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Old media, new media, whatever — nothing moves ad space like the curiously creepy blend of titillation and censure that is the “why are our daughters such skanks?” essay. The Wall Street Journal has the latest example of the genre, Jennifer Moses’ straightforwardly-named “Why Do We Let Them Dress Like That?”
Never mind that teen sex is actually down these days. Never mind that Moses offers no evidence to support any of her tangled theses. She’s got a lede that salivates over twelve-year-olds in minidresses and a dozen paragraphs of hand-wringing to follow it with, and that’s all she needs. It’s time to sell some wine! (And, since this is the WSJ, a hospital!)
Mary Elizabeth Williams has already dissected Moses’ silliness admirably, and I won’t rehash her points. (Go read.) But I do want to highlight the piece’s final paragraph, which is a real doozy:
But it’s easy for parents to slip into denial. We wouldn’t dream of dropping our daughters off at college and saying: “Study hard and floss every night, honey—and for heaven’s sake, get laid!” But that’s essentially what we’re saying by allowing them to dress the way they do while they’re still living under our own roofs.
Yes, that’s what all the short hemlines and dangly earrings and inexpertly-applied blush are leading up to. Our daughters are going to have sex. In college.
Sex. In college. What will they think of next?
Every once in a while I post about the latest high-profile bad scholarship on youth and students. There’s all sorts of crap social science writing out there, but in this particular field what makes a splash is research that reinforces prejudices about young people — that they’re narcissists, that they’re overly entitled, that they drink too much, that they’re having too much sex too soon.
That last one is a biggie. Ask any middle-aged person about young people’s sexuality, and chances are they’ll bend your ear about how young people are having sex earlier, more casually, and more recklessly than ever before. You’ll hear all about “the hook-up culture,” and rainbow parties, and so on and on.
But there’s no evidence of any such shift, and in fact all the data we have points in the other direction.
Here’s a great write-up of what we know about heterosexual teen sexual activity. Compared to twenty years ago, teen girls aged 15-19 are 20% more likely to report being virgins, and boys the same age are more than 25% more likely. Three-quarters of girls who have had sex say they were in a serious relationship when they lost their virginity.
This is all self-reported, of course, but it’s backed up by hard data. Teen pregnancy rates have plummeted since the mid-1990s, after holding steady for the previous two decades. Today’s teenagers are just half as likely to get pregnant before their eighteenth birthday as their parents’ generation was, and as a result both teen abortion rates and teen motherhood have dropped dramatically.
Other studies demonstrate that media reports about an epidemic of casual, predatory oral sex among young teens are similarly unfounded. Most teenagers who report having had oral sex say they’ve also had intercourse, and that they started both activities at about the same time. And the vast majority of teens of either gender who say they’ve given oral sex say they’ve received it as well. (These numbers are from 2002. Data from a 2006-08 survey should be available soon, and I’ll pass those stats on when I get them.)
Oh, and the percent of teens aged 15-19 who report having used contraception the last time they had intercourse has risen from 84.2% in 1988 to 93.3% in 2006-08, with condom use soaring from 53.3% to 78.8%. In the same time period, the number of teens reporting that they used condoms and the pill more than doubled, to 35.3%.
So, to sum up: Today’s teens are having intercourse later than their parents’ generation, and taking safer sex precautions far more consistently. They’re getting pregnant less and having fewer abortions. They’re having intercourse and oral sex mostly in the context of committed relationships, and the vast majority of them are reporting that their sexual experiences have been reciprocal.
But don’t look for any of this info on the nightly news.
Back in September, when the alleged-then-retracted Hofstra gang rape was front page news, I made the following observations about it:
If a woman is raped by a man she’s been intimate with before, or raped in the course of a sexual encounter that began as consensual, or raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question, she can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.
I don’t know what happened that night, and I expect that I never will. I’m not accusing any of the five men who were named of anything, and I’m not saying that the fact that they were accused means they must have done something wrong. I don’t know, and I’m not interested in speculating.
I do, though, want to say clearly that the question of what happened isn’t a binary one of “she told the truth, and they’re guilty” vs. “she lied, so they’re innocent.”
It’s possible that she lied and that some or all of them are guilty.
Yesterday the historian KC Johnson stumbled across that post, and concluded from it — I swear I’m not kidding — that I’m a “campus ideologue … trained to believe that women never lie about rape.”
