Teen Sex 3.0

TEEN SEX 3.0

by John Rosengren

 

We’re in the midst of a new sexual revolution among urban and suburban youth. 

Welcome to the age of technology, porn, and hooking up. 

 

(Author’s note:  This is a slightly modified version of the article that appears in the January 2011 issue of Mpls. St. Paul magazine--call it the author’s cut.)

 

Saturday night.  The homecoming dance.  Boys in neckties and girls in party dresses—some so short they won’t be able to sit down—file into the school. A priest in a Roman collar checks them in at the door and passes out glow sticks. This is a private suburban prep school; these are good kids, clean-cut and college-bound. 

 

Inside the darkened cafeteria-turned-nightclub, colored lights pulse hypnotically, music throbs at conversation-killing levels, and the throng of teenagers oozes body heat. First a male and then a female robotic voice intones the chorus of a techno pop song. Many of the kids mouth the words:  “Touch me till I can get my satisfaction.” 

 

A knot of 20 or so kids in the center grinds away. The boys guide the girls’ hips with their hands and nuzzle their crotches into the females’ gyrating asses. One brown-haired beauty in a red dress throws back her head and laughs while her date’s hands wander her southern slopes, their heads haloed by glow sticks.

 

“It’s sex with clothes on,” says Steve , a soft-spoken, self-confessed tech geek 

who attends another suburban Catholic school. 

 

“It gets nasty at our school,” says Amber (not her real name; all the minors quoted in this story spoke, for their own protection, with the promise of anonymity), a soft-spoken public school junior with a liberal attitude. “The guys move around, change girls.” 

 

“It starts as a one-on-one, but then it’s a free-for-all,” adds Luke, a boy with black sideburns and a self-deprecating sense of humor. 

 

The private school principal had promised the faculty there would be no grinding at the dance.  Yet--while the kids engaged in their upright lap dances--the priest stood behind the refreshment stand scrolling through email on his Blackberry; a police officer leaned against a radiator in the back, hands in pockets; and the principal tread along the fringes of the dancers without venturing into the middle.  “The teachers don’t want to go into the middle,” says Angie, a talkative girl in a green sweater.  “It’s so silly because they make these rules, but they don’t enforce them.” 

 

School administrators have tried to ban grinding for the past few years with little success. They’ve instituted policies, canceled dances, and tried to utilize peer pressure—all to little effect. The kids, more flagrant than ever about their sexuality, have come to see grinding as an entitlement of expression and entertainment. They have petitioned school boards, boycotted school dances, and—on the television show “Parenthood”—one girl even ran for class president on a right-to-grind platform. 

 

 

Kids today. They haven’t changed. They’re loaded with hormones, curious about sex, and filled with a desire to be loved. But the world around them has changed. Unlike their parents of the Brady Bunch generation, today’s teens are coming of age in a hypersexual society fueled by the influence of rampant pornography and guided by smartphones, iPods, and laptops in the context of the Facebook culture. These are Glee kids in on Victoria’s Secret. If they want to grind, they’re going to grind. 

 

“Kids are a lot more open today about sex,” says Katie, a girl with long brown hair who sits with her legs crossed, her phone in her lap. “We move a lot faster.” 

 

She’s part of a group of 10 high school students—male and female, juniors and seniors, from public and private schools around the Twin Cities—gathered at The Depot coffee shop in Hopkins on a recent Sunday morning for two hours of frank talk about sex. 

Judy, a blonde in a white blouse who sprinkles her comments with literary references, agrees. “We’re going to do what we’re going to do--“ 

 

“No matter what you say,” cuts in Luke, the boy with dark sideburns. 

 

Yet, perhaps surprisingly, today’s teens are not necessarily more promiscuous than their parents. By graduation, roughly half of the high school class of 2011 will have lost their virginity. That statistic has jiggled up and down but remained basically constant over the 

past 30 years. The biggest difference between today and yesterday is the heavy doses of sex teens absorb. They may not be sexually active, but they’re sexually activated. “Parents can’t shelter kids from sex and sexual issues,” says Erin, a bright-eyed 

and articulate girl in a short floral skirt. “Parents can educate their children, but ultimately it’s up to the children to make their own decisions.” 

