Worth The Wait

I think that the issue of teen sexuality comes up a lot in politics for a very simple reason: People care about it. There's a lot of parents out there who don't like the idea of their kids having sex, whether for religious reasons or because it's unhealthy, or whatever.

I don't think this issue is being pushed on Americans by a small ultra-religious minority.

So what do we, as liberals, do about this issue? How can we address this concern that people have? If we just say "Well, anyone should be able to do anything they want as long as it doesn't harm other people," and leave it at that, then the conservatives will continue to be the only ones addressing this issue. And that means stupid policies like "abstinence education"...

House is a stupid analogy.
Sex is like a new car.
Do you give someone a new car and expect them to wait until marriage to drive it?

Wouldn't "throwing a rock through your window" be rape? Since it's an involuntary violation. Actually, that would be more like breaking and entering... I honestly can't think of a way that metaphor works. I'm confused.

Are you allowed to talk with someone on your lawn? Receive mail?

Well, how do you really use policy to deal with the issue? You can point out that it is a public health issue (STD's) and that students who learn about safe sex have lower pregnancy rates and STD rates than students who don't, but beyond that how do you get the state to penetrate into society enough? Is that even desirable? All of this Mrs. Lovejoy, "won't someone please think of the children?" crap assumes an all-powerful government that will actually see its policies turn out effectively without unforeseen consequences. The truth of the matter is teen pregnancy has been going down for decades. Kids today aren't exactly recreating the "summer of love." The baby boomers were out of control and are now part of the most cynical generation in recent history. Parents today just get up their child knows what a blowjob looks like because they look at internet porn. Expecting parents to be honest about their kids and not get a holier-than-thou attitude about their generation versus their kids' generation is wishful thinking.

No. We all know it is the husband who is supposed to throw rocks through the windows of your home. This should be done frequently, and ONLY through the same window - never through the back door or other windows.

Beautifully eloquent metaphor, WaPo.

There's a lot of parents out there who don't like the idea of their kids having sex, whether for religious reasons or because it's unhealthy, or whatever.

Yes, but the vast majority fall under "whatever," which comprises the many parents who can't really deal emotionally with the idea of their children--including their grown children--having sex (the corollary of childrens' discomfort with the idea of their parents having sex), and rationalize their own discomfiture into a moral or "health" compulsion why their children should be abstinent. Of course, under a certain age it certainly is inappropriate and emotionally risky for adolescents to have sex, but we're not largely talking about that age, we're talking about consenting adults or late adolescents--Stepp's book, after all, "follows three high school girls and six college women." (See Matt's link.)

Defenestration never sounded so hawt!

"Think about the first home you hope to own. You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?"

First the "community gum" story, now this. It's been a banner week for completely ridiculous sex metaphors!

You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?

That's why good girls have it thrown through the back window.

Speaking of sex and the media and politicians:

RE: http://mediamatters.org/items/200702170002 --

I hold no brief for Hillary, but I agree:

If the press is going to go after her and Bill for a) piggybacking on a powerful spouse and b) being a horndog, then why not ask (as Jamison Foser of Media Matters asks) the media why they aren't talking about John McCain's piggybacking on his rich and connected wife Cindy?

Or Rudy's and McCain's horn-doggery?

Or -- as Foser doesn't mention -- Rudy's own reliance on HIS rich-and-connected then-wife, Donna Hanover, without whom Rudy would be nothing?

As Gee notes, the problem here is distinguishing between a real problem (for example, the very serious problem of older men preying on underaged girls; or teens having unsafe sex) and the fake problem (unmarried people generally having sex). The hard right wants to conflate the two, when they are entirely different. In black neighborhoods in Chicago, for example, there is a serious problem with girls as young as 13 or 14 getting into relationships with 20 years olds. Mary Mitchell has written extensively about the problem in the Tribune, which is shockingly widespread. That has nothing to do with the fact that, for example, two 18 year-olds may want to have sex, and have been informed as to how to do it with less risk to their health. Similarly, do we really believe that a 13 year-old and a 14 year-old are mature enough to deal with the problems of sex? As liberals, we need to distinguish between trying to address actual problems and the hard right trying to legislate morality.

Um, as for what our answer is: how about comprehensive sex education, which includes not only teaching kids how to behave in less unsafe ways, but also how to try to make responsible choices in an area fraught with messy (and misogynistic) social expectations as well as physical dangers like pregnancy and STDs?

Parents may not be eager to think about their kids having sex, and more than kids are eager to think about their parents having sex. But since it's gonna happen someday, parents need to think about how you actually prepare kids to make more responsible choices, and evidence shows that scaring them about throwing rocks through windows doesn't work at all.

