How to Lie about Sex … with Statistics!

The Discredited Report Used to Promote Sex-Positive Sex-Ed

As you’ve probably noticed, sex-ed is a controversial topic in America. The conflict is between proponents of more morality-focused programs emphasizing abstinence, and those who want a more a “sex-positive” curriculum emphasizing only safety and achievement of personal goals.

The arguments from the sex-positivity side tend to focus on the fact that abstinence-only school programs are ineffective at preventing STDs and teen pregnancies (which is probably true, honestly), and the practical need to include information on contraception. But if you dig slightly deeper into the arguments, you typically find that the more fundamental objection is against the idea of teaching young people that premarital sex is wrong in the first place. One of the main arguments given for objecting to this is that basically everyone has sex before marriage anyway, so it is pointless and hypocritical to teach a different standard.

This claim was bolstered in 2007 by an influential study by Lawrence Finer, who was at the time a researcher at the Guttmacher Institute. Finer analyzed data from the National Survey of Family Growth conducted in 1982, 1988, 1995, and 2002, which had asked Americans in different age cohorts questions about their past sexual behavior. Finer’s results were shocking. Premarital sex, he declared, was “nearly universal.”

The study showed that 95 percent of Americans (96 percent of American males, and 94 percent of females) had had premarital sex by age 44. He further declared that even among women born in the late 30s and the 40s, 88 percent had had premarital sex by age 44. In other words, almost nine out of ten people in the generation now entering their eighties had slept around before marriage. Ol’ grandma had been putting up a false pretense of chastity all along.

The paper was openly political in its implications. Finer argued that since the data showed that almost all people of both genders had premarital sex, holding onto abstinence-until-marriage as a normative behavior is an unachievable policy goal and should be abandoned.

The Movement Gains Momentum

As the author intended, the paper was widely cited in political debates surrounding sexuality. In 2008, Harvard Human Right Program released a rather polemical report (titled “Sex, Lies, and Stereotypes”), which vehemently argued against federally funded programs that advocate an abstinence-only approach to premarital life. The authors wrote with unconcealed disdain for the teaching that “a mutually faithful monogamous relationship in the context of marriage is the expected standard of human sexual activity,” and suggested (without evidence) that such ideas would create low self-esteem in children whose parents did not conform to this societal norm. Naturally, the report cited the 2007 Finer paper.

The climate of opinion was certainly shifting against abstinence in intellectual circles. In 2011, a major literature review of studies on adolescent sexuality from 2000-2009 described the normalization of adolescent sexuality as a “key innovation” from that decade and concluded that it was time for sex education to become more sex-positive.

All this seems to have had an effect on government policy. In 2016, President Obama’s proposed budget cut all funding for abstinence-only educational programs, though this was reversed by President Trump. Guided by the U.S., the UN followed suit in shifting away from an emphasis on abstinence. Today in 2023, programs advocating abstinence still exist, as they are mandated by some state laws, but the general content of sex education in schools has become much more “sex positive.”

In fact, the current national sex education standards explicitly states that approved sex-education is “sex positive” and “refrains from using shame and fear to motivate students to be abstinent.” Interestingly, among the developers of the standards was the group SIECUS, which, according to the acknowledgment section, “advances sex education as a vehicle for social change—working toward a world where all people can access and enjoy their own sexual and reproductive freedom.” (No hidden agenda here – it’s pretty much spelled out.)

A Bad Foundation

So it’s settled. Basically no one in America was ever abstinent to begin with, it was all hypocrisy, and it’s time we moved on.

But in 2018, a replication study published by the Max Planck Society in Munich ran the numbers on the exact same data sets used by the influential 2007 Finer paper. It turned up completely different results. It turns out that Finer had used wildly deceptive statistical methods on the data.  

With the correct methods, the same data indicated that only an estimated 53 percent of women born in 1939–1948 had had premarital sex by age 44, compared with 88 percent in the Finer study. (Maybe ol’ grandma wasn’t a secret floozie, after all!) For later generations, the rate of premarital sex was also lower, though less so: it was 87 percent by age 30 for women born 1969–1978, instead of 94 percent. (For some reason, the authors did not publish the revised estimates on the male population.)

