Sarah MacIntyre, 19, doesn’t have sex – nothing beyond kissing, holding hands and an embrace now and again. So she’s excited about the new abstinence group at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
“Half of me sees it as a dating breeding ground,” says the sophomore French and linguistics major. “It’s like, wow, there are these guys and gals who are abstinent.”
And in a place like CU, where sex is assumed, finding like-minded folks demands strategy, something formal and organized, a group with its own chief operating officer and website (colorado.edu/studentgroups/CCRE).
Thus, the College Coalition for Relationship Education was launched this month by Jonathan Butler, 19, because “if you don’t have a group of friends, they aren’t accepting of your values,” he says. “You are ridiculed.”
With the coalition, he hopes, people interested in abstinence or relationships in general will have a place on campus to find support.
“There’s a counterrevolution going on,” says Leslee Unruh, president of the Abstinence Clearinghouse, an advocacy organization in Washington, D.C. Abstinence groups began forming largely in middle schools and high schools in the 1990s, but now there “is an explosion in colleges.”
By the time most teens turn 18, about two-thirds of them have had sexual intercourse, says Jennifer Manlove, a researcher at Child Trends, a nonprofit organization in Washington, D.C., dedicated to studying children. The percentage rises when teenagers leave high school, she says.
At CU, 91 percent of students queried in a 2003 survey reported being sexually active, says Jonna Fleming, a program coordinator at the university.
But the revolution, at least for the coalition, needs a dash of sexiness.
So instead of fixing entirely upon the denial of pleasures of the flesh, the coalition will stress “relationship education” in its message.
“We’re not going to push abstinence, we are going to push healthy relationships,” says Shelly Stachurski, 19, an astronomy education major.
The focus on relationships is “a big topic right now,” says researcher Manlove. “A lot of sex-education programs that are effective are helping teens learn how to negotiate relationships, and help them figure out what they are trying to find in their relationships.”
Stachurski will push for relationship health, but she pledged herself to abstinence in middle school. She says she will remain a virgin until she gets married.
When she moved from her Fort Collins home to a CU dorm, she says, “it was not uncommon to deal with people from the opposite sex sharing rooms. It was shocking. I remember calling my mom and saying this is complete culture shock. To me it was immoral.”
“I walked in on my roomate once,” says Stachurski. “What was really shocking to me is it wasn’t even with a boyfriend. It didn’t matter who the guy was. Being drunk was an excuse.”
Preparing high-schoolers
There’s more to the coalition than the establishment of a support group for virgins and students thirsty for relationship education. Coalition leaders say they want to develop emissaries from CU who will speak to high school students, to prepare them for their freshman year in college.
“In health in high school, you have a PE teacher who gives you the spiel,” says Eric Wilson, a coalition member. “You’re like, OK, whatever. We think it would be so much better if college students went to high school.”
Campus life tested Stachurski’s high school commitment to abstinence. At one point, she says, “I wasn’t dating anyone, and (flirting with sex) did cross my mind.”
But eight months ago she found her current boyfriend, another abstinence advocate. It’s a good thing, she says, that the two of them have “preset boundaries.”
“It’s so easy, in the heat of passion, to get caught up,” says Stachurski, who limits her physical engagements with men to kisses and hugs.
Like Butler and MacIntyre, Stachurski attributes part of her commitment to her Christian faith.
The organization will remain separate from religion, says Butler. Abstinence, he says, has become “stigmatized” as something just for evangelical Christians.
It’s unclear how many college students around the country have taken abstinence pledges. Scholars too have little data about effectiveness.
A widely referenced 2001 study by Columbia University sociologist Peter Bearman found that 12 percent of roughly 2.5 million adolescents who had pledged abstinence by 1995 ended up abstaining from sex until marriage.
The study also found, however, that adolescents who do pledge abstinence generally put off their first sexual encounter for about 18 months.
Abstinence under attack
Abstinence education has flourished in high schools, thanks in part to federal funding for the programs. At the same time, some researchers and scholars have attacked aspects of abstinence.
When sex education fails to go beyond the “just say no” approach, kids are endangered, some experts say.
“For many kids, not for a minority but for many, it’s not a realistic goal to be abstinent until marriage, and given that, it’s really important that they know how to protect themselves from (sexually transmitted diseases),” says Hannah Brueckner, a Yale University sociology professor who has collaborated with Bearman on abstinence research.
Among other things, her research showed that kids who have taken virginity pledges are more likely to engage in oral and anal sex, which in the minds of some is not sex. Engaging in oral and anal sex, however, can pass on sexually transmitted diseases.
Butler, an upbeat, computer- science sophomore with copper-highlighted hair, has never had sex. And for him, sex is anything beyond kissing and hugging.
“Sex is going to be a learning experience for me when I find that one person I want to spend the rest of my life with,” he says. Of his future wife, he says: “I want her to be a virgin.”
“I feel like I waited for her, she should wait for me.”
MacIntyre, who thrills to find dates through the College Coalition, wears a silver “purity ring,” which her father slipped onto her finger during a mountain ceremony. When she gets married, she says, her father will give the ring to her husband.
And when she finally has sex, she says, “it’s gonna’ freaking rock.”
Sex rocks? Old news, says Kyle Moffitt, 22, a senior communications major sitting in a campus courtyard on a sun- splashed afternoon.
The abstinence crowd can do what they want, but “it is college,” he says, smoking a cigarette. “People party.”
Moffitt doesn’t know anybody on campus who is abstinent, although he used to have an abstinent friend.
“Now she has a boyfriend,” he says. “She was just a quiet girl.”
Jennifer Brown, 22, a junior psychology major, says she supports abstinence as a personal decision, but thinks it’s “a really dangerous idea to enforce publicly.”
“People aren’t getting the education they need,” she says, explaining that a sex education revolving only around abstinence ignores important information about sexuallytransmitted diseases and pregnancy.
Is CU electric with sex?
“There’s a lot of pressure to have sex,” she says, smiling. “There’s a lot of hormones.”
And then she giggled.
Staff writer Douglas Brown can be reached at 303-820-1395 or djbrown@denverpost.com.
