by Eurydice (c) 1999

In Defense of Teen Sex

     On a Miami radio talk show last week, affluent, well-spoken teenage girls were discussing the recent controversial recommendations?made by a California panel of educators, and supported by liberal sexologists?that even young preteens should be taught techniques of oral sex, anal sex, and mutual masturbation, as part of the effort to reduce teen pregnancy, STD and abortion. The girls said that they regularly gave head to boys at the back of the schoolbus, and on dates they all preferred recreational anal sex to intercourse. They discussed abstinence, birth control, sex with adults. Their experiences were way ahead of the panel's recommendations. It was clear that grownups were ignoring the fact that most kids over 13 are sexually active.
     The bottom line is that kids have sex to practice being adults. Not only is the sexual urge a biological imperative, it is also what first separates teenagers from their parents and initiates them into womanhood and manhood. Youth is obsessed with sex because sex is our society's training ground.
     Keeping underage sex inside the closet leads to moral confusion, unwanted pregnancies, kids killing newborns, the wreckage of families, and lives being built around one accidental conception. Families that originate with two teenagers copulating in a parked vehicle and marrying because of an unplanned pregnancy, consider sex to be trouble. Ostensibly to protect kids from repeating the parents' mistakes, parents contrive to banish sex by keeping it unmentionable; they end up recreating the cycle of ignorance. Because families permit love but no sex, kids perceive trust and sex, love and lust, as antithetical. People spend lifetimes trying to integrate familial and sexual happiness, because our society retards kids' emotional growth and encourages dependence. This is the history of family: the struggle to control desire.
     Boys and girls are divided at puberty. One difference is that girls are discovering they have clitorises, whereas there's nothing subtle about a full-blown hardon that needs relief. Another difference is that men's sexual peak hits at 19 (when they can perform multiple physical wonders in bed) and women's occurs in their 30s (which is a natural advertisement for younger men-older women trysts); at 19, women hit breeding peak. Girls learn to use their physique to attach themselves to a strong man; boys must compete with older men for the possession of women and prestige. This brutal end of childhood leads to a grim view of sexualization as a loss.
     Forty years ago it was common in this country for 13 year olds to marry. The adagio went, 'old enough to bleed, old enough to breed.' Some states allow 13 year olds to sleep with 15 year olds. But consensual sex between a teen and a grownup is a crime. In 1997 Mary Kay LeTourneau was 28 when she fell in love with her 13 year old student who was a painter. They have two kids, and she's still in prison for raping him.
     Most countries in Europe, Asia, Latin America have kept the age of consent at 13. The idea, I believe, is not that 13 year olds should be tying the knot, but that they should accumulate the knowledge and experience which are as essential in our private lives as in all else. In ancient Greece it was customary for the teenage boy to enter the tutelage of an older mentor; the relationship was often sexual, the mentor was married, and the youth was expected to 'graduate' into marriage and, in time, teach another teen how to act in society. There are tribes today that hold collective initiation rituals where teenage boys must give oral sex to the men to mark the end of childhood, after which boys can marry. Rites of this kind aren't simply exploitative or abusive; they are meant to prepare youths for the trials, the responsibilities, the nuances, of community life. They emphasize the importance of selflessness, generosity, skill, in sex, and in general. Because sex is not like drugs, it's bad to 'just say no.' The practice of physical intimacy teaches us who we are every day.
     Teen sexuality makes adults uncomfortable. As people grow older they come to think that 16 year olds look too young to be fucking. The young seem younger. Archetypal fears of being overthrown by younger stags take over, people forget about being kids and wanting to change the world. The people who ran the antiwar movement in their 20s and didn't 'trust anybody over 30' recently considered a 21 year old White House intern with a sexual past incapable of free will. Aging babyboomers won't face the fact that youth has raging hormones and abounding opportunities to satisfy them. They scramble explicit programming, limit freedom of speech on the Net, block the distribution of condoms, and in every way make it difficult for kids to act responsibly and honestly—to own their bodies. The age of consent is about adults. It refuses kids our trust. At the door of the 21st century, we're pitifully holding on to this last taboo—teen lust—as a symbol of the world's manageability: if we can't control our kids, how can we run the planet? That's why a 15-year-old's hard-on is frightening.
     The hypocrisy doesn't end there. It's legal for adults to manipulate underage models into looking achingly desirable, inbreeding their fresh lustfulness with grownup cheesiness. We want our representations of youth dirty, but our kids clean.  We inundate the culture with seductive images of precocious youth, indulging our nostalgia for our lost puberty, but forbid kids to be turned on. When a 15 year old Brooke Shields uttered 'Nothing comes between me and my Calvins' (having already played a sex toy in 'Pretty Baby'), Calvin Klein became an American trademark. Since then, Madison Avenue has objectified many sheepish teens. Adults surreptitiously enjoy the ads. The fine line successful marketers tickle is our suppressed pederasty and pedenvy. 
     The impulse to stifle kid sexuality stems from good ol' ingrained guilt, and insincerity. The streets brim with teens empowered by newfound sexuality—strutting cherubs game for anything, glowing in their combination of innocence and experience and in the ephemeral availability of their bloom. Custom keeps us from doing what seems most natural: propositioning them. We fear their sexiness, so we ban their freedom of love. When Dominique Swayne played the main role in 'Lolita,' her age (16) created a scandal that sank the film. It's unacceptable for a 16 year old to be sexual with an adult, which is why a 16 year old can't pose nude in 'Playboy.' But, also at 16, Thora Birch was harmlessly topless in the context of realism in 'American Beauty'. Our morality is a laughable mess. Let's make peace with who we are: equal part parents and lovers.