 

“Parents make the conclusion that we’re so open that we must all be having sex with each other,” says Judy, the budding English major. “No. Just because we can talk about it doesn’t mean we’re giving everybody blowjobs.” 

 

Our children are being sexualized at increasingly younger ages. Pop star Katy Perry performed a music video with Elmo in a low-cut dress that proved too revealing for Sesame Street producers. A second-grader tells another boy, “If you Google ‘naked 

lady,’ a bunch of pictures show up.” Stores like Victoria’s Secret and Abercrombie & Fitch plaster their storefronts with larger-than-life images of soft porn. Girls on elementary school playgrounds practice pole dancing on tetherball poles. Meanwhile, moms coat their prepubescent girls in makeup, wax their eyebrows and pay big bucks for their daughters to perform suggestive moves in competitive dance troupes. It’s all part of the new normal. 

 

Young girls wear tight T-shirts with messages spread across their breasts and sweats or shorts with words like “pink” and “juicy” on their bottoms. “Dressing provocatively still doesn’t mean I’m asking to be assaulted, but it could give the message, ‘I’m sexually available,’ ” says Brigid Riley, executive director of the Minnesota Organization on Adolescent Pregnancy, Prevention, and Parenting (MOAPPP). “A lot of young girls are wearing those outfits but are not aware of what they’re advertising. They’re not cognitively able to understand what messages they’re sending.” 

 

The explosion of online porn in the past decade, its redefinition of what constitutes normal sex (anal sex, double penetration, “facials”), and the rapid dissemination of smartphones (which barely existed three years ago) have occurred so recently that it’s too early to know what the long-term effects will be on today’s teenagers. “The content is more deviant and violent,” says Cordelia Anderson, a Minneapolis-based prevention consultant and chair of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Exploitation. “You see a lot more ejaculation on women—on her face, in her eyes. When this is used for arousal, that’s a concern in how it’s going to affect what I get aroused by and what my partner gets aroused by.” 

 

There are bound to be consequences to this cultural revolution. Health experts believe that the influence of online porn has warped a generation’s view of healthy sexual interactions and meaningful, committed relationships. Various studies support this notion, yet it’s difficult to obtain reliable data from large samples because it’s difficult to get access to minors—what school district would allow researchers to ask students about their attitudes regarding facials? 

 

“An American Psychiatric Association study in 2007 looked at how the media sexualizes girls,” Anderson says. “They see themselves as sexual objects, for others’ uses. Their sexuality is seen as the most important aspect of themselves, not simply as part of who they are. The only thing that matters is how sexy I am.” 

 

The number of sexually-transmitted infections being reported has also gone up. Even though they make up only 7 percent of the population in Minnesota, adolescents aged 

15 to 19 accounted for 32 percent of chlamydia and 27 percent of gonorrhea cases in 2009. These rates disturb health care professionals, especially when STIs are so easily prevented with the use of condoms. But not even school nurses who pass out free samples can convince kids to use them. 

 

Perhaps the greatest casualty in all this is healthy relationships. “They’re learning more about how to have anal and oral intercourse than how to hold, hug, and kiss,” says Anderson. 

 

That’s really what most kids want, namely to be loved and respected. “Everybody thinks kids want to talk just about sex, but really they want to talk about relationships and how to have healthy relationships,” says Nina Jonson, community education program manager at the West Suburban Teen Clinic (a full-service health clinic in Excelsior that offers reproductive services for adolescents). “Even kids who say they’re not interested in dating, when you ask them what they want when they grow up, they say they want to be with someone who loves and cares about them—they want to know how to get there.” 

 

In general, it seems, kids are growing up faster. “What many of us remember from the freshman year of college is happening the junior year of high school,” says Steve Kahn, Ph.D., a licensed psychologist in White Bear Lake. 

 

 

After the Homecoming Grind, the boys and girls spill into the night inebriated with arousal. Many will head to parties in suburban rec rooms, where they’ll follow the foreplay to its natural conclusion. “We have them at the cool parents’ house,” says Judy, the blonde with the high verbal SAT scores. “They turn a blind eye. They may come down once, but they don’t sniff around or look outside. 

