After reading Tim Burke’s post on Caitlin Flanagan, I went back to the Atlantic archives to find the article. I’m not quite sure how I missed it the first time around when I skimmed the table of contents. Any title containing the words “oral sex” usually flies off the page for me.
Flanagan is an odd duck, as Burke points out. She makes wonderful observations and commentary about stuff that I find interesting. (Yes, Dr. Phil is an oaf. Yes, Judi Blume did teach me about sex.) She is refreshingly political incorrect. (Maybe girls can’t handle teenage sex as well as boys can.) But the problem with Caitlin is that she criticizes and pokes, but doesn’t always have a world view of her own. That’s why we end up with this article on oral sex that starts out being skeptical about exaggerated claims and then somehow by the end says that there is an oral sex epidemic.
With Flanagan, each paragraph is a gem, but the essay over all is a patchwork of rambling cuteness.
The other problem with Flanagan is that she writes as if her wealthy California mom experience was universal. Thanks to her, I have to correct every wingnut who shows up at this blog to tell them that most woman don’t have nannies. Too bad that the only people who have time to write about parenting are rich.
Part of the essay, Flanagan discusses parental hysteria about oral sex. Tim is skeptical about these claims and you should read him for that. I’ll write about the second half of the essay, which Tim scorns. Here Flanagan writes that there may not be rainbow parties, today’s culture promotes teenage sex, and girls are more willing to service boys than in the past.
While most kids aren’t involved in the orgies described in sensationalist journalism, a lot of kids are still adrift. Flanagan writes:
But the show also contains interviews with kids who had nothing to do with this horrifying and aberrant episode, kids who seem adrift in the increasingly isolating family culture that was being born in the nineties. They speak of family members who have televisions in their own rooms, who never eat dinner together, who live with one another in the sepulchral McMansions of Conyers the way people live together in hotels: nodding politely as they pass on the stairs, aware of one another’s schedules and routines but only in a vague, indifferent manner. These are kids—girls especially—who have developed a dull, curiously passionless relationship to their own sexuality, which they give of freely. The girls seem sad that their easily granted sexual favors (including oral sex) have not earned them boyfriends, and completely unaware of how they could have negotiated the transactions differently.
They are listening to pornographic rap music and get sex tips from Planned Parenthood.
In contrast, in the 70s when she grew up, Judi Blume was as racy as things got. And there were the Burkean social restraints keeping kids in line.
But even in my teenage snit I understood what she was talking about… the immutable truth about boys: They want most what we keep private. When it’s known, it’s lessened.
At the time of my adolescence my mother was too distracted to give me everything I needed to turn out well. But 20 percent of her attention was enough, because the whole culture was supporting her. The notion that a girl should not give her sexuality away too freely was so solidly built into the national consciousness that my mother didn’t have to snap out of her depression and give me a comprehensive lecture on boys for me to understand what she meant.
Then she brings it home at the end…
As a parent, I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households—individual mothers and fathers—are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The “it takes a village” philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it….
I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel. Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It’s in the nature of who we are.
But perhaps the girls themselves understand this essential truth.
As myriad forces were combining to reshape our notions of public decency and propriety, to ridicule the concept that privacy and dignity are valuable and allied qualities of character and that exhibitionism as an end in itself might not be beneficial for a young girl, at the exact moment when girls were encouraged to think of themselves as victims of an oppressive patriarchy and to act on an imperative of default aggression—at this very time a significant number of young girls were beginning to form an entirely new code of sexual ethics and expectations. It was a code in which their own physical pleasure was of no consequence—was in fact so entirely beside the point that their preferred mode of sexual activity was performing unrequited oral sex. Deep Throat lingers in the popular imagination because it was one of the few porn movies to trade on an original and inspired premise: what a perfect world it would be if the clitoris were located in a woman’s throat. In a world like that a man wouldn’t have to cajole a woman to perform fellatio on him; she would be just as eager to get it on as he was. But this was a fantasy; a girl may derive a variety of consequences, intended and otherwise, from servicing boys in this manner, but her own sexual gratification is not one of them. The modern girl’s casual willingness to perform oral sex may—as some cool-headed observers of the phenomenon like to propose—be her way of maintaining a post-feminist power in her sexual dealings, by being fully in control of the sexual act and of the pleasure a boy receives from it. Or it may be her desperate attempt to do something that the culture refuses to encourage: to keep her own sexuality—the emotions and the desires, as well as the anatomical real estate itself—private, secret, unviolated. It may not be her technical virginity that she is trying to preserve; it may be her own sexual awakening—which is all she really has left to protect anymore.
