US study: Teens top users of condom

A wide-ranging study of Americans’ sexual behavior, based on the largest nationally representative survey since 1992, has found that condom use is becoming the norm for sexually active teenagers.

Indeed, US teenagers are more responsible than adults about using condoms, the researchers reported in a study that is coming out on Monday (Tuesday in Manila).

A vast majority of sexually active 14- to 17-year-olds said they had used a condom the last time they had intercourse, compared with well under half of US adults involved in casual liaisons.

“I think that just as teenagers quickly develop an expectation that they’re going to learn to drive no matter where they live, there’s the same general widespread sense among contemporary teenagers that as you get to the point where you start thinking about having sex, condoms are going to be part of that decision,” said a co-author of the survey, Dr. J. Dennis Fortenberry, a professor of pediatrics at the School of Medicine of Indiana University.

The results, presented in nine peer-reviewed studies in The Journal of Sexual Medicine, debunked stereotypes about teens being reckless when it came to sex.

Only 14 percent of 14-year-old boys reported any kind of sexual interaction with a partner in the prior three months, but almost 40 percent of 17-year-old males did, Fortenberry told a media briefing, adding that the findings were similar in females.

He said many teens reached the age of 18 with no sexual experience, and for those who did have sex, condom use was routine.

“In this study, somewhere between 70 and 80 percent of adolescents reported condom use at their most recent vaginal intercourse,” Fortenberry said. “This indicates we’ve had a real public health success that we need to acknowledge.”

Satisfaction gap

The new study—the first to include participants as young as 14 and as old as 94—has found that decades after the sexual revolution, the gap between men’s and women’s sexual satisfaction persists.

While most men said they had experienced orgasm the last time they had sex and 85 percent believed their partner had also, only two-thirds of the women surveyed said they had achieved orgasm the last time they had sex.

And a startling number of women—almost one-third—said they had experienced pain the last time they had sex (only 5 percent of men did).

The report was drawn from the National Survey of Sexual Health and Behavior, which was carried out by researchers at the Center for Sexual Health Promotion at Indiana University. It was based on responses from 5,865 individuals, including about 800 people under 18.

Report welcomed

The report was welcomed by health providers and sex educators, who said the field had little data to go on, even as monumental social changes—the gay rights movement, increases in cohabitation, later marriage and childbearing, the AIDS epidemic, and the widespread use of the Internet and of drugs for erectile dysfunction, among others—had transformed sexual attitudes.

Government agencies and private foundations are reluctant to pay for studies of sexual behavior that do not focus on reproduction. The last broad nationally representative sex survey, the 1992 National Health and Social Life Survey, was started under a government contract, but Congress cut off financing and the study was completed with support from private sources.

“There’s been an enormous explosion of research in virtually all areas of medicine except the entity called sexual medicine … We can’t get the funding,” said Dr. Irwin Goldstein, the editor in chief of The Journal of Sexual Medicine, which is devoting 130 pages of its special issue to papers from the study and commentaries by experts.

The new study was financed by Church & Dwight, the maker of Trojan condoms. While the researchers shared information with the sponsor during the course of the study, they said the company did not exert influence over the way it was conducted, except to offer advice on how to phrase questions to accurately gauge condom use.

Little access to info

Even though Americans are bombarded with sexual imagery, they have little access to reliable information about sexual behavior, said Monica Rodriguez, president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States, a nonprofit group based in New York.

“That’s why this is so important,” Rodriguez said. “It gives us a sense of what’s really happening, instead of all this, ‘Well, my sex life must not be normal, because I don’t do this or only do this.’”

Fortenberry agreed, saying the overall findings of such a huge survey should provide reassurance to Americans curious about how their sex lives compared with others.

“Unless, like al-Qaida, you feel there’s something abnormal about the American people, what these data say is, ‘This is normal—everything in there is normal,”’ he added.

The study also has found that while only about 7 percent of men and of women identified themselves as “other than heterosexual,” a much higher percentage reported having had sex with a member of the same sex.

Among women in their 30s, for example, 14 percent said they had performed oral sex on another woman at some point in their life; 13 percent of men over 40 said they had performed oral sex on another man.

And adults using condoms for intercourse rated their arousal, pleasure and orgasm as highly as those having intercourse without a condom.

Need for more research

Goldstein noted that the new study came more than 60 years after Alfred Kinsey—also based at Indiana University—published his groundbreaking report, “Sexual Behavior in the Human Male.”

“Just like then, these papers contain material that is avant garde and often considered off-limits,” he wrote in a forward to the study.

“At a time when we can have nudity on HBO but cannot use the names of our genitals on the evening news, there remains a need to continue research on sexual health.” Reports from New York Times News Service, Associated Press and Reuters, Philippine Daily Inquirer