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    Is That a Threat or a Promise?

    Posted Wednesday, April 08, 2009 4:07 PM | By Dana Stevens
    As we try to craft the Platonic ideal of the teen sex talk, I have a few thoughts. Like Hanna, I’m all for mixed (or, to be more precise, layered) messages. I don’t think there’s anything hypocritical or unloving about delivering up a combo platter of threats and promises: Having sex in high school is a lousy idea (but if you’re really going to do it, make sure you use protection.) If you get pregnant in high school, your future is screwed six ways from Sunday (but if it happens anyway, I’ll stick by you whatever you choose to do.) After all, much of adult life functions on this kind of more-than-binary logic: For example, most marriages operate on the assumption that cheating is intolerable, but when infidelity does happen, it’s often worth working through the problem and staying together.

    God knows Levi and Bristol could have used a bit more negative capability (the capacity to hold two contradictory thoughts at the same time) as they embarked on their ill-considered journey toward parenthood. What’s most maddening in their press appearances is the way that, enabled by fatuous interviewers, they blur together their crappy decision-making with its, in some sense, happy outcome (a baby, even an unplanned one, is bound to be a source of joy.) I could have throttled Tyra Banks when she said to Levi, “If [Bristol] could wave a magic wand, she’d have preferred to wait ten years.” Magic wands are notoriously ineffective as a means of birth control. Like Jessica's mom, I’d rather arm my daughter with a stern warning, an implied promise, and a five-dollar box of condoms.

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