We’ve made a world for our girls in which the pornography industry has become increasingly mainstream, in which Planned Parenthood’s response to the oral-sex craze has been to set up a help line, in which the forces of feminism have worked relentlessly to erode the patriarchy—which, despite its manifold evils, held that providing for the sexual safety of young girls was among its primary reasons for existence. And here are America’s girls: experienced beyond their years, lacking any clear message from the adult community about the importance of protecting their modesty, adrift in one of the most explicitly sexualized cultures in the history of the world. Here are America’s girls: on their knees.
Are teenagers more awash in sexual messages today than when we grew up? Is this having any impact on their sex lives? Are too many girls servicing the football team? Is a blow job an act of control or submissiveness?
Apt. 11d 
See, for example, if she wants to claim that the Planned Parenthood (or similar) literature is clinical, robotic, demystified, passionless, under the heading of “empowerment”, I’m with her. But notice in that passage how easily she bridges from what is said by others to an assumption that what is said in various media (rap, Planned Parenthood literature, etc.) is a good description of the interior consciousness of the teenagers who might consume such media. I hate to be a stickler, but that’s precisely one of the places where you have to show your homework. People are not what they see or consume; the imaginative relationship they have with media is extremely variable and divergent, and the relationship between what we imagine and what we do is even more so.
I’m interested to hear what your readers say about whether women giving oral sex to men is always or invariably male-dominant or involves a non-reciprocal male-favored sexual exchange. Notably among the things that Flanagan overlooks about that study she cites is that it shows pretty high levels of teenage women reporting that they’ve been the recipients of oral sex as well as the givers of it.
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Tim: “People are not what they see or consume; the imaginative relationship they have with media is extremely variable and divergent, and the relationship between what we imagine and what we do is even more so.”
True enough, but I was just reading about recent studies of how our brains in essence mimic the neurological patterns associated with actions we see other people doing. Thus when we watch someone lift a pencil, our brain does much the same work as if we were lifting it ourselves. And this is not limited to visual inputs: aural inputs trigger similar responses.
This explains why, as a species, we’re extraordinarily good at learning things from each other, especially very early on in life (kids are fantastic mimics, as we all know). But it also troubles me when I think of the imagery our kids are exposed to routinely in popular culture.
Video games, slutty pop stars and violent (and often creepily sexualized violence in) movies may not cause kids to do nasty things, but these sensory inputs are likely triggering deep, visceral neurological responses that I’m not sure I want coded into my kids’ neural hardware just yet!
Tim: “I’m interested to hear what your readers say about whether women giving oral sex to men is always or invariably male-dominant or involves a non-reciprocal male-favored sexual exchange.”
I’m at least as interested as what attitudes and impressions are in the heads of young men involved in teen and preteen blowjob sessions.
Something tells me those punks will typically see their partners (such as they are) as involved in a “male-dominant … non-reciprocal male favored sexual exchange”
(although I’m going to reveal my prejudices on this point and guess that, if a high school kid were to put the point in anything like those terms, then they likely aren’t the punks in question).
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I’m sorry but Caitlin Flanagan just needs to get a grip. One thing I noticed as my girls (now 21 and 18) grew up, is that there was a subset of parents that desperately feared the “bad older kids”. They absorbed every rumor or documentary or article that suggested “teenagers” were on drugs, in gangs, having promiscuous sex, etc. Yet as our kids aged into the feared age group their kids and our kids were mostly fine.
Just as was the case when we were growing up there were some extremely “wild kids”, and the other kids knew who they were, and in turn scorned and were fascinated by the traumas and adventures these kids underwent. The remainder did what all adolescents have always done, studied, loved their families, worried about the opposite sex, felt insecure about their appearance, and, yes, occasionally experimented with drugs and sex. This is not news.
