Teens Sex T

Teens Sex T
November 11, 2022, 6:45 PM · 7 min read
Across the country, students are turning to social media to get their sex ed questions answered. (Collage: Getty Images/Nathalie Cruz for Yahoo Life)
Yahoo Life’s School Report Card: Sex Education series examines what adolescents are being taught about sexuality — and why it’s about more than the birds and the bees.
Dr. Jennifer Lincoln is an ob-gyn with a massive following on social media, where she’s a source for many young Americans who are grasping at straws when it comes to sex education — something the doctor knows plenty about.
“I received abstinence-only sex education, which left me ill-informed and ill-prepared to keep myself safe,” Lincoln, 41, tells Yahoo Life. “Once I started using social media professionally, I used myself in high school as the target audience: What did 15- or 16-year-old me need to know? What were the topics I was clueless about, that an ob-gyn on TikTok could shed some light on?”
Unfortunately, not a ton has changed since Lincoln was a teen: Experts have told Yahoo Life in recent weeks that sex education in America is “failing,” with its patchwork approach falling short in most districts when it comes to offering honest, inclusive, medically accurate information that goes beyond teaching abstinence-only. And that’s despite a majority of parents — 59% — wanting their kids to learn about birth control methods beyond abstinence, according to new findings by Pew Research .
It’s no wonder young people are turning to online sources.
“Social media is where most of us spend a lot of time — especially young people — so I knew I could use it as a platform for education and empowerment,” says Lincoln. “If I had access to TikTok or Instagram as a teen, I can guarantee I would have understood much more about my body and felt more confident in seeking care,” she says.
That’s certainly true for Aarush Santoshi, 16. He recalls receiving sex ed in middle school but says it felt exclusionary.
“I personally identify as gay, so I felt it was lacking in that sense,” he tells Yahoo Life. “I didn’t learn a lot of things about how nonheterosexual sex works, or, you know, protection and stuff for nonheterosexual forms of sex.”
Now in high school, Santoshi says sex ed isn’t even taught as a class anymore.
“We just have a Google Classroom page where our gym teacher gives us questions to respond to every week,” he says. “So the research is actually stuff we do on our own; all the information I get is from online.”
Luckily, there are sources like Lincoln, and many other qualified people just like her, sharing their wealth of knowledge on TikTok, Instagram and YouTube.
However, not all content creators teaching sex ed online have Lincoln’s bona fides.
“You have some people who are unfortunately contributing to either misinformation or are unknowingly contributing to stigmatizing language or stigmatizing programs or beliefs that actually harm people,” Monica Edwards, the federal policy manager for Unite for Reproductive & Gender Equity (URGE), tells Yahoo Life. “It’s important for young people to be in community with each other, and to learn from each other’s experiences, but at the same time, there’s always that danger of not getting accurate information.”
That’s why Nora Gelperin’s organization Advocates for Youth tries to counter misinformation by getting involved and creating some expert-led lessons of their own — all informed by youth advocates, who range in age from 10 to 16.
According to a report by sex ed advocacy organization SIECUS (Sex Ed for Social Change), abstinence is all that’s being taught in 16 states and is required to be emphasized in the sex ed curricula of 30. Only 29 states and the District of Columbia require any sex education at all, while 13 don’t require it to be medically accurate. And only nine states have queer-inclusive sex ed policies, while six states require that sex ed lessons are anti -LGBTQ.
It’s what’s driving Santoshi and so many other young people to turn to social media — even though it can have its limitations.
Dr. Staci Tanouye , an ob-gyn who began sharing sex education information on TikTok when she noticed a need there, explains that medical professionals, specifically, are limited in their communication on the platform.
“I do have people that reach out and say, ‘Well, I’m having this, this and this, what should I do?’ And legally, I cannot answer that. I can’t even answer that for my own patients on a platform like that; I have to direct them to their own physician or if they are my patient I have to direct them through the appropriate channels. And so it does become challenging because I don’t want people to get discouraged by that,” Tanouye tells Yahoo Life. “I cannot form a patient-doctor relationship over social media, that’s just legally not appropriate. It makes it hard and it blurs the lines and it’s hard to answer the way we want to answer.”
Despite these setbacks, doctors like Tanouye believe that it is their duty to combat the spread of misinformation that they know exists on social media platforms by putting reliable content in the mix. “You can’t monitor your kids all the time, but you can point them in the right directions,” she says, explaining that she knows of parents who send her TikTok page to their children in an effort to do just that.