In the end, like so many debates, this once comes down to whether you want to send a message, or you want to achieve policy goals. Conservatives like their anti-sex message, whereas we have policies (comprehensive sex education) that actually achieve the goal parents seek. (Just look at teen pregnancy rates in Massachusetts vs. Texas.) Showing that our policies are the right ones won't convince conservatives who would rather send a message (see e.g. right-wingers who are still against the cervical cancer vaccine because they want to send an anti-sex message). Somehow we have to point out the fact that our policies work, and do so by treating kids as future adults who have to take responsibility for their actions and therefore need to learn to make good choices.

> Are you allowed to talk with someone on your lawn? Receive mail?
This is /such/ a good analogy. I do not think. Because your parents coming over for dinner is life-destroying, having a dinner party ruins your enjoyment of eating and opening a door to someone is exactly the same as them breaking in.

First Marriage? No, he/she who would throw stones (of this type, IP's point being taken) has to show that they saved it for each marriage -- no sex outside of any marriage.

Sometimes it's not even a matter of policy; the government isn't all-powerful, and it certainly can't stop people from having sex.

But people like to see that their public figures, including politicians, care about the issue. So if liberals drop the rhetoric on this issue, parents will drift conservative. It's that simple. In fact, I think that's one of the reasons America "shifted to the right" in the 80s and 90s; conservatives just kept harping on the sex issue, and liberals just shut up and ignored it. So now, as a result of that drift, we have a corporate patronage-state, a militarist foreign policy, rising inequality, "intelligent design", domestic surveillance, environmental suicide-ism, etc.

Talking occasionally about how kids shouldn't be having sex is a small price to pay for keeping conservatives out of power, in my opinion.

I think that the issue of teen sexuality comes up a lot in politics for a very simple reason: People care about it. There's a lot of parents out there who don't like the idea of their kids having sex, whether for religious reasons or because it's unhealthy, or whatever.

Yes, people care about teen sexuality, but the vast majority of them do not want to do away with sex education. Certainly, the people concerned about health don't want to. The people who support abstinence-only education mainly do it for religious reasons.

That's the issue here. Other than sex ed and abortion laws, teen sexuality is a private issue, not a public one.

The problem with trying to scare people into not doing the Big Forbidden Thing, whatever it may be, is that this doesn't even work on a three year old, let alone on a teenager. Religious conservatives might recall that this strategy didn't work terribly well on Adam and Eve, either, but they will never stop beating their heads against the wall of scare-em hector-em threaten-em childrearing.

If you want kids to act more like responsible adults, you've got to treat them more like responsible adults, giving them all the information and at the same time helping them think through how to make their OWN choices. And that includes teenagers too young to have sex responsibly: they need to learn to think it through and AGREE that they're too young, or else, they're gonna go out and have sex at 13. When will parents learn that kids have minds of their own?

Too many parents in this country treat having kids are something they are expected to do and then realize they have no idea what raising them entails. They go on auto-pilot - "Oh no, my daughter held hands with a boy and had a glass of syrah" - and lose all connection with reality while overlooking their days of blacking out between coke-and-vodka binges. Then they say, "well, my parents did the same thing and I turned out fine," and start lecturing their critics about how they don't have kids or enough kids to point out their bullshit because they don't know man because they weren't there man!

I don't think that people en masse want invasive behavior from thier government when it comes to sex, but I also think that people are gullible and easily riled up. The whole issue is a big nothing. But you can get people's faux anger levels up by talking about "rainbow parties" and myspace and blah di blah. Look, its still illegal to have oral sex in Massachussetts. Nobody pays attention to any of these laws. The only necessary sex laws are the ones which 1) etsablish an age of consent, 2) establish that forced sex is a felony punishable by heavy prison sentences and a lifelong tag as a sexual offender and 3) protecting people's right to birth control and health care services as advised by their doctors. Other than that, the only response should be to toss Republican hypcrisy right back at them, as Atrios suggests. Don't engage in a god damn debate about it, just ridicule the prudish Republicans as the out of touch, big brother embracing anti-sex goons that they are.

"You wouldn't want someone to throw a rock through the front window, would you?"

No. That would be horrible. Which is why women shouldn't wait until marriage... that way if it IS like a rock being thrown through a window, they can move on until they find someone who can throw boulders.

The baby boomers were out of control and are now part of the most cynical generation in recent history.

My, the arrogant ignorance leading to such educated sweeping conclusions. My parents (born in the mid 30s - came of age in the 50s) grew up in a working class neighborhood in NYC. They "had" to get married at the age of 16. Most of their peers "had" to get married before the age of 20 - very few of them even graduated high school - and since that was pretty much the norm, nobody really thought much about it. When I was a kid in the 50s I had a slew of neighborhood "aunts and uncles" who were all in their 20s and all had several kids of their own.

