The future of sexuality

[markomalley]

From the 30 January New Yorker magazine:

---

The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School

Researchers find it shocking that 11 percent of American girls between 15 and 19 claim to have same-sex encounters. Clearly they’ve never observed the social rituals of the pansexual, bi-queer, metroflexible New York teen.

Alair is wearing a tight white tank top cut off above the hem to show her midriff. Her black cargo pants graze the top of her combat boots, and her black leather belt is studded with metal chains that drape down at intervals across her hips. She has long blonde curls that at various times have been dyed green, blue, red, purple, and orange. (“A mistake,” she says. “Even if you mean to dye your hair orange, it’s still a mistake.”) Despite the fact that she’s fully clothed, she seems somehow exposed, her baby fat lingering in all the right places. Walking down the sterile, white halls of Stuyvesant High School, she creates a wave of attention. She’s not the most popular girl in school, but she is well known. “People like me,” she wrote in an instant message. “Well, most of them.”

Alair is headed for the section of the second-floor hallway where her friends gather every day during their free tenth period for the “cuddle puddle,” as she calls it. There are girls petting girls and girls petting guys and guys petting guys. She dives into the undulating heap of backpacks and blue jeans and emerges between her two best friends, Jane and Elle, whose names have been changed at their request. They are all 16, juniors at Stuyvesant. Alair slips into Jane’s lap, and Elle reclines next to them, watching, cat-eyed. All three have hooked up with each other. All three have hooked up with boys—sometimes the same boys. But it’s not that they’re gay or bisexual, not exactly. Not always.

(snip)

Since the school day is winding down, things in the hallway are starting to get rowdy. Jane disappears for a while and comes back carrying a pint-size girl over her shoulder. “Now I take her off and we have gay sex!” she says gleefully, as she parades back and forth in front of the cuddle puddle. “And it’s awesome!” The hijacked girl hangs limply, a smile creeping to her lips. Ilia has stuffed papers up the front of his shirt and prances around on tiptoe, batting his eyes and sticking out his chest. Elle is watching, enthralled, as two boys lock lips across the hall. “Oh, my,” she murmurs. “Homoerotica. There’s nothing more exciting than watching two men make out.” And everyone is talking to another girl in the puddle who just “came out,” meaning she announced that she’s now open to sexual overtures from both boys and girls, which makes her a minor celebrity, for a little while.

When asked how many of her female friends have had same-sex experiences, Alair answers, “All of them.” Then she stops to think about it. “All right, maybe 80 percent. At least 80 percent of them have experimented. And they still are. It’s either to please a man, or to try it out, or just to be fun, or ’cause you’re bored, or just ’cause you like it . . . whatever.”

With teenagers there is always a fair amount of posturing when it comes to sex, a tendency to exaggerate or trivialize, innocence mixed with swagger. It’s also true that the “puddle” is just one clique at Stuyvesant, and that Stuyvesant can hardly be considered a typical high school. It attracts the brightest public-school students in New York, and that may be an environment conducive to fewer sexual inhibitions. “In our school,” Elle says, “people are getting a better education, so they’re more open-minded.”

That said, the Stuyvesant cuddle puddle is emblematic of the changing landscape of high-school sexuality across the country. This past September, when the National Center for Health Statistics released its first survey in which teens were questioned about their sexual behavior, 11 percent of American girls polled in the 15-to-19 demographic claimed to have had same-sex encounters—the same percentage of all women ages 15 to 44 who reported same-sex experiences, even though the teenagers have much shorter sexual histories. It doesn’t take a Stuyvesant education to see what this means: More girls are experimenting with each other, and they’re starting younger. And this is a conservative estimate, according to Ritch Savin-Williams, a professor of human development at Cornell who has been conducting research on same-sex-attracted adolescents for over twenty years. Depending on how you phrase the questions and how you define sex between women, he believes that “it’s possible to get up to 20 percent of teenage girls.”

