Sex and teens
It’s kind of hard for me to have an informed comment, since the aforementioned site is down and I’ve never seen it prior; but hell, being ill-informed has never stopped me before, so here goes.
I basically agree with Andre.
When it comes to sexuality, so many of the problems regarding communication between adults and teens stems not from our culture or the immorality of the youth, but from the fears of the grown-ups. Early teens these days have very similar questions and concerns to what teens 100 years ago had, mainly because the bulk of their curiosities come from within their own changing bodies — bodies which changed just the same in “better times” as today.
I do find that teens today definitely do want values, guidelines, and restrictions to be placed on their emerging sexuality. The idea of an unrestricted sexual free-for-all would terrify most adolescents. But at the same time, and regardless of what their parents are telling them, teenagers know that sex usually won’t cause people to suffer, it won’t destroy their life or wreck their reputation, and they’re almost positive that they won’t go to hell for it. Parents of all beliefs need to deal with these realities.
And teenagers today probably know something else their parents may not: they probably know someone who is gay. If not from their social group, then someone who is a sibling or an uncle or a friend of someone in their social group. And the quickest way parents will lose credibility with their kids is to tell them that that gay friend or acquaintance is a bad person, or has been cursed by the Devil.
Kids who have been raised with a certain set of sexual morals from their parents are highly unlikely to scrap those values if handed some literature or exposed to a website that offers a different viewpoint.
gurusteve
DFV the Scribe
Andre the Defiant
Wes
pg - your humble messenger
hairybeast
thompaine
Drowning Creek
Our esteemed host wrote:
Ahhh, there’s the rub: the adverb “usually.” One round of Russian Roulette “usually” won’t kill you, either — and Russian Roulette is a pretty apt description of what is happening in teen sex.
Thanks to artificial contraception, a pregnancy “usually” won’t result — but sometimes it does. Sexually transmitted diseases “usually” won’t be caught, but sometimes they are.
Sex is an adult activity, and when adolescents engage in adult activities, sometimes adult consequences obtain.
Dana
12 May 07 at 12:46 pm
DFV, when you actually read the site Dave linked you will realize what a disgrace your opinion is. In fact, you’re a disgrace and you are going to hell for having an ill informed opinion. You are also going to be blind in hell because of your other activities.
E the Wise
12 May 07 at 4:23 pm
Well who would want to see in hell, anyway?
DFV the Scribe
12 May 07 at 5:26 pm
I do! Remember, I am going to find Fred Phelps and kick him repeatedly in the nuts.
Andre the Defiant
12 May 07 at 5:30 pm
Dana’s comment is very reasonable, and very true. Some teens (and adults) have indeed suffered badly from a single sexual encounter. But one could also apply that possibility to a whole host of activities.
It’s true that sex could destroy their lives, but teenagers are smart enough to know that it almost certainly won’t. In fact, they’ve already figured out, based on the behavior of their elders, that the odds of this whole sex thing being a really sweet deal, are overwhelmingly good.
My point is that if parents offer the thin reed of possible negative outcomes as a persuasive reason for their teens to avoid sex, they will lose all credibility. They’ll be viewed just like previous generations of parents who told their kids that if you smoked pot once, you’d become a drug addict. As soon as the kids figured out how ignorant that warning was, they dismissed mom and dad from their list of reasonable sources of information.
DFV the Scribe
12 May 07 at 5:40 pm
Yeah sure the 40+ age group knows nothing of sex, drugs and rock n roll.
The Beast lifeguarded at Ogunquit Beach in Maine in 1982. This was the coastal gay mecca at a time when the whole lifestyle was reeling out of the closet and Ogunquit was the epicenter north of Provincetown. Worked out nice for the guards because we could eat breakfast for free in any restaurant in town, just because all the locals knew that the Gay summer people would flock to whatever place the guards hung out in. We literally had our own individual fan clubs (new guards were told NOT to eat any sandwiches brought to them on the beach that had lots of mayo on them - a common prank). The place was a zoo and an unnerving locale to work for a straight young football player. But since all the french canadian girls had no way to get dates there were compensations.
Eight years later, driving through in late summer on the way up to kennebunkport to buy home beer brewing supplies, Ogonquit was a ghost town. The Beast commented to his roomate on how empty the once-bustling streets were. His buddy said “I bet half of em are dead now.”
hairybeast
12 May 07 at 7:12 pm
I don’t think for a second that the 40+ crowd knows little of the pleasures of the flesh. Rather, I think that as people age, (and especially when they have kids!) they naturally and gradually evolve into a different role in society. Every father I’ve ever known — every one — absolutely expects and wants his children to be more sexually restrained than he was. And most of these chaps are shocked when their kiddos do just what they did.
“Damn this culture!” they rail. “It’s the fall of America, I tell ya!” But see, since I knew these guys when they were younger, I know how dramatically different their outlook is now, from what it was then.
It’s not that mature folks don’t know about sex, Beast, it’s that their growing fears and metastasizing dogmatisms slowly begin to cut off the blood supply necessary for clarity.
Young people have innumerable faults, weaknesses, and blind spots. Dangerously, they aren’t even aware of most of them. But in many ways, they see things with a view that is less encumbered by the pathologies of age.
DFV the Scribe
12 May 07 at 9:00 pm
No, no, no.
Kids see without the perspective of experience, which makes them even blinder. You really think that a man or woman can’t remember what he did and how he felt a mere fifteen years ago? Knock the girlfriend up and drop out of college - yes that changes how you look at sex. Have three hundred sexual partners - get Hep B. Sexuality of youth is the mere beginning of the adventure - to understand it you need to get all the way through, which they have not.
Yes, change is inevitable. But it’s a function of growth, not dogmatism. It’s the burnt hand that tells you not to play with the stovetop until it’s cooled a bit or the bit finger that tells you not to try to pet the growling doggie chained up in his yard. It’s life. The “clarity” you reference is the clarity of ignorance. yes, it is all so simple when you are going to live forever and there is no tomorrow.
Until tomorrow comes, of course.
As for the faults and weaknesses of the young, they are always the same. It doesn’t matter what decade. The same goes for the middle aged and the old. It’s always the same.
hairybeast
12 May 07 at 9:34 pm
Guess what. KIDS FUCK UP! They’re good at it. When I was 14, I would go on Sunday mornings and listen to Pastor Ted (Yes, THAT Pastor Ted), then my mom, my friend -redacted-, who was staying over for the night, and I would read Psalms before bed.
Then, after mom left the room, guess what I and -redacted- would do.
Well, let’s just say, we made Jesus blush.
Of course, he’s married with three kids now, and I am… well, me.
Andre the Defiant
13 May 07 at 12:40 am