The baby boomers didn't invent being out of control - teens were very much "out of control" way before the Boomers came along. What changed were science, econommics and education (the pill and the fact that not having a high school degree didn't cut it any more) as well as societal mores - after the 60s, you got pregnant, there were other alternatives to "having" to get married or being sent away to a home to have the baby. What also changed was that in society in general, sex was no longer considered hush-hush and was actually addressed as an issue. Perhaps that visibility compared to previous generations is what makes you imagine that this all started with the hated baby-boomers.

If I wanted to look for cynical generations "in recent history", I might look to those who cast wide yet shallow judgements based upon... I don't know what, exactly. But the boomers, when we were young, saw a world filled with hypocricy and actually tried to change it. What exactly has your generation put aside it's love of videogames to actually do to change things?

Laura Sessions Stepp is the mother of one of my former students, who I taught in middle school in Arlington. It was a great school, with very high standards, lots of activities for kids, tremendous parental support, great teachers. It was in an affluent part of town and many parents who kept their kids in private school for elementary and high school would actually have them attend our public school because it was so well regarded. It was a very high-pressure school. Almost all the kids were highly scheduled with sports, lessons, extra tutoring, and all sorts of structured activities. The parents were so hyped up for their overachieving kids that I even had a few demand that I give their kids extra help because they "only" scored 1200 on their SAT's (for the Johns Hopkins Talent Search) in MIDDLE school!

Sessions Stepp's son was in all gifted classes; a great kid, somewhat geeky, but with a good circle of friends who tended to be a bit more innocent than most of the other kids that age. He was well adjusted, well liked, and seemed pretty happy.

Sessions Stepp's first really big piece for the WaPo was a expose about an oral sex scandal at our middle school. Seems a bunch of 8th graders had a fairly regular habit of having oral sex parties after school and even in parent homes when the parents were home. The kids who participated in this were mostly from very affluent homes, active in sports and other activities, with every possible advantage that a parent could give. Parents were FREAKED out by this. It totally rocked the school that kids were engaged in this kind of casual sexual activity with multiple partners with very cavalier attitudes.

I don't think Sessions Stepp has ever gotten over the shock. It seems like all of her stories still echo that same incredulty from a decade ago -- how could it be that all these "good kids" have sex??? Like it's no big deal??? Ack!!! It seems like all of her reporting, even now, reflects that her world-view was really shaken by the oral sex ring in her kid's "good" school.

> Sex is like a new car.
> Do you give someone a new car and expect them to wait until marriage to drive it?

Well if you don't have your license yet would it be OK to get in the seat and play with the stick shift a little bit?

How ya gonna keep 'em down on the farm, after they've seen Paree?

The world is divided between people who accept that sex is simply part of who we are (the posters here) and those who for some reason don't, and think it can be controlled.

If you think that sex is simply part of being human, you pretty much want abortion to remain safe and legal and teenagers to be taught about STDs and condoms.

If you think that sex and sexual activity can be constantly controlled, you're probably against abortion and certainly against educating teens about it.

Wouldn't a nice set of pots and pans be a better metaphor. If you never boil water, fry an egg, make a casserole, or fry some fantastic chicken, you're never going to be a good cook. Why ruin your spouse's first dinner by not knowing how to use your equipment. And besides...if you take good care of your equipment it's not going to get ruined by using it. Just avoid spoiled ingredients, wash it thoroughly after each use, and and let it hang out to dry.

if it IS like a rock being thrown through a window, they can move on until they find someone who can throw boulders.

Size queen.

Parents don't mind if their kids have sex, they just don't want them to have more sex than they did when they were teenagers.

Teen sexuality comes up a lot because Republican politicians are obsessed with fucking teenagers. Not as much as Catholic priests, perhaps, but a really close second.

There's a "let he who is without...cast the first stone" joke in here somewhere, but I can't come up with it.

In Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them, Al Franken contacted a bunch of right-wingers for a (fake) book project called Savin’ It. I still long for it to become a reality!

This isn't about keeping young people from having sex. It's about instilling in them a sense of shame, guilt and unworthiness through which they can be manipulated and controlled.

It'd no coincidence that ab-ed's biggest supporters (aside from pandering politicians) tend to be the kind of people whose concept of morality begins and ends in their underwear.

Throwing a rock throught the window would be the counterpart of rape. Consentual sex is like opening the front door and inviting somebody in. Does one only invite people to who one is married into your home?

