Photo by Flickr user exakta. Used under a Creative Commons license.

Emily Anthes of Slate Magazine’s “Medical Examiner” column says

Sex and the City, which, as it’s hard not to know by now, comes to the big screen this weekend, rarely ventured beyond the island of Manhattan in its six years on television. When the women did find themselves elsewhere, they weren’t usually happy about it. This was especially the case in Season 4, when Carrie’s boyfriend, Aidan, hamstrings her into a trek to his rustic cabin upstate. Carrie, in turn, pressures Samantha into tagging along, and urban-misfit misadventures ensue—until Samantha spots a hunky, half-naked farmer and seduces him out of his overalls. And thus the show discovers what researchers have been documenting over the last decade or more: It’s the country, rather than the city, where more of the sex is.

Read the rest of the article here.

Anthes goes on to list a range of reasons why out-lying kids tend to wind up having more, earlier, and less safety-aware sex and drug-related activities. I’d like to point out what was, in my experience, a very big reason: very often the parents who move out to the suburbs or exurbs to “get away from the danger of the city” nevertheless commute to the city, leaving their, especially teenaged, children unattended for very long periods between when school gets out and the parents (finally) get home.

It’s certainly the case that when I was a teenager with a motorcycle I spent a lot of 1970s after-high-school afternoons visiting friends who lived out in the county for sex, drugs, and rock ‘n roll. Oh, and alcohol too. Depending on circumstances parents sometimes weren’t home till suppertime. That was (almost) always long enough to come down, sober up, and/or get dressed without raising suspicions.

Thirty years later and on the other side of the country a good friend’s niece died while she and her methed-up friends were rat-racing back from some kind of party even further out in the Seattle exurbs and drove the car they were in under the wheels of a logging truck. The irony, of course, was that her parents never let her go “into that Seattle” for fear of all the immorality and violence!

Again, I’m not saying Anthes other reasons aren’t valid, in fact they’re great. I’m just saying the list is incomplete without accounting for a) early high-school release times and b) extended commutes by custodial adults.