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You and me, baby, ain't nothin' but mammals;
so let's do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.

from "The Bad Touch" by The Bloodhound Gang

If there's nothing missing in my life,
then why do these tears come at night?

from "Lucky" by Britney Spears

The woman I am listening to sits slouched on my sofa. She is a lovely woman with eyes so tired and depressed I can hardly believe she is only 20 years old. She hates being in a counselor's office, but she's got to talk to somebody. It's her life that's the problem, she says. It's not going well. She wishes her boyfriend were more attentive and her father had not married this difficult woman, her stepmother. She wonders about her relationship with God. And yes, she sleeps with her boyfriend, answering my question as though I were asking something I should already know. With that fact on the table, though, she suddenly turns the pages of her life back five years. She begins to talk about the first time she had sex.

"I didn't want to have a bad experience in losing my virginity—;like some of my friends," she says. "So I found a guy I knew but didn't feel anything special for, and I had sex with him. That way I could just get it over with."

Your virginity was something you wanted to "just get over"?

"Well, sure. That way I could enjoy sex more with guys I really cared about." These words explain her logic, one alien to my own but so representative of the sexual world of her generation. Losing one's virginity, in many cases, is a girl's rite of passage into relationships and sex—;where, it seems, all the happy people live.

This picture looks a bit different at 30. Then I see women like Molly, who is married and has children, a job, and one small problem—;Molly hates sex. What can I do to help her overcome her reluctance? It's boring, distasteful, and her husband is tired, not of sex but of her disinterest. Please fix this broken part of my life, she pleads. She and her husband end up arguing a lot.

So I begin to probe her sexual history and discover that she's had sex since she was 16, with as many as 10 men, one of whom is now her husband. But that is the past, and she's in church now. She's reformed her life. She doesn't see why her past, even one with multiple partners, should have much bearing on her present sexual experience. I ask her a question:

"Can you picture what it would have felt like to be really cherished by a man, to be so special to him that he wanted to protect your innocence? Can you sense what it would mean to be that valued by a man?"

She makes no response for a while. Finally, a little trail of tears slides down her cheek, the best clue to the sense of loss she feels as she connects her early promiscuity with the boredom she now experiences.

Both of these women reflect the sea change in sexual attitudes and practice of the past 20 years, a shift of epic proportions. Youth workers, counselors, singles pastors, and college ministry leaders have been long aware of the changing sexual landscape. But recently several stunning articles, books, and one in-depth TV documentary have exploded on the public scene, providing a veritable expos of the sexual practices of those under 30. The result is a widespread wake-up call that could direct the most attentive listeners to a Christian apologetic for chaste and moral relationships the church has known in many years.

Some would say this explosion began with last year's The Lost Children of Rockdale County, a PBS Frontline documentary that told the story behind a strange outbreak of syphilis in kids from the white, affluent town of Conyers, Georgia. The picture was not pretty: over 50 teenagers involved in extreme sexual behavior with between 20 to 50 partners, a secret world of sex that functioned, as one boy put it, "like an underground railroad with everybody having sex with everybody," in which the only clueless people were the adults. The documentary reported parties of 12- and 13-year-olds watching the Playboy Channel and simply copying the behaviors they saw.

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July 10 2000, Vol. 44, No. 8