I remember the LSS story on oral sex in 8th grade. My Republican neighbor from across the street immediately called me (she reads the WaPo online and used to work in D.C.) to warn me that my middle school sons were probably going down on girls during recess at their public school. I had to patiently tell her that it would be very difficult for the kids to be having oral sex at recess since it was in an open area, no hidden spots.

Anyhow, I remember skimming that article. I'm a liberal mom of three sons, now ages 14, 17 and 19. I vote straight Democrat and yeah, I think 8th graders having oral sex parties are out-of-line---it shows lack of personal boundries and an acceptance of sex as a casual group activity. I think kids should postpone having sex until they're out of high school----sex is great, but it's better when you're older.

According to Planned Parenthood, somethng like 50 percent of the kids in high school are not sexually active This figure has stayed stable for years..

Anyhow, I can see why Laura Sessions Stepp was freaked out about 8th grade blow jobs. But I don't think 8th grade blow jobs have become "the norm."

I think the more important thing, in the long run, is to talk about what kind of relationship do you generally want to be having with someone that you have sex with? A few flings are okay, but in the long run, you don't want to have an endless series of casual, consumer-oriented relationships. It would be such a shallow, twisted, exploitive way to live. You end up having to spend a lot of time with shallow, selfish assholes, male and female.

By the way, I was raised in a conservative, evangelical culture. From childhood on, we were strictly and relentlessly warned not to have sex before marriage.Adults were totally obsessed with it. All the other big moral topics--greed, violence, poverty, racial justice, embezzling, stealing, lying, sobriety--paled in comparision to whether or not we were virgins at marriage. I graduated from Wheaton College in Illinois, where I signed a four-year pledge not to drink, do drugs, smoke, dance or have sex. Okay, so I drank and dance, but otherwise I was a Pure Girl. Which was fine with me, since I wasn't really ready to have sex at the time; I didn't like getting high; and I hated smoking.

A lot of my Wheaton friends married the first person they had sex with..........not necessarily a good idea and could explain why the divorce rates among evangelicals tend to be high. While at Wheaton, I also ended up talking to girls who had all kinds of ways to remain technical virgins. Sex was forbidden. And sex was defined as vaginal intercourse. Which meant that for many of my classmates, oral sex was fine. Sometimes anal sex too. I heard more weird sex stories at Wheaton than I ever did at my Ivy League graduate school. Sex was a really, really big deal at Wheaton. More so than at any other place I've been.

Anyhow, I'm no longer evangelical---I turned into one of those liberal mainline Protestants instead. My faith still matters to me. Our family still goes to church every Sunday. And no, I don't want my kids sexually active in high school and so far.....to the best of my knowledge..... they haven't been. But I certainly don't tell them to wait until marriage. I didn't. Neither did most of my evangelical friends.

Again, we need to stop focussing on "The Act" and focus on the relationships.

One more aside: I'm almost 50. In the last 30 years, I've seen that girls who are sexually active at a pretty young age---especially under 15---have usually been sexually abused by someone in their life. We know sexual abuse obviously crosses all racial, economic and educational lines. I would bet that at least some of those wealthy 8th graders that Laura Sessions Stepps wrote about were sexually abused by their fathers or step-fathers. Kids who are sexually abused often don't have personal boundaries and confuse sex with love. Or they keep acting out sexually in a way to make their earlier experiences seem "okay."

I had a roommate at Wheaton who was seriously sexually twisted and did all kinds of werid things. She was also one of those Bible-thumping, evangelizing, moralizing types. At the time, I thought she was the world's biggest phony and hypocrit. Much later I found out she had been horribly abused, probably since toddlerhood. She was crazy a lot of the times. But looking back, I know think it was a miracle she was even half-sane.

Sorry, this is a long rant. But I'm sick of hearing Republicans say that Democrats don't care if their kids are sexually active. Here in my very Democratic Congressional district in the Midwest, surrounded by Dems on all sides in the neighborhood and in church, you bet we care about whether our teenagers are sexually active. I think we are just willing to look at the big picture and focus on relationships as opposed to rigid rules.

Also, there's a big difference between 8th graders having blow-job parties and two seniors in high school who are in their third year of a committed, healthy relationship having sex. I still think postponing sex until you're out of high school is a good idea. But evangelicals don't make the distinction the two above relationships. If it's sex before marriage, it's bad.

Hey "Some perspective on LSS",

I thought the oral sex party story was urban legend. But you're saying it really was happening in 8th grade there? How did the story come out? Did some parent walk in, or ??? I'm still kinda skeptical...

