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Communicating with boys is the theme of the day in the New York Times, which has a front-page article on how market researchers are communing with young guys to help Disney carve out a boys' entertainment niche, as well as the Science section column on how pediatricians tackle the sex talk with boys. Like you, Jessica, I like the basically egalitarian core of the message the doctors urge, which is an emphasis on respect and consideration; that strikes me as right, and something kids (especially teenagers) of both genders can't hear enough about. And I was surprised that the subtext of the Hollywood story seemed to be gender convergence, too. Forget the Girlz vs. Boyz approach to marketing, apparently. Expert "boy-whisperers" like Disney's Kelly Peña have discovered that boys aren't so into the stark winner-loser paradigm after all, and the no-girls-allowed ethos seems to be out.
But also like you, Jessica, I have my doubts about the adult presumption that all this communication is, or even should be, quite as open and revealing as it's cracked up to be. I'm dubious about the doctors' claims that if adults are at ease, the conversations about sex won't be awkward—and I wonder if it's a service to parents to suggest they can expect that. I'd say the Talk is easier to conduct with respect and consideration—qualities parents should model, after all—if adults aren't envisaging lots of cozy sharing and caring.
And based on the other Times article, I'd say the market researchers are kidding themselves if they think they've established great rapport with boys, whom I'd credit with doing a great job of keeping their own counsel in the face of those who want to snare them into endless show-based merchandizing. Certainly Disney's probing hasn't produced much in the way of insights: Show the underside of skateboards in movies, use check marks not Xs (which remind boys of bad grades). The boys aren't talking much, and it's not clear the adults are listening very well when they do. Disney seems to have concluded boys want "fun with a purpose," though the rare comment offered by a kid in the story did not exactly confirm that. The boy helpfully defined a popular boy pastime—to "crash"—for the nice, nosy lady. "After a long day of doing nothing, we do nothing."
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Great points, Jessica, about the many and complicated ways in which teen sex plays out. Agreed that broader questions, like whether kids can imagine good futures for themselves, can matter more than what parents say to them about sex per se. Still, I want to probe this a little more. OK, so we encourage teenagers to wait 'til college (I'll go with that timeline for the sake of argument) and then give them access to birth control if they ignore us. But what else do we say when that happens?
In writing our way through this season of Friday Night Lights, Meghan and Hanna and I were all struck by the great sex talk the mother character on the show, Tami, has with her daughter Julie when she finds out that Julie has slept with her boyfriend. He is sweet and kind. They love each other. They are 17 and in high school. Like many parents I know, Tami dealt with sex by saying don't do it, don't do it--and then reassuring her daughter that it was all OK after she went ahead anyway. Isn't that sort of schizophrenic, or at least incomplete? Is there another more consistent set of talking points for parents here? And shoot me for asking, but is the answer different depending on whether you're talking to a son or a daughter?
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Over on Talking Points Memo Cafe, I posted this week as part of a discussion of Jessica Valenti's new book, The Purity Myth. Jessica makes a strong and convincing argument against fetishizing virginity and judging how ethical girls and women are based on when they first had sex, or how many partners they've had. Amen to that. She also says that some of the time, there's nothing wrong with teen sex. This opens up a host of questions: If we quit cautioning kids against having sex, what do we say instead? From my TPM post:
Jessica cites a survey showing that "47 percent of teens who had experienced some form of sexual intimacy said they'd felt pressure to do something they didn't want to do--and young women were more likely to have had this experience than young men." I would bet that a disproportionate number of those girls are low-income and not white, exactly the girls who Jessica and many of us are particularly concerned for.
Will taking away the taboo take away the pressure, or even reduce it? Again, I'm not sure. I'd argue that we want teenagers to have sex lovingly and safely--or not at all, because sex can, sometimes, explode with meaning. Probably, we want teenagers to have sex sparingly, because a lot of their relationships aren't especially loving and safe. That's not necessarily what the testing of adolescence produces. And so I think there's a lot of work to be done to figure out what should replace the purity myth--the details and multi-faceted layers of what kind of sex ed makes sense for what kind of kids, and how parents should weigh in.
