From free love to safe sex

The information has no doubt contributed to what has been a bit of a cold shower. The percentage of students who say they've had intercourse declined to 46.7% in 2003 from 54.1% in 1991, according to the CDC. And the number of both boys and girls who have had sex before the age of 13 has dropped to 7.4% in 2003 from 10.2% in 1991.

Health class lectures, once just an embarrassing source of giggles and red faces, have fueled this attitude change with information that can only be called urgent.

At the age of 12, in the mid-1980s, sex education was sobering for Martha Kempner, 34, vice president for communication for the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the U.S. She was a seventh grader then, and sex education class remains a crystal clear memory. "It was straightforward and honest," she says. "The message was that this was something we could prevent. It wasn't \o7meant \f7to make us scared. But it made us scared \o7because \f7it was straightforward and honest."

Despite a dose of fear, teens are still a bundle of raging hormones, developing bodies and immature minds. And they still do what they've always done, if just a bit later.

"If you thought [AIDS] was affecting their attitudes about sex, you'd expect a rapid decline in the number of 17- and 18-year-olds having intercourse," says Jeanne Brooks-Gunn, professor of child development at Columbia University. "We're not seeing that." Today, the median age for first intercourse is 16.9 years for boys and 17.4 years for girls -- not much different from 1979, when boys started having sex at 15.7 years old and girls at 16.2 years old. By high school graduation, 46.7% of students have had sex.

But teens and young adults have incorporated a measured dose of safety. "Worrying about sex, and using condoms as a way to protect themselves -- that's what young people have known from the beginning," Downs says. In 1970, only 22% of women had their partner use a condom the first time they had sex; by 2002, that number was up to 67%, according to the CDC.

There seems to be a generational divide on condom use, Kempner says. "We were the generation where condom use was the norm," she says. "For people even just a few years older, condom use was something that had to be negotiated."

Monica Rodriguez is just four years older than Kempner -- a crucial difference, because her sex education classes hardly mentioned the new epidemic. "AIDS was not something we learned about in school. We thought that, unless you were gay or hemophiliac, you didn't have to worry about AIDS," she says.