The onset of puberty in a population can be measured by the average age of menarche, when a young woman’s menstrual cycle commences. In research examining variation in the onset of menarche in differing countries and cultures, several trends appear. Menarche occurs at an earlier age when there is a longer life expectancy, when vegetable calorie intake is adequate for good nutrition, and when illiteracy rates are low (Thomas et al. 2001). Low illiteracy rates are likely to imply high rates of child labor; such labor would be expected to demand a greater expenditure of energy than relatively sedentary school attendance (Thomas et al. 2001). Moreover, a well-nourished population is in better stead to reproduce. When there’s consistent high quality nutrition a secular trend may appear where subsequent generations are larger and reach menarche at earlier ages (Stein and Rowe, 2000). In a 1999 University of Southern California study, early ages for menarche were linked to girls who were either tall or who were relatively large in size for their age (Koprowski et. al. 1999).
The average reported age for the onset of menarche in the U.S. in now between 12 and 13 years, a rather dramatic leap from the early 19th century when the age was between 17 and 18 years (Wierson, Long, and Forehand, 1993). This secular trend has had dramatic consequences relative to young people engaging in sexual activity at earlier ages. In 1993 one million females under the age of 20 became pregnant; with 43% of teen females having been pregnant at least once by that age (Shapiro 1993). In 2000 more than three million American teens acquired an STD; that was 25% of sexually active people between ages 15 and 19 (Burcum 2001).
In a recent study of African-American teen mothers in Richmond, Virginia, the average age at menarche was 10.76 years (Jones-Harris 1998). While these young women didn’t typically begin having sexual intercourse immediately following menarche, most of them did become sexual by the time they were 13.5 years. Half of the male partners of these young women reported their first sexual intercourse before age 11 with over half reporting that they’d had more than 20 sexual partners. This study found that the majority of the respondents inhabited a netherworld in which they didn’t openly seek to become parents yet they were not using contraceptives when their pregnancies occurred.
There are several ways to look at this phenomenon. One is that teens are out of step with mainstream society; the other is that mainstream society is out of sync with the passions and drives of teens. Most studies make teens look like the culprits by reporting that they have the highest rates of gonorrhea, are considered at extremely high risk for hepatitis B and human papilloma virus (HPV), and that white teens have five times more herpes today than they did 30 years ago (Burcum 2001). Much of this is explained by claiming that teens feel they’re so invincible that they mindlessly take risks with their bodies and ultimately their health.
Frankl’s (1986) idea that when teens fall in love they are unprepared for this sudden invasion of sexuality in their psyches presumes that the adult experience of new love is more staid and mature. Ironically, much of popular culture that is readily consumed by adults as well as teens celebrates being obsessed with another person and becoming head over heels lost in love. While most adults may believe that they know better than to dive into their unfettered emotions (and act like teens), the popularity of the cult of the one-and-only-soul-mate may well confirm that if they could, they would.
We hear how multiple partner dating practices are problematic for teens. Ironically, active swingers, average many more partners in a single year than most teens do through their entire adolescence (Wolfe 2002). Since swingers are not a compelling cohort that society as a whole cares about, the consequences of their behavior (e.g. unplanned pregnancy) is rarely seen as a public health issue. Statistics like 43% of sexually active girls get pregnant before turning 20 need to be deconstructed. If we presume that these girls were sexually active beginning at 15, then during each year of their sexual activity only 8.6% got pregnant. Healthy fertile women who take no precautions to prevent pregnancy have an 80% chance of getting pregnant in a year. For teens to produce such relatively low pregnancy rates, most of the time they must be taking precautions.
Let’s consider that the problem isn’t the teens, but American society at large. Traditionally, when a young woman became sexually mature, she would begin having sexual intercourse. Amongst the !Kung tribal people of the Kalahari desert in Southern Africa, a girl may marry several years before she is physically mature enough to have sexual intercourse (Shostak 1981). She might live with her husband’s family beginning at 11 years of age, but would not engage in sexual activity until she reached menarche which typically occurs at about 16. Here, unlike America today, the society is completely equipped to incorporate teen sexuality. By the time a young woman begins to have sexual intercourse, she’s already established herself in her husbands’ household and has the full support of her tribal community.
Amongst rural Blacks in north central Florida (Dougherty, 1978) when a teenage girl gives birth she has the opportunity to assume the responsibilities of an adult, but if she chooses to remain a girl, then her maternal kin (mother, grandmother and aunts) will take responsibility for parenting her baby. Here teen pregnancy offers a rite of passage into adulthood, but only for those girls who are interested. If there’s no interest then their kin community provides a lifeboat both for young mothers as well as their infants.
