The Media's Silence About Rampant Anal Sex

Newspaper article

By: William Saletan

Date: September 20, 2005

Source: William Saletan. "The Media's Silence About Rampant Anal Sex." Slate.com (September 20, 2005). 〈http://www.slate.com/id/2126643〉 (accessed April 1, 2006).

About the Author: William Saletan was a contributor to the online journal Slate when this essay was published as an installment of his column on science, technology, and society, "Human Nature." He has also contributed to Mother Jones magazine and was author of a book, Bearing Right: How Conservatives Won the Abortion War (2004).

INTRODUCTION

William Saletan devotes this essay to a study released on September 15, 2005 by the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS, a division of the U.S. federal Centers for Disease Control or CDC), "Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002." The survey gathered data in 2002 and 2003 by asking survey questions of 12,571 Americans aged fifteen to forty-four years about their sexual behaviors. Most coverage of the report focused on its finding that over half of U.S. teenagers (fifteen- to nineteen-year-olds) had engaged in oral sex, with male and female teenagers reporting about the same level of experience, and with the percentage increasing to about seventy percent among all eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds. According to the NCHS survey, one fourth of teens who had never had vaginal intercourse ("virgin" teens) had had oral sex. This was deemed surprising and disturbing by many commentators and was often assumed to be a large increase over earlier years. However, as Saletan notes, the NCHS report states that from 1995 to 2002, there was little or no increase in the proportion of males in the fifteen to nineteen age group who had had heterosexual oral or anal sex (for female teens, trend data were not available for these behaviors).

Many commentators interpreted the supposed increase in teen oral sexual activity as evidence that abstinence-only sex education programs in public schools, widely supported in the United States by religious and social conservatives, had moved teens to substitute oral sex (fellatio and cunnilingus) for vaginal intercourse. The Washington Post, typical of many news sources, opined on September 16, 2005 that "The new data tend to support this view." This was a controversial conclusion because such a result would be unwelcome to most of the persons who had supported abstinence-only sex education. Clinical studies have shown that oral sex can transmit gonorrhea, syphilis, herpes, human papillomavirus, and human immunodeficiency virus (HIV), the cause of acquired immunodeficiency syndrome (AIDS).

Saletan, however, focuses not on the teen-sex results of the study but on its little-reported numbers on the practice of anal sex among people aged twenty-two to twenty-four. The NCHS study found that thirty-two percent of females aged twenty-two to twenty-four self-reported as having had anal sex at least once, while thirty-four percent of men in the same age group reported likewise. (This single percentage point difference between men and women is not statistically significant.) Saletan makes the point that this result would have been more appropriate to highlight as a public concern, given that anal sex is more likely to result in the transmission of HIV than is oral sex—according to figures Saletan cites from the CDC, about fifty times more likely.

PRIMARY SOURCE

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

[This text has been suppressed due to author restrictions]

SIGNIFICANCE

One can only speculate as to the cause for the relative silence in the media concerning the anal-sex results that Saletan highlights. First, it is possible that some journalists did not read the original report, but reported secondhand knowledge gained from earlier news reports that happened to emphasize the teen-oral-sex results. Second, commentators may have chosen to emphasize the teen results because teen sexuality and sex education are explosively political topics in U.S. society: the sexual behaviors of legal adults are much less politically controversial. Third, there is Saletan's theory that journalists think of anal sex as "too icky to mention in print." Some combination of these causes may also have been active.

Other than AIDS, all of the diseases that can be transmitted by oral sex can be readily treated. AIDS, however, is a life-threatening disease for which only partially effective treatments are available. Hence Saletan's emphasis on AIDS. As of 2003, according to the CDC, approximately 38,490 people in the United States between the ages of thirteen and twenty-four had contracted AIDS; 10,041 had died, accounting for about two percent of the 524,060 deaths of people in all age groups in the U.S. (Far greater numbers have died from AIDS worldwide, especially in Africa.) Further, the proportion of AIDS-diagnosed persons aged thirteen to fourteen was increasing: in 1999, only 3.9 percent of all persons diagnosed with AIDS were in this group, but by 2003 4.7 percent were.

The recent increase in AIDS infections among people aged thirteen to twenty-four might be related to the increase in anal sex found by the 2005 NCHS study and highlighted by Saletan—more anal sex, more AIDS cases—but this cannot be assumed. This depends partly on who young people are, on average, having anal sex with: anal sex with a person who does not have HIV cannot cause AIDS. The NCHS study, although intended to help identify U.S. populations at risk for AIDS, cautioned that it was "not an exhaustive analysis of either sexual behavior or of the risk of sexually transmitted infections." Great care should be taken in drawing any conclusions at all from the NCHS study, other than that certain sexual behaviors are probably prevalent at approximately the rates reported.

FURTHER RESOURCES

Periodicals

Heslam, Jessica. "Sex Survey Shocker: Concern as Most American Teens Have Had Oral Sex." Boston Herald (September 16, 2005).〈http://news.bostonherald.com/national/view.bg?articleid=102800〉 (accessed April 1,2006).

Stepp, Laura Sessions. "Study: Half of All Teens Have Had Oral Sex." Washington Post (September 16, 2005). 〈http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2005/09/15/AR2005091500915.html〉 (accessed April 1, 2006).

Mosher, William D., Anjani Chandra, and Jo Jones. "Sexual Behavior and Selected Health Measures: Men and Women 15-44 Years of Age, United States, 2002." CDC: Advance Data for Vital and Health Statistics. 362 (September 15, 2005). 〈http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/data/ad/ad362.pdf〉 (accessed April 1, 2006).