Danielle Bezalel, who has a master's degree in public health, is the creator of Sex Ed With DB , a podcast that offers science-backed sexual education to over 100,000 followers. Bezalel tells Yahoo Life that it’s crucial that parents have reliable sources to which they can direct their kids. “If they can access this content on TikTok, and they can hear about it and understand it and digest it in a way that feels funny and relatable and silly and goofy and they don’t feel judged for asking the questions that they do — and they feel like they’re getting the education and information they need to live happy and healthy lives — why wouldn’t they go to TikTok?”
Bezalel says social media platforms allow for more candid conversation around difficult topics, offering the chance for young people to ask questions that they might otherwise be too embarrassed to bring up — especially in class, but even during a doctor’s appointment.
“There is a certain level of anonymity on TikTok, especially if you have no picture or a random username, [so] you’re able to ask questions how you’d like,” Bezalel says. This has enabled her to partake in a back-and-forth with her audience about all related topics, including different types of birth control, porn literacy and masturbation logistics. “[I] ask young people who I know are watching, ‘Hey, what methods did I miss?’ ‘What do you want to hear about?’ And there are tons of comments that I get around, ‘Hey, what about the ring?’ Or ‘What about the shot?’ ‘Why don’t you talk about this?’ So people are engaging, people are curious, but they don’t want to be judged for asking certain questions or not knowing certain information.”
When it comes to understanding sex and their bodies, young people are eager to “take control” of that process, says Taylor Nolan , a social media influencer and MSTI-certified sex therapist currently working toward a PhD in the subject. This ensures that they’re finding content that fits their specific needs, whereas a general curriculum might not.
“Many express relating, feeling seen or learning something. I think it points to the interest young folks have in engaging in their sexual pleasure,” Nolan tells Yahoo Life of the audience she’s gained by sharing expertise as well as personal experiences. “In traditional sex education content, they miss the subjectivity, and what I’ve seen is that the vulnerability of sharing experiences is incredibly powerful in folks learning more about sex.”
The bottom line, say experts, is that sex education needs to be fixed — but in the absence of that, many are happy to see young people doing their due diligence to get the information elsewhere.
“I am all for sex education anywhere people are, and anywhere that puts legit information in their hands,” Lincoln says. “And if that means watching one of my TikToks or YouTube videos, I am all for it.”
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Contexts (Berkeley Calif). Author manuscript; available in PMC 2017 Oct 5.
Stefanie Mollborn, Institute of Behavioral Science and the sociology department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies teen parenthood, social norms, and social inequalities;
The publisher's final edited version of this article is available at Contexts (Berkeley Calif)
There are “culture wars” over teen sexuality playing out in U.S. society as a whole and in individual communities.
Teens’ experiences of sex and pregnancy differ in fundamental ways between liberal, secular “blue” and conservative, highly religious “red” communities.
Most teens eventually have sex, most adults seem clueless that it’s happening, and most adults disapprove.
“Don’t get pregnant, I don’t care how you do it, I’m not gonna give you condoms, you’re not supposed to get pregnant when you’re 17.”
Which is more important for our society, eliminating teen sexual activity or minimizing its negative consequences?
Bearman Peter S, Brückner Hannah. Promising the Future: Virginity Pledges and First Intercourse. American Journal of Sociology. 2001; 106 :859–912. This influential article’s findings on the effects of virginity pledges have been used by both sides in cultural debates about teen sexual behavior. [ Google Scholar ] Elliott Sinikka. Not My Kid: What Parents Believe About the Sex Lives of Their Teenagers. NYU Press; 2012. Articulates the complex ways in which parents think about their teenagers’ sex lives and how they communicate with teens. [ Google Scholar ] Fields Jessica. Risky Lessons: Sex Education and Social Inequality. Rutgers University Press; 2008. Documents community debates around sex education and the role that social inequalities play. [ Google Scholar ] Mollborn Stefanie, Jacobs Janet. ‘We’ll Figure a Way’: Teenage Mothers’ Experiences in Shifting Social and Economic Contexts. Qualitative Sociology. 2012; 35 :23–46. Investigates how cultural and structural changes over time have shaped the consequences of teen parenthood. [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ Google Scholar ] Schalet Amy T. Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex. University of Chicago Press; 2011. By comparing middle-class messages about sexual behaviors in the United States and the Netherlands, this book sheds light on our taken-for-granted cultural understandings. [ Google Scholar ]

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Institute of Behavioral Science and the sociology department at the University of Colorado Boulder. She studies teen parenthood, social norms, and social inequalities
Patton grew up in a mostly white, wealthy, liberal town. He thinks about half of the kids in his high school, mostly the “cool” ones, were having sex. Mostly, they practiced safe sex, and few ended up pregnant. Parents, he said, “turned their head because they didn’t want to know what their kid was doing.” This made teen sex and pregnancy a taboo topic. Parents gave their teenage children a clear message about “being careful”—avoiding sex or using contraception consistently—to avoid getting pregnant. Patton says, “As a whole, it was more kids practicing safe sex rather than being a focus on being abstinent.” Teens who messed up paid a social price, and pregnant girls were shunned. Someone from the same town said, “A pregnancy is just like a physical marker that you are a slut.”
