posted 04-11-2002 09:03 AM               

Even if you're not on the side of abstinence-ed, what are your feelings about how to responsibly nuture and guide youths in regard to their sexuality, offering protection without impedment?

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Heather Corinna

posted 04-15-2002 06:46 PM            

We live differently today. We are told to get our lives together before we have children, to find a partner to help you rear the children. For most of us, that means establishing a career. For me that meant college, graduate school, oops couldn't get a job, now an apprenticeship. It was only in the past few years that I could finally bear the financial responsibility of a family. With that experience I also grew calmer and wiser, much more capable of parenting. But now I'm single and forty five. Yet Pat Robertson would insist that I remain a virgin.

Tough luck, Pat.

It isn't reasonable to ask people to endure more than a decade of raging hormones, as the fundamentalists would prefer. But it also true that people need to make their own lives before they assume responsibility for another.

In the past the way we enforced sexual order was through shunning. Shunning women that is. Women who said 'yes' before marriage could be rightfully dumped by the person they said yes too. Pregnant girls were 'sent away' to have their children, so they wouldn't have to bear the stigma. Or they turned to coathangers.

While I don't think we should return to the hateful days of the past, I don't think teenagers should be having children. At all. Sure some of them pull it off magnificently, and yes, we could give more support to the kids who do. But the reality for both father and mother is 'goodbye college' and 'hello work'. Now work isn't a bad thing, I do it every day. But I don't like the idea of short circuiting kids out careers that might permit them to do more than worry about getting by, like so many do. And I volunteer at a homeless shelter that's full of single parent families who lacked the skills and support network to get by when their luck turned. We live in a world that is deeply overcrowded, and have both the medical skills and technology to control our population. We have a responsibility to use our technology to choose when to have our children. Children are simply too important to deserve less than our best.

When you have a child with someone, you are bonded to that person for life, whether you despise them or not. Teenage romantic relationships are usually what we might call 'short-term serial monogamy'. A few people find their life partners and that's great. But a six month relationship is really long term thing in that context. The crushes of those days feel very, very real, and they are, but kids often lack the experience and understanding to know what kind of partner they really need. A lot of teenage dating involves figuring that simple truth out. Yet a moment of passion may bond two mismatched people together.

So what do we do? I don' t think it realistic to ask kids to wait forever for 'marriage' or whatever. But I do think it realistic to ask them to wait for a finite period. We need some type of ‘coming of age’ for boys and girls. For it to succeed it needs to be fun, and something to look forward too.

So let me put on my ‘science fiction writer’ hat and imagine how I think it ought to go in an ideal world. First of all, the time between puberty and the coming of age, has to possess some significance, some status and it can’t be non-sexual. After all, we are sexual then. I know because I masturbated whenever possible back then. It needs to be a time of learning.

Second, boys and girls can’t ‘come of age’ as strangers, without contact. In many ways we are strangers today when puberty turns our attention toward one another. The two sexes tend to play separately, and sexual segregation is encouraged by tradition. Probably because it made it easier to limit premarital sex. And tradition made sex. In a pre-industrial society, everyone had to work all the time, and women’s skills were often different from men’s. What seems to be striking is that children seem to come out better when raised in larger groups, such as in extended families. Children can be given responsibility early, in looking after their younger siblings. And if the system is not limited to one pair of parents, then a youngest child can learn responsibility looking after younger children. You sometimes get this in the best day cares, which combine schooling, socialization, and good supervision in a mix that outperforms single family households.

So here’s part B. We need some kind of ‘kibbutz’ or ‘village’ structure for child rearing. Right away. That allows us to pick up the slack of weaker parents-- which are inevitable-- and provides a better social structure for single parents. They get help, the help they might have gotten in an agrarian extended family, but don’t in our post-industrial age of fragmented families. They also might have the time to take care of finishing their lives, if they have kids before college or trade school. In this case the ‘village’ steps in and assumes significant parental responsibility, which makes the burden easier on the parent. Every parent needs a break, particularly the single parents.

So lets look at how this might shake out. Boys and girls grow up learning to ‘co-operate’ and communicate with each other, because they need to in order to fulfill their responsibility for the younger children. Boys learn homemaking skills they’ll need in later life, and girls learn boys games and skills so the two sexes are bonded not separated. So when puberty comes, it doesn’t come to strangers. And it comes to people who have already carried responsibility.

The responsibility is critical. It takes responsibility to roll on that condom or not forget a pill. Responsibility met grows genuine pride, the kind that allows you to believe in a better future. Perhaps to wait if the time is not right, or perhaps to be careful because of future goals that are both tangible and attainable.

Sex education has to start early, at levels the kids can understand. It has to begin with birth control and contraception, and continue all the way through to ‘the coming’. But it needs to change at puberty and become more ‘personal’. Masturbation needs to be encouraged, even taught. Some real sex training would be good. Here the question is ‘how’. Do you begin with adult surrogates? Or the kids help themselves with ‘exercises’. Or a mix of both. The advantage of an adult ‘instructor’ would be that the person could really get to know their student, and try to teach them communication and sensitivity as well as the more obviously fun stuff. Or do you do exercises in touching, to teach the body, allowing touch in strictly limited ways. And if that’s the case should kids pair off, each finding a good ‘lab partner’? Or should they constantly change places, and so learn more.

If you choose the latter lets say you do those exercises at specialized festivals, perhaps timed with the solstices, where each year brings more privileges. Ritual is used to formalize and regulate the event, just as it can be used during religious services to control and guide the emotional responses of worshippers. The festival becomes something to look forward to, and the growth permitted. I think restraint is easier when it’s not open-ended, as is so often asked today. People seem to have trouble with open-ended commitments.

In the past we did this. ‘Dances’ were places were men and women and boys and girls were allowed to touch in ritualized ways. The square dance itself is almost a rehearsal of sorts for coupling, as boys and girls ‘change partners’, touching in limited ways, and perhaps learning who the do and do not wished to be touched by. The bundling bed represented a way of letting kids pet, but keeping their groins separate. Slow dances were the same thing, allowing touch in limited, but potentially thrilling ways. Perhaps these traditions could be built on.

The ‘big event’ should be a large festival, but it should simply be a party, a release from structures. Not a ritual orgy, or pairing like you might find in a fantasy novel. It should be preceded with exercises and the choosing of contraceptive methods. Controlled dances where some touch is permitted. And then rather than an event, a release, a recognition of maturity with privileges. Now, you have the right to choose. I expect many people will choose sex. Others will choose to wait, but they will do so from knowledge, and with social permission.

When something’s legal, you can control it a lot more effectively than when it’s hidden.

posted 04-21-2002 06:26 PM            

The question is sexual maturity has no relationship to emotional maturity. It takes emotional maturity to deal with the consdequences and responsibilities that come with sex. If I had my drothers, I'd have everyone start puberty at 18 or 20. Most evidence suggests that would lead to longer overall life. But more importantly personalities would be more stable and better developed before the hormones start flooding in. I think puberty would be a better experience overall.