Comments on: Middle school orals

By: q

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:58:08 +0000

laura_m: drug use is not murder but it is also illegal The legality of drugs use depends on the drug and which country you live in. Alcohol is widely available in many countries, for example. laura_m: You don’t regulate sexual activity by any other means than setting an indicative minimum age for consent. Sodomy, oral sex, incest, adultary and bestiality are not always legal. laura_m: Drugs are also inherently and always unsafe and damaging to society (and health care systems). Can you provide some evidence. I think you need to do a bit more reading around the subject of drug use. laura_m: It’s a bit too easy to generalise. Indeed it is!

By: laura m

laura m — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:52:15 +0000

Also, at 14 – 16 year old, you’re not exactly a child anymore. You’re sexually developed, whether you’re active or not. We’re not talking of sex between “children”, but teenagers. If sex is an “adult activity”, at which age should it start and who gets to decide that? Why not the teens themselves? Again, the only defined rule is about legal age of consent, and even that is a pure abstraction and only actually used when there’s allegations of abuse, in an entirely different context. So… nevermind that not everyone thinks teenagers being sexually active in any way is a bad thing or needs controlling. I just don’t see what kinds of regulations you could possibly introduce and how would you enforce them.

By: laura m

laura m — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 11:29:43 +0000

q – drug use is not murder but it is also illegal. (Exclude pot from definition of “illegal drug” where applicable, depending on that country/state’s laws). Drugs are also inherently and always unsafe and damaging to society (and health care systems). Sex is not inherently so. You don’t regulate sexual activity by any other means than setting an indicative minimum age for consent. And even that is generally not applied when the activity is consensual and between teens of same or similar age. No one goes around policing places where teens hook up and arrest them as if they were exchanging heroin. I don’t think you’re suggesting that, are you? So I really can’t see how you could compare sex to drugs in terms of regulating, nevermind in any other terms. Honestly, it’s mindboggling.

By: q

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 09:09:30 +0000

laura_m: q — oh, so now sex=drugs? I see… Why don’t we compare it to murder while we’re at it. “Hi, I’m Laura, and I’m a moral relativist, I don’t see nothing wrong in killing other people as long as it’s consensual.” Both “consensual sexual activity” and “drug use” are adult activities with controls over the exposure to/practice of children. How we regulate one might be instructive in how we regulate the other. Murder is generally not a legal adult activity.

By: laura m

laura m — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 08:45:21 +0000

q—oh, so now sex=drugs? I see… Why don’t we compare it to murder while we’re at it. “Hi, I’m Laura, and I’m a moral relativist, I don’t see nothing wrong in killing other people as long as it’s consensual.” I don’t think so… I wasn’t even saying ALL girls loooove giving blowjobs, or even just casual sex in general, and being treated like sluts. But those two things are not always equivalent. What Jeannette May was saying in the NYT article:

‘’Often, I think girls, if they are getting as much out of it as the guys, are better served by having sex for their pleasure, without a lot of emotional attachment,’’ she says. ‘’Because they would feel more empowered to practice safe sex, use birth control and avoid sexual interactions that would not benefit them. When girls think they are in love or in a relationship that will lead to love, they’re more easily manipulated.’‘

Note emphasis on that “if”. It seems to me there’s a ton of patronising mysoginy and moralism in wanting to attach that “degrading” idea to all no-strings-attached situations at all costs, no matter how the girls themselves are experiencing it. belle—absolutely, surely I can see that, and I agree, but it doesn’t seem to me it’s that kind of situation all the time. It’s a bit too easy to generalise. Not all teenage boys are insensitive pigs, not all girls are inexperienced self-hating idiots. I know no one was saying that explicitely, but that’s the feeling I’m picking up from reading a lot of the comments, starting from those cited in the article.

