Generation Me--Revised and Updated

by Jean M. Twenge

  Scott McLeod, the headmaster at a private school in New Orleans, has witnessed this trend firsthand. “The parents’ willingness to intercede on the kids’ behalf, to take the kids’ side, to protect the kid, in a not healthy way—there’s much more of that each year,” he said in a New York Times Magazine article. Outside of school, some runaway parents apply these principles to sports as well; thus the increasingly common image of the soccer mom or dad yelling at the coach to let the parent’s kid play. And if the kid isn’t any good? It’s the coach’s fault. McLeod sees it at his school; if parents “see their kid fail—if he’s only on the JV, or the coach is yelling at him—somehow the school is responsible for that.” The rest of the article goes on to describe the parents’ dissatisfaction with a coach who told it straight and didn’t let kids get off by making excuses. Alums say that the coach made them men and want to name the gym after him; current parents think he’s too hard on the kids because he “yelled” at them when they didn’t do what they promised to do. With the older generation of gruff coaches rapidly retiring, parents will soon have less to complain about, but their kids will be cheated out of a character-building experience they would never have forgotten.

  CONSEQUENCES OF EXTERNALITY AND CYNICISM

  These externalizing and cynical beliefs can be adaptive; they help protect the self-esteem of GenMe in an increasingly difficult world. But too much cynicism and alienation can be self-defeating: Why study for a test if it’s going to be unfair? Why vote or learn about politics if it’s not going to do any good? The startling growth of these attitudes goes a long way toward explaining the apathy and inaction so common today. With college and work getting more competitive, the trend toward believing things are out of your control is likely to continue. Teens who have been told their whole lives that they are special will desperately try to protect their self-esteem, and many will choose cynicism as their armor of choice.

  Unfortunately, psychologists are virtually unanimous in their condemnation of external-control beliefs. This is somewhat stunning, as psychologists consider most traits and beliefs to be normal variations, with no “right” or “wrong” answers. But the research on externality is definitive. People who believe that outside forces determine their fate are more likely to be depressed, anxious, and cope poorly with stress. As we saw in the last chapter, GenMe displays record high levels of anxiety and depression. Believing that you don’t have control might be part of the reason. If nothing you do matters, it’s easy to give in to lethargy and despair. Psychologists call it learned helplessness.

  Externality also doesn’t bode well for meeting important goals. Perhaps because they don’t think their actions will have consequences, externals have weakened self-control and an inability to delay gratification. They are less likely to work hard today to get a reward tomorrow—an especially important skill these days, when many good jobs require graduate degrees.

  Another overwhelming stack of research finds that externals consistently achieve less in school, which makes sense, as externals believe that there’s no point in studying. Having an internal feeling of control—believing that you can change your fate—is especially important for underprivileged children. A definitive report concluded that feelings of control were a better predictor of school achievement in minority children than any other variable.

  The consequences for society as a whole are alarming. If everyone believes that nothing can be changed, that prophecy is likely to be self-fulfilling. And if we blame others for our problems, we might never make the changes we need to improve as people (sorry to sound like a Baby Boomer). As Robert Putnam argues in Bowling Alone, we are rapidly heading for a society low in the critical social capital it needs to grow. GenMe’s concerns will be ignored if we do not get involved in politics and social change.

  Julian Rotter, the author of the control scale I studied, began to realize in the 1970s that people were increasingly feeling that things were out of their control. The trend was in its infancy then, but Rotter knew what to look for, and he wasn’t happy. “Our society has so many critical problems that it desperately needs as many active, participating, internal-minded members as possible,” he wrote in Psychology Today. “If feelings of external control, alienation and powerlessness continue to grow, we may be heading for a society of dropouts—each person sitting back, watching the world go by.” Dr. Rotter, welcome to GenMe’s world. Whatever.

  6

  * * *

  Sex: Generation Prude Meets Generation Crude

  In Valerie Frankel’s novel The Not-So-Perfect Man, 40-year-old Peter asks out a 23-year-old woman. She replies:

  “I can’t go out with you, Peter . . . you seem like the kind of guy who wants a relationship. I don’t do that. I hook up.”

  “Hooking up?” he asked. It sounded painful.

  “Going out in groups of girls, and picking up groups of guys, taking them back to someone’s apartment and having safe-yet-casual sex,” she said. “I think I’m leaning toward lesbianism anyway. And even if I were attracted to you, I couldn’t do much about it until my labial piercings heal.”

  “Labial piercings,” he said.

  “Four of them. Two on each side. Very tasteful. Refined,” she said. Peter checked his watch, straightened his tie, cleared his throat.

  He said, “I’ll be going now.”

  In case you haven’t heard, “hooking up” has replaced dating among many young people, even among those without “tasteful” labial piercings. The Hookup Handbook notes that hookups can range from “making out to full-on sex” but are most distinguished by being “between two people who don’t necessarily have any foreseeable future or even a hint of commitment.” A recent article in the Atlantic quotes a business school student from Argentina who experienced sexual culture shock in coming to the United States. “Here in America, the girls, they give up [everything] before they even know the guy. It’s like, ‘Hello.’ ‘Hello.’ ‘You wanna hook up.’ ‘Sure.’ They are so aggressive! Do they have hearts of steel or something? In my country, a girl like this would be desperate. Or a prostitute.”