Meanwhile, despite that upwards of 60% of high school seniors say that they’ve had sex, the Bush administration promotes abstinence focussed sex education programs. Reportedly these programs have caused an eight-percent drop in teen sex between 1991 and 2001 (Ali and Scelfo 2002). Abstinence sex education at its worst focuses on fear by showing students images of first stage herpes outbreaks and untreated syphilis and gonorrhea. The implicit message is that if you don’t have sex, this won’t happen. Rather than explaining a fuller range of options and approaches including using condoms, dental dams, latex gloves, topical microbicides and mouthwash, abstinence educators have been known to play up the hazards of relatively safe activities like deep kissing and mutual masturbation (Ali and Scelfo 2002).
If we wanted a sexually competent population who safely (both virally and emotionally) practiced a variety of ways to access their own orgasmic potential, we wouldn’t be teaching them abstinence. Instead, we’d be teaching teens how to honor their own and their partners’ bodies by learning how to have deeply satisfying sex. Abstinence education returns us to a time of sexual ignorance and frigidity, when women were admonished for giving it away and newlyweds were clueless about the mechanics of good sex.
What if we FULLY embraced teen sexuality? Not just by placing images of Brittany Spears on the covers of teen magazines and allowing our daughters to hang posters of her and Madonna on their bedroom walls, but by creating a modern American version of the Muria of East India’s ghotul (Elwin, 1968). The ghotul provided Muria youth with a socially approved hands-on learning environment where children beginning at the age of six would learn about sensual touch, dancing, and erotically engaging a partner. Rather than entering marriage with the ignorance that abstinence education implies, Muria youth arrived with the knowledge of upwards of ten years of practical sex education.
What if we taught our teens how to use breath control and masturbation to better know their own erotic capacities? What if we encouraged them to watch their partners masturbate? What if erotic dance was part of every high school curriculum? What if the puritanical sublimation of teen sexuality through sports, excessive homework, and church –based youth groups were reexamined? My sense is that if mainstream society embraced teen sexuality, giving young people permission to learn how to really enjoy themselves sexually, there would be very little reason to engage in high-risk activities.
If we can’t change the nature of sex education, at a policy level, what should be done? We might do best by investing heavily in teen mothers. Rather than presuming that this is the time of their lives to finish high school, we might treat them and their babies as our nation’s precious future. We could offer them high quality parent education, the best medical care there is, and all the food, clothes, and amenities needed to insure a viable next generation. When these young women reach their thirties, they might then seek higher education in pursuit of a career. These women would be free of the bio-time clock battles many of today’s professional women in their late 30s and 40s struggle with. Rather than sinking thousands of dollars into the quixotic infertility industry, as a society we might be best off by embracing the most fertile among us and allowing them to become the mothers today’s secular trends have played no small part in generating.
Ali, L. and Scelfo, J., “Choosing Virginity,” Newsweek, December 9, 2002:61-66.
Burcum, J., “Teen STD rates highlight a growing public health concern,” Star Tribune, April 3, 2001
Dougherty, M.C., Becoming a Woman in Rural Black Culture, New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1978.
Elwin, V., The Kingdom of the Young. Oxford; Oxford University Press, 1968.
Frankl, V., The Doctor and The Soul. New York: Random House, 1986.
Jones-Harris, J. L. “Urban African American adolescent parents: their perceptions of sex, love, intimacy, pregnancy, and parenting.” Adolescence, Winter, 1998.
C. Koprowski, R. K. Ross, W. J. Mack, et al., “Diet, body size and menarche in a multiethnic cohort,” Journal of Cancer 79(11/12): 1907-1911, May 1999
Shapiro, J., “Teenage sex: Just say "Wait."” U.S. News & World Report, 115(4), 1993: 56-59.
Shostak, M., Nisa: the Life and Words of a !Kung Woman, New York: Vintage Books, 1981.
Stein, P. and Rowe, B., Physical Anthropology 7th Edition, New York: McGraw-Hill, 2000: 416-421.
Thomas, F. et al., “International Variability of Ages at Menarche and Menopause: Patterns and Main Determinants.” Human Biology, v. 73 no. 2 , April 2001: 271-290.
Wierson, M., Long, P., & Forehand, R. “Toward a new understanding of early menarche: The role of environmental stress in pubertal timing.” Adolescence, 28(112), 1993:913-923
Wolfe, L., “Basic Research Project Featuring People With Multiple Partners” IASHS, 1523 Franklin Street, San Francisco, CA 94109, Fall 2002, unpublished manuscript.
Discuss the changes of age of onset of puberty for males and females over the past 100 years, and discuss the implications of these changes.