 

“At our after-homecoming party, the dad found a condom in the bathroom trash can. ‘I can’t do anything about it now,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to know whose it is.’ ” 

 

 

Hannah’s phone vibrated.  “UR so sexy.”  

 

Kurt.  He’d been chasing her for weeks now.  He was a year older, a senior.  This was the day before graduation.  Why not?  They weren’t doing anything in class.  It would be a sort of graduation present.  She slipped out of the classroom.

 

Kurt led Hannah to an isolated wing of the school.  Her heart galloped.  It wasn’t like this was the first time--that was freshman year; she and her boyfriend had exchanged oral sex for months before deciding to lose their virginity together sophomore year (they had since broken up).  Hannah and Kurt snuck into an elevator.  Zip.  While her classmates puzzled over logarithms, she took him in her mouth.  

 

Social media has redefined courtship. Kids “talk” via text messages or online chats. These means of communication engender a virtual courage and ease inhibitions. Kids make flirtatious comments on Facebook walls that they would never say to someone’s face. “It’s too embarrassing when you’re 13 to go up and talk to someone, but texting you don’t have to talk to them or see their reaction,” says Angie, a talkative girl in a green sweater. 

 

One thing (“talking”) leads to another (“hooking up”), which can mean anything from groping to oral sex—the new “second base”—to intercourse. “A big difference between the ’70s and today is that dating doesn’t happen, at least not dating in the way grown-ups think of it, where someone picks you up to take you out for dinner and a movie,” Jonson says. “Many young people today ‘hook up’ (have sex) first to see if they want to date. It’s in reverse.” 

 

Sometimes they do end up in committed relationships. Luke, the boy with the sideburns, got into his first relationship by “talking” online. Judy was in ninth grade at her private school when a senior “Facebook chatted” her. They have been together for more than two years. But other times, teens are content with the convenience of hooking up—after school before parents get home, in secluded areas of city parks, in cars parked on quiet residential streets or office building lots, at school, and even in family restrooms at shopping malls. (“They’re perfect because they’re really big,” says Stacey, who sports 

a pierced nose. “You put down some paper towels on the floor.”) In addition to hallway PDAs, kids report seeing other students at school doing everything from fondling to screwing in locker rooms, bathrooms, stairwells, storage closets, empty cafeterias--even elevators. 

 

“It’s pretty common just to have sex with someone without all of the emotional hang-ups,” Luke says. 

 

“It’s just sex, for gratification,” Angie adds. “People are busy. They don’t always have time for a relationship. It’s the best of both worlds. 

 

“Our parents think sex and emotions always go together, but for our generation it’s not always like that. They can go together—that’s when you have the relationship—but if you’re not going to be invested emotionally, you can just have the sex. That’s possible.”

 

“I have friends who are doing it (hooking up) but want more than just sex,” Amber pipes in.  “They’re doing it hoping something (like a relationship) will happen.”

 

Cell phones have taken flirting to the next level:  sexting. “The new ‘if-you-loved me-you-would’ is to perform a sex act (on your own or with someone else) and send it to me,” Cordelia Anderson says.

 

Web cams up the ante.  Web sites like ChatRoulette.com allow anonymous video interactions online.  The conversations frequently lead to stripteases.  “It’s another easy was for teens to be sexual and not have consequences,” says Erin, the girl in the short floral skirt.

 

“Everyone did it last year--it was a trend,” says Angie, the girl in the green sweater.  “But it gets creepy because people say, ‘You should undress now.’”

 

“The difference between our generation and the middle school generation is if we heard that, we’d say no,” Judy says.  “But the middle school girl says, ‘Oh, okay.  He thinks I’m cute.’”

 

“They don’t have the confidence, and so they do it,” Amber says.

 

“Girls in middle school want to appear older,” Stephanie says.  “So even if you’ll become a sex object for someone, you’ll do it because you crave that attention.”

 

“Parents don’t have to worry about us,” Judy says.  “It’s the middle schoolers they need to worry about.”