I bet Caitlin Flanagan is to be found at the PTA meeting expressing concern about the building of a new high school close to her neighborhood. “Those teenagers” will lure her precious babies into bad ways, you know.
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I’ve only read the portions of the article contained here, but it seems rather…overwrought. Yes, I think kids today are faced with more overt sexual messages and pressures than we had growing up (late 70s/early 80s in my case). Yes, I’m troubled by the fact that many kids (boys and girls both) may not be prepared to interpret and be critical of those messages. Yes, I’m concerned that lots of kids are not receiving the support they need to let them make the choices that are best for them. But wow, Flanagan goes a little crazy here with both her assumptions and with her identification of the causes. And Judy Blume was as racy as it got? Where on earth did she live? Even in the late 70s, in a Maryland suburb, there were girls in our school who were very sexually active (one unfortunate girl’s initials happened to be T.J., and you can imagine the rhymes…). Was that the norm? I doubt it. Is it the norm now? I doubt it, and there’s no evidence here that it is.
I think it’s worth looking at how the proportions of kids who are sexually active have changed over time, at the activities that are most prominent now, at the attitudes of the kids engaging in various sexual behaviors, and at the cultural factors that shape these behaviors and decisions, but it doesn’t seem to me that this piece does any of these things. It’s just a lot of dubiously founded hand-wringing about the decline of modern morals. That always bugs me.
And a lot of her essay was just plain annoying. Like here:
“Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It’s in the nature of who we are.”
I’d somehow missed the headline where Caitlin Flanagan had indisputably resolved the essentialist/constructionist argument. Maybe her statement is true. Or maybe women have simply had the message that sex equals love pounded into them since infancy in a way that men have not. Either way, she ignores the multidimensional nature of sexuality for both men and women, while also dismissing an enormous range of individual variation.
She also betrayed a somewhat bizarre attitude about oral sex in declining to see its possibilities as anything other than a service provided by a girl/woman to a boy/man. Where were the questions about context? Yes, there can be disturbing aspects of dominance/submissiveness, but not by definition, at least in my opinion (and I well know that some feminists would disagree). Where was the discussion of oral sex performed by boys/men on girls/women? And I think her assertion that “a girl may derive a variety of consequences, intended and otherwise, from servicing boys in this manner, but her own sexual gratification is not one of them” is also suspect. Where is the evidence for this claim? It made me wonder whether a deficiency of creativity is coloring her perceptions.
Finally, that bit at the end about feminism being partly to blame by tearing down “patriarchy”—which she claims held providing for the sexual safety of young girls as a primary goal—made me want to retch. If patriarchy protected a girl’s “sexual safety,” and I think this is arguable as a blanket statement, it was a side effect derived from the fact that a girl’s virginity had transactional value. Though it would probably be impossible to prove, I would wager that over the centuries patriarchal culture proved the undoing of young girls far more often than it protected them. Maybe they were chambermaids, barmaids, milkmaids rather than the young ladies of “quality,” but I think that the class factor underlines my point—patriarchy’s interest in “virtue” wasn’t about protecting girls, it was, at its core, about preserving the worth of assets. And girls of good family were subject to being traded off in order to improve the family’s fortunes or social status. Hardly the boon for womanhood that Flanagan makes it out to be.
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Teen Anomie
Caitlin Flanagan published an article on the alleged epidemic of oral sex among children under 18 in the January/February 2006 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. I thought at the time she made some good points*, and used the article to
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Oh Laura — please don’t use the “mirror cells” found in the primate brain as evidence against’ Tim’s assertion that we are not the information we consume.
Those of us in the know about cells think the mirror cells somewhat dubious, but worth studying, but they certainly shouldn’t be used in an argument like this.