So what was wrong with the original study? Well, in theory, Finer was calculating the probably of people in different age cohorts having premarital sex by different ages. The trouble is, people kept getting married, at which point they couldn’t be having pre-marital sex if they hadn’t already. So Finer removed those people from the analysis at the time of their marriage. Naturally, this biased the result in favor of premarital sex because it eliminated from the model all the people of any given age who were married and had never had premarital sex.

In other words, Finer was actually estimating the probability of an individual having premarital sex by a given age if the person had not gotten married by that age. But he presented his results as the percentages of people in the U.S. who had actually had premarital sex, despite the fact that this is something completely different.

I’m sure this was a totally innocent mistake, but it is odd that Dr. Finer didn’t know how to run the analysis correctly. He has a Ph.D. in Population Dynamics from Johns Hopkins University.

It is also rather baffling that he got away with his mistake until 2018. After more than a decade had passed, and many of the political goals of the study had been achieved, then another study was published debunking it.

Even today, the Google search “statistics on premarital sex in America” brings up the 2007 study as the top result. You also seem to find far more web posts and news articles citing the original study than the correction. And at the time of this writing, the Wikipedia entry “Premarital Sex” cites the 2007 Finer paper, but not the 2018 correction.

I suppose this is just how things work. A dramatic claim is published loudly. A rebuttal of the dramatic claim is shared more quietly. It’s just not as interesting. But beyond that, if it goes against the spirit of the age, there is certainly little motivation to get the word out there.

Of course, the 2018 correction still indicates rather depressingly low rates of abstinence. You could certainly point to the results as evidence that society has never been as moral as some might like to think. But the gap between the two studies does make a difference. The smaller the number of abstinent people, the easier it becomes to dismiss them as anomalies—fanatical fundamentalists, asexuals, incels, exceptions that prove the rule. The larger the number, the harder this dismissal becomes. If even a large minority of people in any era practice abstinence from sex, then abstinence is something that can be achieved. And if it can be achieved, it can be taught as an ideal.

The Truth About Choice

A further problem with the Finer study was that his data only goes so far back – his oldest age cohort included people who came of age in the 60s, after all. By contrast, in a 1989 study, only 12 percent of women and 61 percent of men born before 1910 reported that they had ever had premarital sex.

The huge disparity between the sexes has been attributed to the fact that effective birth control was not readily available, so women could face serious social and economic consequences from engaging in premarital sex if they got pregnant. Men, by contrast, could just walk away, and forget about it. Once the pill became widespread, premarital sex for woman quickly rose to similar rates to that of men.

This illustrates two important facts about human nature:

First, that most humans will compromise their moral values if the reward for doing so is enticing enough and if they can get away with it.

Second, it shows that if sufficiently motivated, humans can exercise self-control. Up until the early 1900s, women chose to abstain from premarital sex because the consequences would have been ruinous. That means the choice to exercise abstinence was theirs to make.

In other words, people do what they want. I am not, of course, referring to cases of assault, I am referring to everyday personal behavior. People make choices. We are not driven to these choices by psychosomatic forces outside of our control.

One of the pillars of the anti-abstinence movement is, therefore, a lie. Premarital abstinence will never be universal, but it will always be achievable. People who want to abstain will abstain. Anyone who claims differently is just making excuses.

The Guttmacher Institute has not removed the post about Finer’s paper from its website or added a correction to it, and the organization is still campaigning to do away with the ideal of abstinence in America.

It’s funny, although it’s also very serious. We shouldn’t be here. The people who want to tear down ancient cultural ideals should never have been allowed to fool people with this sort of libel and fatalistic nonsense. But people do have a choice, and Western Civilization has apparently chosen to let go of premarital abstinence. Now the chips will fall as they may.

Further Reading

• Marcia Segelstein, “Sex Re-Education”
• Terrell Clemmons, “Sexual Insanity”
• Terrell Clemmons, “Saved Sex”
• Robin Phillips, "Wilhelm Reich and the Irony of Liberation"
• Bobby Maddex, “Getting Real: A Holistic Approach to Pregnancy & Teenage Sexuality”