 

 

Today’s teens may be sexually precocious, but their brains remain immature.  The prefrontal cortex, the area that governs decision-making--curbing impulses and weighing long-term consequences--is still under construction during adolescence.  “Once the guardrails that stop impulses get moved farther and farther out, kids reason, ‘Why should I bother managing the impulse?  It’s what cool people do,” says David Walsh, Ph.D., author of Why Do They Act That Way?:  A Survival Guide To The Adolescent Brain For You And Your Teen.

 

Doesn’t help that kids are inundated on all fronts by sexual messages more graphic and more often than their parents were.  Teens spend on average more time daily with media (television, music, Internet, magazines, video games, movies), about 7.5 hours, than they do in school, according to a 2010 study by the Kaiser Family Foundation.   On television alone, the number of scenes with sexual content increased by 96 percent from 1998 to 2005, also according to the Kaiser Family Foundation.  It follows that kids who watch sex are more likely to have sex, based on results from a 2004 study published in the journal “Pediatrics.”  “The net result of all this--from sitcoms that portray casual sex to Abercrombie & Fitch using sex to sell clothes—is that it normalizes casual sex,” Walsh says. “The message is, ‘This is what the cool people do.’ It lowers the barrier to engage in sexual banter, like sexting. It starts to distinguish sex from relationships. Sex as recreation becomes more acceptable.” 

 

Previously aberrant behavior also becomes socially acceptable. Former stripper Diablo Cody won an Academy Award for her screenplay Juno about a precocious pregnant teenager. Porn star Jenna Jameson became a bestselling author with her memoir How to Make Love Like a Porn Star: A Cautionary Tale. Britney Spears hired Gregory Dark, an adult filmmaker, to produce her music video portraying a repressed Catholic schoolgirl. Meanwhile, health clubs push the latest fad workout: pole dancing—sweat like a stripper! And Hugh Hefner appears quaint beside Joe Francis, who’s made millions convincing young women to bare their breasts (and more) on camera for his Girls Gone Wild DVDs and website. To wit, pornography has gone mainstream. 

 

Yet we hardly blink. “It’s so much there that we don’t even see it,” Anderson says. “There’s nothing wrong with wanting to be sexy or have fun, but we’ve lost our thinking between what’s healthy and what’s harmful.” 

 

 

The first time Jacob saw porn on the Internet, he was 14 years old. That’s late. Most experts agree that the average age for a child to first view pornography is 11, or younger. Jacob was at a friend’s house and acted disgusted when a pop-up ad on the computer showed a couple having vaginal intercourse. Not long after, he searched for porn on his computer at home. 

 

Jacob’s not unique. Kids are naturally curious. And what constitutes today’s version of porn is readily accessible. Kids laugh at parental efforts to block it. “That’s so easy to get around,” Amber says. 

 

There are a gazillion free hard-core porn sites featuring variations on sex acts that not even the Kama Sutra imagined. YouTube, which ostensibly censors material, features more than 1,100 hits for the search “How to give a blowjob.” “It’s pretty hard to resist for 

13-, 14-, 15-year-old boys,” psychologist Kahn says. 

 

Porn is pervasive and persuasive. It’s changing the way kids think and act, whether they view it or not. Consider that “The Brazilian”—universal among women in porn—has become The Look, inducing teen girls to wax or shave their pubic hair. “Teenage girls do it because they think a guy might be attracted to it and because they’re getting a trickle-down message that it’s ugly not to look that way, that being natural is unsanitary and unattractive,” says Jonson of the West Suburban Teen Clinic. “That trend started with porn.” 

 

But boys want more than to see bare genitals. They want to act out what they watch. With so much of online pornography degrading and abusive, that translates into violent sexual 

encounters among teens. “We’re seeing more violence—biting, clawing, scraping, drawing blood during sex,” says Molly Snuggerud, the West Suburban Teen Clinic’s 

program director. 

 

“The normalization of sexual harm is the biggest change,” Anderson says. “Things that used to be considered problematic, if not illegal, have come to be considered normal.” 

 

Porn keeps pushing the limits to keep pace with the increasing tolerance for titillation and stimulation. What worked yesterday—say a Playboy centerfold that showed breasts and 

pubic hair—seems hardly even risqué now. “When we become desensitized, we need a bigger jolt to get the high,” author Walsh says. “One of the concerns with pornography is that it needs to get more and more extreme to get the same results.” 