Check out the third article under “bad neuro-journalism”
http://www.jsmf.org/
bj
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I think it’s actually quite an interesting piece, but it has much more of a second-hand feel than Flanagan’s usual work. Flanagan didn’t grow up under the current sexual regime, her children are boys and much younger than the kids in question, and the Flanagan does not have her own teen informants, just their anxious mothers. Of course, just by the nature of the subject-matter, it’s almost impossible to get good information on the prevalence of various sexual activities among kids (or anybody else, for that matter). Worse, typically in the big media stories, your early-teen informant says something like, “EVERYBODY is doing X,” rather than “I do X, Y, and Z.” How does the early-teen informant know what other people are doing, anyway? Probably they don’t. It’s amazing how perceptions can take on a life of their own. My husband teaches a love and sex course at a major university and occasionally queries students about campus culture. What is quite striking is that the students believe that while nearly everybody else out there is just using people, they themselves are interested in love. A related issue was a recent study that showed a dose relationship between consumption of sexually charged media and early sexual experimentation among white teens. One reading of the data is that these TV shows provide kids with a sort of virtual peer group, and a perhaps distorted view of the actual goings on among other kids their age.
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(I’ve got the kids home this week, so I’m not around to moderate debate or even edit my posts properly. Sorry.)
OK. I think everybody agrees that kids are exposed to more graphic sexual images and messages than in the past. I remember a few years ago there was a season of the Real World where 19 or 20 year old kids were put up in a hotel in Las Vegas and given a job of working at a bar. They got drunk every night and slept with each other on camera.
There’s the whole video cam thing and personal web pages, which have made the perverts very, very happy.
Yeah, Suze, maybe we had access to trashy novels after we had outgrown Judy Blume and there were always rumors about classmates, but there wasn’t a cornucopia of sexual material in the mainstream that exists today.
I think that the growing isolation of today’s kids means more opportunities for trouble.
Is all this information just washing over the heads of kids with no impact on their behavior? The ratio of good kids to bad kids stays constant over time? I am open to the idea that repeat exposture to casual sex on MTV has no effect, but you would really have to prove it to me. Seems counterintuitive.
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Suze — Yeah, Flanagan provides no evidence about the blowjob revolution and is overwrought at the end about oral sex. I think her hang wringing is because she’s thinking about it in terms of teenage girls, who do give blow jobs for all the wrong reasons. Let’s face it. For every strong, empowered 16 year old girl, there are 30 more insecure, stupid, eager-to-please, wanting-to-fit-in girls.
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I think there’s some fairly strong anecdotal evidence suggesting that many people (it isn’t just limited to “kids”) hold that “sex” and “oral sex” are different. And for many, the latter isn’t really viewed as sex per se so much as a facet of what once was called “making out.” Again, my evidence is hardly scientific and is anecdotal, but amongst my friends and acquaintences, “hooking up” can involve anything from “making out” to blow jobs, but it all halts at “sex.” ut admittedly, there’s only a short distance, plus some favorable circumstances and surroundings, from making out to a blow job. It’s fairly commonplace.
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I don’t agree about being exposed to more sex. Heck, I was a teen in the 1970s, right after the summer of love, a time when casual sex was glorified in every kind of media. It was before widespread fear about STDs, and the first one to come along was herpes. Mid to late 70s disco life was all about immediate pleasure in the now with complete disregard for any possible consequences. And remember hot pants? Worn on the street, as daily office wear?
What depresses me most about this conversation is that sex is again being defined only as PIV intercourse. It’s all sex, from kissing and groping on, no matter who you are doing it with; it’s a continuum of behavior and being conscious of that rather than setting white-line limits around certain behaviors seems like a better approach to teaching moral decisionmaking (however you choose to define that).
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“Oh Laura — please don’t use the “mirror cells” found in the primate brain as evidence against’ Tim’s assertion that we are not the information we consume.”
That wasn’t Laura; it was me, and it wasn’t offered as evidence against Tim’s assertion (that’s why I started off with “true enough …”).
I know you folks who study this stuff are appropriately sceptical about mirror cells, but if philosophers can’t offer halfbaked conjectures (about speculative implications of still-controversial science based on fuzzy science journalism) on blog threads about oral sex and moral panic, then where the hell are we allowed to do it!?
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Just read this Salon review of Flanagan’s new book.
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Apologiesto laura (I assumed lk was Laura) —
and,
“if philosophers can’t offer halfbaked conjectures (about speculative implications of still-controversial science based on fuzzy science journalism) on blog threads about oral sex and moral panic, then where the hell are we allowed to do it!?”
in a bar? perhaps? But, if we were both there, a bar might be a more dangerous place for a philosopher to spout off about neuroscience than a blog :-).
