teenagers, sex, and agency

Being a teenager is shitty. You're making terrible fashion choices, you're under pressure to figure out a life path, and you're chock full of hormones (racing at the speed of light) and unsure how to handle them appropriately. Have sex and risk being labeled as a slut and a nasty (not to mention accidentally creating a person or receiving a gift you can't get rid of)? Avoid having sex and battle your urges constantly (and GASP maybe go to college a virgin)? 

My thoughts on this whole topic are very muddy now. I've worked with teenagers since I was barely older than one myself, and as someone who became sexually active pretty early in my teens, I rarely questioned the fact that when someone decides they're ready for sex, goddammit, then they're ready.

Then I started working with teens who had babies and wildly unhealthy ideas about women. And I started to doubt all that. 

To paraphrase a Liz Lemon quote, the problem with teenage girls is that they're both vicious and vulnerable. While girls are definitely being ushered into adulthood and sexuality (or at least the appearance of sexuality) and some of them are quite knowledgeable about their bodies, the risks and benefits of fucking, and have access to birth control, I don't know if these girls are necessarily in the majority (I hope I'm wrong). Most girls struggle to figure out their own desires, versus the desires of what they think they should do, versus what their partner might expect from them. It makes me feel incredibly queasy and scared to think of them essentially going into the battle that is adolescent sexuality and life without the proper armor and know how. 

This is not to say, obviously, that girls don't want to bang--clearly, they do. I'm only pointing out that the longer I work around teenagers, the more it seems that their choice to have sex at an early age is a foregone conclusion, something they don't seem to choose so much as something that happens to them and thereby objectifies them and disconnects them from their choices. Maybe I'm just getting older and being a geezer and over-analyzing their lives because mine is one-quarter over and I can be reflective like that, but teen sexuality is so muddled and pathologized and just fucked up in this country. It is a fight for young women (and young men!) to learn themselves and establish a healthy sexuality and ability to have sexual experiences that work for them. 

Is the Sheriff being a prude on this one, or what? Tell me what you think.

Much love,

The Sheriff