Blowing It

by Daniel Radosh

A few years ago an irresistible teen sex meme began to spread. For kids today, the story goes, oral sex is no more intimate than a handshake, and exchanged just as casually. Recently the media reported on a new study in the journal Pediatrics that appeared to confirm this conventional wisdom, leading to tsk-tsking among talk radio moralists and regret at having been born too soon among the rest of us. But hold those fantasies of sneaking back into high school, Cameron Crowe–style. I actually sat down and read the study (I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known it wasn’t going to have illustrations), and it doesn’t quite say what you think it does.
The headlines were certainly titillating enough. “Oral Sex Among US Teens Common and Acceptable,” “Teens View Oral Sex as Safe,” and simply “Oral Sex ‘Is Best.’” To read the stories, you’d think the significant finding of this survey of California ninth-graders was that one in five teens has had oral sex and that “girls and boys both see oral sex as not being a big deal,” as lead researcher Bonnie Halpern-Felsher told the Associated Press.

“I didn’t mean that literally,” Halpern-Felsher told me. “I meant as opposed to vaginal sex.” It turns out the press glossed over the main point of the survey, which was how attitudes about oral sex compare with attitudes about vaginal sex (or, as one particularly inept news site had it, “virginal sex”). You see, while the 14-year-olds surveyed did say that oral sex is safer and more acceptable than going all the way, they specifically did not say that it is “safe and not really sex” or “OK for teens,” as two wire stories summarized it. Indeed, when given a list of statements and told to rate how much they agree with them, the two sentences the students endorsed most strongly were: “Teens my age are too young to have vaginal sex” and “Teens my age are too young to have oral sex.” It’s certainly true that the kids were substantially more likely to approve of oral than vaginal sex, but overall they were wary of both.

As for the headline that teens think oral sex is safe, look at what they actually said. When asked to estimate the risks of various scenarios (“Imagine that you have been dating Tanya for 3 months...”), the average teenager in this study said that with unprotected oral sex he or she had about a 37.5 percent chance of getting either HIV or chlamydia.

In other words, not only do teenagers not think oral sex is safe, they think it is far more dangerous than it actually is. There’s little solid data on STD transmission rates through oral sex, but one recent study found that among high-risk gay men (not, mind you, straight 14-year-olds), the per-contact risk of HIV infection from giving head is .04 percent. While it is theoretically possible for chlamydia to be transmitted through oral sex, it is extremely unlikely. (We’re assuming here that fellatio is more common among teens than cunnilingus, but this survey didn’t actually define oral sex, because, Halpern-Felsher told me, the researchers had to get parents’ permission and “we didn’t want to freak them out or scare them off.”)

Perhaps it was a mistake to ask kids about risk from a single encounter, which is always going to be minimal no matter what kind of sex you have (and with whom), but even studies that followed sexually active gay men over a period of a year found the cumulative risk of HIV transmission through oral sex to be no more than 8 percent and maybe as low as 2 percent — so the kids in this study should be pretty safe. Hell, if we really care about the health of America’s teenagers, we should be encouraging them to have as much oral sex as possible. On webcams.

Yeah, yeah, there’s still HPV and herpes and other nasty bugs that are transmitted easily through oral sex (and which weren’t, strangely, included in the Pediatrics survey), but when we hear that teenagers are eschewing vaginal sex for oral sex because they think it’s safer, the reaction should be to remark on how savvy they are, not how slutty.

Photo: NYDN

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