Of course, what can’t be expressed in statistical terms is how teenagers think about their same-sex interactions. Go to the schools, talk to the kids, and you’ll see that somewhere along the line this generation has started to conceive of sexuality differently. Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure. “It’s not like, Oh, I’m going to hit on her now. It’s just kind of like, you come up to a friend, you grab their foot,” Alair explains. “It’s just, like, our way of saying hello.” These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the “post-gay” generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, “just sexual.” The terms are designed less to achieve specificity than to leave all options open.

To some it may sound like a sexual Utopia, where labels have been banned and traditional gender roles surpassed, but it’s a complicated place to be. Anyone who has ever been a girl in high school knows the vicissitudes of female friendships. Add to that a sexual component and, well, things get interesting. Take Alair and her friend Jane, for example. “We’ve been dancing around each other for, like, three years now,” says Alair. “I’d hop into bed with her in a second.” Jane is tall and curvy with green eyes and faint dimples. She thinks Alair is “amazing,” but she’s already had a female friendship ruined when it turned into a romantic relationship, so she’s reluctant to let it happen again. Still, they pet each other in the hall, flirt, kiss, but that’s it, so far. “Alair,” Jane explains, “is literally in love with everyone and in love with no one.”

(snip)

Their sexual behavior is by no means the norm at their school; Stuyvesant has some 3,000 students, and Alair’s group numbers a couple dozen. But they’re also not the only kids at school who experiment with members of the same sex. “Other people do it, too,” said a junior who’s part of a more popular crowd. “They get drunk and want to be a sex object. But that’s different. Those people aren’t bisexual.” Alair and her friends, on the other hand, are known as the “bi clique.” In the social strata, they’re closer to the cool kids than to the nerds. The boys have shaggy hair and T-shirts emblazoned with the names of sixties rockers. The girls are pretty and clever and extroverted. Some kids think they’re too promiscuous. One student-union leader told me, “It’s weird. It’s just sort of incestuous.” But others admire them. Alair in particular is seen as a kind of punk-rock queen bee. “She’s good-looking, and she does what she wants,” said a senior boy. “That’s an attractive quality.”

(snip)

Even as cultural acceptance of gay and bisexual teenagers grows, these kids are coming up against an uncomfortable generational divide. In many of their families, the ‘It’s fine, as long as it’s not my kid’ attitude prevails. Some of the parents take comfort in the belief that this is just a phase their daughters will grow out of. Others take more drastic measures. Earlier this year at Horace Mann, when one girl’s parents found out that she was having a relationship with another girl, they searched her room, confiscated her love letters, and even had the phone company send them transcripts of all her text messages. Then they informed her girlfriend’s parents. In the end, the girls were forbidden to see each other outside school.

Even Jane, whose parents know about her bisexuality and are particularly well suited to understanding it (her mother teaches a college course in human sexuality), has run up against the limits of their liberal attitudes. They requested that she go by her middle name in this story. “My mom thinks I’m going to grow up and be ashamed of my sexuality,” she says. “But I won’t.”

To these kids, homophobia is as socially shunned as racism was to the generation before them. They say it’s practically the one thing that’s not tolerated at their school. One boy who made disparaging remarks about gay people has been ridiculed and taunted, his belongings hidden around the school. “We’re a creative bunch when we hate someone,” says Nathan. Once the tormenters, now the tormented.

(snip)

The cuddle puddle may be where a flirtation begins, but parties, not surprisingly, are where most of the real action takes place. In parentless apartments, the kids are free to “make the rounds,” as they call it, and move their more-than-kissing hookups with both genders behind locked bathroom doors or onto coat-laden beds. Even for bisexual girls there is, admittedly, a Girls Gone Wild aspect to these evenings. Some girls do hook up with other girls solely to please the guys who watch, and it can be difficult to distinguish between the behavior of someone who is legitimately sexually interested and someone who wants to impress the boy across the room. Alair is quick to disparage this behavior—“It kinda grosses me out. It can’t be like, this could be fun . . . is anyone watching my chest heave?”—but Jane sees it as empowering. “I take advantage of it because manipulating boys is fun as hell. Boys make out with boys for our benefit as well. So it’s not just one way. It’s very fair.”