We know for a fact that Danmell Ndonye lied about rape, because she told two contradictory stories about an alleged rape. My entire post was premised on the obvious fact that women sometimes lie about rape. In a comment on that post — a comment Johnson quoted from — I said that Ndonye’s “allegation should not have been taken as proof that she was the victim of a sexual assault.”
But apparently I believe that women never lie about rape.
And that willful misreading isn’t enough for Johnson. He goes on to pull the last sentence of my post out of context, snip away the crucial italics, and offer it as my “startling claim” that “it’s possible that [Ndonye] lied and that some or all of them [the falsely accused men] are guilty.”
As I said in a (long trapped in moderation purgatory) comment at Minding the Campus, the Manhattan Institute blog where Johnson’s post appeared, there are two factual claims in my blockquoted passage above: first, that “a rape survivor [may] alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family,” and second, that it was possible — not likely, not probable, just possible — that Ndonye’s original lie was a lie of that kind.
Johnson finds these suggestions preposterous.
And I find that deeply depressing.
Postscript: Four days after my original post on the Hofstra case, the Nassau County DA decided that she would bring no criminal charges against Ndonye. Under the terms of an agreement between Ndonye and the DA’s office, Ndonye stipulated that she had not been sexually assaulted or sexually abused by the men she had accused. The DA was later quoted as saying that she was convinced that what happened that night was consensual, and I have no reason to doubt her assessment.
October 14 update: It took two Twitter messages, an email, and a week’s wait, but the folks at Minding the Campus have finally posted the comment referenced in this post, as well as a link to this post.
October 7 update: Readers coming from Minding the Campus should know that I take issue with KC Johnson’s gloss on this post. I’ve submitted a comment to that effect over there, and written a follow-up post here as well.
In a new post this morning about last week’s Hofstra rape case — in which a student initially said she’d been raped by five men, then withdrew her allegations — Jaclyn Friedman writes the following:
There’s a widespread assumption that recanting an accusation means that you’re admitting you lied. But in reality, lots of victims recant not because they made it up, but because they come to the unfortunate realization that it will cost them more, emotionally, to pursue justice than to let it go.
We’ll probably never now what happened in this case, but it’s entirely possible that she was threatened by the accused perpetrators or their associates, interrogated by the police about her sexual history or what she might have done to “provoke” the attack, or blamed and slandered by the media or people in her community. All of these things happen all too often to rape victims who speak out. Let’s not ignore the possibility that they happened here.
This is important stuff to keep in mind, and Friedman makes other good points along the way. But I’d like to take it a step further: Even if the Hofstra student lied in her original statement to the police, it doesn’t automatically follow that she wasn’t raped.
The cultural pressures that lead women to falsely recant rape charges are the same pressures that lead women to blame themselves, or expect blame from others, when their rapes don’t follow an accepted narrative. If a woman is raped by a man she’s been intimate with before, or raped in the course of a sexual encounter that began as consensual, or raped in circumstances in which her judgment may be called into question, she can expect to be disbelieved, shamed, and attacked, and that expectation may lead a rape survivor to alter her story to make it more palatable to police, or to a jury, or even to her friends and family.
I don’t know what happened that night, and I expect that I never will. I’m not accusing any of the five men who were named of anything, and I’m not saying that the fact that they were accused means they must have done something wrong. I don’t know, and I’m not interested in speculating.
I do, though, want to say clearly that the question of what happened isn’t a binary one of “she told the truth, and they’re guilty” vs. “she lied, so they’re innocent.”
It’s possible that she lied and that some or all of them are guilty.
University of Michigan Near Eastern Studies professor Yaron Eliav is teaching again at the university, eight months after he publicly admitted slapping a Michigan law student whom he had paid for sex.
Eliav met the student, who was then 22 years old, through Craigslist, and paid her $300 for a sexual encounter in April 2008. After their meeting, she filed a complaint with police, saying he had slapped her twice in the face. (He later admitted to slapping her and hitting her with a belt, but claimed the acts were consensual.)
Police refused to charge Eliav with assault, and one officer publicly mocked the student for filing charges, saying that since she had been engaged in illegal sex work at the time, “she should have cracked a legal textbook before coming in to the police station.”
The incident became public last December when Eliav and the student both pled guilty to misdemeanor prostitution-related charges. Each was fined and made to pay court costs. Eliav, who has tenure, was placed on paid leave last semester while the university investigated the incident.
studentactivism.net 
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