By: Kathy

Kathy — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 04:08:04 +0000

I’m 37 now, but I remember being quite sexually active from about 15 on (Yeah, I turned out all right, too). It would never, ever have occurred to me to “give” without “getting.” I’d’ve laughed long and hard and walked off at the very suggestion. As I recall, none of my partners hassled or even hesitated to “reciprocate.” Maybe I just had a good picker, or a forceful personality. But I strongly agree with the posters who state that a girl who really has no interest in her own orgasm is rare to nonexistent. In other words, somethin’ WRONG with those chicks. Of course, the whole thing could be just a bunch of hooey. Remember the “epidemic” of satanic ritual abuse in the ‘80’s? Me neither…I was too busy having lots of fabulous, mutually pleasurable sex…

By: Belle Waring

Belle Waring — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 03:31:29 +0000

Laura M: I think you’re being a little disingenuous here. I don’t deny that some people like to give blowjobs without any reciprocity. Look in the personals section of your free alternative weekly and see gay men advertising their willingness to do just that for young, ostensibly straight, men. No doubt many of these men have integrated this practice into a rich, fulfilling sex life. The idea that no-strings-attached blowjobs could play the same role in the sex life of an inexperienced 14 year old girl whose older partner is assumed to regard her own vagina as “nasty” and the prospect of bringing her to orgasm “gross” is just ridiculous. Surely you can see that. I don’t object to teenagers having sex. I object to sexist stereotyping and devaluation of girls’ bodies and pleasure.

By: q

Tue, 08 Jun 2004 02:35:30 +0000

laura m: None of us has the right to judge other people’s consensual sexual activity. Even more so with teenagers. Everybody should make their own rules in that area, and that’s the age when you get the chance to do it. How about this: “None of us has the right to judge other people’s drug use. Even more so with teenagers. Everybody should make their own rules in that area, and that’s the age when you get the chance to do it.”? A major plank of rights-based politics is the right of self-determination. The trick is to balance that with an environment where “informed safe choices” are made. Hence children do not have the same status as adults in law. Some young girl “sluts” I have met have psychological disturbances which seemed to have caterpulted them into rampant sexual activity. I don’t think that is the profile which “self-determination-ists” had in mind.

By: vivian

vivian — Tue, 08 Jun 2004 00:15:04 +0000

Why should we have to choose? Decades ago girls were expected by society to be virgins, and by their dates to put out. Neither allowed for female pleasure or active agency in choosing who or when. When caught, by pregnancy or gossip` she was condemned for life. Nowadays the “slut” label is partially gone, it would appear, and female pleasure, agency, choice, orgasm are at least on the table for adults, if not commonly valued by (these) teens. They also think about birth control and STDs, though they don’t think as well as we would like. It probably counts as progress, though not much improvement, they’re probably better suited to have healthy sex lives when they grow up. There is of course the potential that the abstinence crowd’s ethic will merge with this and turn them into real self-loathing sexual servants, but it doesn’t seem to have happened yet. See, we can condemn both sides, the prudes and the supercilious-but-liberal adults.

By: drapeto

drapeto — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 22:09:10 +0000

Is it unthinkable that at least some of those girls enjoy doing it to a guy, not just having it done to them? while you live in the lala land of your own speculations, i happen to live on planet earth, where i have a pretty solid grasp on the social dynamics of this situation, and the dynamic is about patriarchy and misogyny. is that unthinkable for you?

By: laura m

laura m — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 21:59:15 +0000

ian – teenage sexuality is almost by definition ‘unsuitable’ Absolutely, it is disturbing for parents. It titillates other adults. It makes for eye-catching pseudo-sensationalist tripe. I too recall many similar refrains in the tabloids, they always crop up from time to time. They exploit that ambiguous line between moralism and voyeurism. Some of the concerned readers of the NYT must have gotten a few kicks out of reading those legal descriptions of 14-year-olds getting down to it. I really feel sorry for the kids interviewed. They should have known better than to talk to reporters about their sex life. That’s the disturbing part. The need to brag about it to a journalist, of all people…

By: laura m

laura m — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 21:43:50 +0000

“These are kids — where are their parents and why is there so little supervision?” Don’t know, maybe parents are busy going down on their respective lovers. Hence unable to provide moral guidance. We are all doomed. No really. These kids are 15, not 5. At 15, who ever wanted their parents supervising them about when and where and how and with whom to have sex? How is that supposed to be psychologically healthy? And for whom? What is so wrong with recreational consensual sex between teens anyway. Like it’s this big shocking new product of a decadent consumer culture, not something that’s been there for ages. Please someone tell me I’ve stepped right into a giant elaborate joke. You can’t all be serious.