On the other hand, it is not wise to invite people who one does not know into the house. A better argument for meaningful relationships, instead of casual ones, can be made than the house metaphor.

politicians who want to foist this kind of thing on the public ought to get asked the question: Did McCain save it for his first marriage?

If he didn't, would that somehow undercut his message? This is like saying because Obama did coke once upon a time, he cannot legitimately take any anti-drug positions. This is just silly logic.

"But the boomers, when we were young, saw a world filled with hypocricy and actually tried to change it. What exactly has your generation put aside it's love of videogames to actually do to change things?"

And later they were they supported things like Reagen and the War on Drugs, the latter of which has probably done more to harm African-Americans than any set of policies out there. This is despite the fact the boomers experimented with everything under the sun. In sum, the boomers became the hypocrites they despised. Now that is cynical, much more cynical than speaking generally in any way. It isn't boomers today who are the loyal opposition to Bush, but are important among his enablers. Boomers complained about how the Deaniacs and MoveOn.org activists were just a bunch of young kids. It isn't the youth pushing for abstinence-only sex education.

"This is like saying because Obama did coke once upon a time, he cannot legitimately take any anti-drug positions. This is just silly logic."

Why is it silly? If someone believes that drug users should go to jail and that same person has used drugs, then logically their beliefs dictate they should go to jail. I'm tired of this hypocrisy where former drug-using politicians - mostly white - send minority kids to jail for having some pot. It basically says that there are different standards of behavior in America based on privilege and race. Now, I don't believe Obama has taken such a position, but I don't really know much about his opinions on the war on drugs.

Let's not forget the Vice-Prevaricator-in-Chief has a daugher having a child out of wedlock. I'm shocked, shocked that the right-wing is not up in arms. Shouldn't she be burned or hanged or something?

Why is it always the GIRLS who get the lectures?

"I hold no brief for Hillary, but I agree:

If the press is going to go after her and Bill for a) piggybacking on a powerful spouse and b) being a horndog, then why not ask (as Jamison Foser of Media Matters asks) the media why they aren't talking about John McCain's piggybacking on his rich and connected wife Cindy?

Or Rudy's and McCain's horn-doggery?

Or -- as Foser doesn't mention -- Rudy's own reliance on HIS rich-and-connected then-wife, Donna Hanover, without whom Rudy would be nothing?"

Silly - it's okay if you are a Repugnican.

I don't even think about my daughters ever having sex. On the other hand I don't want them to be some whack job with issues who compares sex to a criminal act like vandalism. I'd rather they have enough knowledge about sex to deal with any issues -- from emotions to birth control to prevention of STDs to society's views -- so that they can live as healthy human beings who enjoy what life has to offer.

All I have is my own experience, which (as i recall) included sex education class beginning with one at 7, then a few at 10, then regularly (1 or 2 a year) from 12 through 17 - just in case we had any questions.

Are you a progressive parent without the courage to talk sex, but want your kids to grow up without huge sex hangups? Bring them to the Unitarian Church on Sundays. Watching my college friends deal with their repressed BS was one reason I'm glad I grew up UU. Another reason is that I never got VD, because I wasn't stupid about sex - because I had people available to me who talked openly about it on a regular, if scheduled, basis, and fielded questions.

i hope my kids have great sex lives. i hope they have mind shattering orgasms, and give similar joy to their chosen partners, that they practice safe sex emotionally as well as physically and that they don't feel guilty about it afterwards.

i love them, and want them to have the best of all parts of life.

Other than sex ed and abortion laws, teen sexuality is a private issue, not a public one.

I disagree. I think it's a public issue, because I think that most people consider it a public issue.

If you want kids to act more like responsible adults, you've got to treat them more like responsible adults, giving them all the information and at the same time helping them think through how to make their OWN choices.

I agree completely. I think that's what good sex ed is about. But to give kids advice, and say, "If you have sex with people who don't care about you, you may wind up cynical and unhappy," is no bad thing, IMHO. And I think that's the message a lot of parents want their kids to hear.

Don't engage in a god damn debate about it, just ridicule the prudish Republicans as the out of touch, big brother embracing anti-sex goons that they are.

But I think if Democrats come across as being pro-sex (i.e. supporting sex for sex's sake), it will lead to them not winning many elections.

The world is divided between people who accept that sex is simply part of who we are (the posters here) and those who for some reason don't, and think it can be controlled.

I don't think the division is that stark. Even the people on this board don't hire teen prostitutes, for example (I hope!). We control our own sexuality, often in accordance with social mores. People are smart enough to recognize that sex is not a yes/no question.

I don't even think about my daughters ever having sex...I'd rather they have enough knowledge about sex to deal with any issues -- from emotions to birth control to prevention of STDs to society's views -- so that they can live as healthy human beings who enjoy what life has to offer.

