A few years ago an irresistible teen sex meme began to spread. For kids today, the story goes, oral sex is no more intimate than a handshake, and exchanged just as casually. Recently the media reported on a new study in the journal Pediatrics that appeared to confirm this conventional wisdom, leading to tsk-tsking among talk radio moralists and regret at having been born too soon among the rest of us. But hold those fantasies of sneaking back into high school, Cameron Crowe–style. I actually sat down and read the study (I probably wouldn’t have bothered if I’d known it wasn’t going to have illustrations), and it doesn’t quite say what you think it does….

…It turns out the press glossed over the main point of the survey, which was how attitudes about oral sex compare with attitudes about vaginal sex (or, as one particularly inept news site had it, “virginal sex”). You see, while the 14-year-olds surveyed did say that oral sex is safer and more acceptable than going all the way, they specifically did not say that it is “safe and not really sex” or “OK for teens,” as two wire stories summarized it. Indeed, when given a list of statements and told to rate how much they agree with them, the two sentences the students endorsed most strongly were: “Teens my age are too young to have vaginal sex” and “Teens my age are too young to have oral sex.” It’s certainly true that the kids were substantially more likely to approve of oral than vaginal sex, but overall they were wary of both.

As for the headline that teens think oral sex is safe, look at what they actually said. When asked to estimate the risks of various scenarios (“Imagine that you have been dating Tanya for 3 months…”), the average teenager in this study said that with unprotected oral sex he or she had about a 37.5 percent chance of getting either HIV or chlamydia.

In other words, not only do teenagers not think oral sex is safe, they think it is far more dangerous than it actually is.

-From a Radar magazine article delightfully entitled “Blowing It”