I just finished reading “Are You There God? It’s Me, Monica”, a long piece by Caitlin Flanagan in The Atlantic Monthly. It’s concerned with, as Oprah put it, ‘the oral sex epidemic’, and the apparent trend of young teenage girls offering casual, unreciprocated oral sex to boys.
There’s no analysis of how widespread the practice, and therefore how justified the parental hysteria is. Still, Flanagan delves expertly into that hysteria and the reality behind it, drawing some interesting connections to the books of Judy Blume and their contemporary equivalents. Flanagan’s a witty writer. Check out this passage:
Dr. Phil, who has the vast, impenetrable physique of a pachyderm and the calculated folksiness of a country-music promoter, employs a psychotherapeutic cloak of respectability to legitimize his many prurient obsessions.
Or this one:
Wherever there’s a girl gone wild, there’s a gender-studies professor not far behind, eager to blame her actions on the patriarchy…The problem with this idea is that surely the patriarchy was far stronger and more oppressive in the 1950s. But you don’t find Bettyâ€â€or even Veronicaâ€â€cravenly servicing Archie and Jughead.
A young mother herself, Flanagan doesn’t arrive at a lot of conclusions, but does provide some thoughtful commentary. I was reminded of the other long, well-written magazine article I’d read recently about how different things were for kids these days.
I was also reminded of this blog post, about sex bracelets, which continues to attract inane and peculiar comments from the teen set.
DarrenBarefoot.com 
I’m curious. Since none of the teens that I know are given opportunity to be alone with unrelated other teens without the presence of an adult, how do you figure this is happening? I strongly suspect it falls into the realm of either ;
1) Urban Myth or
2) Unsupervised kids, of which there are very few. Or
3) People who are 18 and up, better known as young adults. But I doubt it.
Unreciprocated? These girls should at least be getting some reciprocated action, imho. Oh wait, did I say that aloud?
Imagine: I think your reason #2 is faulty. We’re talking here about 12 to 15 year old teenagers who have lots of unsupervised time–that’s definitely not ‘very few’. For example, Wikipedia puts the number of latchkey kids at 5.8 million.
Speaking anecdotally, my parents got divorced when I was twelve, so I could have been running daily orgies out of my home after school without anybody being the wiser.
“The Greatest Generation Gap Since Rock and Roll” was a really worthwhile read, I meant to thank you for pointing it out.
When I first read about this stuff, I was shocked. Not because I thought it was an epidemic, but because I thought teens had been doing this stuff for years. Perhaps no one awarded bracelets, but this stuff was pretty commonplace when I was a young teen in the 80s. Didn’t legions of 6th and 7th graders go into the bushes at lunch at other schools? Weren’t there wild stories about camping trips? Didn’t people go partying on weekends? Or is this just small town life and only a recent part of the middle class urban world?
I think this is merely the latest moral panic. Nobody, as far as I am aware, has any actual evidence of any of this occurring.
Cathy Young wrote about this last year:
http://www.reason.com/news/printer/36643.html
+1 for the latest moral panic. For sexual activity to be described as an epidemic betrays that. What the real illness is is the persistence of that Foghorn Leghorn of therapy, Dr. Phil. Now that is something that should be stopped.
What, all this time I could’ve been getting jewelry for it? I wonder if I could retroactively bill former boyfriends…
(Didn’t read the article)
The passages you chose made me smile – she is indeed a witty writer.
Seems like a moral panic. Reminds me of something that happened a year or so ago. A colleague, who has a 13-year-old daughter, was talking with some women who can only be described as “matronly”.
“Oh, your daughter is 13?” the woman asked D.
“Yes,” he said. He had just returned to Canada after spending ten years in a remote, wholesome corner of the world. He’s from a Mennonite community. His children attend a Christian high school.
“Aren’t you worried about your daughter going to those rainbow parties?” the matron asked.
“What are those?”
It seems to me like the whole thing is a mixture of moral panic, cruelty and middle-aged horniness.
I graduated from HS in 86. I was a latchkey kid. My brother and I had regular “events” at our house. Believe me, it happens, and it happens often.
Dean – BS to Cathy Young. My next door neighbor’s 15 year old kid was kicked off the school bus for good for receiving BJs from a 14 year old girl on the school bus. The SCHOOL BUS! It is going on, and people are fools to think it isn’t.
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