Young people suffer the first love attacks without warning: previously silly boys feel a libidinal drive towards the other sex and girls until then angelic become electrifying Lolitas. They are certifications that childhood is coming to an end.
On the way to long-awaited maturity, puberty – the initial phase of adolescence – represents the experimental field for romantic love affairs, the time when second-hand experiences do not count, in which the closure of the bra is all a Mystery, the saliva will never flow again as in the first kiss with the tongue, the friction with the skin of the other short-circuits the senses and each acne pimple becomes the reason for an existential crisis.
Without a doubt, puberty is a time of profound changes, in both boys and girls, affecting in both cases their entire body, their way of thinking, their world of relationships and their own identity. Sexuality , until now lethargic, also acquires a new dimension . The increase of certain hormones in the blood translates into an increase in the erotic impulse and puts the young person in a state of emotional emergency. In an inexorable way, the brain and endocrine products direct the innocent pubescent towards the extraordinary and unrepeatable event: the first love.
New research confirms that adolescents discover sexual passion, desire and pleasure at an increasingly early age. Normally, they usually have the first erotic experience, with or without penetration, around the age of 15. This is confirmed by the Survey on sexuality and contraception in Spanish youth carried out last year by the Schering laboratories: 79.2% of the boys and 71% of the girls between 15 and 19 years old have had an erotic encounter occasionally.
Spanish women born in the 1950s lost their virginity with an average of 23.2 years. In those coming to the world between 1971 and 1975, the average was already 20.1 years. Today, various studies carried out in our country indicate that more than 15 percent of quinceañeras have had a coital experience. This trend is accentuated in male adolescents: between the 1950s and 1970s, the age of sexual initiation among boys dropped from 20.2 to 18.7 years. In other Western countries, precociousness is more pronounced : for example, one eighth of German fourteen-year-olds will lose their virginity this year and 6.6 percent of American schoolchildren have made love at 13.
Several sexological reports maintain that adolescents enter biological puberty earlier. If this desire continues, Dr. Norbert Kluge, from the University of Koblenz, in Landau (Germany), estimates that in 2010 there will be 10-year-old children prepared psychically and physically for sexual intercourse. Experts speculate on the possible consequences: contraceptive methods and unwanted pregnancies will become increasingly important among the pubescent.
A review of the statistics corroborates the forecasts. While the annual rate of pregnancies among Spanish teenagers is at 18,000 cases, the number of voluntary interruptions of pregnancy has only increased in the last five years . “Certainly, the percentage of abortions in young women is very high. Between 50 and 70 percent of the girls who become pregnant in a sporadic relationship choose to have an abortion,” says Dr. Javier Martínez Salmean, head of the Gynecology Service -Obstetrics at the Severo Ochoa Hospital, in Madrid.
There is no doubt that the anticipation of puberty is closely attuned to the emergence of erotic love. “Our boys and girls complete physical development two years earlier than young people of three decades ago,” says psychiatrist Lynn Ponton, author of The Sex Lives of Teenagers. Without going any further, the menarche or first menstruation has been remarkably advanced; thus, it has gone from an average of 17 years in the 19th century to 12.6 in the 21st century.
The interaction between hereditary predisposition and environmental factors is unequivocally the key that opens the doors of adolescence. An internal clock that appears programmed in our genes fuels the hypothalamus – a structure located at the base of the brain – and the pituitary – a gland very close to it – to synthesize the hormones of bodily change and libido. But the biological timer can be disrupted by external or environmental elements. These include socioeconomic status, geographic environment, sanitary quality, and diet. For example, a study conducted by researchers at the Fox Chase Cancer Center in Philadelphia (USA) reveals that a modest reduction in fat intake in pubertal girls significantly reduces the body’s levels of certain sex hormones. Among the waning is estradiol, an estrogen that actively participates in the general changes seen in the pubescent breasts, vagina, and uterus.
Physical transformation goes hand in hand with increased sexual drive. The endocrine system releases the constituent compounds of the chemistry of love, where it sends testosterone, also known as the hormone of desire. The special dimension of first love, which will never be like the ones that happen to it, has to do with hormonal rush. The psychobiological basis of falling in love is immutable; today you love yourself the same way you did hundreds of years ago. In reality, what varies in the love experience are the patterns of sexual behavior, which have to do with socio-cultural values. It is therefore worth asking how our young people live their first love affairs and how they differ from those enjoyed by previous generations.
If Spanish adolescents are asked about their erotic relationships, more than 80% will answer that they are satisfactory or very satisfactory. The extensive sexual education they have received gives them confidence: they know a lot about pleasure, contraception, postures, sexual tactics … But do sexologists think the same way?
