In 1996, 26,000 American girls, ages 10-14, became pregnant.  For the ages 15 to 19 years, there were 893,000 pregnancies.  For these same groups, there were 10,000 and 264,000 abortions performed, respectively.

(Source: U.S. National Center for Health Statistics, Vital and Health Statistics, Trends in Pregnancies and Pregnancy Rates by Outcome, 1976-1996, Series 21, No. 56, in U.S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2001 [121st edition], Washington, DC, 2001, p. 68.)

"According to abstinence promoters, high STD-sexually transmitted disease-infection and teen-pregnancy rates mean that pro-condom, nondirective sex ed has utterly failed...abstinence promoters criticize how condoms and birth control are uniformly prescribed for sexually active teens. 'They don't see sex as a union of persons,' Mast says, but treat it in medical terms, like a cold or a headache. Sometimes 'condom-tossers' (as a recent press release from the Family Research Council called them) do advocate not having sex, but this mixed message confuses teens, promoters claim. Says one abstinence contractor, 'We don't do it with smoking. We don't tell people not to smoke, then do a unit on filtered cigarettes.'"

(Source: Michael Erard, "Virgins, Inc.: Inside the government-funded sexual-abstinence movement," Rolling Stone, April 25, 2002; accessed at http://www.rollingstone.com/news/newsarticle.asp?nid=15738&cf2=1.)

As infinitely plastic social conventions, traditional notions of masculinity and femininity must surely change-perhaps even disappear-as men and women adopt new social roles.  So progressive thinkers have been arguing since at least the 1960's.  Nevertheless, the authors of a study recently published in Social Forces are not so sure.  Indeed, as these sociologists from the University of Akron examine survey responses collected in seven surveys between 1974 and 1997, they are struck by the "persistence of sex typing," a persistence which is stubbornly "contrary to the predictions from the sociocultural model" relied upon by all progressives in predicting the imminent demise of traditional perceptions of gender.

Though the Akron scholars acknowledge some evidence indicative of "a slight increase in masculinity scores among females" during the 24-year span of data, it is not the dominant pattern.  "The major findings," the researchers insist, "have been stability and increasing sex typing.  Of the 24 comparisons [investigated in this study], ten have shown stability and eleven an increase in sex typing, the strongest of these being the increased femininity of females, both in the ratings of the typical female by both males and females and in the self-ratings of the female respondents."  These findings of stable or even increasing sex typing defy "the general expectation of the diminution of sex typing" because of the dramatic "changes in all areas of women's life: labor force participation, desegregation of work, increasing levels of responsibility, political office holding, family size, age at marriage, divorce, and the important shift in family structure toward single parenting, increased participation in higher education and in nontraditional advanced degrees and increased recognition of women's athletic competitions." 

Lest anyone misread their conclusions, the authors spell them out emphatically: "The findings of this study with regard to gender stereotypes are very clear: they are not decreasing, if anything they are intensifying." 

Since these results run wholly "contrary to prevailing notions of the dynamics of gender," the authors look outside of those notions for an explanation. Though sociocultural theories of gender plasticity cannot account for it, the researchers see stability of gender stereotypes as a phenomenon "consistent with the concept of predispositions based on innate patterns as posited by the evolutionary model."  Nor do these scholars detect anything in the new evidence of "temporal stability in sex-differentiated personality traits and stereotypes" which does not fully harmonize "with the basic propositions emanating from the differing reproductive strategies of males and females."  Though these propositions are "not familiar nor comfortable terrain for most sociologists," perhaps they need to become so, now that sociologists' sociocultural theories are failing them.

(Source: Lloyd B. Lueptow, Lori Garovich-Szabo, and Margaret B. Lueptow, "Social Change and the Persistence of Sex Typing: 1974-1997," Social Forces 80[2001]: 1-35, emphasis in original.)