In recent years there has been a lot of talk about how Gen Z believes things are too sexual. This is understandable to a point as they came of age in an Instagram model world, but back in the day – sex and sexual imagery were also all over the place via TV, movies, and advertisements but millennials didn’t care. We embraced whatever level of sex we could get because we couldn’t just lock our doors and scroll until the wee hours of the morning looking at half-naked this and that. We had to get creative to see actual sex that wasn’t just a worn-out VHS copy of Cruel Intentions because when millennials came of age, again, sex was everywhere but also nowhere at the same time, and our hormones wanted more, more, more. So by high school, many were trying to explore those urges in reality and not just in their fantasies. So crushes moved from just being about who you liked, to who you could get your rocks off with. This led people in a lot of different directions; teen pregnancies, broken hearts, rumor mills, and situationships. All of these come with baggage that the teenage mind could not wrap their heads around.
In reality, looking at the data, teen pregnancies actually peaked at the start of the ‘90s and have shown a decrease since then. Rates were high when millennials were in high school, but looking at this chart, one can see the downward trend. My high school had a handful here and there, but what I noticed more was the rumors and situationships that started to come about. Hookups led to people flapping their lips, and while this was before social media, you’d be surprised how quickly word can spread in a high school setting when it came to juicy gossip, especially when it revolved around S-E-X. That’s the thing though, this is probably one of the most constant and sad threads about the high school experience, only those younger than millennials could take to social media, getting the hearsay out faster; back to millennials though, and their obsession with sex.
It wasn’t their fault. Sex was everywhere and it was sold as the cool thing to do. Movies like the aforementioned Cruel Intentions, and American Pie, alluded to the idea that if you were a virgin – there was definitely something wrong with you. There was this shroud of shame placed upon you because if you weren’t having sex it meant you were undesirable and basically a loser. Basically standing there with your finger and thumb in the shape of an “L” on your forehead, and no one wanted that. Alas, a lot of us were losers. Some of the losers faked the funk though, creating fake scenarios that led people to believe they totally scored on their family’s vacations, while the rest sort of just kept quiet and hoped no one noticed they were still not getting any.
The world around us made sex seem like the end-all-be-all of cool and we fell hard for those notions, so much so that we put a lot of our self-worth into losing those v-cards, no matter with who or where. Despite that data, I have to say my hometown was built for teen pregnancy because when you’re in the middle of nowhere and the options are drugs or sex, what’s a bored teen to do? Sit and watch MTV all day? I mean, that was my choice but for a lot of other people it wasn’t. I can’t say whether or not they regret their decisions in hindsight but as an outsider looking into the cool kids world, I do think the kids having sex had as many issues as those of us who weren’t. They had to deal with the possibility of breaking the news to their parents that they themselves were going to be parents, STDs, and, again, those rumors. Well, if they were female. Guys always had the upper hand in this. They were the big dogs on campus if they scored, while their female counterparts were labeled the Hester Prynnes of their campuses. This is an unfair notion that millennials have since tried hard to steer away from, becoming more sex-positive as we headed into adulthood and realized as women we were allowed to have sex in the same capacity as their male counterparts, and then some.
Millennials’ relationship with sex is an interesting one because, like a lot of their existence at that time, it rode the line between what the old school way of thinking which was just not to talk about it, and the 21st century that was going to be more open due to social media knocking down any sort of wall built up around personal boundaries. We managed though, awkwardly at times, but we managed. However, for the millennial woman – we managed to come through with internal scars that most of us have had to work hard to heal. We were damned if we did, damned if we didn’t but as we great older we realized that it was more damning to hate ourselves for whatever we chose to do with our bodies. We’ll get to that though as we head towards college and adulthood.
Crushgasm 