Monday, October 29, 2007 - Posts
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Wow, I take a couple days off and all heck breaks loose on the teen sex front. I have to agree with Melinda that there is a vast middle ground that is being missed up in Portland, Maine. What have they got against parents up there, anyhow?
One thing that I find interesting from reviewing the posts on the subject is that all of us who support the idea of calling parents at least sometimes are … parents. For better or worse, having children changes your perspective. When I was in high school and college, I always said, “I’m going to be one of the cool parents. If my kids want to drink, I’ll let them do it at home. And I’ll give them birth control, and …” you get the picture. Now that I have children, I’m trying to figure out where I can snap up some GPS-enabled ski jackets. (And they certainly won’t be going to summer camp.)
Just kidding on the ski jackets. But it raises an interesting point. On the one hand, we're better able to keep track of our kids with cell phones and other gadgets, and the concern is we're not letting kids be kids. On the other hand, they're not acting much like children if they're having sex at age 12. But I suspect that some parents use "helicoptering"—knowing where kids are at every moment, signing them up for every activity under the sun to keep them busy and then attending every practice—as a substitute for actual involved parenting. Why, who needs to talk to Suze and Johnny about sex when you know they're not having it, because their RFID tag tells you they're at the mall like they said they would be. (Too bad that unless you're Jack Bauer and can upload the mall schematics to your cell phone, you won't know if they're at the movies or in the broom closet.)
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In answer to your question, Emily, no, I don’t think it would be good if 12 became the new 16, and suddenly preteen sex seemed perfectly normal or even yawn-worthy. That said, I think we as a culture do too much gnashing of teeth over the preservation of virginity. Few of my precocious friends regret their early encounters, and none of them seem emotionally stunted or scarred.
In contrast, I think it can be harmful to wait too long. I had a couple friends in college (OK, they were girls) who had a fairy tale view of sex and kept delaying the act. They waited and waited until suddenly all their potential partners had lots of experience while they had none. That’s not a great state of affairs.
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I think Juliet is right: We do worry more about girls and sex, as I've argued here and here in Slate. Although I share Emily's impression that my teenage peers most confused about their sexuality were girls, I don't think we should rely on anecdotal evidence or our personal histories to try to understand the broader realities of teen sexuality today. After all, one of the reasons girls can seem more confused about sex than boys is that our cultural rhetoric routinely casts them as victims rather than lusty conquerors. Of course there's another good reason girls might be more confused: They bear the consequences of unprotected sex (i.e., pregnancy) in ways that boys just don't and never will. But being alarmist on their behalf doesn't serve a clear purpose; yet you see this kind of scare-mongering over and over in the media (especially the conservative media). The American Family Association Journal spotlights an alarming statistic about girls and sex ("46% of teen girls become infected with an STD during their first sexual encounter") next to a supposedly gender-neutral 2003 piece about teen sexuality; there's no comparable stat for boys.
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If early sex isn't necessarily bad sex, could we agree that it's usually a bad idea? I'm agnostic about calling parents, because it seems so case by case to me, in terms of the kids and the parental relationships involved. And I'm all for the release of a 17-year-old like Genarlow Wilson, whose case exemplifies the worst intersection of adult prudishness and prurience. I also remember from my middle school years a couple of cases of kids having sex at 13 or 14 that didn't seem harmful. But I also remember other kids who seemed confused or taken advantage of, and yes, they were girls. Juliet, do we really want to veer closer toward a norm that sweeps up young teens? You were in 8th grade a lot more recently than I was--what in your experience makes you think differently than I do?
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This weekend, a friend showed me artist Edina Tokodi’s incredible moss
graffiti, which features moss in the form of animals like rabbits and deer
and abstract compositions mounted on walls in Williamsburg, Brooklyn. Tokodi’s
work is a whimsical surprise, green and playful. But I think moss will be creeping up on us more and more.
Last week, the New York Times announced it was installing an
“open-air birch and moss garden” in the lobby of its new building. It was about
to import seven ginormous birch trees and “several tons of moss” from New
Jersey, according to incredulous accounts from NY
Mag and Gawker.
Moss has also shown up in designs for green rooftops. And a few years ago, a
“moss laboratory” was created in a shed at a minimum-security prison
(because working with plants is apparently good for inmates and moss
cultivation does not require sharp objects.)
Where else will moss spread? I’m betting yoga studios, table
arrangements, and fancy facial cleansers. Maybe moss is the new lemongrass. Still, tooling around the web, I realized its new uses couldn’t possibly be more creative
than its traditional ones: some kinds of moss were included in wound dressings because
of their antibacterial properties. Some were even used as diapers because they
can absorb up to ten times their weight in liquid. Any takers?
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