 

Which forces the porn to push harder, upping the degradation and violence. “You see a lot of what is called body-punishing sex—double penetration, violent penetration, gag porn—this does very little to enhance mutual pleasure,” Anderson says. “Part of the new arousal is actually seeing [women’s] pain.” 

 

But the girls don’t flinch. “We live in a generation of porn,” says Erin, the girl in the floral skirt. “Our generation has become immune to it.” 

 

Well, not quite. The kids are just not aware of the subtle ways porn is shaping their attitudes and influencing their behavior. Boys can develop a warped sense of what it means to be sexual with a woman. For starters, the cyber images have no wants or needs, so young males don’t learn how to be in mutually-satisfying relationships; instead, they focus on how to maximize their own pleasure. Also, having become accustomed to digitally-enhanced images, they may encounter difficulty being aroused by real, often flawed, bodies. Most disturbing are the lessons absorbed while watching males degrade females. 

 

Girls feel it, too, in the way porn casts females in subservient roles. “It’s usually all about the females servicing the males,” Anderson says. 

 

 

Have you read your daughter’s Facebook wall? One father of a 17-year-old girl did and was startled by how sexually aggressive girls have become. “Everything’s centered on 

‘You’re so beautiful, I’d like to take you to bed’—and this is girl to girl,” he says. “It’s changed the dynamic, blurred the lines. Technology has facilitated the aggression. We live in this society where we’re bombarded with sexuality and now they have a place to express it on Facebook. Their sexuality is much more in the open. How many girls when we were younger would be willing to [grind] in a public place? There’s a competitive aspect among the girls. The more outrageous they can be, the more narcissistic they become. They’re willing to do anything, no matter how outrageous or how permanent—they just want people to ‘look at me.’ It’s like the Salahi character on ‘The Real Housewives of D.C.’: ‘Any attention is good as long as it’s on me.’ ” 

 

 

Anderson, of the National Coalition to Prevent Child Sexual Exploitation, deems the way society has perverted sexuality a public health crisis. “There are so many influences on children making it difficult for them to make healthy choices,” she says. “It’s a child’s right to have accurate and comprehensive information and the skills to navigate through this toxicity.” 

 

Yet most kids don’t have an adult they feel they can confide in or turn to for advice. “Only 17 percent of American teenagers report that they have good enough communication with a trusted adult to talk about sex with them,” Walsh says. “To make it worse, we’ve told a lot of the responsible individuals that used to be able to talk about sex that we don’t want them to do that any more. School districts have imposed policies not to talk about sex. We end up delegating sex ed to Hollywood and Madison Avenue.” 

 

Anderson, Walsh, and others advocate comprehensive sex education in schools. They express concern that the abstinence-only movement downplays—or downright misrepresents—the importance of condoms in preventing sexually-transmitted infections. They also dismiss the notion that talking about sex will encourage promiscuity. “We continue to assert that young people really need a grounding in good sex education,” says MOAPPP’s Riley. “We’re not teaching them how to have sex, but teaching them what it means to be healthy sexual beings.” 

 

The best education begins at home, of course, but that’s where many parents are failing their kids. Adults uncomfortable with the subject or uncertain how to broach it or afraid they’ll say the wrong thing—pick your excuse—don’t talk about it. Yet, believe it or not, kids do respect their parents’ values and want to hear what they have to say. “Even though we’ve said teens are going to have sex, I still want my mom to talk to me,” says Katie, the girl with the phone in her lap. “If she says, ‘I don’t want you to have sex with random people,’ I will take that to heart and pay attention.” 

 

But papa, don’t preach. “You might not hear what you want to hear, but you have to go in with an open mind and trust that your kids are doing what’s best for them,” Judy insists. “What was the right decision for you might not be the right decision for them.” 

 

And avoid the scare tactics. Be reasonable. “Instead of saying, ‘You’re going to get pregnant,’ say, ‘It’s going to be really awkward in the morning,’” says Angie, the talkative girl with the green sweater. 

 

“This is the age when people are having sex,” Katie says. “But you can still be responsible about it. I wish parents could understand that.”