The three-paragraph item in Time quoted one source, a 15-year-old girl in Los Angeles, but that was enough for the American public, always willing to believe the worst about anyone under 30, especially when it comes to sex...
According to Barbara Mikkelson, co-proprietor of a Web site about urban legends,
(http://www.snopes.com) who investigated the phenomenon, girls and boys she contacted were shocked "that adults would think they were actually obeying this 'code.' "
"Yes, many kids had heard the rumor before the media threw it at them (and many hadn't)," she writes on her Web site, "but even to those exposed to this snippet of lore in the wild (i.e., from their friends as an item of schoolyard lore), this was nothing more than a giddy 'everybody knows' fact, right up there with 'Bubble Yum contains spider eggs.' "
