Ready or Not: Why Treating Children as Small Adults Endangers Th by Kay S. Hymowitz

Author:Kay S. Hymowitz [Hymowitz, Kay S.]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Free Press
Published: 2008-06-29T16:00:00+00:00

Chapter 6

Sex and the Anticultural Teenager

Everyone knows that teenagers today are more likely to have sex than kids of previous generations. What most people probably don’t know is how little joy attends these encounters. Eric Konigsberg, a journalist who followed the sexual exploits of students at Vassar College for Spin in 1998, found “an environment that seemed melancholy, nihilistic, groping, purposeless, apathetic, lifeless.” Students sometimes get in the mood by composing computer billboards with categories like “Freshmen I Want to Fuck” or “Top Ten Whores.”1 At Georgetown University undergrads have sponsored “money parties,” for which they pay a cover charge of twenty dollars in exchange for a fistful of Monopoly money. The goal is to earn as much money as you can by performing sexual favors.2

The younger brothers and sisters of these college kids also aspire toward the “nihilistic” and “groping.” The infamous Spur Posse of California, a group of high school boys who “hooked up” with up to sixty girls each in a sexual competition, are perhaps not a completely new breed. But today girls have joined in the once male-only sexual competition. Take, for instance, the sixteen-year-old interviewed by the sociologist Lillian Rubin who had sex with “forty, maybe fifty different guys.”3 Even middle schoolers can be blasé these days: “It was sort of the thing to do,” shrugs one girl, remembering her seventh grade sexual initiation. “It wasn’t supposed to be a big deal.”4 To be fair, for most kids it is still a big deal. On school buses and in hallways they mimic sexual intercourse and masturbation and grab at each other’s buttocks and breasts. They lie about being virgins. According to Michael Cohen, a research psychologist and principal of Arc Consulting, nine- and ten-year-old girls, whose counterparts in the past always looked forward to becoming teenagers, now say they are afraid.5 Even as, in recent years, the number of teenagers engaging in early and promiscuous sexual intercourse is declining, their foreplay, which increasingly and at younger ages includes oral sex—and, if the teen grapevine is to be believed, anal sex as well—remains casual.6 Though it has been obscured by the threat of disease and pregnancy, the real news on the teen sex front is that there has been, regardless of what form sex takes, a radical downsizing of the emotional side of sexual desire. “None of us will ever have a normal relationship,” the heroine moans in an episode of the teen hit TV series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, expressing what is perhaps the latent fear of a generation. “We’re doomed.”

It wasn’t supposed to be like this. When they were young adults, the parents of today’s teenagers, a generation that came of age in the sixties and seventies, believed they were going to hand down to their children a freer and more honest world than the one they were just escaping. That generation understood, in a way their own parents had not, that teenagers are fully sexual beings. They hoped that by escaping the Puritan

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