Free Amish Confidential by Lebanon" Levi Stoltzfus

premarital sex, just like teens in other places do. Are they having more sex or less sex? We could debate that all day. The truth is there are no reliable surveys on Amish kids doing it. And don’t hold your breath. Because we aren’t likely to get good data on this any time soon. Amish sixteen-year-olds probably won’t report their next grope-and-grind session to Gallup or Quinnipiac any more than they’ll report it to their parents or to the bishop. And you probably won’t find good evidence on Facebook, either. There’s the occasional Amish-teen status update from a forbidden smartphone, but Amish teens tend to use sites like Facebook, Instagram and Twitter with extra discretion and modesty, when they use social media at all. All I’m saying is, please, don’t believe all the chastity talk. Amish parents are mostly kidding themselves when they say, “Oh, our fine youngsters wouldn’t dare be involved in anything like sex! They’re too busy canning vegetables and singing hymns!”
    As if!
    Here’s what I know from my own experiences and those of many friends, relatives, neighbors and bar-stool companions: The Amish may live on farms in out-of-the-way places, but we aren’t stuck in flyover country as far as youthful hormones are concerned. God may be standing guard over all of us, but anatomy and biology haven’t thrown in the towel yet.
    From holding hands to making out to reaching down to—well, you get my point. The only thing I will say for certain is this: In my group, the early attempts were clumsy, wrapped up in awkwardness,inexperience and guilt. And we all thought about sex a whole lot more than we were doing it.
    But except for the suspenders and prim bonnets, didn’t that make us about the same as young people everywhere?
    N ot long ago, I asked some of my Amish friends how much sex education they got at home. The answers came in about like I expected:
    “Not a word.”
    “The night before I got married, my father sat me down. He seemed very uncomfortable. ‘Um, if there’s anything you want to know about, just ask me, okay?’ I said there wasn’t. He said, ‘Good.’ ”
    “The only sex education I got,” one female friend said, “was watching a litter of kittens be born at our neighbor’s house. My mother wasn’t happy when she heard I’d seen that. I thought I might be going to hell. But actually, that taught me a lot about where babies come from. Farm kids don’t stay in the dark too long.”
    My father did what he could to keep us there. He never had a birds-and-bees talk with me or any of my brothers. He even made sure I wasn’t in the barn when he was arranging for the cows and bulls to breed. God knows how that might have scarred me!
    Several of my female friends said their mothers had warned them about getting their periods—or at least comforted them afterward by explaining that they weren’t dying. But most of my friends, male and female, said they picked up a lot of what they learned in little snatches from friends, cousins and older siblings. Some of that information was probably exaggerated or just plain wrong. ( “I’m not sure, but I think you might get pregnant from French-kissing a boy!” )And frankly, being on the back side of the sex-educationcurve, I’m not sure our knowledge was ever all that complete. Even today, I sometimes joke about my own lingering cluelessness: “You’d really be amazed at how much I still don’t know!”
    I ’ll bet you already know the traditional Amish view on sex. It can be summed up in exactly four words: “Go forth and multiply.” Genesis 1:22 stretches it out to nine: “And God blessed them, saying, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply.’ ” And then you have one more important wrinkle: All that is supposed to happen after getting married . Marriage, sex, babies—in that order and, hopefully, without any unnecessary delay. Ever since Jakob Ammann roamed the earth, his followers and descendants have been told over and over