<< Adolescent Sexual Activity >>

As we have previously indicated (Chapter 5), there is sexual activity in the pre-adolescent male which may involve definite erotic arousal and actual orgasm; but the onset of regular sexual performance is usually coincidental with the onset of adolescence. Throughout the remainder of this volume, descriptions of sexual activity will apply to age periods that begin with adolescence and which extend, in the first instance, through 15 years of age, and which are five year periods from that point through the remainder of the individual’s history.

Over 95 per cent of the adolescent males are regularly active by 15 years of age (Table 44). Over 99 per cent of the adolescent and older males are active throughout the whole period from 16 to 45. In those 30 years, only 1 or 2 per cent of the male population is without regular and usually frequent outlet. After 45 there is a gradual but distinct drop in the number of active cases. These generalizations apply to all white males, whether single or married, and whatever their educational level or social background.

Table 44. Total sexual outlet in relation to advancing age
Age
Group		 Cases Total Outlet: Frequency Per Week
Total Sample Population Active in Sample
Population		 U. S.
Population
Range
(minus 1)		 Mean Me-
dian		 % of
Total		 Mean Me-
dian		 Mean:
Total
Popul.		 Mean:
Active
Popul.
Adol.-15 3905 0.0-29+ 2.86 ± 0.05 2.11 95.1 3.00 ± 0.05 2.26 3.17 3.36
16-20 3750 0.0-29+ 2.87 ± 0.05 2.17 99.3 2.89 ± 0.05 2.19 3.32 3.37
21-25 2502 0.0-29+ 2.85 ± 0.06 2.10 99.6 2.86 ± 0.06 2.11 3.35 3.40
26-30 1310 0.0-29+ 3.01 ± 0.09 2.24 99.5 3.03 ± 0.09 2.25 3.35 3.38
31-35 879 0.0-29+ 2.64 ± 0.10 1.91 99.7 2.65 ± 0.10 1.92 2.89 2.90
36-40 628 0.0-22.0 2.36 ± 0.10 1.73 99.5 2.37 ± 0.10 1.73 2.36 2.36
41-45 440 0.0-15.0 1.98 ± 0.11 1.41 99.1 2.00 ± 0.11 1.42 1.96* 1.98*
46-50 285 0.0-12.0 1.78 ± 0.12 1.10 97.5 1.82 ± 0.12 1.15 1.75* 1.78*
51-55 173 0.0-10.0 1.50 ± 0.14 0.90 96.0 1.57 ± 0.14 0.96   
56-60 106 0.0-9.0 1.20 ± 0.15 0.73 95.3 1.26 ± 0.15 0.79   
61-65 58 0.0-4.0 0.84 ± 0.16 0.52 81.0 1.04 ± 0.19 0.71   
66-70 30 0.0-3.0 0.65 ± 0.24 0.30 73.3 0.88 ± 0.31 0.48   
71-75 12 0.0-0.5 0.13 ± 0.07 0.00 41.7 0.30 ± 0.14 0.30   
76-80 4 0.0-scant 0.01 ± 0.01 0.00 25.0 0.05 0.10   
81-85 2 0.0 0.00 0.00 0.0 0.00 0.00   
Total 14084 0.0-29+ 2.74 ± 0.02 1.99 97.9 2.80 ± 0.02 2.04   
Adol.-30 11467 0.0-29+ 2.88 ± 0.03 2.14 98.0 2.94 ± 0.03 2.20   

These data are based on the total population,
including single, married, and previously married groups.
For each group calculated separately, see Table 60.
Data for the U. S. population are based on a theoretic group with the marital status and
educational levels shown in the U. S. Census for 1940.

* Starred items are corrected for marital status only.
Figure 34. Frequency of total outlet in relation to age

Based on total population, including single, married, and previously married groups.
Blue and pink lines represent raw data;
the green line represents the mean corrected for the U. S. Census distribution.

Maximum Activity. The maximum sexual frequencies (total outlet) occur in the teens. Frequencies then drop gradually but steadily into old age (Table 44, Figure 34). Considering the active, single males in the population, the maximum mean frequencies are almost 3.4 per week (calculated for the U. S. population), which is almost exactly every other day in the week, month, or year (Tables 45, 60). This rate is reached between adolescence and 20 years of age.

The means for the married males begin at their highest point, 4.8 per week, between 16 and 20 (Tables 45, 60). Few males are married prior to 16, and there is not enough material to calculate statistically significant averages for any married group prior to that age. It is probable that in a population which married at an earlier age, the highest frequency on the curve would come in the earlier adolescent group; but, in our society as it is, the high point of sexual performance is, in actuality, somewhere around 16 or 17 years of age. It is not later. The data which have already been given on the sexual capacity of the pre-adolescent boy (Chapter 5) indicate that the peak of capacity occurs in the fast-growing years prior to adolescence; but the peak of actual performance is in the middle or later teens.

