Only about 20% of university students participating in a 2007 survey agreed that oral-genital contact constituted sex, yet the majority believed that penile-vaginal and penile-anal intercourse did (98% and 78%, respectively), according to “Sex Redefined: The Reclassification of Oral-Genital Contact,” by Jason D. Hans et al. The article is currently available online, and will appear in the June 2010 issue of Perspectives on Sexual and Reproductive Health. Participants in the survey were only about half as likely as those in a similar 1991 study to classify oral-genital contact as sex, suggesting that young people’s notions of what behaviors constitute sex have changed as oral sex has become increasingly acceptable among youth as a less-risky alternative to intercourse......The authors suggest that school-based sex education programs and popular media, as well as the infamous Clinton-Lewinsky incident, may have contributed to the changing conceptualization of oral-genital contact.
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I like this study. I think more work should be done along these lines, discoursing rapid shifts in sexual order/disorder/valuation through language. And I think the findings (sweetly obv) point toward the absurdity of Neo-Con morality-marketing tactics, the failure of abstinence-only edu. and the failure of the Starr Report, all of that Clinton character bashing de los 90s. Clinton and Lewinsky's affair, even the bit about the Oval Office, was not extraordinary, but its airing-out and politicization was. House Republicans and their mouthpieces are responsible for the promotion of non-sexual bj's as much as, if not more than (?), William Clinton, who certainly would have, if possible, avoided describing "sexual relations," entering into the mad, post-OJ law-gossip vortex.
This survey of college students was taken while I was an undergraduate three years ago. The Starr Report was published my (our) 8th grade autumn. And it was salacious; I (we) read every word. It's wide publication was revolutionary, a revolution in smut (a prelude to the celebrity sex tape golden era--just after Larry Flynt's Hollywood folk-heroism and Pam and Tommy's wedding cruise, just before Paris Hilton's career-making teen, night vision submission and high speed Internet access). It seems quaint now. We, born mid-80s, may have been the last hip youngsters who had to fake like we knew what "creample" meant. But, to me (us), it's a big deal how differently we think and speak, not only from our parents, but from Gen-Xers, the students of '91 (our almost-peers, babysitters, older boyfriends). And we can do much by parsing out why and how we casually approach(ed) an act that was once considered more intimate than vaginal penetration. What texts did we read? Do we feel isolated by our differences/choices/speech? Liberated? How and when will our 'laxness' be out-moded by those a decade+ junior?