Why? Because the data don't exist. They've never existed. They can't be had. No one was asking these questions then.
Yes, we can make educated guesses, and we do and we should. We can look at some of the known variables—the ages of mothers and first-born children, for instance—and extrapolate probable, but not necessarily actual, timings for those mothers' first experience of sex. We can look at ages of people getting married for the first time and assume that this is also more or less representative of when they would've started having partnered sex. These are the kinds of circumstantial evidence from which we've derived the lion's share of the data we say we have about virginity and virginity loss in the decades and centuries before quantitative behavioral surveys on the subject began to appear.
These types of "educated guesses," though, are problematic for many reasons: not all births are registered, not all people get married, not all marriages are recorded, and, most importantly, not all marriages or births coincide even remotely closely with when the people involved began to engage in partnered sex.
They're problematic on other levels too. Socioeconomic class, race, and cultural background often have a lot to do with whether one's marriage or birth is recorded at all, let alone in a source that is likely to have survived. Think about it: how likely do you suppose the births of slave children were to be recorded in the antebellum South? How many common-law marriages, particularly among the very poor and/or very rural, were never dignified by so much as an entry in a census? What about women whose babies were born and immediately put up for adoption, or women who became prostitutes, or women who for one reason or another never married? And they are problematic from the perspective of gender: due to the long history of the sex-based double standard and the fact that men don't get pregnant, we can never assume that marriage or the birth of a child tells us anything at all about when a male began his partnered sexual life.
To put it in the simplest possible terms: when it comes to virginity and particularly to virginity loss, we do not have enough information to make very many meaningful historical comparisons.
Where we do have enough information to make small historical comparisons they are extremely limited and of only circumstantial import. For instance, work by Judith Walkowitz, Ruth Rosen, and Francoise Barrett-Ducroq suggests that on the Continent, in Britain, and in the USA alike in the later C19th, women who became prostitutes and who bore children out of wedlock frequently seem to have begun having active partnered sex lives around the age of sixteen. This is roughly the same age at which teenagers from the 1970s to the present have tended to start embarking upon their own partnered sexual journeys. But does this tell us anything significant? Does it establish a relationship between those two things? Not unless you consider the simple fact that sixteen is typically an age at which human beings are likely to be capable of sexual activity to be a whole hell of a lot more illuminating than it really is.
In a similar vein, we know from work by a variety of anthropologists and social historians that various European and American cultures have permitted courting couples of various ages (the age would depend upon expected age of marriage in most cases) to engage in "night courting," also known in English as "bundling" or among contemporary Amish as "bed dates," a custom where a young man and young woman would be permitted to share a bed for the night, fully clothed, under her family's roof. (This occasionally took place with several such couples sharing several different beds in one room, depending on local custom.) These couples could kiss, touch, talk, snuggle, canoodle, and potentially quite a bit more, depending on their daring and the vigilance of whoever else might've been around. We also know that twentieth-century teenagers have incorporated various levels of non-intercourse physical intimacy into dating, a phenomenon which was being criticized by horrified journalists and clergy all the way back in the wee years of the twentieth century and is still being decried today. What we don't know is whether teenagers in the 1990s were doing substantially different things, or more or less of them, than their bundling great-great-grandparents might have done a century or more before them. No one ever inquired too closely of them what they got up to, you see, unless someone ended up needing a shotgun wedding.
In this information vacuum it become easy to manufacture crises based on the data we do have. All one really needs to do is compare it to the data that we don't have: data that we don't actually have can be anything at all that we want. Sixteen-year-olds having intercourse can be shocking, appalling, and a moral and cultural crisis if we stick our fingers in our ears and la la la la-ignore the possibility that just maybe it's actually nothing particularly new. Fourteen- or fifteen-year-olds wanting to explore kissing and touching and caressing can be a horrifying proof of the detrimental effects of our sex-saturated media culture if we're willing to pretend that great-grandma never ever would've gone to a public park to dance to the community band and perhaps enjoy the frisson of a few stolen moments of "sparking" behind the bandshell.
I'm not saying that we do not have social crises in the arena of adolescent sex. We do, and here in the USA we have some doozies. What I'm saying is that blaming the crises solely on behavior, which is an incredibly common strategy and is the strategy at the core of the "abstinence-based" sex education movement, is historically and scientifically bankrupt. A lack of information does not grant anyone license to create a history that is, in its 20/20 rose-coloured hindsight, engineered to mire the present-day situation in irrevocable ignominy. It's a cheap trick, it's ahistorical bullshit, and it's that much worse when it's used as the basis for shoving a reactionary social agenda down the throats of people too young (and too ignorant even if not too young) to know any better.
I have more thoughts on this, but this is already awfully rambly and it's getting late. Still, it's helping me organize my thinking a bit and do some strategizing about some of the ways I want to try to talk about this stuff in the book. I might try to continue with this here at a later date, we shall see.
-- Hanne
