The Secret Life...

I have a confession to make. I occasionally watch "The Secret Life of the American Teenager." (It's an ABC Family show about a 16 yr. old girl who gets pregnant and drama ensues.) During the commercial breaks, the actresses always do a public service announcement along the lines of "too many teens don't talk about sex with their parents until they are telling them that they are pregnant. Don't wait, talk now." And they list a few websites including stayteen.org. This morning, being bored (my internship finished and I have NOTHING to do!), I decided to visit stayteen.org out of curiosity. Unfortunately but not unexpected, I was pretty disappointed with the website. The site includes a bunch of information about abstinence and birth control and a blog (supposedly written by teens). ABC Family definitely has a more conservative agenda, so the show and the websites reflect it. My problem is that the website presents information in a way that completely denies teen sexuality and sexual agency.

Overall, the website (not unsurprisingly) pushes abstinence. The "Sex" subsection of the the "What's your relationship reality" gives reasons that teens have sex. It does not list "I wanted to, sex is fun, I like sex" as a reasons that teens give for having sex. Personally, I had sex at 17 because I wanted to. I never imagined that my relationship with surfer boy would last forever or that we would get married. And we used protection. The website continually denies teenage sexual desire. It ignores the desire that people feel when about to bang.

Abstinence doesn't work (as a national campaign) and nor should it. Throughout human history and around the world, girls got married shortly after their first period. Men had more sexual license, but they also got married in their early 20's. So, this is the FIRST time in history that society has expected people to wait until their mid-20's to have sex. In general, there has always been an expectation for people to wait to have sex until marriage. However, people got married earlier (most girls around 15), and people had still had sex outside of marriage. New research shows that the number of people having sex outside of marriage has pretty much been stable since the early 1900's. Basically, by asking people not to have sex until marriage (currently average age around 25, I believe), we are asking the impossible, in my opinion.

There is nothing wrong fundamentally wrong with teenagers wanting to have sex. (Again, I'm not saying the losing your virginity is always smooth-sailing. Normally, it's not). Wanting to have sex doesn't make you a slut nor is it automatically a poor decision. I think that we need to restructure the conversation around teen sex. Right now, the conversation is not "Let's talk about sex" in a completely open, judgement-free environment. It's "Let's talk about sex," but I'm going to judge your choices. Currently, the conversation alienates teenagers because they ask their peers for information (possibly false) rather than talking to adults who would be able to help them when shit goes wrong. They hide their problems which only creates more. If we created an environment around sex which didn't deny teen sexuality, then I believe that we could more easily address the issues surrounding sex (date rape, abuse, pregnancy, birth control etc).

Lots of Love,
Lady Lola