UCSF explores teens' post-sex emotions

Dan Fran Chronicle ^ | yesterday | Ilene llelchuck

[Rodney King]

We know teens are having sex and opting for oral sex over intercourse because they think it's safer. Now a team of UCSF researchers may be the first to analyze how it makes adolescents feel.

Ninth- and 10th-graders surveyed at two California high schools between 2002 and 2004 revealed mixed emotions that for many included guilt and feeling manipulated.

Girls were more likely than boys to feel bad about themselves afterward and to "feel used." Boys were more likely than girls to say sexual activity made them feel self-confident and popular.

"We tend to focus on the health consequences of having sex, like pregnancy and STDs, but we also need to talk to them about all the emotional consequences," said UCSF pediatrics Professor Bonnie Halpern-Felsher, senior author of the report published this month in the journal Pediatrics.

Of the 618 students her team followed from their freshman year, 44 percent reported having intercourse or oral sex by the end of 10th grade. The report focuses on the surveys from those 275 students and the differing effects of intercourse and oral sex, which researchers said has become more common because teens believe it carries fewer physical and emotional risks.

A majority said they enjoyed sex. The teens who engaged only in oral sex reported fewer problems with sexually transmitted diseases, pregnancy, guilt and their parents -- but less resulting pleasure, self-confidence or intimacy with their partners.

Forty-one percent said they felt bad about themselves later, nearly 20 percent felt guilty, and 25 percent felt used. By comparison, 36 percent of those who had intercourse reported feeling bad afterward, 42 percent felt guilty and 38 percent said they felt used.

...Excerpted...

[Rodney King]

On the naughty teacher sex lists, a typical thread goes like this:

Guy: Wow, I wish I had that teacher when I was in high school.

Gal: What if your daughter had a relationship with a male teacher?

Guy: It's different.

Well, now we have scientific proof. It's different. Girls feel cheated and used, guys feel self-confident and popular.

[Rodney King]

Important research for your ping list. It is, in fact, different.

[Domicile of Doom]

QUICK! Allocate more government funding to this all important study.

[akorahil]

They needed funding to figure this out?

[GreenLanternCorps]

If the girls are feeling used and the guys are feeling great, it doesn't take a Phd to figure out that these are Bill Clinton/Monica Lewinsky type relationships.

These girls feel used, because they are being used!

[Dixie Yooper]

Sex education and research of children has become or has always been a tool of predators. Until recently, we have started to realize the predators are not just lurking around outside of the schools, but also inside, disguised as teachers, principles and highly educated researchers.

[atom99]

And we all know males never lie about their sex lives.

[caddie]

This is the kind of stupid crap that the NIH funds for study. To the tune of hundreds of thousands of dollars.

[The_Reader_David]

Well, maybe it was worth the money (I'll explain why in a moment). But first, his study probably cost about $2000, maybe $20,000 tops if the researcher got summer salary for data collection and analysis and paid some grad students to help collect the data in person, not the hundreds of thousands of dollars. (My wife is in the behavioral sciences and does some survey research, so I have a good idea of the costs involved.)

Why was it worthwhile? Because the secular left values emotion and values controlled studies. "Proof" of what whe conservatives knew intutitively was true about the 'sexual revolution', from a goverment funded study that shows the Helen Gurley Brown attitude doesn't fly, and buying into it causes emotional harm to girls, can be cited in arguments for chastity. The left can't very well shout down this argument by claiming it's an imposition of religious values, or 'anti-woman', or comes from a biased right-wing source. (There is some particularly delicous irony about a study which supports chastity coming out of one of the most loney left universities in the country.)

[paddles]

Teen to researcher: "Ask me whatever you like...just as soon as I finish this cigarette."

[caddie]

There was a recent funded study here at my institution. It had to do with the attitude of gays who were doing promiscuous sex. Basically it was a study to find out what their 'thoughts and feelings' were.

In other words, totally worthless crap. It got $500,000 from the NIH for the researchers and the institution here.

Sure you can come up with some lame rationale for the study.

I can just about see and hear some whining granny-glasses wearing pony-tailed idiot professor going on about the rationale for the study now a la King of the Hill.

But let's get real here for a minute. We all know what gays' thoughts and feelings are regarding promiscuous sex...they like it! There is absolutely no need for such a study, we can all agree, if we are being fair.

This sort of thing is why many scientists have little credibility among conservatives these days.

To survive they have to hype their worthless studies, and after a while, they believe their own bogus hype.

The above is a perfect example is why such professors are basically a cancer on our society...They spend their whole lives working to transform a common vice into a pseudolegitimate area of scientific inquiry. They attempt to legitimize what a generation ago would be a serious crime. They subvert their authority as professors in basically promoting decadence and moral decay.

Just my two cents.

[ishabibble]

The best example of your theory is Dr. Alfred Kinsey, the father of American sexual depravity and child rape.