The earliest serious attempt to determine the age of maximum sexual activity, and the effect of age on sexual performance in the human male, was made by Pearl (1925). For his study, he had data from 213 men (average age 64.53 years) who felt they could recall the frequencies of marital intercourse in their earlier histories. The point of maximum sexual activity for this population was located in the 30-39 year period. For the younger ages, Pearl recorded definitely lower frequencies; but he concluded, as we have with our own data, that “the low frequency exhibited in this [younger] age period is in part and probably mainly an expression of an essentially social factor — lack of opportunity — rather than of anything physiological.” Of the men who were married in their twenties, 67 essayed to recall frequencies in that period; and 9 of the men who were married in their teens supplied data for that age. On these limited bases. Pearl concluded that “with approximate equality of opportunity at the different ages the peak of activity is in the 20-29 decade and that thereafter there is a steady decline”; but after inspecting the curve, he theoretically adds that “with unrestricted legitimate opportunity the peak of sex activity is prior to age 20.” Our own abundant data push the peak of the curve back, as Pearl predicted, into the late teens. Unfortunately, the conclusions which are more often quoted from the Pearl study are those based on his total population, with its maximal frequency between 30 and 39 years; whereas the curve which he derived from the smaller sample of married males, and his prediction that the maximum activity occurs before the twenties, prove to be the more correct.

Social Significance. The identification of the sexually most active period as late adolescence will come as a surprise to most persons. General opinion would probably have placed it in the middle twenties or later. Certainly the average college student and the town boy of corresponding age will be startled to learn that their younger brothers who are still in high school surpass them in capacity and ofttimes in performance. By law, society provides a source of regular sexual outlet in marriage, in part because it recognizes the sexual need of the older male; but it fails to recognize that the teen-age boys are potentially more capable and often more active than their 35-year old fathers. Even among physicians and biologists, there has been a general opinion that sexual capacity develops gradually in early adolescence, reaches its maximum in the thirties or forties (the “prime of life”), passes a peak somewhere in a period which is considered a male climacteric, and drops abruptly into the inactivity and complete impotence of old age. It so happens that much of this picture is correct for the female, but it is certainly not the pattern in the male. The preoccupation of so many of the previous sex studies with the female has too often led to interpretation of the male by analogy, rather than by way of data taken directly from him.

This considerable activity and greater potentiality of the adolescent male pose a number of sociologic problems. In the normal course of events, the primitive human animal must have started his sexual activities with unrestrained pre-adolescent sex play, and begun regular intercourse well before the onset of adolescence. This is still the case in the other anthropoids (Hamilton 1914, Kempf 1917, Bingham 1928, Nowlis 1941), in some of the so-called primitive human societies which have not acquired particular sex taboos (Malinowski 1929, Ford 1945), and among such of the children in our society as escape the restrictions of social conventions (Chapter 5). The near-universality of adolescent sexual activity in our own Western European civilization down through the eighteenth century is poorly understood by those who have not made a study of earlier literature; but there is every indication in that literature, both sober and erotic, 'that the high capacity of the younger male was recognized and rather widely accepted until near the Victorian day in England. The problem of sexual adjustment for the younger male is one which has become especially aggravated during the last hundred years, and then primarily in England and in America, under an increasing moral suppression which has coincided with an increasing delay in the age of marriage. This has resulted in an intensification of the struggle between the boy’s biologic capacity and the sanctions imposed by the older male who, to put it objectively, is no longer hard-pressed to find a legalized source of sexual contact commensurate with his reduced demand for outlet.

The fact that the unmarried male still manages to find an outlet of 3.4 per week demonstrates the failure of the attempt to impose complete abstinence upon him. The sources of this outlet must be a matter of bewilderment to those who have supposed that most males remained continent until marriage. Nocturnal emissions do not provide any considerable portion of the orgasms, in spite of the fact that many persons have wished that to be the case. Masturbation is a more frequent outlet among the upper social level males where, during the last two or three decades, it has been allowed as a not too immoral substitute for pre-marital intercourse; but most of the less-educated 85 per cent of the population still consider masturbation neither moral nor normal. For the mass of the unmarried boys, intercourse still provides the chief sexual activity. This means that the majority of the males in the sexually most potential and most active period of their lives have to accept clandestine or illegal outlets, or become involved in psychologic conflicts in attempting to adjust to reduced outlets. With the data now available, biologists, psychologists, physicians, psychiatrists, and sociologists should be enabled to make better analyses of the problem which has heretofore been imposed on this unmarried male in his middle and late teens, and in his twenties.

The situation is complicated by the fact that the average adolescent girl gets along well enough with a fifth as much sexual activity as the adolescent boy, and the frequency of outlet of the female in her twenties and early thirties is still below that of the average adolescent male. As mothers, as school teachers, and as voting citizens, women are primarily responsible for the care of these boys; and, to a large degree, they are the ones who control moral codes, schedules for sex education, campaigns for law enforcement, and programs for combating what is called juvenile delinquency. It is obviously impossible for a majority of these women to understand the problem that the boy faces in being constantly aroused and regularly involved with his normal biologic reactions.