I think a lot of parents feel the same way, they're just not smart or calm or educated enough to put in these terms. They don't want to see their kids go have sex with the wrong people. And they don't want a culture that, as they see it, encourages kids to do exactly that. So they look to politicians (among others) to fight against what they see as society's unhealthy sexual norms.

Some people (usually conservatives) put this in terms of their religion, and they say "God doesn't want you to have sex until you're married." Other people (mostly liberals) put in terms of health. But conservative parents and liberal parents aren't all that different, really. I've seen plenty of both.

So if liberal politicians want their movement to be a majority movement, they need to address this deep-seated need. They need to show they care about the issue of sex's place in our culture. Because if they don't do that, the conservatives will own this issue until the end of time.

Midwest Meg - Great post.

I just seems to me that if I owned a house I might want to scour out the plumbing from time to time just to keep it fresh.

What if I painted the house... with whipped cream and then tossed kandy kisses at it while it twirled provocatively before me?

And then pressed the doorbell. Several times.

Would that be okay?

Let Rudy and John off the hook just so long as they talk openly about how their out-of-wedlock sexual activities were just youthful experimentation, that they know better now, etc., etc. Yeah, Obama did coke, but he's (1) admitted it and (2) can legitimately claim youthful indiscretion, that he knows better now, etc., etc. Rudy and John haven't even admitted that they acted against their pro-abstinance positions. They have a long way to go to avoid being utter hypocrites.

Torahs are not the only things that get handled at Yeshiva.
Many rabbis are fascinated with the holy of holies.
http://www.theawarenesscenter.org/

So long as people think they have a right to keep children ignorant the argument will always be about what they don't want their children to do, instead of what they don't want their children to know. I think the debate needs to be about wether children have a right to be treated as human citizens. Parents as well as sociey have a responsibility to inform children.

I read through this thread for the jokes, but thanks Midwest Meg. That was a wonderful post.

I would say, determine what the outcome is that you would like (and it has to be reality-based). Then I would say look at the public policies of countries that have teenagers acting the most responsibly. (I suspect it's Scandinavia but possibly most of northern Europe.) Then implement those policies.

The debate in this country is immature, anti-sexual, and annoyingly stupid.

To collate some of the above posts, kids should wait with sex until they become adults and pretty twisted adults at that.

I would say, determine what the outcome is that you would like (and it has to be reality-based). Then I would say look at the public policies of countries that have teenagers acting the most responsibly. (I suspect it's Scandinavia but possibly most of northern Europe.) Then implement those policies.

The debate in this country is immature, anti-sexual, and annoyingly stupid.

The Canadian government conducted a study in the 1980's to determine what the risks were with regards to teen-adult sex. The study concluded that children under 14 should never have contact with adults and that older teens should be more or less off limits to adults in a position of trust or authority. With this in mind they modified their legal definitions of individuals as follows...

Child: Less than 14 years old

Young Person: 14-17 years old

Adult: At least 18 years old

The law has been modified to allow for the prosecution of individuals for "sexual exploitation of minors". This is merely a more flexible interpretation of what constitutes a position of authority. The obvious stuff is covered, like high school teachers having sex with students who are minors. Pornography and prostitution is restricted to adults. It is also possible to convict adults simply on the basis of age difference, where sex between a 19 year old and a 15 year old might be dismissed, sex between a 45 year old and a 14 year old would almost certainly result in jail time. Further, the way in which the relationship was formed can come into play. Was it a "boy meets girl" type of situation, or did it begin on the internet?

It's a fairly reasonable way to regulate the issue of teen sex. But I gather from reading the comments that most people are just naive about the reality of teen-adult sex. Many buy into the hype that it is inherently evil and sick, that's nonsense. I knew a girl who lost her virginity at 16 with her 17 year old boyfriend after dating for two years. Pretty normal, right? They broke up shortly afterwards and she started dating 30 year olds. At 19, she married a 35 year old doctor. We were friends, and she was very comfortable discussing this stuff with me. When I asked her if she felt weird at all about having dated guys in their late 30's as a 16 year old, she looked at me as if I asked her whether she was ever bothered by being a carbon-based life form. It was just natural to her. She wasn't mental, she never became a stripper (not that I think there's any shame in that profession) she was a warm, funny, sensible girl who was very bright and compassionate. She was just into older dudes, some girls are. There is quite a bit of evidence that this sort of behavior has alot more to do with genetic traits than poor environmental conditions. We're not talking about some small fringe element here. There is at least a significant minority of the population which is wired this way, and there isn't much evidence that it is inherently harmful. This is the sort of thing that some people will do, and as we have (hopefully) learned from the disastrous War on Drugs, it's completely futile to try and prohibit people from doing what they are predisposed to do. The efforts to do so through prohibition policies tend to do more harm to society than good.

