I was been teaching a session on consent to a group of students who are between 16 – 17. Yes the famous Stretch strikes again. I was informed by one rather cynical member of the group that I was three years too late with some of the material that I was presenting. She felt that instead of discussing when it was a good idea to have sex we should be discussing HOW to be safe from STI and other misadventure.
She was adamant that EVERYONE was past the stage of deciding if they should be in a sexual relationship. I don’t know if I exactly believe her. Honestly it is impossible to tell. I think that she is right that MOST of her peers are out there fucking like rabbits but ALL?
During a conversation with a friend I discovered that he had lost his virginity at 13. It is not the first person I have spoken to that told me such a young age. I always thought I was around the average age at 17 but honestly I sometimes wonder. Following this conversation I decided to do a poll amongst my Twitter followers. I am a scientist at heart and I will be the first to admit this is NOT a representative or adequate sample but it was an interesting snapshot nonetheless. I even collated the data into a nice table for you all.
| Lose Virginity | Current Age | |
| Average | 18 | 45 |
| Maximum | 21 | 57 |
| Minimum | 15 | 30 |
So my followers are around my age and I was correct. Amongst my peers I was around average. My friend, as my gut told me, was an outlier. (There is a mathematical formula for calculating outliers but I was not nerdy enough to apply it).
It doesn’t answer my question though. What is the average age a young person loses their virginity in my school? I would dearly love to conduct a similar anonymous survey about this and possibly other sexual habits of these teens. I believe it would shock and disturb some of the people working at my school. I also know that if I were to suggest such a thing I would be stuck teaching every class full of every student no-one else wants for the rest of my life! So I will err on the side of caution and keep my curiosity to myself.
However if any of my readers are brave enough to contribute their statistic to my data pool please leave your responses in the comments. Current age, age you lost your virginity and your gender.
Corrupting Mrs Jones 
“I think that she is right that MOST of her peers are out there fucking like rabbits but ALL?”
I had heard that people had more sex w/ less partners in the 50’s but less sex w/ more partners now.
After my run ins with people out in public, I dont know how they pull it off considering the backslide in communications ability
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Totally agree.
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There were a couple of girls in my school who had full term pregnancies and gave birth when they were 13. It was kinda shocking to me at the time. But I realized there must have been others who were having sex, just not falling pregnant. I am glad I slept with my first boyfriend way after I left school. I just think kids should get their education out the way before they start having sex.
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Unfortunately their hormones often have other ideas. It is an almost visible thing as a student turns 14 they just don’t think about the same things. They are physically hampered by it.
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I would love to see the follow-up data on this if you accumulate any more information. I believe I am in the statistic above, as I remember replying to your tweet. I know both my daughters were more responsible than I am as they waited a good 3-4 years longer than I did. I wonder if on average the teenagers today have sex later because there’s more information for them out there, and sex ed in schools, something I didn’t have? But this might just be an assumption on my side…
~ Marie
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I actually think the opposite happens because parents are more permissive than our parents were and kids have more opportunities. As FreeMatt said young people have less sex with more people.
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I can remember at secondary school, all of the students were paired off and dry humping one another in the corridors and lots of them were talking about who had “done it”, though my money is on that few of them had. I think there is a lot of social pressure on kids to be sexually active, it’s a sort of rite of passage into adulthood for some and the sooner you’re active, the more respected you become. I can remember telling some boys that I didn’t want to date and it got to the point that I’d have some of them trying to pair me off with one or their mates, just to see if I would say yes.
For what it’s worth, I lost my virginity at 18, I’m 32 now and married to the same man. That wasn’t supposed to happen, but Justin Timberlake’s “Friends With Benefits” could almost be based on us. Obviously, I’m female 🙂
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Wife and I are 50 and we first had penetrative sex at 16. We experimented with other things at 15… We have three kids, all adults. Only my son had sex in high school, I believe he was 17? My wife bought him condoms off Amazon and left them in his room when I told her what I knew to be going on. I wanted him to have the awesome experience of buying them at the shady convenience store at the edge of the next town. Getting the stink eye and hoping nobody who knows you mom walks in… Good times…
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Hi Gemmi,
WRT sex-ed teaching, perhaps combine with your mathematics side and talk about Risk Networks. In the current Covid environment, most of the kids will know about Contact Tracing now, so talk about the infectiousness of various types of STI, and the ‘degrees of separation’.
There are some excellent papers about Gonorrhea Risk Network at a Colorado Springs school c.1980 (do a Google search), and then HIV infections from 1985-1999, and also Winnipeg, Canada, which have some very revealing Risk Network diagrams of the spread of STI through a school community.
I saved a Network image on my blog, available here:-https://3.bp.blogspot.com/-u1u3mlfF2-g/T9AF12ZaRVI/AAAAAAAAADc/Vnj5W1vqShY/s1600/RiskNetwork.png
The 1980 case was pre “Safe sex” remember. Of the 400+ cases, most are just 2-3 degrees of separations from the couple of most ‘popular’ boys with 20+ partners each.
These diagrams don’t answer your ‘age’ question though.
Good luck with your teaching.
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Thank you so much for your help with this. I will definitely look this up and see if we can work something up for next year.
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