The XX Factor: What women really think.

Is the Teen Sex Talk Different for Sons and Daughters?

Hanna, I think you hit the nail right on the head. Most modern moms are profoundly ambivalent about their daughters' sex lives (sons too, but we'll get to that in a second). I would find it incredibly creepy if a mother told her barely legal daughter, "I'd love it if you were sexually active!" And what about from a daughter's point of view? I didn't want my mother's approval or disapproval when I became sexually active; I didn't want her involved at all. This is something that young adults need to navigate for themselves, for the most part, but of course parents should be there for questions and problems should they arise. My own mother handled this situation well, I think, and of course it still mortified me. I was a freshman in high school and was quite far from wanting to have sex. My mom came into my room bearing a brown paper bag and said, "Your father and I don't condone you having sex in high school, but if you're going to have sex, we want you to be safe." With that she opened the paper bag and left me with a pack of condoms. The message was certainly mixed; but it didn't sway me towards continued virginity or desire to lose it. All it made me want to do was bury my head in my pillows and die.

Emily, I wonder if mothers' attitude to their sons' sex lives is the other side of the Tami reaction: they worry, not just about their sons getting hurt, but also (assuming their sons are heterosexual) about their sons being insensitive towards their girlfriends. They remember all the jerks they dated and pray that they have not spawned a scumbag. Would any mothers of sons care to weigh in?

True Love Waste

Melinda, it’s a fine idea to tell teenagers to wait. Except that it really doesn’t work. This is not liberal wishful thinking. Researchers have pried into the sex lives of abstinence-pledgers and discovered that at best, taking the pledge delays sex by 18 months. But it also encourages more of them to have unprotected sex. (See my review of the book, Forbidden Fruit, for Slate.) Teens who have pledged don’t really admit they are having sex until they’ve already had it, which is kind of too late for the condom (Witness Bristol. Also read Margaret Talbot on the messy realities of red state sex.) My other favorite sexy virgin of the screen is Lyla Garrity, the True Love Waits hottie on Friday Night Lights. For the first couple of episodes, she is snuggling with her boyfriend and dreaming about their wedding. Then she stumbles into an accidental kiss with her boyfriend’s best friend, and one scene later we see her getting up from his couch, pulling on her underwear. This is reality. It’s only in the vampire version that what the preacher said comes true: Go beyond the kiss, and you’re risking your life. 

Do I Feel Bad for Miley Cyrus?

When I wrote about Miley Cyrus not long ago, I was most struck by how profoundly Cyrus had already become a pure product of American culture. Disney, by creating Hannah Montana, has traded on Cyrus' status as celeb-daughter and wannabe pop star to feed the aspirations of scores of young girls across America to become not artists so much as celebrities. Weird. The result for Cyrus has been an attempt by Disney to hyper-stage manage her life, and, in particular, her coming of age as an adolescent. The last thing they want is for any whiff of sexuality to attach to her; but the last thing Cyrus and her parents want is for her to go the way of child stars who can't make the transition to successful adult pop-stardom. Which makes me kinda sympathetic to Nayeli's argument that it'd be interesting if Cyrus did become a spokeswoman for LifeStyles condoms: It'd be inspiring to see a young woman at a sexual threshold refuse to take part in the pretense that she and her peers are not coming of age. And it's a good message for all teenagers: if you are going to have sex (and guess what, they are), just do it as safely as you can. On the other hand, eavesdropping on this whole debate only makes me twinge more with regret that Cyrus—much like the character she plays on Hannah Montana—is so beseiged by pop culture and the media that the ethical decisions she has to make revolve around whether she should be a spokeswoman for a product or whether to appear on a Vanity Fair cover. If she really wanted to send a message to  her peers, why not back away from endorsements of any kind and do some low-key volunteer work or donate to a safe-sex ed program? You'd be killing two birds with one stone by rejecting the self-consciousness and hyper-packaged nature of being a young pop star while doing a bit of good.