All this hysteria about how men are evil predators seeking to get 13 year old girls pregnant serves the precise same purpose in this debate as the hysteria about international terrorism serves in the war debate. It's a debate killer, don't fall for it. Once you start wringing your hands about the prospect of some poor young girl being used and abused by an evil, bad (and worst of all) older man (gasp! horror!) then you've lost the debate and may as well figure out what size chastity belt your kid is going to need. Of course there are some bad guys (and gals) out there who exploit adolescents, and that's often damaging to those young people. Al Qaeda, likewise, is a real threat. But this is the kicker... the policies being proposed ostensibly to deal with this issue, not only do nothing to effectively fight these problems, they make them much worse.

The problem is unlikely to ever be addressed properly because, just as most Americans are shockingly ignorant of what is going on in the Middle East, most Americans are equally clueless about sexuality in general, to say nothing of teenage sexuality. While I concede that teen sex is a minefield, and it is largely undiscovered country ( I don't think there has been near enough reseach done on it) I think the real problem is that there alot of parents out there who are frankly not terribly experienced sexually. That's what no sex until marriage gets you, alot of parents who are unbelievably ignorant about dating. I also suspect that alot of people didn't do much dating when they were in high school, or perhaps they just can't be honest with themselves about what they did during those years once they have kids that age.

This is the fundamental challenge our society faces. No, really. Think about it. If our society wasn't so totally stupid about sex, there is no way a crackhead like George W. Bush could have been elected. Abstinence was a bit part of his appeal to voters, maybe the biggest. America is the greatest nation on the planet, if we could focus our national resources to solve to various problems the world faces, I have little doubt those problems would promptly find themselves solved. We must stop being distracted by paranoid fear mongering. Many commenters noted the issue of misogyny, but no one mentions the issue of misandry. That's a problem. Just as the Israel/Palestine issue can't be solved unilaterly, neither can the problem of gender hatred. Misogyny does not exist in a vacuum, boys don't just wake up and decide that they hate women. All that resentment and distrust is built up through years of experience. The problem is one of a general contempt of sexuality. Specifically, girls are taught that sex is dirty and that boys are monsters for wanting to have sex with them. Girls are seldom taught to have any empathy for men at all, except their male family members. When puberty hits, girls are compelled to interact with boys they are attracted to, but they recoil with horror from the advances of boys they are not interested in. Girls can in fact be especially cruel in their rejection of boys, and this behavior can continue into adulthood. Many women think nothing about hanging up on a guy they don't wish to speak to, without even the courtesy of an explanation. Boys are expected to accept this and adapt to it, which many do by objectifying females. After all, it doesn't hurt to be rejected by an object. Beyond that, men are taught that what they want to do with girls is dirty and shameful, but that if they fail to do it then they are weak and essentially failures as men. This no doubt accounts for why so many men develop all sorts of sexual disorders and engage in deviant behavior.

The problem of misandry is becoming obvious now, as we can observe that boys are now lagging well behing girls in school and fewer and fewer boys are making it through college, and there has been a disturbing rise in the tendency of men to be presented as weak and incompetent in the media. What I propose will no doubt upset some people, but I believe we need drastic change. Feminism needs to be replaced by something less devisive. It's not that society isn't unfair to women, it is (or rather, it can be... something I'll expand on later). But just because feminists have a legitimate beef doesn't mean that what they're doing is productive. Black Panthers certainly had a legitimate beef in their day, but the whole Black Power thing didn't do much besides inflame existing hatreds. Likewise, feminism doesn't seem to accomplish much in the modern era besides increasing the distrust between men and women. I find particularly disturbing the attempt by some feminists to bamboozle people into believing that 1 in 4 men are rapists. This bit of fear mongering is untrue and deliberately misleading, as well as being obvioulsy false. Unfortunately too many feminists simply hate men, specifically, they hate masculinity. Much as social conservtives demonize and attempt to suppress feminine sexuality, feminists have a nasty tendency to do the same with regards to masculine sexuality. It's no coincidence that feminists groups once joined forces with Jerry Falwell in condeming pornography. Jerry Falwell was upset that young women were posing in pornographic magazines, and feminists were upset that men were looking at them. Also, many feminists continue to pose the false idea that there is inequality between men and women in the United States. That is clearly not true. Women make up a slight majority of voters in US elections, and increasingly women are being elected to the highest offices in the country inspite of the high number of entreched incumbents who originally took office in less enlightened days when female candidates had difficulty winning elections. Most tellingly, women have a longer life expectancy than men in the US. It seems to me that this indicates that women generally have a somewhat better quality of life than men. But this does not mean women are treated fairly. They're not. And in the end fairness is the ultimate objective of a just society, not a false sense of some ever eleusive "equality". Women are treated unfairly in that they don't get compensated as well as men in the labor market. Career fields traditionally dominated by women often are low paying, even when those jobs perform a critical social function, such as Elementary School teachers. But there are other ways for women to recieve material support besides earning wages, and many women even today choose to stay at home and raise children while their husbands provide the familie's income. So it's not all about wages. However, men are also treated unfairly in some instances, custodial disputes and divorce proceedings being being a prime example. But I don't want this post to degenerate into a pissing contest about all the ways that men get shafted. Rather, I just want to establish that both men and women are treated unfairly by the current system, and that is unacceptable. Women should not have their feminimity held against them, but men should not have their masculinity held against them either. Only when the process of demonizing and belittling people based on their sexuality stops, will we be able to achieve a fair society, at least with regards to sexuality. Feminists teach women that masculinity is the enemy, something to be feared. That fear inevitably leads to hatred, and there is just too much hate in the world.

