Abstinence Works, Oh Yes

Back in the Middle Ages, after the Roman Church had largely abolished the use of concubines and slaves among well-off Christians, the most popular method for European women to control their fertility and for men to avoid causing impregnation became anal sex. Not until prophylactic technologies improved during the Scientific Enlightenment did European sexuality move away from the rampant buggering of male and female.

Today a similarly zealous religious movement aims to promote wide-spread alteration of sexual behaviour. They wanted to encourage abstinence from sex, and have spent billions within the United States over the past couple of decades promoting an ideal of vaginal virginity to captive schoolchildren. The results are in: by raising the taboo level for vaginal intercourse, the anti-sex campaigners have effectively lowered the taboo level for alternative sexual behaviours, especially oral and anal. There may be a core principle of sexual economy at work here, some sort of inelastic demand curve that responds to social engineering projects in a semi-predictable fashion. Over the past decade or so, the frequency of heterosexual anal intercourse among young adults has doubled. done Jesus Creepers, you’ve spawned a new generation of oral-anal enthusiasts.

For males, the proportion who have had anal sex with a female increases from 4.6 percent at age 15 to 34 percent at ages 2224; for females, the proportion who have had anal sex with a Wellmale increases from 2.4 percent at age 15 to 32 percent at age 2224.

One in three women admits to having had anal sex by age 24. By ages 25 to 44, the percentages rise to 40 for men and 35 for women. And that’s not counting the 3.7 percent of men aged 15 to 44 who’ve had anal sex with other men.