Wow, It Really Is Getting Harder

Stay­ing sex­u­al­ly pure in a pol­lut­ed world seems to be get­ting hard­er and hard­er. At least, that’s the impres­sion any­one speak­ing with Chris­t­ian col­lege stu­dents would get…

Turns out they’re right.

Then there’s the inter­sec­tion of biol­o­gy and cul­ture. Over the past 150 years, the aver­age for menarche—a wom­an’s first period—has dropped from near­ly sev­en­teen to twelve years of age with no signs of stop­ping. (Among African-Amer­i­cans in par­tic­u­lar, the fig­ure is clos­er to eleven!) His­tor­i­cal data for males is hard­er to come by but, with­out being too explic­it, Amer­i­can males, on aver­age, are “sex­u­al­ly func­tion­al” by twelve years of age. (Once again, the fig­ure is slight­ly low­er for African-Amer­i­cans.) At the same time the aver­age age for puber­ty and menar­che has been going down, the aver­age age for first mar­riage has been going up: from 22.8 for men and 20.3 for women in 1950 to 27 and 25 today. For the college-educated—the sta­tus to which most Amer­i­cans aspire, both per­son­al­ly and for their kids—the aver­age age is near­ly two years high­er. (Between 1970 and 1994, the per­cent­age of women aged thir­ty to thir­ty-four who had nev­er been mar­ried rose from 6 to 22 per­cent. For men, the fig­ures were 9 and 30 per­cent, respec­tive­ly.)

The bot­tom line of all these num­bers is that young Chris­tians are expect­ed to remain sex­u­al­ly con­ti­nent for a longer peri­od of time than prob­a­bly any gen­er­a­tion that has pre­ced­ed them. And they’re sup­posed to do this while liv­ing in the most sex­u­al­ly charged cul­ture ever seen.

Read the whole arti­cle at Break­point

You might be inter­est­ed to read the thoughts which prompt­ed Break­point’s arti­cle:
* There’s No Such Thing As Pre­mar­i­tal Sex launched it by claim­ing that once two peo­ple sleep togeth­er they’re mar­ried and seeks to sup­port his posi­tion from the Law of Moses.
* A Horse­less Car­riage rebutted the charge. She did an out­stand­ing job, and used a very per­sua­sive anal­o­gy: To cite the Exo­dus ref­er­ence requir­ing a man to make right his seduc­tion of a vir­gin (which, inci­den­tal­ly, falls in a long list of ways to make ret­ri­bu­tion when bad things hap­pen) as evi­dence that the act of sex, rather than a process of mar­riage and con­sum­ma­tion, made the two peo­ple mar­ried, makes about as much sense as argu­ing that a law requir­ing a thief to pay for the pie he has already con­sumed real­ly means that the pie was right­ful­ly and beau­ti­ful­ly his the moment the first bite crossed his lips. The author of the orig­i­nal arti­cle responds on the same page and clar­i­fies his posi­tion (and even makes a few inter­est­ing claims along the way).

All worth read­ing and reflect­ing on.