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Premarital Sex (PMS) and Moral Panic Michael L. Tan Discussion paper presented at a meeting, “Family Planning New Worlds” organized by the Bill and Melinda Gates Institute for Population and Reproductive Health of the John Hopkins Center for Communication Programs. December 10, 2002. I thank Dr. Laurie Zabin for presenting alternative frameworks to analyze adolescent sexuality and drawing away from the usual perspective that casts the adolescent as the problem, spurred by his (and increasingly, her) raging hormones. Her paper shows how important it is to problematize the way societies interpret the sexualities of young people, and to seek new ways of understanding these sexualities in the context of history and social change. I wanted to elaborate on Dr. Zabin’s points, using examples from Asia (mainly the Philippines) to talk about the dilemmas and pitfalls that come with social conservatism, often expressed through an invocation of a mythical past when adolescents were asexual, obedient, compliant. In doing so, I want to show that conservatism is not limited to the moralizing of religious fundamentalists; in fact, the more dangerous forms of social conservatism are the ones we carry unconsciously, part of a