A 38-year-old father sits in his office and ponders how our culture has drifted so far from its moral moorings: “I have a 14-year-old daughter and the world she is growing up in scares me. I hear all this stuff about the number of kids having sex and the growing number of teens involved in oral sex and I can’t believe what’s going on. Things have changed so quickly and I can’t figure out why.” Like many other parents, today’s youth culture leaves one confused and concerned about the new casual sex revolution. What in the world is going on?

 

To begin with, we have a generation of youth who developed a whole new lexicon of sexual terms to describe their new approach to their world of adolescent sex. Sadly, their new sexual terms reflect their laid-back view of sex.

“Friends with benefits” is a new type of relationship among younger teens. It is when friends get together for sex with no commitment. It is practiced by both church and unchurched youth. Seventeen-year-old Jordan describes it as “easy access. You can just visit a friend you know really good and it just happens, it’s not like you have to work on it.”

 

A “hook up” is more casual than “friends with benefits” and occurs when teens are sexually active, usually engaging in oral sex, with complete strangers. Sometimes it is used as currency to procure things like concert tickets. Sometimes it involves competitions to see who can pleasure the other person the fastest.

“Giving a dome” refers to the act of performing oral sex on a boy. Oral sex is common and considered acceptable among younger teens. One 15-year-old female says, “It’s a big deal if you’re doing it to a lot of people you don’t know. But if it’s your boyfriend, it’s something you do.” Even though I live in Canada, I’ve discovered that our national statistics on teen sexual behaviors are almost identical to statistics in the United States. A recent Health Canada survey shows that 30 percent of teens have had oral sex by ninth grade, and more than half by 11th grade.

 

The recently released Health Canada study, “Canadian Youth, Sexual Health and HIV/AIDS,” provides even more disconcerting data. Although the number of students having intercourse has dropped, the figures are still troubling—21 percent have had intercourse by ninth grade and 43 percent by 11th grade. An amazing 60 percent of the boys and 31 percent of the girls think casual sex is okay. How much sex education do teens get? Sixty-four percent of teens had four hours or less, while 36 percent had five hours or more. Not surprisingly, their learning about sex came from their friends … peers who are just as confused as they are.

 

So how did we get to this point with so many kids engaging in casual sex? There are a number of factors to be considered. Think about each in order to discover what you can do to stem this disturbing tide so that the children and teens you know and love might grow up living a Biblical sexual ethic.

Factor one—Of all the information our teens are exposed to—whether it is sex education in school, friends at the lunch table, media mentors or even some parents—moral considerations and parameters are almost non-existent. When it comes to intercourse, the emphasis is placed on social, emotional and physical readiness, not on right and wrong. The media rarely deals with any of the negatives. Rather, the media portrays the principle of pleasure. In a world without boundaries, sexuality for our kids is only limited by their own imaginations and enjoyment. It comes down to whether you “feel” you are ready to have sex. If you are, then go for it! Increasingly, fewer adults and social institutions are willing to stand up and say to our kids, “this is wrong,” “this is right” or “you don’t have to do this.” Kids have been left floundering on their own. As a result, some are severely emotionally, physically and spiritually damaged.

Factor two—Their world is filled with hundreds of thousands of sexual messages every year. The Canadian Broadcasting Company recently ran a tween special, “Buying into Sexy,” which looked at the world of 10-12 year olds here in Toronto. One eighth grade girl was bombarded by 262 messages of sexuality in one day. She was encouraged to be sexy, act sexy and dress sexy all in the name of popularity and profitability. Our kids also live in a world where pornography has gone mainstream, fueling the raging hormones of children who are already confused and frightened. The paradox of children being pushed to have sex is best portrayed by an image I recently saw of a 16-year-old girl standing in front of her school while puffing on a cigarette. On her back was her pink Barbie-doll backpack. She was all grown up on the outside, but the backpack reminds us that this is really a little girl who not that long ago was playing with dolls.

Factor three—The changing structure of families has left many kids looking for love in all the wrong places. Thirty years ago Johnny Lee penned his country pop classic “Lookin’ For Love.” He sang, “I was lookin’ for love in all the wrong places.” Today, we have a generation of lonely kids living out his song. Two million kids in Canada will go to bed tonight without saying goodnight to their fathers because their dads don’t live at home anymore. Studies show that girls who don’t have loving relationships with their fathers tend to have sex at an earlier age and will have more sexual partners. Other kids growing up in broken homes tend to find the misplaced love of their family in the arms of other kids. When the sexual revolution started in the 1960s, a teen’s first sexual experience was normally in a car because that was one of the few places where you could get away from your parents. Today, many parents have run away from home through separation and divorce and left the kids home alone. Child Trends USA report a majority (56 percent) of teens said they had their first sexual experience not in some distant “love shack,” but under the roof of their family’s (22 percent) or their partner’s (34 percent) home because it was empty—just like their lives.

Factor four—Our young people are also looking for dependable guidance and information in all the wrong places. Health Canada reports that teens’ most cherished source of information for all things sexual is from other teens—not exactly a reliable source. One third of 11th grade girls said they would first go to their friends if they thought they had a sexually transmitted disease, with only 17 percent opting for a doctor. When it comes to information on HIV/AIDS over the last two years, 27 percent of seventh grade students and 14 percent of ninth grade students had not received any information. No wonder cases of chlamydia and gonorrhea among 15-24 year olds have doubled since 1997. Thirty years ago girls lost their virginity at age 20 and boys at age 18. Today, one in four has had sexual intercourse by age 14.

Factor five—There is a growing shift in the values and perceptions of young people when it comes to sex. In today’s postmodern youth culture, young people are taught, and most believe—including kids in the church who profess faith in Christ—that there is no such thing as absolute moral truth. If there is no such thing as truth then all lifestyles become equally valid, including lifestyles of promiscuity and early sexual activity. No one has the right to tell anyone else that what they are doing is “wrong.” If it’s “wrong,” it’s only “wrong” for them. This is the first generation of kids to grow up totally immersed in this postmodern worldview. What we see in terms of behavior is young people simply being true to the only worldview they have ever known. This partially explains why so many kids don’t even consider oral sex to be sex.

Factor six—We have raised a generation of teens who see sexual activity to be anything but risky. In addition, most teens go through a stage of mental development that makes them believe nothing bad will ever happen to them—never get pregnant, never get a STD and never fall out of love. Because they lack the faculties to really think through these serious life issues, they are vulnerable to activities that can have deadly consequences. For example, a growing number of kids think oral sex is normal, safe and acceptable. Most young people don’t even know sexually transmitted infections can be transferred through oral contact.

 

These factors are certainly not all encompassing and there are many other reasons for the current casual sex revolution among teens. As adults, we need to be more aware of the changing traditions and values of today’s youth culture. Our world demands that more than ever before, kids need positive adult role models to prayerfully guide them through this moral maze by communicating—through our words and our actions—the life-giving light of God’s Word as it relates to God’s beautiful and wonderful gift of sexuality.