BTW, we do plenty of spouting off about philosophy in our neuroscience discussions that would make a philosopher wince! Mirror cells happen to be a personal pet peeve.
bj
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Yes, there are girls who give blowjobs for the wrong reasons, and their well being is a big concern, but is this an epidemic? Any sexual situation in which a participant feels obliged or pressured is wrong, and I’m aware of the messages girls get about the importance of being sexy and pleasing boys. But I’m wary of the leap that’s taken in the piece without any information on how the participants actually felt about the act or the nature of the circumstances.
And the study Flanagan cites reports similar percentages of girls receiving oral sex from boys as the opposite. So what does that mean? Can we conclude that boys are being pressured into servicing the cheerleading squad in a vain attempt to be liked? Part of the difference is in the different sexual scripts girls and boys are traditionally given and the social meanings of sex for each; for boys sex is a sign of high status, for girls it has typically been a sign of low status.
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Is this an epidemic?
I have no idea. I’m open to hearing the evidence, though I certainly didn’t get very much from the Flanagan article.
I am sympathetic to families who are worried about their kids. Not every parental alarm should be written off as Refer Madness or Elvis’s pelvis. Sometimes those old stodgies get it right. Many of the things that my parents feared that I was doing, I was doing. ( I hope they aren’t reading this.)
As you said yourself, “kids today are faced with more overt sexual messages and pressures than we had growing up.” Maybe we shouldn’t worry about the increase in overt messages, as Tim suggests. But I haven’t seen evidence about that either.
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Suze,
Could you give a link to the study so we can take a look?
We need a bit more information here, because it looks like we 11D commenters are not all falling all over ourselves to give our personal opinions on the phenomenology of oral sex.
My intuition is that we should not be naive about how our individual performance plays within the larger societal script for women and for sexuality. For instance, as a young woman you might feel incredibly empowered (and perhaps enriched) by having a web cam or stripping or whatever the current thing is. However, this means unconsciously or consciously shaping yourself and your behavior to match the highly scripted tastes of p@rn consumers, who (judging by the flotsam that occasionally floats into my inbox) want women to fit into stereotypical mini-narratives (teen sl@ts/Asian sl@ts/h@rny housewives/h@rny grandmas/ad nauseam). Unfortunately, it is sometimes difficult to tell the difference between empowerment and the surrounding p@rn culture. When is one empowering oneself, and when is one being had?
By the way, there’s an interesting (but not necessarily good) book called “Pornified: How Pornography is Changing Our Lives, Our Relationships, and Our Families.” I’ve dipped into it here and there and it looked interesting. Another book which I’ve only heard about is “Female Chauvinist Pigs: Is Raunch Culture the New Women’s Liberation?”
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Suze,
I agree that in the hard, cruel, cold real world it’s not necessarily true that “female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure” but I like the formulation, and I think it’s an excellent goal to hold out for young women. Why should women settle for anything less?
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Amy, sure, here’s a link to the study—you can download a PDF from this site:
http://www.cdc.gov/nchs/products/pubs/pubd/ad/361-370/ad362.htm
It’s interesting, but it’s also just data, without much context, which is what I think would be most helpful in the discussion. For example, the study shows that of females age 15-17, 30% have given oral sex to a male and 38% have received it from a male. Right there, that’s fascinating, because I would not have guessed that it broke down that way. But what I’d really like to know, and what this study doesn’t tell you, is how those interactions occurred and what the participants felt about them. If many of the girls who gave oral sex to guys felt uncomfortable with it and did it because they felt pressured, in any sense of the word, then that is a problem. If oral sex, largely reciprocal, is simply becoming normalized as one of the many sexual behaviors that kids experiment with, then maybe it’s not such a problem.
I agree with you that the whole matter of sexual scripts and our relation to them and to the wider culture is complex and highly problematic, whether one conforms to them or tries to break out of them. It’s always a struggle and difficult to resolve in any global sense. Thanks for the book suggestions—I’ve had the Female Chauvinist Pigs book on my future reading list for a while now; will have to wait for summer, though.
