The Real Teens of Anytown U.S.A. 

Teens have been having sex for ages.

It’s hardly a new phenomenon.

It can’t be that different today than when I was in high school.

That’s what some adults have said after learning about our book Restless Virgins: Love, Sex, and Survival at a New England Prep School, which follows the social and sexual lives of seven teenagers.

But those aren’t the only reactions we’ve heard.

Teen sex is not as prominent as you make it out to be.

This is not the reality for my child. Not at my child’s school. Not in my town.

As one mother wrote in an Amazon.com review of the book: My daughter and her friends don’t hook up and don’t obsess about the next time they will have sex. They are far too busy working hard at school.

We’ve heard it all. Some adults are convinced that teenage sex has always been going on, while others believe it’s not going on at all. The truth, of course, lies somewhere in the middle. Our book has elicited polarized reactions from parents, teachers, and other adults, and many want to know how we, the twenty-six- and twenty-seven-year-old authors, could disagree with both sides.

What is the reality of teenage sex? The truth is that it is going on and it is different than ever before. So we’re here to have a sex talk—with adults.

We’ll start from the beginning. We came to research and write Restless Virgins when a sex incident surfaced at our alma mater, Milton Academy, a prep school near Boston, Massachusetts. It was the winter of 2005 and we were both working at the Atlantic when the story broke: Five boys, all members of the varsity hockey team, were expelled for receiving oral sex from a fifteen-year-old female student in the locker room. In the following weeks the school uncovered more incidents involving the same girl and some of the same boys.

We both graduated from Milton in the late 1990s; we’re not that much older than the students involved in the incidents. Still, their behavior was foreign to us. Multiple boys? One girl? On campus? Of course students hooked up and had sex when we were at Milton but not in such public ways, at least not that we knew of. The incidents in 2005 pushed the boundaries of teen sexual behavior as we remembered it. Had high school changed that much since we graduated? What new social and sexual pressures do teens face today?

We decided to return to high school and investigate. Restless Virgins offers an honest, intimate look at the hearts and minds of a group of teens at one school (Milton Academy), during one year (the year of the sex incidents). We conducted hundreds of interviews with students from Milton’s class of 2005 and poured over their saved IM conversations, emails, and diary entries. Our book recreates their senior year and paints an intimate picture of high school—best friends, boyfriends, classes, college, dances, and, of course, sex.

Here’s what we found: Many girls and boys engaged in casual and what we call extreme sexual behavior. Some had random hook ups (which ranged from kissing to oral sex). Others had random sex. Still others hooked up in front of an audience, spied on friends, and had threesomes. The sex scandal at Milton may have been one end of the spectrum, deemed an anomaly in the press and by the school, but it was hardly unique.

More important than describing what teens were doing, however, was understanding why. What motivated a girl to perform oral sex on a guy who didn’t like her enough? What drove a guy to disrespect a girl he genuinely liked?

Take *Annie, for example, one of the four girls we profiled in our book. She was an accomplished young woman in every arena except the one she valued most: her social life. She was a smart Milton student, a talented flute player, and a leader in her dormitory. She was pretty (though not like the popular girls) and she had friends (but they weren’t the popular girls). Annie didn’t have a boyfriend, either, and with no viable crushes at school, she was disappointed in herself.

And so, for three years in high school, Annie hooked up with *Scott, a boy from her hometown who didn’t like or call her enough. She’d sneak out of the house at 2:00 a.m. to meet him. Sometimes perform oral sex. Trick herself into thinking that the blanket and the beach made the evening romantic, even when Scott wouldn’t hold her hand during the car ride home. Annie compromised parts of herself even though he didn’t treat her well. And when he left her in tears, when she promised herself she’d never hook up with him again, she’d turn around and do it all over again.

The truth is no teenager is immune to social or sexual pressures. Not even the best and brightest at a school like Milton. Not even Annie. Try as she did to end things with Scott, she yearned for a connection. She wanted intimacy. She had fantasies of a sensitive and caring boyfriend, but all she had—or rather, all she thought she could have—was Scott. Annie went back to him because hooking up with Scott validated her sense of self.

We found that Annie and many other girls we interviewed had casual sexual experiences for three reasons. First, they wanted validation: I’ll feel really good about myself if he hooks up with me. I’ll be a desirable girl, and more guys will want me. Second, they wanted to elevate their social status: I’ll get invited to more parties if I hook up with the captain of the hockey team. I’ll be more popular. Third, they wanted to empower themselves: I’ll be in control when I hook up with him.

The first two reasons are perhaps the most obvious. Adolescence is filled with vulnerabilities. Social status has always been paramount—and for many girls that’s often determined by guys. Just think about Grease, She’s All That, Molly Ringwald’s repertoire from the 1980s, and pretty much any teenage movie involving popular girls, nerds, hot guys, and a high school dance.

