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But if unwed motherhood has lost much of its notoriety, premarital sex has over the same period become positively conventional. Like it or not, American adolescents are far more sexually active than they used to be. Guttmacher statistics show that the incidence of sexual intercourse among unmarried teenage women increased by two-thirds during the 1970s. Moreover, the sexual revolution seems to have moved from the college campus to the high school and now into the junior high and grade school.[*] A 1982 survey conducted by Johns Hopkins Researchers John Kantner and Melvin Zelnick found that nearly one out of five 15-year-old girls admitted that she had already had intercourse, as did nearly a third of 16-year-olds and 43% of 17-year-olds. "In the eyes of their peers, it is important for kids to be sexually active. No one wants to be a virgin," observes Amy Williams, director of San Francisco's Teenage Pregnancy and Parenting Project (TAPP). The social pressure even on the youngest adolescents can be daunting. Says Stephanie, 14, of suburban Chicago, now the mother of a four-month-old, "Everyone is, like, 'Did you lose your virginity yet?' "
Social workers are almost unanimous in citing the influence of the popular media--television, rock music, videos, movies--in propelling the trend toward precocious sexuality. One survey has shown that in the course of a year the average viewer sees more than 9,000 scenes of suggested sexual intercourse or innuendo on prime-time TV. "Our young people are barraged by the message that to be sophisticated they must be sexually hip," says Williams. "They don't even buy toothpaste to clean their teeth. They buy it to be sexually attractive."
And yet, for all their early experimentation with sex, their immersion in heavy-breathing rock music and the erotic fantasies on MTV, one thing about American teenagers has not changed: they are in many ways just as ignorant about the scientific facts of reproduction as they were in the days when Doris Day, not Madonna, was their idol. In a study funded by the Rockefeller Foundation, Demographer Ellen Kisker of Princeton University found that teenage girls are awash in misinformation. Among the commonest myths: that they could not become pregnant the first time they had sex, if they had it only occasionally or if they had it standing up. Adolescents are especially foggy on the subject of contraception. A National Opinion Research Center survey of teenage mothers found that few were familiar with the IUD, and most, says Researcher Pat Mosena, "didn't even know what the diaphragm was." Mistaken notions about the health risks of the birth control pill are rampant. All this may help explain why, according to John Hopkins researchers, only about one in three sexually active American girls between ages 15 and 19 uses contraceptives at all. And many who do use them have a rather weak grasp of the methodology: one-quarter of the girls in the NORC survey said they were using birth control at the time they became pregnant.