  “Friends with benefits” is defined as a friend you do sexual things with—no romantic relationship or commitment implied. “I think you can compare friends with benefits to the driving range,” says Sam, 16, interviewed for an NBC special on teens and sex. “There’s no commitment to playing a round of golf—you just go there to work on your game, figure out what shots are working for you.” (Casual golf, anyone?)

  Or take Kristen, 21, who says, “I lost my virginity at the age of thirteen. But I would like to mention how mature I was about sex in general. I should be applauded, not shunned.”

  This is not your father’s sex life—and it’s definitely not your mother’s. Hooking up is increasingly common, and even sex within boyfriend-girlfriend relationships begins at younger and younger ages. Waiting for marriage is, to put it mildly, quaint. The vast majority of Generation Me does not wait until they are married to have sex. Most do not even wait to graduate from high school. Emma, now 24, lost her virginity at 17 “to a boy I could just barely call my boyfriend.” She explains, “No one I knew believed in waiting for marriage.” Some of this is simple demographics: 80% of people age 18 to 29 are not married (compared to 41% in 1960).

  Even religious teenagers with strict parents soon find themselves sexually active. Patrick, 31, grew up in a strict Catholic family and attended a Catholic high school, but, he says, “I lost my virginity at the age of seventeen to a girl I had known only a week.” Things changed even more once he lived in a college dorm: “I found myself having more sexual partners and not feeling guilty about a one-night stand.” Is this trend good or bad? Your opinion may depend on your generation. Many young people see these trends as the long-overdue shedding of arbitrary restrictions on sexuality, while some older people are often shocked by the sexual behavior of the young.

  Whether you see the new sexuality as freeing or wanton, the tie to individualism is obvi
ous: do what feels good for you and ignore the rules of society. On the other hand, the changes in sexual behavior are so dramatic that it’s not clear that any universally agreed-upon rules about sex exist anymore. Why not do something pleasurable? It’s your body—express yourself. Or as an ad for the birth control method Mirena puts it, “All you’ll remember is the freedom” when you “put yourself in control.” In one survey, college students’ primary motivations for having casual sex were exploration or experimentation, satisfying their sexual desire, and “spontaneous urge.” Sonia, 21, believes, “Different sexual behaviors bring more awareness and more confidence about yourself.” Sometimes self-esteem comes in handy for appraising things later. CBS interviewed one young woman who slept with three boys by the time she was 15. However, she says, “I don’t regard myself as a slut because I have more self-respect than that.”

  When I asked my students to write about differences among the generations, most chose changes in sexual behavior. It’s one of the most noticeable changes in the lives of young people over the last few decades. Perhaps because of the trend toward openness, my students had no problem writing at length about when, where, and how they had sex and how comfortable they were with it. And how uncomfortable their parents were—even though most of their parents are Boomers.

  GIVING IT UP

  The 1960s might have been called the time of the Sexual Revolution, but apparently they were just the beginning. For her master’s thesis with me, Brooke Wells gathered data on sexual behavior and attitudes from research reports on 269,649 young people collected over four decades—at the time, the most comprehensive study ever done of change over time in sexual behavior. Both men’s and women’s sexual behavior shifted with time, but the changes for women were the most striking. In the late 1960s, the average young woman lost her virginity at age 18; by the late 1990s, the average was 15. The change slowed down after the 1990s. The Centers for Disease Control’s Youth Risk Behavior Survey found that the majority of high school students had lost their virginity by the spring of 11th grade in 2011, about the same as in 1991. The percentage of 9th-to-12th-graders who’d ever had intercourse declined slightly, from 54% in 1991 to 47% in 2011. By 12th grade, 63% of the 2011 teens had lost their virginity (compared to 67% in 1991). So in recent years about 6% fewer high school students were having sex by spring of their senior year than in the early 1990s. Overall, Boomers started having sex in college, while GenX and GenMe started having sex in high school. “Most people had the ‘everybody’s doing it’ mentality in high school,” says Miranda, 20.

  Boomers also had less time to rack up a long list of conquests: in 1970, the average woman was 20.8 years old when she married for the first time. So even at the height of the hippie years, almost half of Boomer women getting married for the first time were teenagers! The average age at first marriage for men was 23.2 in 1970, which is now considered shockingly young for a man to marry. Clearly, even college-age Free Love was experienced by only a minority of Boomers, while for GenMe sex in high school is common. An Oregon high school sophomore interviewed by CBS puts it this way: “Sex is something that everyone does except for, like, the pope and Mother Teresa.” Another sophomore added, “I don’t think it’s wrong to have sex when you’re fourteen or so. Your body’s ready, so why isn’t it right?”