By: Ian

Ian — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 21:41:55 +0000

When I was about 16 – a longggg time ago – I recall seeing a article – probably News of the World or Titbits because thats where I went for such stuff – bemoaning a new American fashion of necking parties for – gosh – 14 year olds. I can remember it because of course I immediately wanted to know why we didn’t have them in England but more to the point I thought the definition of teenage sexual behaviour was ‘unsuitable’? I’m not denying the issues around STDs but apart from Aids they were around in 1960 too. As a parent I always felt it hypocritical to take the ‘do as I say not as I did’ line – which isn’t to say I didn’t try – but in the end as I say – teenage sexuality is almost by definition ‘unsuitable’.

By: DJW

DJW — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:57:38 +0000

ADM, the article makes mention of several of the kids interviewed being on sports teams. Sports and sex are hardly mutually exclusive. At my high school, I’d dare say it was the opposite. On the seemingly missing parents, well, they weren’t interviewed, and most teenagers like to present themselves as independent from their parents. But it’s fairly easy to keep all but the most authoritarian parents in the dark as a teenager. Even if they insist on keeping tabs on where you are and what you do, it’s not too difficult to erect a sufficient set of cover stories. I wasn’t really up to any debauchery of note as a teenager, but I made a point of keeping my parents in the dark about my friends, activities, etc. on general principle (what principle, exactly? I don’t know. I was a rather fuzzy thinker back then). I remain pretty unconvinced that this article has identified a new and disturbing trend, as so many people seem eager to believe. All the kids interviewed strike me as the sort at or quite near the very top of the social hierarchy in high school. A decade and change ago when I was there, these kids got laid a lot more than the rest of us. And they wouldn’t give us the time of day. However, if this story accurately portrays a new trend in adolescent behavior, it’s there’s positives to go along with the negatives. Too many of my peers went from relationship to relationship starting at 15, never really learning to be alone. This has little to do with sex, as many of them waited quite a while on that front. But they never learned to be alone, comfortable with themselves, etc. This worked out fine for some of them, but is clearly a problem for many others. Waiting on relationships could be very good news, and may be more important than the sexual dynamic, I suspect.

By: Another Damned Medievalist

Another Damned Medievalist — Mon, 07 Jun 2004 20:41:41 +0000

Could it be a generational thing—that most of us who read and/or write for CT were brought up with sexual ideals that range from abstinence before marriage to “it means something and should be reserved for someone you love?” I would say so, except for the fact that, in western culture, sex outside some kind of meaningful relationship (with the exception of prostitution) has been generally frowned upon for at least the last 2500 or so years. Several things bother me as a parent and as a woman: *These are kids—where are their parents and why is there so little supervision? *What happened to sports? *When did oral sex become “not sex”? I know it pre-dates Clinton, because it was a justification for some girls when I was in high school—except that then, most of us thought that was a fairly sophistical argument *Is this symptomatic of a larger trend towards being emotionally disconnected from the rest of society and from ourselves? *And, of course, what are these kids thinking? Especially the girls. BTW, I have no problem with the idea that some of these girls enjoy going down on guys and don’t mind it not being reciprocated—what I do have a problem with is that they don’t seem to recognize that it might be an issue. And perhaps, absent any cultural pressure to the contrary, having only recreational sex won’t disturb anyone’s emotional well-being. Maybe. I don’t buy it, but even putting relationship issues aside, I would expect people to worry at least a little about the health repercussions. And considering what we do know about the risk of STD’s (especially the nasty ones that have few symptoms, like Chlamydia) increasing with the number of sexual partners, I should think that, ten years down the road, when their fallopian tubes are shot, ther will be repercussions. Anyway, I feel like I’m wavering between squishy liberal and moral majority. It’s just that my gut tells me that this is just wrong and disturbing on so many different levels.