Washington, March 04: Virginity is on the rise among young people up to the age of 24, according to new information released today by the Centres for Disease Control and Prevention’s National Centre for Health Statistics.
Among youngsters between the ages of 15 and 24, 27 per cent of males and 29 per cent of females said they had never experienced any sort of sexual contact. In 2002, that figure was 22 per cent for both sexes. The CDC does not attempt to speculate about a reason behind the trend.
Anjani Chandra of the CDC noted that the change was small but significant. She added that data on vaginal intercourse among never-married adolescents has been in decline since 1988. The CDC has only been keeping tabs on oral sex since 2002 and found in the latest study that more than half said they had oral sex beore vaginal intercourse.
The survey of 13,500 men and women and boys and girls between ages 15 and 44 revealed interesting new information about Americans’ sexual behaviour.
Among the other findings are that more women are having relationships with women or consider themselves bisexual. Among all ages, women were more than twice as likely to have had sex with a same-sex partner than men, in spite of the fact that the same proportion of men and women described themselves as homosexual.
——–Agencies