The virginity hoax: ‘Toss out words like “sexual behavior of teenagers,”
“virginity” and “highly effective” and the parents of adolescents
claw their way to newsstand and keyboard in a panicky search
for enlightenment, looking, always, for relief from the kind of
angst they heaped on their own elders just long enough ago not
to remember.

So what did they — we — learn from the study of “virginity
pledges” by the National Institute of Child Health and Human
Development?’ That they don’t work, in short. When pledgers break their vows (and they do) they tend to have unsafe sex. As the study points out, it’s hard to imagine how someone could both pledge chastity until marriage and carry a condom whle unmarried. Furthermore, they tend not to think of anal or oral sex as violating their commitment to chastity. Salon