     My 6th grade teacher, a tall, tanned, well-preserved bachelor, drove me home from class one day, held my hand in the car, and confessed he'd ask to marry me if I were ten years older. He said I was the woman (to-be) of his dreams. He didn't even frenchkiss me; he communicated his passion to me with his eyes, in class. The boys subliminally caught up and violently fought for my affection. His attention gave me power, his worldliness gave me confidence, and his warm sweaty hand in mine has been a cherished memory since I was 10.
     When I was 15, I slept with a high school teacher 20 years my senior, a DA, much more capable, articulate and intelligent than my classmates. I was flattered and proud of his interest. At 17, I slept with a famous poet in College. His class was full of talented beautiful girls striving to impress him. We dressed provocatively, wrote provocatively, walked into his office for individual conferences provocatively. When he propositioned me, I was elated. Our familiarity helped my work. I broke it off, but it had been terrifically erotic. And flirting in class with professors made student life interesting. This is not to say that sex is a necessary pedagogical tool?though the student is rare who hasn't fantasized about an instructor. This is not even to say that sex is a recommended path to learning or that it is intellectually advantageous.  I learned as much, sometimes more, from professors I barely spoke to outside of class.  In late graduate school, I found a mentor who would never engage romantically with a student.  That relationship-restricted to the realm of fantasy-lasted the longest and was the most rewarding.
     I learned my writing craft from these teachers; I also learned the art of daily living.  Sometimes, I also learned about sex.  There was never the remotest hint of pain or coercion.
     So I cringe at this prevalent notion that bodiliness can be radically eliminated from all pedagogical situations.  Having taught at the University myself, often students my own age, though I never slept with any nor entertained the thought, I know that my youth and physical presence attracted them positively and contributed to the liveliness of the class, to their attendance and to my effective transmission of knowledge.  My body is a useful pedagogical tool.
     Youth is obsessed with sex, period. It's the time in life when we first learn that first important lesson of adulthood: how startlingly important getting some is to everything in life.  And with this we enter adulthood. This is why youth needs to have sex:
    #1:
     Sex is a pursuit of the future.  We stalk it, gain on its tail.  It's a desire for what we don't yet have, for a potential, a slow transformation of the present, culminating in a new state that is without space and time (that exists as only self and the self's captured surrogate self, the sexual partner), ending at the culmination of our desire and the decimation of orgasm.
     #2:
Male Cycle.  Receiving affection from a woman, being nurtured, weakness (childhood/end of day), then beginning to deny weakness and dependence (adolescence/sexual arousal) with prideful strength (young manhood/male aggression during sex), and separating from mother/from female for selfhood (manhood/orgasm), thus losing one's origin and in ways one's self (a little death), and from this regaining weakness and collapsing into a woman (loss of masculine aggression/post male orgasm) with the desire to lay beside a woman for affection (childhood/mother/sleep).
     #3
Male Transformation.  You touch a woman you press the strangeness of her breasts to fit inside the familiar of your hands to shape around your hands you make her lips your lips, her face your face you smell her like she were a better part of yourself, you are allowed all freedom (for that's what sex or love is it's a freedom for your body to take on the abilities of your imagination) allowed all freedom with your body and your desire by leaving so willingly your body just as you most become your body, inside a woman and your penis doesn't feel like just a penis anymore, it feels like something new, you have transformed, and you want this to last forever because you know it won't, and then you die and then become yourself again it is a rebirth, into yourself, and now you have the chance to live again and try again and make a day again, you part from the woman (though still close, still at her side) and divide your mind between remembering what you've just had, just been, and what you want to become, as time moves away and away (for now, until it returns again) from making love.
     #4
Sexuality is a secret (so it's hidden, or revealed through indirection), a mythical state we wish upon our bodies (something more significant than desire, more exalted than physicality), a contradictory ideal (we "share" sex with others but use it to judge ourselves), the means to an end which isn't achieved (the end isn't orgasm or just one would do, so we strive again and again) and the tension of identity at a loss for definition (we try to become two people with one flesh).  All these point to the fact that sexuality is a function of imagination (both individual and social) as much as of our bodies.
     Kids resent this pretense that our minds don't live in our bodies, that we respond to each other's minds independently of each other's bodies, and that, on the other extreme, what we sexually desire in each other is the body alone; that teachers, students, bosses, employees, and colleagues can interact professionally without their bodies being present, and that those bodies can suddenly turn sexual in private rooms at the end of the day with the right consenting adult. I resent the assumption that every woman or youth is sexually in a position of weakness. Coercion can't be assumed from the nature of an encounter and its apparent power dynamics. Not all sexual relationships are or should be 'equal' and uncomplicated and successful. Sex brings together people of diverse strengths and backgrounds. The first important lesson of adulthood is how startlingly important getting some is to everything in life. I don't want to live in a world where life at school, on the job, in the neighborhood, in the cafeteria, on the subway, on a daily basis, is robbed of spontaneous flirtation. Sex is our most important evolutionary task.
     And somebody's gotta do it.