The Terrible Teens: What Every Parent Needs to Know by Kate Figes

Author:Kate Figes
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141928487
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-11-07T00:00:00+00:00

All he did was keep talking in this very monotonous voice about some babe he was supposed to have had sexual intercourse with the summer before. He'd already told me about it a hundred times. Every time he told it, it was different. One minute he'd given it to her in his cousin's Buick, the next minute he'd be giving it to her under some boardwalk. It was all a lot of crap, naturally. He was a virgin if ever I saw one.

Boys go for the erotic experience and are able to walk away. Girls crave emotional intimacy from boys in order to justify sexual exploration, and need romance in order to feel they are not being exploited because they are still so sexually inept and unself-aware and because they are vulnerable to pregnancy. ‘It's difficult because of my insecurities,’ says Denise who met a boy she really likes through a chat line. ‘I don't want him to use me for sex, basically. What's good is just being with him. He's assured me many times that he's not that type of boy and sometimes I do believe him but there's still an edge in me that isn't sure, even though obviously I want to find out what it's all about. But I don't want this to be a hit and run.’

The emotional and practical repercussions of intercourse are so inconsequential for boys that girls often feel pressurized to have intercourse before they are ready. For a substantial minority of young women first sex is not voluntary, but forced on them through rape, date rape or saying ‘yes’ in order to please a boy when actually they mean ‘no’.5 Adolescents are particularly vulnerable to date rape because they fear getting into trouble and many teenagers are unaware of what constitutes consensual behaviour. One American study has found that large numbers of high school students condone it. Twelve per cent of girls and 39 per cent ofboys felt that it was acceptable for a boy to put pressure on a girl for sex if he had spent a lot of money on her; more than one third of the boys felt that it was acceptable if the boy was so aroused that he could not stop and 54 per cent thought that pressure was acceptable if the girl changed her mind about having sexual intercourse.6 Sometimes it is the girls who exert the pressure on boys with taunts of ‘Show me how much you love me,’ but usually it is the boys who become adept at emotional blackmail (‘If you loved me you'd have sex with me’), and they still use the old contraceptive con-trick of ‘I won't come inside you.’ When they can't get what they want, many still resort to force. ‘I once met this boy who was a friend of a friend,’ says Claire, who is sixteen. ‘He goes to me, “Do you want to go behind the bowling alley?” I was forcibly trying to get him off me.

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