Thoughts?
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According to an article published in the London Times today, we Brits are now the most promiscuous nation in the world (of the western industrial nations, that is). In terms of one-night stands, total number of partners, and our "relaxed" attitude to casual sex, we beat Australia, the United States, Italy, and France. France! Where having extra-marital affairs is a favorite national pastime! If nothing else, at least now we might lose our reputation for being frigid and repressed.
In all seriousness though, Britain has the highest teen pregnancy rate in Europe as well as the highest teen STD infection rate in Europe (although both are significantly lower than here in the United States, where abstinence-only sex education doesn't seem to be helping much). Premature sex education in British schools (it can be taught to children as young as 4) has long been blamed for the epidemic, along with the inappropriate sexualization of children by toy manufacturers and the media. But here's a thought. In Britain, we also drink more than any other country in Europe (apart from Ireland and Finland, bizarrely), and our alcohol-related death rate has doubled since 1991. We've also, according to this reasonably insulting story in the New York Times, been causing havoc on summer vacations with our abhorrent, booze-soaked behavior. Could there be a correlation somewhere between the beer goggles and the newfound sluttiness?
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Hanna and Melinda, did you read the Times article yesterday about the evangelical approach to marital sex? In mid-November, the Rev. Ed Young, pastor of the Fellowship Church in Grapevine, Texas, was up in the pulpit, urging his flock to fortify their unions with Seven Days of Sex. "A sexperiment," he called it as he sermonized in front of a big bed to an audience presumed to be not getting nearly enough of it. In my uptight, blue state way, I found myself wondering about the kids ("a word that Mr. Young told church members stands for ‘keeping intimacy at a distance successfully' ")—particularly teenagers.
Talk about a sex-ed message that seems tone deaf to adolescents, no matter how you slice it. For any teens who might have been in the congregation listening to the exhortations to parental "whoopee," can you think of any greater gross out? And if they could bring themselves to think about it, the reverend's diagnosis of sex-starved couples undermined the promises preached to youth: These teens are being told to save themselves, the better to enjoy the bliss that arrives with marriage. I wish I thought the spectacle of their elders' confusion could help kids see what a complicated business sex can be, but somehow I don't think that's what sinks in.
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Oy. All due respect, et cetera. True love does not wait. True love necks, cops a feel. True love tries to put off the inevitable and distracts itself giving a blow job. True love gags a little bit, momentarily forgets it is true love, re-evaluates itself—if this does not feel particularly loving, does my selfless dedication to this higher purpose at least underscore its truth?—oh crap here come the Park Police …
Now, I speak as an avowed nonbeliever in the sacredness of sex. I have committed the act hundreds of times, not always under the influence of alcohol, and never once felt the presence of the Holy Spirit.* And I am one of those heathens who has run the numbers on America's Gross National Sin way too many times to be particularly inclined to get up in the morning if not for some deeply-ingrained irrational hope that some savior, perhaps under the guise of a cleverly formulated stimulus package designed amid a powerful resurgence of cultural humanism, might descend and forgive the bulk of them. I feel the Holy Spirit all the time, at the deli and the movies and sometimes even looking at pictures of children that light up when they call their parents' iPhones.
You never hit "ignore" on your kid. That feels like a sin. And adultery—not redefined Clintonesquely to include premarital sex, but full-on cheating— feels like a sin. Merely flirting with cheating generally feels bad enough to deter wusses like me, and maybe that is why I haven't married, but anyway, the point of this is that the older I get the more confounded I am that so many Americans strive so hard to ask our kids—who are, to be sure, the byproducts of our screwing but we hopefully weren't thinking of them at the time—to take sex seriously as a sin.
