NEWS: Newsflash! Teenagers Lie, Lie, Lie!!! To Themselves and to Others!

CULTURE: Newsflash! Teenagers Lie, Lie, Lie!!! To Themselves and to Others!

Last week, Reuters breathlessly covered a new study in the American Journal of Public Health's June 2006 edition that looked at the issue of "virginity pledges" and claimed that "teenagers who take pledges to remain virgins until marriage are likely to deny having taken the pledge if they later become sexually active." The article then continues, "These findings imply that virginity pledgers often provide unreliable data, making assessment of abstinence-based sex education programs unreliable."

Sure enough, the statistics seem to back this up: "virginity pledgers" do, in fact, prove to be somewhat "unreliable" in their ability to convey the truth.

Of course, the fact that these selfsame "virginity pledgers" are also, well, teenagers seems to be somewhat glossed over as the study digs into elaborate sociological issues of perceived causality:

Now, I'm no doctoral student at Harvard University, unlike the study's author, but I'm pretty sure I can concur to an extent. It's the nature of adolescence, right? And while when I was a teenager, I can't claim that I knew many of these "virginity pledgers", I sure as hell knew quite a few "lying teenaged girls."

Sitting here bitterly, ruminating as part of my Unfond Remembrance Lecture Series, I can even recall such Stats of Mistruth much like those doled out above:

Finally, there's that awkward moment of telling myself that the NIN tattoo I got would make me A) cooler and B) more likely to get laid and C) less likely to be lied to by the new girl in study hall who could espouse at great lengths the merits of Liz Fraser's voice in her work with the Cocteau Twins.

Alas, D) I'm still a virgin, sniff.

(Via Salon's Broadsheet)

Get the Ministry of Lies on this report, right away!

Oh, I forgot, the first report they released was that there was no Ministry of Lies. Scratch that, nevermind.

And I am still a virgin.
Or am I???

I wish I was still a virgin, some reason I think that would get me laid more.

well, i'd fuck you.
post pictures of your tat.

Hehe, I took the pledge and have no intention of ever getting married.

I do, however, plan to have sex at some point.

I'm a filthy liar.

Virginity pledges work about as well as the DARE pledges did. I can remember finding it extremely amusing to smoke pot while wearing my DARE shirt. Ahhh sweet stupid teen rebellion.

I knew I should have taken one of those pledges when I was in school.

Don't they require you to take the pledge at the end of the course? Even people who plan on having lots of sex would probably just do it to get the teachers off their backs.

That damn pledge kept me from getting laid until I was 32 . If it weren't for that damn pledge I might have had children before that terrible farm machinery accident

Whenever the commercial where the guy says "Nobody ever said they want to be a drug addict when they grow up" came on when I was a little kid, I became furious and promptly announced my lifelong goal of becoming a drug addict.

So far I have been unsuccessful

When I was in Middle School I'm pretty sure I made some kind of pledge to have as MUCH sex as I could before marriage, as did most of my friends (and we're still trying).

Of course the most critical fact missed by the study was that nearly 80% of “virginity pledgers” were found to be inordinately malleable to the pressures of peer groups (and research scientists) while the other 20% were later found to be suffering from schizophrenic disorders resulting from severe and unnatural repression of biological imperatives.

Yeah, I was sexually active back in 95 and 96, too. Those were the days.

horray for virgin birth!