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Some of Antonio James’ classmates laugh when they learn the 15-year-old has pledged not to have sex until he marries. It’s not just male bravado that puts pressure on the 6-foot-1, 219-pound football player to be sexually active. “There’s so much temptation around here with girls,” he said.

It is just after 5 p.m. in what was once one of Latin America’s most sexually conservative countries, and the youth of Chile are bumping and grinding to a reggaeton beat. At the Bar Urbano disco, boys and girls ages 14 to 18 are stripping off their shirts, revealing bras, tattoos and nipple rings.

The place is a tangle of lips and tongues and hands, all groping and exploring. About 800 teenagers sway and bounce to lyrics imploring them to “Poncea! Poncea!”: make out with as many people as they can. And make out they do — with stranger after stranger, vying for the honor of being known as the “ponceo,” the one who pairs up the most.

Chile, long considered to have among the most traditional social mores in South America, is crashing headlong into that reputation with its precocious teenagers. Chile’s youths are living in a period of sexual exploration that, academics and government officials say, is like nothing the country has witnessed before. “Chile’s youth are clearly having sex earlier and testing the borderlines with their sexual conduct,” said Dr. Ramiro Molina, director of the University of Chile’s Center for Adolescent Reproductive Medicine and Development.

The sexual awakening is happening through a booming industry for 18-and-under parties, an explosion of Internet connectivity and through Web sites like Fotolog, where young people trade suggestive photos of each other and organize weekend parties, some of which have drawn more than 4,500 teenagers. The online networks have emboldened teenagers to express themselves in ways that were never customary in Chile’s conservative society.

The parents and grandparents of today’s teenagers fought hard to give them such freedoms and to escape the book-burning times of Gen. Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. But in a country that legalized divorce only in 2004 and still has a strict ban on abortion, the feverish sexual exploration of the younger generation is posing new challenges for parents and educators.

One place where Antonio and other teens can find support for their decision is at church. In the last two years, Antonio’s church and four other urban congregations have begun holding ceremonies at which parents, guardians and church members pledge to support youths choosing a chaste lifestyle. The rituals are part of a new openness about sexual issues in the sanctuary. And youths are responding to the no-sex-in-the-city message. Two hundred and twenty-five young people — almost double the number from a year earlier — made purity pledges at “True Love Waits” rallies at two local churches this spring, said Gail Reese, director of the Cleveland-based Ministry of Reconciliation.

Academic studies on the effectiveness of abstinence programs in the general population have found mixed results. But the effort seems to pay off for religious youths. Scholars at the University of Texas at Austin found that religion and chastity pledges have “robust protective effects” on the incidences of premarital sex. Nearly 40 percent of 15- to 25-year-old virgins surveyed said their primary motivation for abstinence was that it was against their religion or morals.

“It almost seems daunting to me at times,” Theresa Zickert, a youth minister at St. Helen Catholic Church in suburban Newbury Township, said of the task of fighting popular culture. But she also says kids are “looking for deeper meaning for their sexuality.”

Congregations can no longer ignore the coarseness of cultural acceptance of casual sex in movies, music and television, on the Internet and through other influences on youths, said Reese, a leader of the chastity movement in city churches. “It was something we knew of, that it was there, but we didn’t address it,” Gail Reese said. “When you look around, it’s more in your face than it was before.”

The teens call their public orgies ponceo. On a typical Friday afternoon in the Chilean capital of Santiago, hundreds gather in a leafy urban park for a few hours of sexual experimentation. Surrounded by passing strollers, they trade partners multiple times—mostly engaging in anonymous rounds of oral sex. When the party is over, no contact information is exchanged. Same-gender interactions are commonplace, as the lines between hetero- and homosexuality are blurred, partly by the alcohol and drugs consumed, but also by shifting social mores held by Chilean youth, in contrast to their conservative parents. “Ponceo is about having fun,” says Natalia Fernandez, a 15-year-old with pink hair and a pierced chin. “This time I had seven partners.”

On the other hand, one of the beneficiaries of the “True Love Waits” campaign initiated by the church, Lyndaisha said ”I’m doing this because God says, `Do it’. I don’t want to be used by somebody. I hate being used by somebody.”

At New Life Church, Antonio says he also is able to resist the peer pressure to have sex. “I’m going to ‘be something’,” he tells himself when others mock his decision to postpone sex. “And you all are going to end up ‘doing something’ that will mess you up.”

Tags: abstinence, casual sex, chastity pledges, Chile mores, experimentation, Fotolog, multiple partners, oral sex, Pinochet, pokemon, ponceo, popular culture, premarital sex, rallies, sexual awakening, sexual revolution, South America, True Love Waits

This entry was posted on Monday, September 15th, 2008 at 11:30 pm and is filed under Geo, Pre-marital sex, Purpose of Life, Relationships, Society, Trends, Troubles & Problems, Women's Issues, Youth Issues. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.