Surprisingly, when you have a bullshit meter that is ringing off the hook, then that should be a good indication that it is time to dig into the sources. So you've done the right thing!

While American and English people of that era had very different notions of what privacy was than we do, privacy is a socially constructed idea after all (see my other answers about the invention of privacy), they weren't (unfortunately) engaging in live sex shows for the benefit and education of their peers. But that would make a great pop culture history article, wouldn't it?

The source that the article links to is illustrating almost exactly the same point that Sin and society in the seventeenth century by John Addy or Church Courts by Martin Ingram does, which is: people had premarital sex. Plenty of it! They did it in the barns, they did it in the hayfields, they did it (in England) in the back alley of the White Horse pub when they thought no one was looking. Hell, some of them did it UNDER THE THE TABLE of the White Horse Pub. While we might see some teenagers making out at a nightclub and not think much of it, there was equally as much sexual activity going on between all teenagers just about everywhere in the history of teenagers (and adults too).

However, the point that Addy, Ingram, and this author, GR Quaife, are making is that sex and sexuality were much more socially controlled and regulated. This might seem apparent, but take it to the extreme. Young women's and men's sexuality (and everyone else's) was subject to investigation, reporting, shaming and in extreme cases, church court legislation.

You were expected to perform to your social role. If you were a man, you were expected to be a man and control your wife and children and come to church and contribute to the town. If you had a domineering wife, or worse, if you were a cuckold, you would be subject to a chivaree where the entire town would get out and parade and humiliate you. In extreme cases they might drag the wife down to the river or lake and dunk you in with a cucking stool. This is not to say that the Puritans weren't totally cool with sex and sexuality! They were, and moreso in some ways than other groups of their time. As long as it took place within the confines of a socially acceptable and sanctioned marriage.

This was the established social compact, and it was enforced through gossip, shame, and sometimes even more forcefully. And it remains so in some small towns today, undoubtedly, but the emergence and growing power of cities was, as Dabhiwhola documents in The Origins of Sex, what eventually broke this system down.