The Oral Myth

The story is shocking, but perhaps not unfamiliar. At a birthday party for a seventh-grader, the boy's mother had gone down to the basement only to find all the boys lined up along one wall. The girls, the mother reported, had been going down the line performing oral sex on them.

But is the story true? Some people certainly seem to think so. In the new play "Good Boys and True" students at an elite boys' school have contests to see who can be orally serviced by the most girls. Last year's nonfiction book "Restless Virgins" detailed a sex scandal at Milton Academy, a Massachusetts prep school, involving a female sophomore performing oral sex on five male students. And by now most of us have heard of "The Rainbow Party," the 2005 young adult novel that suggested high school girls spend their afternoons fellating their male classmates.

But according to a newly published study of 15-to-19-year-olds by the Guttmacher Institute, teen sexual behavior in general hasn't changed much since 1991. Just a little more than half the teens studied had engaged in oral sex, only 5 percent more than had engaged in vaginal sex. Most teens who had had oral sex had also had intercourse, and only one in four teen virgins had had oral sex—not exactly the makings of a teen oral sex epidemic.

So why is society constantly speculating about the most salacious stories about our children? Possibly because they confirm our worst fears about the values of the next generation and our growing sense that we really have no idea what's going on with our kids. Maybe, also, because in our increasingly sexualized culture the stories seem not so implausible. Maybe it's easier to pay attention to a few shocking anecdotes than to what the data—or our children—tell us. (It's not surprising that most of the rumors focus on girls servicing boys, since our culture seems to revel in being simultaneously titillated and appalled by the precocious sexuality of teen girls, as evidenced by the recent controversy surrounding Miley Cyrus’s seminude “Vanity Fair” spread.) "We were the free-love generation, and we're obsessed over the sexual lives of our children. We need to ask ourselves why," says Laura Sessions Stepp, author of "Unhooked: How Young Women Pursue Sex, Delay Love, and Lose at Both."

As for the veracity of the story about the seventh-grade birthday party, Stepp is skeptical. But the hysteria of the mother who called to tell her about it (who had heard the tale from another mother) is real. Stepp should know: she helped create it, with a 1999 front-page story in the Washington Post about the alarming fad for oral sex among middle-schoolers in Washington's suburbs, one of the first stories to publicize the idea that oral sex among youngsters was on the rise. Thanks to Monica Lewinsky oral sex was already on everyone's minds, along with the idea that the younger generation didn't consider it as serious as intercourse. "It had been going on among older teens. Then Monica surfaces, and all of a sudden it's front and center," says Stepp. "It was more than a wake-up call. It was a siren." Over the next few years the idea that kids were having oral sex—in basements, on school buses, in study halls—as cavalierly as shaking hands gained traction in the popular imagination. (In 2002 Oprah devoted an episode to the "epidemic.") The logic seemed self-evident: if oral sex wasn't "really sex," it was a way kids could satisfy their sexual urges while remaining chaste.

But according to the Guttmacher study, the idea that kids use oral sex as a substitute for intercourse is a myth. According to the study's author, Laura Lindberg, "There is no good evidence that teens who have not had intercourse engage in oral sex with a series of partners … Our research shows that this supposed substitution of oral sex for vaginal sex is largely a myth."