Patton’s story contrasts sharply with Annika’s experiences in a conservative, white, lower-income mining town with deep Evangelical roots. There, the message was “don’t have sex before marriage.” But most teens were having sex anyway, and hiding it from parents. Annika thinks because most teens were with someone they eventually expected to marry, they weren’t as motivated to “be careful” with contraception. Many of the kids in her high school were pregnant. The school didn’t try to hide them as Patton’s school did—on the contrary, the senior class president was eight months pregnant at graduation. Annika links this openness to teen pregnancy to the fact that people in her town were very anti-abortion; some teens even wore “abortion is homicide” shirts to school. Pregnant teens who chose not to have abortions were sometimes praised by older people, who Annika said thought, “it was a gift from God.”
It may seem like Annika and Patton come from different worlds when it comes to messages about teen sex and pregnancy, but their hometowns are in the same U.S. state. It’s striking that Patton’s “very liberal” town accepted that teen sex may happen but ostracized pregnant teens, while Annika’s “very conservative” town grudgingly accepted pregnant teens. Both of these communities are communicating messages to teens that work to reproduce their cultural values in the next generation. But as we will see, these messages are mixed, which may be making them less effective.
The vast majority of American adults today have had sex outside of marriage, but most adults think teenagers shouldn’t have sex. Even so, researchers at the Guttmacher Institute have found that most young people become sexually active in their teens: Just 16 percent have had sex by age 15, over 60 percent by 18, and 71 percent by 19. And about one in four teen girls ends up pregnant. (This article focuses on self-identified heterosexual teens—additional research would be helpful for understanding the experiences of teens who identify in other ways.) Research collaborators and I interviewed 57 college students and 76 teen moms and dads about the messages they heard about sex, contraception, and pregnancy in high school. The college students all attended a large public university in the West. Most teen parents were nonwhite and living in or near poverty in an urban area.
Even though their backgrounds are so different, there are important experiences these young people have in common. Most teens they know eventually have sex, most adults seem clueless that it’s happening, and most adults disapprove. Teens themselves are petrified that their parents and other adults might find out they’re having sex. But there are also tremendous differences in the messages teens hear about sexual behavior in different communities. Here, I examine these messages—which tend to be inconsistent and confusing—and the ways teens react to them.
In the New Yorker article “Red Sex, Blue Sex,” Margaret Talbot argues that teens’ experiences of sex and pregnancy differ in fundamental ways between liberal, secular “blue” areas like Patton’s and conservative, highly religious “red” areas like Annika’s. People in Patton’s town are communicating a practical message, one that is focused mostly on careful contraception if teens decide to have sex. They talk about things like maturity, responsibility, and being smart about your future. In high-poverty, secular urban communities regardless of race, the messages about responsibility and protecting your future sound the same as in wealthier ones—but they feel different because teens and those around them realize that their futures are precarious.
In contrast, Annika’s highly religious community takes a two-pronged approach of teaching abstinence until marriage, and if that fails, strongly discouraging abortion. As Bryce sums up the message in his Catholic-dominated community, “we were taught that premarital sex and pregnancy outside of wedlock is against God, and therefore wrong.” This moral message is in line with conservative Christian religious teachings but—as evaluations of abstinence-only sex education and virginity pledges have shown—it is not as useful for reducing teen pregnancy. Teens from wealthier religious communities may resolve an unwanted pregnancy through a secret abortion. But teens from lower-income communities like Annika’s have less to gain by aborting a pregnancy in violation of their community’s message.
Sociologists call these messages social norms, or rules about how people should behave that result in punishment if they aren’t followed. The moral and practical communities are not just teaching teens how to
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