High school students are wearing white t-shirts and encourage classmates to remain virgins until they are married.

The conservative US Christian group Liberty Counsel, which organised the day, said US teenagers should make a “public demonstration” of purity.

It said the day offered teenagers a chance to stand in opposition to “a culture of moral decline”.

purity’

Liberty Counsel, which says it works to promote “religious freedom, the sanctity of human life and the traditional family”, said young Americans faced a daily barrage of sexual messages in contemporary culture.

The way sex is talked about, it’s so casual, like it’s an everyday thing, like going to McDonald’s Teenage Day of Purity supporter

It said the Day of Purity enabled teenagers to make their voices heard and become part of America’s true “counter-culture”.

“When the youth of America stand up for sexual purity they send a message to parents, churches, communities, legislators and the media that they want a different America,” it said in a statement on its website.

It added it had chosen the day before St Valentine’s Day to encourage “purity in dating relationships” until marriage.

Teens ‘exposed’

US teenager Melissa Millis, who says she will wear a white t-shirt to promote the Day of Purity at her Michigan state school, told the Associated Press news agency she was tired of feeling pressurised.

‘’The way sex is talked about, it’s so casual, like it’s an everyday thing, like going to McDonald’s,” she said.

US President George W Bush has massively increased funding and support for the US sexual abstinence movement during his term in office.

Christian abstinence True Love Waits says it has more than one million young members.

However, critics say the programmes are unrealistic and leave teenagers exposed to pregnancy and sexual diseases.

They’re first-name type of guys; they wear sandals; they never, ever stick to the point.

“I’m a figure of beauty,” Craig proclaims, lounging in his comfortable chair, feet firmly on the table. “But while I reek of glamour, it’s just an illusion”.

“Even when I was youthful, I was not very youthful,” the 52-year-old blurts, only for Jim to chip in: “Old young man becomes young old man.”

Global reach

Don’t be deceived, though: this sunny Californian banter conceals an online venture that has become a cultural phenomenon.

Craigslist’s design is deliberately simple

Craigslist.com, their classified adverts website, has quietly emerged as one of the top 10 internet companies in the world in terms of page views, attracting more than 10 million unique visitors per month and with a presence in 175 cities across 34 countries.

The sites’ success has come in spite of, or perhaps because of, their notably basic, almost amateurish, design.

“Brevity is the soul of wit,” Craig declares, insisting that “the site is deliberately very plain”.

Everything and nothing is a commodity on this virtual flea market, whose addictive nature has arisen from a bizarre blend of shopping and flirting: anything from cheap sofas or bicycles or electronic gadgets, to new apartments and casual sex is brokered here.

It is free as well, for everyone except companies placing job adverts in San Francisco, Los Angeles and New York, and even these fees are low, ranging from $25 to $75.

Craigslist’s popularity has seen it tipped as the next Google or Ebay, and made Craig and Jim into hot media property hounded by Hollywood moguls keen to bring their experiences to the silver screen.

Numbers game

The figures seem to justify the hype.

“We think of ourselves as a community service, but we have a business structure out of necessity Craig Newmark Customer service rep and founder Craigslist.com

More than five million new classified adverts per month generate 2.5 billion page views.

Each month, the website runs a million new forums postings and publishes 160,000 job adverts, according to company PR Susan Mactavish Best, who has “known Craig for years” and who also happens to cohabit with Jim.

And all this is run by a team of no more than 18 staff to look after the technical kit, to moderate the discussion boards and to deal with what Craig describes as ” apartment brokers in New York”.

The sites are self-policing: if enough users who find an advert offensive click to have it removed, it will simply disappear.

Business or pleasure?

Which raises the question: is Craigslist a business, or simply an unusually successful hobby?

Buying an old bicycle has become a new way of meeting people

“We’re a business,” responds Jim hesitantly.

Although the company is tight-lipped about its finances, estimates put its annual earnings at around $10m; not enormous compared with its potential, yet sufficient to ensure Craig can afford the “few luxuries” he enjoys - namely “gadgets and overpriced coffee”.

“We think of ourselves as a community service, but we have a business structure out of necessity,” explains Craig.

Craig and Jim are actively resisting the temptation to maximise profits, though with investors desperate to get in on the act they are having to fight hard to stay true to their beliefs.