I grew up the eldest child in a very conservative Catholic family (whose conservatism has basically been all but decimated by time and events and exposure to the Simpsons, thank Jesus or this week would be painful). Growing up, I thought premarital sex was sinful. But I had spent a few formative years during the first Bush administration in China, a society that had declared an entirely different battery of activities to be sinful: reading, expressing opinions, owning stuff—especially if it in any way acknowledged the past—failing to renounce one's parents if they happened to be bourgeois counterrevolutionary running dogs, etc. etc. Even at 12, it occurred to me that (protected) sex, if one could find a place to have some, might be the one uncorrupted joy experienced in the lifetimes of most of the dreary-faced adults I saw (bicycling, very mirthlessly, to work each day) on the street. I remember feeling so awful for them. I remember feeling terribly sinful that I could not, or didn't want to, give anyone "half" of what I had, as Jesus would have, not that there was any real practical way of doing that, which, by the way, is a big reason communism didn't work out.
But anyway, the point is that I never felt remotely that sinful about sex. I think most of the guilt that we feel about sex has to do with confusion we've created by dubbing it a "sin." Of the various reasons I've felt guilty about honest, unadulterated sex—does he think I am his girlfriend now? why did I watch that porn?—it always seems to go back to fundamental dishonesty. Elevating sex to sin, that is to say, was the original sin.
*Ha ha, boner joke optional here.
(And P.S., any future kids of mine who might ever stumble across this blog post or anything else I've ever written on the subject, there are a LOT of conditions, footnotes, and appendices to all this and by the way, I was nearly 19 when I lost my virginity, and as far as I'm concerned, you can wait that long, too.)
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Not sure this is a liberal-vs.-conservative divide exactly, Hanna, or even a religious-vs.-secular one, though that's probably closer to the mark. It's definitely not only in red states that parents would prefer that their kids delay having sex. How to communicate that while also teaching them about birth control—does the one message undercut the other?—is an old, old problem. And because people being people it's not always communicated perfectly or received gladly doesn't mean there's no point in trying.
At a meeting on sex ed in Sunday school at our church last spring, one of the other parents remarked that even those of us who don't believe everything the church teaches about sex want our kids to believe it, and everybody laughed. Only, when it came down to actually talking to my kids, I felt compelled to explain both the church teaching on birth control and why I see it more as an ideal than an absolute. Did I worry about this obviously mixed message? Yes. Do I get the appeal of a more clear-cut approach in either direction? You betcha. But I see risk in punting on either the moral or the practical dimension of sexuality, and in the end, that's a line every parent has to locate for himself. One of my many hopes for Obamamerica is that we will no longer see "red state sex'' as a distinct phenomenon.
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Family values are in the news again today, but this time it's the Democrats who are taking the heat. McCain's latest ad attacks Obama on the subject of sex ed, misstating the senator's voting record in the process. Over nursery school music, viewers are told that Obama is "wrong for [their] family" on the grounds that he wants kids to learn about sex before they learn how to read.
I've stated here before that I think sex should be introduced early and often to the elementary school curriculum. Mine's an opinion many people disagree with, and Barack Obama happens to be one of them.
Obama himself has said, "Nobody's suggesting that kindergartners are going to be getting information about sex in the way that we think about it." What he did support (in 2003) was a bill in the Illinois state legislature that would have introduced "instruction on the prevention of sexually transmitted infections, including the prevention, transmission and spread of HIV" to pre-existing programs.
Yes, Mitt Romney, I do think there's a sex ed curriculum that's appropriate for 5-year-olds, and it has more to do with protecting them from other people's misguided actions than from their own. The only sex ed current students even have a chance of seeing before middle school is the kind that limits itself to a discussion of acceptable body language, peer respect, and personal space or "inappropriate touching," as Obama's own campaign once referred to it.
And for the record, child literacy has nothing to do with children's ability to handle sex ed, unless you consider that, as they learn to read, children become more aware and more likely to process conflicting or inaccurate messages about sex. If McCain is truly concerned that kids learn to read before learning about sex, maybe he should stick to the topic at hand (education reform) and refocus his efforts on improving early reading skills.