Laura, to your point, I’m not saying we shouldn’t be concerned about the messages and their effects and I’m not saying that there’s nothing to worry about with regard to any given sexual trend among teens. I’m just saying that I haven’t seen solid evidence presented that this particular moral panic is warranted, and that the Flanagan article had a distinctly hysterical tone, all that business about America’s girls on their knees with no one to tell them to protect their modesty. Please. As an editor, I say “yes, selling magazines.” As a reader, I’m annoyed.
Also, my irritation was with Flanagan stating so emphatically “It’s in the nature of who we are,” with regard to the contexts in which women want sex. I’m not sure where she got the authority to define who “we” are. I think kindness and trust along with pleasure are excellent goals to hold out for all young people, not just women. For one thing, it’s sort of hard to do the kindness and trust thing by yourself.
Well, Happy Easter—I’m off, to not discuss oral sex with my mother.
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Why should it be just young women’s sexuality that is bound up with kindness and trust? Where does that leave young men? We already have a big problem with gender mistrust, why polarize the sexes into “women want love and kindness, men want conquest and adventure?” That bodes ill for heterosexual relationships.
And the idea that patriarchy somehow protected vulnerable young women is just wrong. Wrong wrong wrong. In practice that meant that while white girls of “good” family were sequestered and protected, it was open season on young black girls, or working-class girls. In their book Having Our Say, the sisters Sarah and Elizabeth Delany, African-Americans who lived through Jim Crow, recalled that they were strictly chaperoned as teenagers, and severely punished for staying out late. Why? Because so many black girls were raped by white men and “there was nothing anyone could do about it.” The sisters Delany were the daughters of a minister. Yet “the patriarchy” wasn’t going to do jack to protect them.
Dear god, how can Flanagan be so naive? Or is she only thinking in terms of middle-class, white girls?
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re: Flanagan’s over the top tone. I don’t know. It’s probably a matter of taste, but that’s what amuses me about Flanagan. I find it refreshing after reading tomes of stuffy academic stuff. She gives voice to many parents who can’t sit back and talk about teenage sexuality with measured civility. It’s their kids, after all.
re: Flanagan and the patriarchy. That came totally out of left field. In the article, she gradually gets to her point that kids are going wild, because of kids have less supervision today and because of cultual images. And then only in the last paragraph does she blame feminism for this. She never builds a case for her claim. I have no idea how she would respond to your excellent comment, Allurophile.
Suze, I think you’re right that we need more than just numbers of who’s doing what, but analysis of who’s able to handle what. But you know that I’m more skeptical than you that teenagers can really handle anything.
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Laura,
I’m also a bit skeptical about what teenagers can and can’t handle. Consider, for instance, that car rental companies (who have a lot of money riding on this) prefer not to rent to those under 25. Judgement matures much later than you might think, based on our societal norms of treating 18 or 21 year olds as full-fledged adults.
There has been some work on the subject of girls and sex and self-esteem. The first one is a major Canadian study, linking girl’s low self-esteem to early sexual experimentation. The second is from the Heritage Foundation and links girls’ sexual activity, depression, and suicide. I realize that the Heritage Foundation is not necessarily very popular around here, but I would suggest that their findings dovetail with those of the Canadian study. Here is a story on the Canadian study, as well as part of one on the Heritage study:
http://www.ctv.ca/servlet/ArticleNews/story/CTVNews/1115130628112_110539828/?hub=CTVNewsAt11
Girls with low self-esteem and boys who have a troubled relationship with their parents are more likely to have sexual intercourse at an early age, according to data from a national survey.
The National Longitudinal Survey of Children and Youth (NLSCY) found that more than one in 10 adolescents — 12 per cent of boys and 13 per cent of girls — reported having sex by the time they reached 14 or 15.
While risky behaviours, such as drinking and smoking at an early age, were linked to early sexual intercourse for both genders, there were several differences in behaviour.
Low self-esteem at age 12 or 13 was a key factor in determining whether girls would have sexual intercourse at 14 or 15. However the opposite was true for boys.
