Vaginal and Oral Sex Initiation Timing: A Focus on Gender and Race/Ethnicity

ABSTRACT

Objectives: Most previous studies on sexual initiation timing have examined its effects on a variety of subsequent outcomes without first examining the correlates and predictors of these timing categories. Studies that do exist often do not utilize samples through young adulthood, leading to a misclassified set of sexual timing categories. In addition, the literature does not adequately address the issues of oral sex timing. Therefore, the objectives of this study were (a) to explore age cutoffs that mark the “normative” and “non-normative” entry into vaginal and oral sex among young women and men in the United States and create 4 sexual initiation timing categories — “early,” “normative,” “late,” and “inexperienced” — and (b) to examine the association between race/ethnicity and sexual initiation timing by gender. Methods: The National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent to Adult Health was used in both descriptive and multivariate contexts to determine the net association of gender and race/ethnicity with vaginal and oral sex initiation timing. Results: Age cutoffs for vaginal sex timing were similar for women and men yet differed by gender for oral sex timing. Women were more likely than men to initiate vaginal sex (20% vs. 18%) and oral sex (19% vs. 16%) at an early age and were less likely than men to initiate these behaviors at a late age (18% vs. 19% for vaginal sex and 15% vs. 16% for oral sex). Although most respondents initiated these 2 behaviors by young adulthood, a considerable proportion remained inexperienced, with men more likely than women to report inexperience with vaginal sex (7% vs. 5%) and women more likely than men to report abstaining from oral sex (8% vs. 6%). Racial/ethnic differences in sexual initiation timing remained robust in the face of controls for both women and men. Conclusions: Understanding the timing at which adolescents and young adults transition to first vaginal and first oral sex is critical for sex education curriculum and policymakers.

KEYWORDS:

• Adolescents
• vaginal sex
• oral sex
• sexual initiation

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

Special acknowledgment is due Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design. Information on how to obtain the Add Health data files is available on the Add Health Web site (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth). This article benefited from the helpful comments of Kathryn Harker Tillman, Karin L. Brewster, Koji Ueno, Kay Pasley, and Shannon Cavanagh. Comments provided by the editor and three anonymous reviewers were also greatly appreciated.

FUNDING

This research uses data from Add Health, a program project directed by Kathleen Mullan Harris and designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and funded by grant P01-HD31921 from the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development, with cooperative funding from 23 other federal agencies and foundations. No direct support was received from grant P01-HD31921 for this analysis. The author has received support from Grant 5 T32 HD007081, Training Program in Population Studies, awarded to the Population Research Center at The University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Notes

¹ By “normative,” I mean that the majority of respondents initiated the corresponding sexual behavior at the specified ages.

² Because most adolescents initiate sexual intercourse by age 18 years (Halpern & Haydon, 2012), “late” refers to those who reported transitioning to this behavior at age 19 years or older.

³ By ages 18 to 19 years, 7 in 10 men (70%) and more than 6 in 10 women (63%) report oral sex experience (Chandra, Mosher, Copen, & Sionean, 2011). Therefore, “late” refers to those who reported initiating oral sex at age 19 years or older for men and at age 20 years or older for women.