“Today, adolescents are victims of greater social pressure to fall in love at ages as early as 12 or 13 years. Among themselves the demand is established to be, if not in love, interested in someone of the opposite sex,” he explains Carlos de la Cruz, sexologist at the Youth Delegation, in Leganés (Madrid).
This loving readiness is actually a role-playing game that appears to be conditioned by two key factors. “Schoolchildren enter the Institute at the age of 12 or 13 , that is, two years earlier than in the previous system of studies, which causes them to feel , in a certain way, more adults and imitate loving behaviors that do not correspond to their sexual maturity, “says De la Cruz. The second factor that precipitates pubescent love affairs must be found in the erotic messages sent from advertising, television series, movies, youth magazines and the Internet. Sexologists like Kluge frighten parents with the thesis that the erotic avalanche in the media fuels their children’s libido. But this would not be the only consequence of media culture.
“Boys,” says this sexologist, “go from watching Teletubbies to series like One Step Forward or Companions , where they are bombarded with fictitious sexuality and love affairs.” In the same way, Iván Rotella, specialist of the Asturian Association for Sex Education (Astursex), thinks: “In my research on Internet pornography, which by the way young people access without difficulty, I am noting that many adolescents adopt their pornographic content like the reality of sexual intercourse and they do not realize that it is a fantasy concocted for erotic arousal. ” On the other hand, the world of celluloid and advertising associates specific patterns of beauty with sexual potency. “Young women considered explosive are more passionate and lustful, and men who fulfill the beauty canon, more virile. This tyrannization of body image narrows the margins in the search and selection of a partner, which makes many adolescents relegated of the love game, “says De la Cruz.
There is no doubt that the sexual encounter has become one more consumer object . We enter a generation of young people rushing into the coital relationship as a passport to a new status within the group. In Rotella’s words, “adolescent sexuality is focused on intercourse. Boys and more and more girls, imitating masculine patterns, seek in penetration the wonderful sensations of pleasure and orgasmic experiences that they see in the cinema and the TV”.
Almost overwhelmed by theory, most young people view first erotic contacts as an athletic competition. This is how De la Cruz explains it: “The most widespread myth among kids of both sexes, apart from the fact that drugs such as cocaine and ecstasy enhance sex, is that they have to embroider the task. They have to know how to stimulate the other, last a long time. and many times. This makes them more aware of what grade the couple is going to give them than to enjoy the moment. ” The result: frustration and loss of self-esteem.
“It has not been possible to transmit to adolescents – he adds – that the crux of erotic pleasure is to recognize inexperience, nervousness, modesty or dislike of a sexual practice.” In this particular, the love affair of the uninformed previous generations was more of an exploratory type. “Paradoxically, the lack of sexual information generated an extra confidence among lovers, who learned to enjoy the erogenous zones of their body, including the genitals, but without necessarily reaching penetration,” explains De la Cruz.
But media eroticism is not solely responsible for the current co-tocracy that overwhelms the love life of young people. Sex educators have also helped fuel the genital obsession. As this teaching body recognizes, the objective of sex education has been focused for decades on risk prevention and on educating young people about the miseries of sex: unwanted pregnancies, the spread of AIDS or another sexually transmitted disease (STD) , coital pain and sexual abuse, among others.
“Before we started our talks by emphasizing that sex is not only intercourse, but we ended up talking almost exclusively about it and handing out condoms at the end of them,” says De la Cuz. Without neglecting risk prevention, sex education has taken on a new discourse. “Our objective is now to help boys and girls learn to know each other, to accept each other and to express erotica in such a way that they are happy,” says Silberio Sáez, director of the Amaltea Institute of Sexology in Zaragoza. “We want – adds Rotella – to transmit to young people the kind side of sex, as well as values related to communication, respect, sharing, self-esteem and pleasure.”
“In my view, adolescents have to learn to enjoy the sexual encounter as a long journey, without shortcuts, where eroticism can give as much or more satisfaction than penetration,” says De la Cruz. As a culmination, Sáez adds that “those who have a more enriched vision of sexuality, who include in it more issues than the merely mechanical and physiological ones focused on genital-intercourse, will have a wider range of sexual alternatives and will be able to to be able to choose expressions that are equal or more pleasant and with consequences that have minimal costs “.
Some studies suggest that adolescents who have received sexual training in this direction postpone the beginning of coital relations. “Indeed, once they discover that there are many ways to give pleasure and to enjoy the couple, they take penetration as one more option. If they do it it is because they feel like it, not out of obligation,” says Rotella.
Enrique M. Coperías