But the empowerment explanation is more complex. In this post-Sex and the City age, girls know that they can—and deserve to—own their sexuality. They can have sexual experiences casually, without intimacy, just like the character Samantha Jones in Sex and the City. The problem? Samantha is a fictional character in her forties, and these girls are teenagers. When we asked the girls we interviewed if they were comfortable receiving oral sex, the answer was usually a resounding no! That would be too gross, they said, and too intimate. To us, it was clear that most were not empowered after all. Today, it’s still a boys’ world.

What about the guys? Take *Reed, one of the three boys we followed for our book. He was a popular hockey player, smart, a total guys’ guy. He and many of his friends embraced the mentality that stories make the man and the man gets all the stories. They’d make comments like, that’s the kind of girl you get a story from and that’s the kind of girl you hook up with and keep a secret. Some of these guys expected to receive oral sex from girls (and, as we mentioned above, many girls accepted this expectation). Of course, not all the guys we interviewed shared this perspective. Some genuinely wanted relationships and others were uninterested in extreme or even casual hook ups. Even Reed changed during his senior year, moving from casual hook ups to a relationship, but still, where did his privileged mentality come from? Is it problematic or do we dismiss it as a boy being a boy?

What is perhaps most interesting about Reed’s mentality is that it shows how the sex incidents took place. Here we have a group of guys (in this case, varsity hockey players—jocks) constantly striving for the best story. They’re taking their cues from pornography; they’re trying to one-up each other; one tells a story, another betters it; that’s exactly how five guys ended up in the locker room with a girl.

We knew girls and guys like Annie and Reed when we were at Milton, but high school in 2005 was not the same as it was in the late 1990s. And it’s probably different now, three years later, in 2008. What has changed and what continues to evolve? We believe it begins with popular culture.

Today, sex is everywhere. We live in a society saturated by a sexuality that’s both casual and misogynistic. The Internet has made pornography widely accessible and has also cultivated a culture of exhibitionism. On social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, users can post risqué photographs and comments for their friends—and in some cases, for the general public. Teenagers today are comfortable putting their private lives on display; they’re part of what we call Generation Exhibitionist.

In Hollywood, celebrities like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, and High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens have profited from the unexpected releases of their home sex videos and nude pictures. Britney Spears, and now her sixteen-year-old younger sister Jamie Lynn, who recently announced her unexpected pregnancy, may have fallen from grace, but sex certainly has not. According to The New York Times, one of the most popular television shows for the tween crowd is Gossip Girl, which is essentially a racy Sex and the City remake that features privileged high school students in New York City.

It should come as no surprise, then, that teens are engaging in casual and extreme sexual behavior. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), nearly half of teens in 2005 had sexual intercourse during their high school years, and about 14 percent reported having sexual intercourse with four or more people. Three-fourths of U.S. teens have premarital sex by age twenty, according to a study published in 2007 in Public Health Reports, the journal of the U.S. Public Health Service. And in December 2007 the CDC reported that for the first time since 1991, teenage birth rates have increased by 3 percent from 2005 to 2006.

Here’s the problem. Despite the high rates of sexual activity in pop culture and among teenagers, we’ve found that many parents don’t discuss sex with their children. In our research we uncovered a generational chasm between what adults understand about teenagers’ lives and what teens actually experience. Not since the ’ 60s has there been such a divide between generations. Decades ago sex was part of a cultural revolution. Today, it’s part of everyday life; it’s business as usual. And today, it’s also more complicated.

STDs and HIV rates among U.S. teens remain high compared to other developed countries, yet despite sex education, a small number of students we interviewed still had sex without condoms. Debates are brewing over the HPV vaccine (which we think is imperative) and the appropriate age for giving birth control to girls. With the rise of the conservative right, interest in overturning Roe v. Wade has intensified. There are those who believe abstinence is the answer and those who understand that many teens believe oral sex is abstinence.

The questions outnumber the answers, but the reality is that teenagers are surrounded by sex, in their own lives and in today’s culture. Even if your child isn’t engaging in casual or extreme behavior, it’s a safe bet that his or her friends and classmates are. Talking about sex on moral grounds, or with judgment, does not help teens understand their motivations and the emotional consequences of their decisions. It’s not just about physical health, either. Safe sex, condoms, and birth control are critical, but so are the emotional components of sex. Parents (and schools, mentors, coaches, older siblings—anyone who knows a young person) must help teenagers question their own motivations as well as gender stereotypes and objectification in the media and entertainment. We must not judge, but listen. At the end of the day, every teenager wants someone to talk to and each of us can be that person.

*All names of students have been changed to protect their privacy.

Abigail Jones is a writer living in Boston, Massachusetts. She has degrees from Dartmouth College and the University of Edinburgh, Scotland, and graduated from Milton Academy. She has worked as a staff editor for the Atlantic.

Marissa Miley is a graduate of Milton Academy and the University of Pennsylvania, and has worked for Harvard University and the Atlantic. She lives in New York City, where she is working on a second book of nonfiction.