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The silver lining was, practically everyone was available! Archie could go out with Betty one weekend while Reggie was on a date with Veronica, and then date Veronica the next weekend himself, and that was how things were (in the ancient comics, anyway; I gather the recent TV version may have been more "modern"). "Going steady" was a later relationship upgrade and was a big deal. So by the time you were getting off the market you'd probably actually had a decent amount of experience interacting romantically with the opposite sex, figuring out what types of person you were compatible or incompatible with, figuring out what categories of your own behavior were individual personality quirks to the right person versus what types were just universally attractive or repulsive, etc., and you could pursue someone or judge someone's pursuit accordingly.
Trouble is, that system only works if having sex before marriage is "fornicating" and is literally listed as a "mortal sin". If instead the "third date rule" for sex is normal, or even if it's just perceived as normal, dating around carries different weight, right? Increased jealousy and STD risk make "my date's been banging other people" feel much more serious than "my date's been seeing other people" alone could ever be. The obvious defense is to have the "exclusivity talk" ASAP, rather than be left with those worries. But then each time that happens you're with just one person from that point until marriage or breakup, so the same amount of time spent dating limits you to fewer people to date, and a heuristic like the 37% rule translates those limits into greatly reduced selection on who to snag.
It seems to be a collective action problem. Staying a virgin longer sends a signal, and unless you're in the shrinking communities where the signal received is still "they're probably properly devout", the signal is likely to be "she might be frigid" or "he might be a loser".
Teen dating is actually a pretty recent thing- before about the thirties, dating was a serious matter for adults looking towards marriage(which of course didn't mean none of the young women doing it were teenagers). The fifties casual dating culture was a brief moment in time.
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Also a lot of societies you just didn't have a ton of options as a woman unless you got married to a guy. My dad's almost 80 and his 5 sisters were all married by 22 at the latest, due to a combination of the shotgun and life as an unmarried single woman in a poor part of Europe with no particular professional or educational prospects just kinda sucking when you're 1 of 7 siblings in a one-income household.
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It's hard to imagine that teens weren't fucking around regardless. They'd just have to be discreet about it and have deniability.
Once they were going steady, sure, but at that point, many of them just went ahead and got married. Teen marriage rates peaked in the 1950s, which also explains why the teen birth rate was so high. But any girl who slept around before going steady would have gained a reputation for being easy.
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Oh, definitely. How does the old quote about shotgun weddings go? "The first baby can come at any time; after that, it takes nine months." I think sex generally came after the "going steady" phase, so wouldn't greatly change my point, but with something that wasn't openly talked about it's hard to say for sure.
Oops babies aside, there is a whole lot that teens can do together that doesn't result in pregnancy or hymen loss, but most definitely isn't chaste.
And those things genuinely appear to have been relatively rare in historical societies- unmarried men visited prostitutes or, uh, lady palma. Respectable women might not have waited all the way til marriage, this was definitely acknowledged by relevant law codes even into the twentieth century- but these same societies listed 'asking for a blowjob' as grounds for divorce.
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