The XX Factor: What women really think.

Don't Make Rules About Teen Sex

Emily, Jess, Hanna, when it comes to teens and sex, the language of "condoning" doesn't seem that useful to me. After all, it just reinforces a kind of pressure and rebellion, a dichotomy that takes authority and security away from the girl (or boy) trying to figure out how she feels about sex. And sex is, finally, extremely personal. That's part of what makes it so hard to agree about. So, Emily, rather than condone or disapprove, I think parents need to cast the discussion about teen sex in terms of autonomy and making good choices. (Also: Protection!!!) Basically, I think you say what my mom said to me, which is actually similar to what Tami said to Julia. In the midst of some crisis, I had mentioned that a friend of mine was having sex. My mom's response made me stop and think (even if it was awkward, too). She said, pretty simply, that sex was a very special thing that could be beautiful (yes, she used that word!), but sometimes wasn't. And that for my sake, she hoped I would make sure it happened in a way I felt good about. A lot of her meaning was conveyed in her tone and in her attitude, which was direct, inclusive, and not embarrassed. It had as large an impact on me as her words. It made me feel that having sex was my choice (which took it out of the realm of rebellious activity) but also that she had motherly hopes about how I'd feel about my choices. 

Because sex is so personal, the idea of assigning an abstract age at which it is "OK" for kids to have sex doesn't feel terribly useful to me. (I grant that under 15 seems too young.)  Put it this way: I had sex for the first time when I was 17, with a boyfriend I absolutely loved. In college a year or so later, I briefly went out with someone I liked but was much less close to. I am confident that if I'd "waited" and had had sex for the first time with him, I would not have felt as good or as secure about it. In other words, older is not necessarily better. Kids have to choose for themselves. They can only do this if they truly are choosing for themselves, if parents are helping them see that choice is a way out of peer pressure, and that their choice is valid. Talking openly--rather than handing down rules--has an additional boon: some studies show that countries or cultures where parents routinely talk to their kids about sex have the lowest rates of teen pregnancy and STDs.

On a side note: As a non-parent, it often seems to me that parents focus on the issue of age and sex because later always seems better to them. It means that much more time when they don't have to confront their own rightfully ambivalent, complex feelings about their kids having sex.

Scripting the Great Teen Sex Talk

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?

Teen Sexual Reality Much More Complicated Than Purity Mythology

Your question is a good one, Emily. The flip side of the purity pressures are well-drawn in Ariel Levy's excellent Female Chauvinist Pigs. I remember one girl Levy spoke to in particular—a pretty, leggy California high schooler who had sex utterly without pleasure. She did it to keep up with her fellow popular Janeses; she did it because she felt it gave her a measure of power over the men in her life. Sex didn't make her feel good, not one bit.

For me, one of the biggest problems with Valenti's book is that she makes the personal political to an outrageous degree with vignettes about her adolescent sexcapades. Her attitude is essentially, I had sex in high school by choice and it worked out, so having sex in high school is a positive thing. For many, many women this is not the case. From what I observed when I was a teen, most of my cohorts were happier when they waited until 17 or 18 to become sexually active; it is a rare 14 or 15-year-old who is secure enough in herself to have sex without regret. I think we should encourage teens to wait until college, but supply them with the proper contraception if they choose not to. As we all know, encouraging people to wait until marriage is completely unrealistic.

However, teens are so woefully undereducated about sex in this country that the first step should be to get them proper information from the get-go. The next step after that is more difficult because we cannot remove teenagers from their own social ecosystems. While a teenager in rural Alabama may be pressured by the so-called purity myth, a teenager in San Francisco may be pressured by her sexually active friends. The best bet is to encourage internal traits—like self-confidence—that help teens make the right choice for themselves. Again, I will return to Margaret Talbot's point in the New Yorker article Red Sex, Blue Sex: teens who feel they have a lot at stake will delay sexual intercourse and when they do have sex, have it responsibly. If I knew how to make all teen girls feel like they have a future worth waiting for, I would be a trillionairess.

Busting the Purity Myth--What Replaces It?

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?