Share and share alike

Already, though, shares in Craigslist have trickled through their fingers: Ebay recently acquired a 25% stake from a former employee, a deal neither Craig nor Jim is keen to comment on.

“We don’t talk about who owns us,” says Jim, insisting that Ebay “has a similar philosophy to ours”.

The deal seems to be a sore point, though. When asked about what the former employee has done with the money from Ebay, Jim’s reply is curt.

“We’re not really in contact with them so we’re not sure what they’re doing.”

Lack of trust

Craigslist’s rivals are not fooled by its apparently listless approach to business.

Some analysts are already predicting that newspaper classified could vanish entirely.

Investment bank Goldman Sachs describes Craigslist as “a real menace” to newspapers, and warns that “all publishers face a threat to their profitability”.

Neither Craig nor Jim seem to lament the threat they pose to the future of local newspapers, however.

“People trust conventional media less and less,” says Craig.

Adds Jim: “Where do you want to throw your sympathies? With huge conglomerates or with millions of people who can use our services to get on with their lives?”

The first survey consisted of 18,876 interviews carried out in the UK between May 1990 and November 1991. It covered almost every area including the age people lost their virginity, homosexual experiences, and the number of sexual partners. It also looked for differences between demographic groups and attitudes towards sex and sexuality.

The results were fascinating, but it was the follow up survey in 1999-2001, which showed conclusively just how fast the sexual behaviour of people in Britain was changing.

Number of partners

For men and women, the average number of lifetime partners had grown significantly between 1990 and 2000. On average, for men, it had grown from 4 to 6, and for women, it had doubled from 2 to 4. The number of people reporting one or no sexual partners in their lifetime had also decreased. Younger people (aged 16-24) reported the highest median average of partners for the last five years (3 for men, 2 for women).

Sex in the last four weeks

Researchers found that the number of sexual encounters in the previous four weeks was very similar for those questioned in 1990 and 2000. So we aren’t necessarily having more sex - just sex with more people.

Casual sex

There has been a substantial change in the attitude to one night stands. In 1990 53% of men and 79% of women considered one night stands to be wrong. Ten years later the figures had fallen to 35% and 54% respectively. However, Britain remains highly intolerant towards sex. Indeed there was a slight increase in hostility to affairs for both men and women

Losing your virginity

In 1990, the average age for losing one’s virginity was 17 for men and 18 for women. Ten years later it was 17 for both men and women. Notably, there was a doubling of the proportion of women who reported first intercourse before 16 years of age - from 10.3% to 20.4%. For men the figure rose from 20% to 27%

The agony aunt’s experience

Deirdre Sanders of the “Dear Deirdre” column is a top agony aunt

The facts come as no surprise to Britain’s most widely read agony aunt, Deidre Sanders. Her page in The Sun has been running for 25 years, and is the second most read part of the newspaper. She gets 800 letters and e-mails a week, and has seen a big change in her mailbag since she began.

“From younger people, they used to be quite simply nave questions really. They might be worries about their body or how you get to know a boy or girl. I still get inquiries like that but also now from that same age group I’ll be getting much more heavy-duty questions.”

“It was all summed up for me by one… which is a 16-year-old girl involved with an 18-year-old boy. She wanted to lose her virginity in a threesome with another girl, and it’s actually the boy writing to me because he’s a bit worried about what he’s getting involved in.”

“It was absolutely inconceivable when I started this job, that you’d have a 16-year-old girl thinking about a threesome.”

Deidre is shocked by the continuing levels of ignorance about protection. She believes passionately that relationships and sex education should be taught at an early age, and that it should be compulsory. “I’m surprised to find myself saying this, but it does appear that the situation is even worse.”

“For example I had a letter from a young guy who was gay and he had no idea about HIV, how it’s transmitted, how you protect yourself against it, and you just think… how has he managed to get through to that age and no one has got that information through to him?”

And Britain’s most read agony aunt is worried not just about the physical about our sexual behaviour - but about the long term emotional effects.

“I think there’s a whole generation, or generations of young people who are not happy with this, they’re not having a good time, they’re picking up infections which are going to damage them physically, some of them aren’t going to know that they’re not going to have children as a result of this, they’re not having good sex, they’re not enjoying this, they’re not having relationships they’re finding rewarding.”

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