Other factors exclusively linked to girls was the onset of puberty at 12 or 13, as well as weight. The study suggests that the odds of having intercourse by age 14 or 15 were twice as high for girls who were not overweight at ages 12 or 13.
For boys, their relationship with their parents at age 12 or 13, and whether they came from a low-income family, were key factors in determining their sexual behaviour a few years later.
http://www.usatoday.com/news/health/2003-06-03-teen-usat_x.htm
A controversial new study links teen sexual intercourse with depression and suicide attempts.
The findings are particularly true for young girls, says the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think tank that sponsored the research. About 25% of sexually active girls say they are depressed all, most, or a lot of the time; 8% of girls who are not sexually active feel the same.
The Heritage study taps the government-funded National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health. The Heritage researchers selected federal data on 2,800 students ages 14-17. The youngsters rated their own “general state of continuing unhappiness” and were not diagnosed as clinically depressed.
The Heritage researchers do not find a causal link between “unhappy kids” and sexual activity, says Robert Rector, a senior researcher with Heritage. “This is really impossible to prove.” But he says that study findings send a clear message about unhappy teens that differs from one portrayed in the popular culture, that “all forms of non-marital sexual activity are wonderful and glorious, particularly the younger (teen) the better,” he says.
The Heritage study finds:
• About 14% of girls who have had intercourse have attempted suicide ; 5% of sexually inactive girls have.
• About 6% of sexually active boys have tried suicide; less than 1% of sexually inactive boys have.
Tamara Kreinin of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States (SIECUS) says “we need to take depression among the young very seriously.” But it is a “disservice” to blame sexual activity and ignore “divorce, domestic violence, sexual abuse, substance abuse, lack of parental and community support and questions about sexual orientation,” she says. SIECUS supports school programs with information on birth control and abstinence.
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I’m less willing to let the Heritage Foundation get away with stuff that Caitlin Flanagan does. Flanagan is entertaining at least, while the Heritage Foundation isn’t. It also employs academics to do its research.
Just because a lot of depressed kids are having sex, it doesn’t mean that the sex made them depressed. Their depression was more likely to cause them to engage in risky behavior, like unprotected sex and drug use.
You just can’t throw out a caveat like “it is impossible to prove causality” and then put forward shoddy research. There are ways to get closer to determining if sexual activity leads to depression. There are time series tests. You have to eliminate other causes of depression, like chemical imbalance, family difficulties, learning difficulties.
And as much as I’m not thrilled with the sexually explicit messages for young kids, I’m not sure that they are promoting the message “the younger the better.”
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Laura,
The Heritage study may or may not be flawed, but its results (links between sexual activity, depression, and attempted suicide) seem to match those of the Canadian study which found links between between low self-esteem in girls and early sexual activity. Notice I’m saying “links,” rather than suggesting that the causation goes either way. From the little reading I’ve done, it seems like bad stuff comes in clusters for kids. Early sexual activity is associated with parental divorce, as well as consumption of tobacco and alcohol. For the latter items, I think that one can generalize that these are risk-taking behaviors, so it makes sense that they would go together.
I would also argue that causality is really besides the point. We had earlier been discussing the question of whether or not early sexual activity among teen girls is more symptomatic of happy, self-confident empowerment or exploitation and/or a loss of self. I would argue that both the Canadian and the Heritage studies bring us a whole lot closer to an answer to this question. Also, for what it’s worth, I know I’ve read a number of times that the level of sexual activity among highschool girls who wind up at college and those who don’t is quite different–there’s far less among the future college students. Planning, studying, being cautious, delaying gratification, and having a sense of oneself as a person with a future is the opposite of the risk-taking behavior I talked about in my first paragraph.
Lastly, I wish you would be fairer and more open to writers and sources on the “other” side. Just because conservatives say something, doesn’t mean it’s wrong!
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Here’s some more survey information, which probably should have been in the Flanagan article as background.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2004/12/041217103714.htm
Teens Delaying Sexual Activity; Using Contraception More Effectively
The proportion of never-married females 15-17 years of age who had ever had sexual intercourse dropped significantly from 38 percent in 1995 to 30 percent in 2002. At age 18-19, 68 percent had had intercourse in 1995, compared with 69 percent in 2002. For male teens, the percent of those who were sexually experienced dropped significantly in both age groups: from 43 percent to 31 percent at age 15-17, and from 75 percent to 64 percent at age 18-19. These and other data suggest that teenagers are delaying sex until somewhat older ages.