Hate is a two way street. It does not exist in a vacuum. Newton's Law is definitely in effect here: for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction. So long as women are taught to mistrust and despise men, men will resent and feel anger towards women. This is obviously unhealthy, as it leads to unneccesary anxiety and unhappiness in the lives of many, many people. And it does eventually drive some to engage in anti-social behavior. This has evething to do with the abstinence idiocy. Many have noted that people feel "icky" about the thought of their teenage kids having sex. That maybe so, but it hardly explains the extent to which parents are paranoid about their teenage kids having sex. In particular, I have noticed that many people really lose it at the thought of their 18 year old daughters becoming involved with, say, a 35 year old man. This is silly on it's face, as there is no logical reason to think that a 35 year old man is more likely to be a bad person than a 19 year old man. But many parents internalize the idea that men are rapists and child molosters while women are innocent victims, making it seem that a guy in this situation is a perverted sexual predator when in fact thtere is not a shred of scientific evidence to back up such a notion. A far more likely cause for the paranoia is that parents internalize the idea that women are like children, innocent and pure, whereas men are predators. This is compounded by the fact that teenagers truly are more vulnerable than adults and can well be exploited in some instances, such as by the much hyped "internet predators" which anti-sex activists love to use in their fear mongering propaganda. So it becomes all too easy in the minds of over protective parents to decide (very unrealistically) that they should try to stop their sons and daughters from having sex, well after they have passed through puberty.

Now think about that for a moment... why on earth would you try and completely restrict someone from having sex, after they had gone through puberty. That doesn't make any sense. It's like try to stop a two year old from walking, on the grounds that he's not very good at it and might get hurt. Not only would it stunt the kids development, but it's totally unrealistic. Are you gonna carry the kid around 24/7? It's absurd.

The correct analogy is the hunger drive. Do you expect someone to go hungry for 18 years or more?

Republicans are like a bunch of fat loads preaching anorexia.

Hey br1 - did you really need to post 2500 words to say you don't like feminists and are attracted to 16 year olds?

Suppose that Congress enacts a law prohibiting farting, with particlarly harsh penalties for (a) farting in the presence of youngsters under 14 years --- if the perpetrator is above 19, and (b) farting in the presence of a parson who got acquainted over the internet, (c) unducing minors to fart, e.g. by feeding them pea soup (even if the latter is consumed voluntarily). Suppose also that the law is not batshit insance, so solitary farting remains legal.

The thing is that it would be rather insane, and yet a campaign against such a law would be awkward. Imagine hell raised by the Chairman of Anti-Farting Leage when a blogger working for a Presidential contender is found to have written a farting joke or two.

Maybe we need to treat sexuality with a little maturity. It is part of who we are. While no parent wants their child to have sex, the reality is that some teens do. Instead of creating analogies, why don't we just be honest? The Europeans seem to deal with this issue a whole hell of a lot better than we do. Discourage early sexual relationships, make birth control and STD education medically accurate. Stop lying that abstinence is 100% effective. The truth is that vows of abstinence break more often than condoms.

I think we want to focus on teen sexuality because most adults can't deal with their own. Not to mention it is absolutely titillating to the US public to read about teens having sex. (Note the current press on the the MySpace cases etc. . . ) Any social problem we have we push it back on children and teens (drinking and driving, obesity, drugs, depression, just to name a few.) It is so much easier to prescribe remedies to others than to adopt the healthy habits we should.

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