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THE statistics are reassuring. Just last year, the Centers for Disease Control reported that, for the first time in decades, more than half of America’s high-school students described themselves as virgins. According to the Urban Institute, the rate of sexual activity among 17- to 19-year-old boys in urban areas declined from 75 percent in 1979 to 68 percent in 1995. Over the same period, the proportion of young men who approved of nonmarital sex fell from 80 percent to 71 percent.

Popular culture, though, tells a different story—as anyone who has channel-surfed past MTV’s Spring Break, listened to the Backstreet Boys, or saw American Pie can testify. The Washington Post’s front page recently carried the headline “Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex.”

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THE statistics are reassuring. Just last year, the Centers for Disease Control reported that, for the first time in decades, more than half of America’s high-school students described themselves as virgins. According to the Urban Institute, the rate of sexual activity among 17- to 19-year-old boys in urban areas declined from 75 percent in 1979 to 68 percent in 1995. Over the same period, the proportion of young men who approved of nonmarital sex fell from 80 percent to 71 percent.

Popular culture, though, tells a different story—as anyone who has channel-surfed past MTV’s Spring Break, listened to the Backstreet Boys, or saw American Pie can testify. The Washington Post’s front page recently carried the headline “Parents Are Alarmed by an Unsettling New Fad in Middle Schools: Oral Sex.”