Are modern generations sexually irresponsible?

Post Reply New Topic

I may only be twenty and the answer may be obvious, but are we as a species becoming more sexually irresponsible? All I hear about are my friends on Facebook who are younger than me already having kids while working a minimum wage job, people having abortions left and right, which most of the time is the result of not being responsible sexually (exceptions include rape), and people contracting diseases more and more.

I'm not old fashioned by any means, but why is it so hard for people to take sex and relationship seriously these days? My whole generation is full of people who can't do that, and then they complain and what their parents or the government to pay for their mistakes.

What's your thoughts on this phenomenon?

Solution: Make sex education a higher priority. And no, not that monumental failure known as "abstinence only" sex education. Real sex education...

I think Denmark got it somewhat right. I must have been 13 or 14 when my class was warned that anal intercourse was much more likely to result in STD's than vaginal intercourse.

No, we've always been sexually irresponsible. My maternal grandparents were less responsible than I am, they already had a child when they were my age.

Today the problem might be worse than at times in the past because society does not condemn pre-martial sex any more, but it has always existed.

The teen pregnancy rate in the UK is lower than for my parent's generation: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-17190185

No more than previous generations, as each generation ages it likes to think that it is more sensible than the next.

I'm not sure I'd phrase it as 'sexually irresponsible', it's more than that. 40% of children are born out of wedlock and a good portion of the ones that are will get divorced. I don't think it's as simple as people being too loose sexually.

^^^ The problem is anomie.

Modern society has rejected the old norms regarding sex, coupling and child rearing and we have yet to agree on a new set. Eventually, we will. In the meantime there will be a lot of limit testing, experimentation and "irresponsibility" and children and society will suffer (and benefit) for it.

QFT.

There is nothing new under the sun.

The difference now, is that we talk about teenage sexuality, rather than pretending that it doesn't exist (well, some of us do), and we deal with the results, rather than banishing young women to sanitoriums to delivery babies that were whisked away to orphanages before their mothers could see or hold them.

Yes. There is too much sex outside of marriage.

Yes. People are not using birth control. People are getting stupid ideas like they can raise kids at 16. I blame parenting.

Well, feeding growth hormones to animals that will be eaten as meat(or to cows whose milk will be drunk by people) certainly isn't helping because it's making people develop earlier, and naturally, at a young age, you are generally less mature, so there's that factor. Part of it is sex education as was suggested, but I don't think "not enough" education is the problem; it's the nature of the education.

I don't know about anybody else's school, but at mine, all we ever really learned in health class was that all drugs would be pretty much guaranteed to kill you or completely alter your brain and who you are, and that sex is terrible. That, and we should never do either of them. Health class was nothing but one big scare tactic. Don't get me wrong here... Drugs aren't great(I could argue some of them are, but that's not the topic here), and we certainly need to learn about STDs, but the whole "just say no" thing doesn't work. Life is more complex than that, and simply lying to us and making it seem like every other person on the planet is a cesspool of disease isn't really helpful. Why? Well, because kids will eventually learn that things are more complicated than that. They will then therefore realize they'd been lied to, and then they won't trust authority at all. It doesn't help that masturbation seems to be generally looked down upon either. What's a kid to do with all those raging hormones?

Also, it doesn't help that sex is glorified all to hell everywhere you look these days. This is another reason why I feel mass nudity would make things a lot better in the long run. If everywhere you looked, you saw boobs, vagina, and penises hanging out, flopping around, etc., then it would be much more difficult for them to use sexual themes in advertising. I feel we would also be more in tune to the lack of reality in the ads we see because we'd see real people every day, the way they really look. We would more quickly spot the plastic surgery and photoshop. But the way things are now, we get so used to seeing the fakeness in the ads and the porno that we just accept it as reality.

Then there's that damn Teen Mom show on MTV. While it does show that raising a child can be difficult, at the same time, it glorifies getting pregnant as a teenager to an extent because now doing so can get you on TV! YAY!

While all of these things are definitely real, I think it's also important to note that back in the middle ages, girls and boys as young as 12, possibly even younger, would be married and having(or trying to have) children already. Of course, back then, they also didn't live as long either, but still, it's worth mentioning. In addition to this, It's also important to take a look at what went in on the 60s and 70s, during all that "free love" and "sex, drugs, and rock and roll" stuff. I don't know that we're necessarily less responsible about sex these days so much as it's a matter of statistics. In other words, there are more people around today, so there will be more of the sexual irresponsibility, and it will be more easily noticed, especially with the way we have facebook and other social media networks where everybody shares everything. There's very little privacy anymore.

There have always been teens who have had sex, humans are human, the christians have distorted the way the issue is framed and therefore debated. What we didn't have, however, was adults thinking its okay.

and that led to hundreds of thousands of people suffering under either wrongufkll ideology or straight up fanatic parents, good riddance i say.

A little over 2,000 years ago, there was the so-called "virgin" Mary who got herself knocked up when she was a teenager, too. You never hear anyone complaining about what a hoe she was.

I don't see anything wrong with promiscuity if you aren't in an exclusive relationship. People do need to do more to protect themselves from pregnancy and disease.

As a member of the generation right before yours, I agree. Young people today seem more frequently sexual responsible than my generation was at that age. I think AIDS may have affected that. Condom use became a cultural norm because of AIDS and this helped lower both pregnancy and STD rates. I also look around with some horror at how much young people happily share on social media. My generation was less responsible but also less documented and more private. Cameras only occasionally were brought to parties and then only one or two photos were taken. People talked about the parties the next day but only face to face with other people who had been at the party or who wished they had been. These days, every party is extensively photographed and discussions about it are available to prospective employers. Yikes!

Interestingly, it's my generation that is teaching the sex ed classes these days and came up with the concept of "abstinence education". So I think there is some over-correction at work. Some of today's health education (sex and drugs both) may be an attempt to save this generation from repeating the mistakes of my generation (and there were a lot of mistakes, although I think the one thing we got right was not oversharing). This backfires badly, as you noted.