The mean rate of outlet for the women who are young mothers and high school teachers lies between 0.7 and 2.1 per week (as indicated by preliminary calculations from our unpublished material on the female). Many of these women, including some high school biology teachers, believe that the ninth or tenth grade boy is still too young to receive any sex instruction when, in actuality, he has a higher rate of outlet and has already had a wider variety of sexual experience than most of his female teachers ever will have. Whether there should be sex instruction, and what sort of instruction it should be, are problems that lie outside the scope of an objective scientific study; but it is obvious that the development of any curriculum that faces the fact will be a much more complex undertaking than has been realized by those who think of the adolescent boy as a beginner, relatively inactive, and quite capable of ignoring his sexual development.

Institutional Problems. The legal approach to this problem is, as usual, even less realistic. By making illegal all pre-marital sexual activities except nocturnal emissions and solitary masturbation, English and American law forces most boys, as indicated above, into illicit activity. The chief exceptions are largely in that group that goes on to college, and which, coincidentally, accepts masturbation as a chief source of outlet. On a specific calculation of our data, it may be stated that at least 85 per cent of the younger male population could be convicted as sex offenders if law enforcement officials were as efficient as most people expect them to be. The stray boy who is caught and brought before a court may not be different from most of his fellows, but the public, not knowing of the near universality of adolescent sexual activity, heaps the penalty for the whole group upon the shoulders of the one boy who happens to be apprehended. This situation presents a considerable dilemma for law enforcement officials and for students of the social organization as a whole.

The problem of sexual adjustment for a younger male who is confined to a mental, penal, or other sort of institution is even more difficult than the problem of the boy who lives outside in society. Administrators who have these younger males in their care are generally bewildered and at a loss to know how to handle their sexual problems. In many cases, the situation is simply tolerated or ignored, and the administrator would prefer not to be aware of the actualities. For this, many people would condemn him; but the problem in an institution for teen-age boys is far more complex than the public or the administration or scientific students have realized. It is obvious that lifetime patterns of sexual behavior are greatly affected by the experiences of adolescence, not only because they are the initial experiences, but because they occur during the age of greatest activity and during the time of the maximum physical capacity of the male. This is the period in which the boy’s abilities to make social adjustments, to develop any sort of socio-sexual contacts, and to solve the issues of a heterosexual-homosexual balance, are most involved. Since younger boys have not acquired all of the social traditions and taboos on sex, they are more impressionable, more liable to react de novo to any and every situation that they meet. If these adolescent years are spent in an institution where there is little or no opportunity for the boy to develop his individuality, where there is essentially no privacy at any time in the day, and where all his companions are other males, his sexual life is very likely to become permanently stamped with the institutional pattern. Long-time confinement for a younger male is much more significant than a similar period of confinement for an older adult.

The situation is aggravated by the more recent development of the juvenile court. Abundant as the merits of such an institution may be, there are complications involved when a court assumes control of a juvenile for a long period of years, until he is twenty or twenty-one, without, at the same time, considering the problems of sexual adjustment for its ward. The practice of the juvenile court is based on a realization that a child may need long-time training; but it ignores these other aspects of the child’s development. The juvenile court protects many a boy from the more severe sentences of the adult laws; but it sometimes holds a juvenile for several years in a correctional institution, or under probation with the court, when the crime involved would have brought only a few months’ sentence on an adult criminal charge. Adult institutions often have young inmates who have falsified their age in order to draw the lesser time of a penal commitment. The juvenile court structure is disguised by a verbiage which avoids references to “convictions,” “sentences,” “penalties,” “years to serve,” “prisons,” or “penal institutions.” But in spite of the legal fiction, the fact remains that teen-age boys may, by order of a court, be held in custody, sometimes for several years, in institutions which may be no less repressive and punitive than the average of adult prisons. It is doubtful if many of these committing judges ever consider the juvenile’s sexual adjustment when he is sent to such an institution. Within recent years there has been a movement to extend the jurisdiction of the juvenile court to persons as old as eighteen or twenty. There are commendable objectives back of such moves, but no one seems to have considered the sexual problems that will arise from the commitment of a still larger portion of the teen-age population to what are in essence long-time institutions.

The problem is not solved by the common practice of releasing juveniles from institutions on long-time parole; for the terms of the parole are, in most states, practically as strict in regard to sexual activities as the rules of the institution itself. We have numerous histories of boys who have been paroled from such institutions to elderly persons, often on farms, who have no understanding of the problems of sexual adjustment of a younger boy, who do not comprehend the significance of his socio-sexual development during that period, and who believe that such a boy should be kept from making even the simplest sort of social contacts with individuals of the opposite sex. If any large portion of the male population had been raised under such conditions, the implications of the situation would be apparent to everyone; but since the boys who get into institutions represent a small portion and a socially limited portion of the whole population, most people do not have firsthand contacts with them, and have not, therefore, considered the problem of sexual adjustment for institutionalized boys.

Boys who live in private boarding schools, and even boys who attend public or private day schools that are restricted to the single sex, face some of the same sexual problems as the boys in a penal institution.

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