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.

Continue reading “Girls Gone Wild” →