“Girls Gone Wild” for the New York Times Set

The New York Times magazine has a titillating article about the “cuddle puddle” at Stuyvesant High School. Stuyvesant is one of the hardest and most competitive magnet schools in one of the hardest and most competitive cities. They draw kids from all over New York, including children of former hippies and aging avant-gardists. It is a tough crowd to shock. Within the school’s 3000 students, a handful engage in show-off hook-ups with anyone and everyone within the group.

The one sociological fact in this extended anecdote comes from the first teen sex survey done by the National Center for Health Statistics. That survey revealed that 11% of teen girls had experimented with some kind of same-sex physical encounter. This is the same percentage of women 15 to 44 who have had similar encounters. The Times reads this as a trend of increasing same-sex experimentation – or even of rising non-heterosexuality – among teenagers. It is probably true that more girls are experimenting sexually with other girls than was true a generation to two ago, especially in liberal enclaves. Still, on the face of it, if all of a group shows the same percentage of some behavior as one subset, then it could just as well mean that all the action is taking place in the subset. In this case, if 11% of teen girls kiss girls, and that percentage doesn’t rise when all women up to age 44 are included, then we could reasonably guess that all the experimentation happened in the teen years. This is probably too strong a conclusion, but it does seem reasonable that single young women experiment sexually with other women, but few mature women do. And this experimentation does not translate into large percentages of permanent homosexuality: the national lesbian rate seems to be steady at about 2%.

The stars of the cuddle puddle show are pretty girls who kiss each other in public and talk endlessly about sex – until they find a serious boyfriend. They have found a way to be famous within a school of high achievers, and shock their parents, and get an admiring profile in the nation’s leading newspaper. Which is more than the spring-break boob-flashers at Panama City of the more proletarian Girls Gone Wild could manage.