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Amy — I appreciate your comments and referrals to these studies. You clearly have read more about this than I have. I try to be open to both sides. I already said that I was uneasy about teenage sexuality. But I also have to criticize major methodological problems when I see them. And while I smile at hyperbole from a conservative writer in a fun magazine, I judge it more harshly when it is presented as science.
You may have been using the Heritage Foundation study just to show us that there is this conjunction of problems in some teenagers — premarital sex, depression, risky behavior. However, it seemed from the clip that you gave me that the Heritage Foundation was using the information to be more unidirectional. Sex leads to depression. From what I saw, they didn’t have the data to prove it.
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Talking Dirty
If you didn’t think it was possible to discuss blow jobs on a high intellectual plane, check out this post at 11D and the ensuing comment thread. Though I shudder to think what kind of Google hits Laura is going…
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You are over-idealizing the past. Remember, your generation started the sexual revolution — not mine. Your generation started “free love, free sex” and non-committal. Your generation (these kids’ parents) are the ones who get divorced (over 50 percent of Americans who were married are divorced) and have multiple spouses. Your generation taught mine that sex was cheap and committment was overrated. Of course, some (like me) still had parents who weren’t part of that and taught responsibility et.al . but more than “responsibility” and “safe(r) sex” but rather values and personal morals (which, of course, is the job of parents and not gov’t but how can parents teach what they themselves never learned).
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Laura,
Thanks for your kind words. However, I still think you are having a Pavlovian response to the word “Heritage.” See for example what the article said about causation, “The Heritage researchers do not find a causal link between “unhappy kids” and sexual activity, says Robert Rector, a senior researcher with Heritage. “This is really impossible to prove.” But he says that study findings send a clear message about unhappy teens that differs from one portrayed in the popular culture…” How much clearer does Rector need to be that it’s premature to talk about causation?
Amechad,
I suppose you’re not still here, but kindly stop parachuting into strange blogs without first having a look around and figuring out what the blog is about.
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Look, Amy. I’m sorry, but I think that I have spent more time giving careful consideration to conservative thinkers on this blog than just about anyone else in the blogosphere who places themselves on the left.
Of course, the Heritage research doesn’t prove causality. No research can. You can’t put forth bad research, make hasty conclusions, and let yourself off the hook by giving that caveat. They could have put a lot more effort into getting closer to causality employing commonly used techniques.
I think we aren’t going to come to a resolution to this discussion, so let’s drop it.
The following discussion can only be funny and involve blow jobs.
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Laura,
But do you notice how little this thread has actually dealt with our purported subject?
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Dear Laura,
I agree with you that you “have spent more time giving careful consideration to conservative thinkers on this blog than just about anyone else in the blogosphere who places themselves on the left,” and I think that is both true and unutterably sad.
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Not exactly on point but possibly of interest: http://feministlawprofs.law.sc.edu/?p=433
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Are teenagers more awash in sexual messages today than when we grew up? Is this having any impact on their sex lives? Are too many girls servicing the football team? Is a blow job an act of control or submissiveness?
If so, it’s happened within less than six years, because her descriptions of teen sexuality in the early 70’s sound exactly like my high school years (1996-2000).
Were the girls giving freely of their sexuality without having any idea of how they could use it to negotiate with boys? In other words, were they allowing themselves to be exploited? About 1% of them were. The girls who most efficiently combined beauty with ignorance and a lack of opportunities. I assume it was the same thirty years earlier.
As for being “more awash in sexual messages”, I think we are much more awash in sexual messages today than we were six years ago. This is because of A) the internet, and B) the pop music on the radio.
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Maximus
Dylon Pierre Dawson Ulysses Melvin <a href="http…
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Amoxicillin false positive for cocaine.
Amoxicillin. Amoxicillin drug interactions. Amoxicillin and clavulanate potassium. Dosing of amoxicillin for sinus infection. Taking amoxicillin while pregnant.
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