  This has created a noticeable generation gap. Many students told me that sex was not even discussed in their household. “All of our parents would have heart attacks if we told them we had sex,” says Bill, 19. “My mom won’t even let a boy and girl share the same bed if they aren’t married.” Allissa, 22, agrees: “My parents found my diary a few years back and freaked out. It is hard to live in a generation where sexuality is acceptable and have parents from a generation where it’s not. All you can do is live life according to your generation, because it is all you know.” Andy, 20, says, “From frat houses to the White House, there’s no denying that sex is present everywhere. Everywhere but my parents’ house, that is!” In a 2013 Gallup poll, twice as many GenMe’ers (48%) as Boomers (22%) said that sex between teenagers was morally acceptable.

  All of my students who wrote about sex confessed to losing their virginity in high school—15 and 16 were the usual ages mentioned, though 12 and 14 also came up. And the same was true among their friends. Jose, 21, said his parents were upset when he confessed that he’d had sex: “The majority of my friends had already lost their virginity after freshman year of high school. This was my sophomore year. I just assumed they knew.”

  Attitudes toward teen sex have become more permissive in the last few years. The General Social Survey (GSS) asks adults if sex among young teens—those age 14 to 16—is “always wrong,” “almost always wrong,” “wrong only sometimes,” or “not wrong at all.” In just the four years between 2008 and 2012, the percentage of those 18 to 29 who said teen sex was “always wrong” dropped 15 percentage points (from 63% to 48%). Nearly twice as many young people in 2012 said that teen sex was “not wrong at all” compared to those in 2004 (9% versus 5%). As more GenMe’ers born in the late 1980s and early 1990s enter the survey, a “Why not?” attitude toward early sexual activity becomes more prominent. Slightly fewer in GenMe have sex during high school than GenX’ers did in the early 1990s, but they are less likely to believe it is wrong. They may have personal reasons for waiting to have sex, but their highly individualistic ethos makes them more reluctant to judge others’ choices. It’s not quite “anything goes”—but it’s close.

  WAITING UNTIL MARRIAGE? ARE YOU KIDDING?

  Brooke’s comprehensive study also showed a radical shift in attitudes toward premarital sex. In the late 1950s, only 30% of young people approved of sex before marriage; by the late 1990s, 75% approved. The change in attitudes was even more striking among young women: only 12% approved of premarital sex in the 1950s, compared with 80% more recently. Just as earlier generations found it somewhat shocking to hear about premarital sex, GenMe is shocked by the lack of it. Many ask how you’d know if you were sexually compatible with someone if you didn’t have sex before you got married. “You wouldn’t buy a car you haven’t test-driven, would you?” asks Emily, 25. Angela, 23, uses a similar analogy: “Not having sex with your future husband is like not trying on clothes before you buy them.”

  Similar to the trends for teen sex, approval for premarital sex in the GSS has spiked in recent years. As recently as 2004, only 47% of 18-to-29-year-olds said sex before marriage was “not wrong at all,” about the same that said so in the early 1970s (48%). But by 2012, 64% said it was not wrong at all. The number who said sex before marriage was “always wrong” was nearly cut in half between 2004 and 2012 (from 22% to 12%). Once again, the second wave of GenMe’ers is shifting attitudes toward more sexual permissiveness. In the 2013 Gallup poll, 72% of GenMe said that sex between an unmarried man and woman was morally acceptable, compared to only 56% of Boomers.

  “Premarital sex is a must for me,” explains Elaine, 24. “Sex is like anything else—it takes practice. The more practice, the more we feel at ease with the act and with ourselves.” Felicita, 19, says, “I strongly disagree with people who say it is not morally correct to have sex before marriage. Marriage is a promise, but all promises can be broken. Marriage should not be the reason why someone chooses to have sex—love should be.”

  Christina, 23, has been married for a year. “I don’t see having premarital sex as a problem,” she says. “As a married woman, I am actually happier knowing that I have experienced other people and I won’t spend the rest of my life wondering what someone other than my husband might have been like.” Christina’s attitude is typical for GenMe women, who approach sex similarly to the way men do. Today’s young women are not afraid to pursue sexual pleasure and are assertive in going after what they want.

  Author Paula Kamen studied magazines for young women (such as Cosmopolitan and Glamour) and concluded that they were “unabashedly prosex for women. Their lack of shame in speaking candidly about a wide a
rray of fears, experiences, and pleasures delivers a strong message to readers. The effect of such confident articles is ultimately to fight the age-old double standard for women.” Many young women scour these magazines for sex advice, and the general message is, it’s your body, have fun, and do whatever you want to do.

  What about those abstinence pledges you hear so much about? They don’t work. A whopping 88% of teens who take abstinence pledges have sexual intercourse before marriage. These teens do tend to wait about a year and a half longer to have sex and have fewer partners. However, participants in abstinence programs were less likely to use condoms and thus more likely to acquire sexually transmitted diseases such as chlamydia or HIV infection.

  High school students who make these pledges often forget them completely once they get to college. “My freshman year in college, only two of the fifteen girls I knew were still virgins. Now in our junior year neither of those girls is,” says Lindsay, 20. Just about every aspect of college culture encourages sex: fraternity parties with abundant booze, the exhilaration of being free from prying parental eyes, the easy availability of partners in a coed dorm. The University of Texas at Austin has a fountain with a stone sculpture of three leaping horses. Students joke that the horses will take off and fly when a virgin graduates.