Caitlin Flanagan published an article on the alleged epidemic of oral sex among children under 18 in the January/February 2006 issue of the Atlantic Monthly. I thought at the time she made some good points*, and used the article to discuss the matter with some teens dear to me.
Now Timothy Burke, at Easily Distracted: Seers of Suburbia, and Laura at 11D: Girls Gone Wild,are continuing the discussion.
Burke is commending Flanagan's scepticism about the alleged epidemic, but faults her for neglecting important parts of the picture.
To me, the amazing thing about moral panic is its stability as a cultural structure in modernity, its cyclical recurrence, its narrative consistency from time to time. In Flanagan’s case, you can also see its irresistable pull: even an observer with skepticism and smarts can get drawn into the frame of the panic.
Laura focusses on the part of the essay that Burke derides, and asks the following questions
Are teenagers more awash in sexual messages today than when we grew up? Is this having any impact on their sex lives? Are too many girls servicing the football team? Is a blow job an act of control or submissiveness?
Laura is at least 20 years younger than I am. Yes, the message that sex is good and desirable and cost-free are all more prevalent in teens' lives today than in the mid-sixties (when I entered teendom). I think it is much more "awash" even that the early 1990s, when I was parenting a just-turned-teen male.
But it is footless to just look at the "sexual messages". It's the whole package--the change in styles of parenting, the decline in time parents spend with kids, the "age compression" effect; the commercialization of the family; the pressure to succeed and get into a good college, the "zero tolerance" movement; the "troubled teen" industry...I could go on.
I think very little of contemporary popular culture is good for kids. Flanagan's concern is just a piece.
The concept of "moral panic" is discussed in this wikipedia article
The concept of "culture of fear" is discussed in this wikipedia article.
*It was the following passage that rang true to me:
As a parent, I am horrified by the changes that have taken place in the common culture over the past thirty years. I believe that we are raising children in a kind of post-apocalyptic landscape in which no forces beyond individual households—individual mothers and fathers—are protecting children from pornography and violent entertainment. The "it takes a village" philosophy is a joke, because the village is now so polluted and so desolate of commonly held, child-appropriate moral values that my job as a mother is not to rely on the village but to protect my children from it....
I think that girls are vulnerable to great damage through the kind of sex in which they are, as individuals, as valueless and unrecognizable as chattel. Society has let its girls down in every possible way. It has refused to assert—or even to acknowledge—that female sexuality is as intricately connected to kindness and trust as it is to gratification and pleasure. It's in the nature of who we are.
Books:
Barry Glassner, The Culture of Fear
Elliot Currie, The Road to Whatever
Maia Szalavitz, Help at Any Cost
Juliet Schor, Born to Buy
Posts here:
Age compression and the Britney Effect
The Road to Whatever
A Call for Parental Firmness
Category: Therapeutic Schools
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