She’s not just making excuses. These girls have obliterated the “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” stranglehold that has traditionally plagued high-school females. They set the sexual agenda for their group. And they expect reciprocation. “I’ve made it my own personal policy that if I’m going to give oral sex, I’m going to receive oral sex,” says Jane. “Jane wears the pants in any relationship,” Ilia says with a grin. “She wears the pants in my relationship, even though she’s not part of it.”

When the girls talk about other girls they sound like football players in a locker room (“The Boobie Goddesses of our grade are Natalie and Annette,” or “Have you seen the Asian girl who wears that tiny red dress and those high red sneakers?,” or “Carol is so hot! Why is she straight? I don’t get it”), but there’s little gossip about same-sex hookups—partly because the novelty has by now worn off, and partly because, as Alair puts it, “it’s not assumed that a relationship will stem from it.” It seems that even with all the same-sex activity going on, it’s still hard for the girls to find other girls to actually date. Jane says this is because the girls who like girls generally like boys more, at least for dating. “A lot of girls are scared about trying to make a lesbian relationship work,” she says. “There’s this fear that there has to be the presence of a man or it won’t work.”

But dating gay girls isn’t really an option either, because the cuddle-puddle kids are not considered part of the gay community. “One of the great things about bisexuality is that mainstream gay culture doesn’t affect us as much,” says Jane, “so it’s not like bi boys feel that they have to talk with a lisp and walk around all fairylike, and it’s not like girls feel like they have to dress like boys.” The downside, she says, is that “gays feel that bis will cheat on them in a straight manner.” In fact, there’s a general impression of promiscuity that bisexual girls can’t seem to shake. “The image of people who are bi is that they are sluts,” says Jane. “One of the reasons straight boys have this bi-girls fantasy is that they are under the impression that bisexual girls will sleep with anything that moves and that’s why they like both genders, because they are so sex-obsessed. Which isn’t true.”

If you ask the girls why they think there’s more teenage bisexual experimentation happening today, Alair is quick with an explanation. “I blame television,” she says. “I blame the media.” She’s partly joking, giving the stock answer. But there’s obviously some truth to it. She’s too young to remember a time when she couldn’t turn on Showtime or even MTV and regularly see girls kissing girls. It’s not simply that they’re imitating what they’ve seen, it’s that the stigma has been erased, maybe even transformed into cachet. “It’s in the realm of possibilities now,” as Ritch Savin-Williams puts it. “When you don’t think of it as being a possibility, you don’t do it. But now that it’s out there, it’s like, ‘Oh, yeah, that could be fun.’ ” Of course, sexy TV shows would have no impact at all if they weren’t tapping into something more innate. Perhaps, as research suggests, sexuality is more fluid for women than it is for men. Perhaps natural female intimacy opens the door to sexual experimentation at an age when male partners can be particularly unsatisfying. As one mother of a cuddle-puddle kid puts it, “Emotionally it’s safer—it’s difficult in this age group to hold onto your body. You’re changing. There’s a safety factor in a girl being with a girl.” Then, laughing, she asked that her name be withheld. “My mother might read this.”

(remainder snipped)

---

Sorry for the length, folks...but I already cut out about half the article.

I am posting this because it is an interesting commentary on the state of the youth. While people of our generation are debating between gay and straight, etc., it appears that, at least in this particular clique, they've moved completely beyond any kind of sexual labeling and are just into sex...with whomever...

Is this an indicator of where society at large is going to be in 25-30 years?

[tomtuttle1]

I've gotten a glimpse of this by overhearing some of the conversations between my son and more than a couple of his girl FRIENDS. They were not girlfiends, just friends he "be chillin wit". Unbelievable... I am jealous ...

[wwjesuslaughat]

I have to deal with women (girls) in their early 20's flirting with each other at my JOB! They are all straight, but seem to think that that's fine. It makes me uncomfortable sometimes. Am I just not "with it?"

[topoftheworld]

Another generational issue. Any suggestions on how a parent would counsel their child in this situation? Or would they just let it go and hope they grow out of it?

[Nottawayfer]

Grow out of it? I don't think that would happen.

If I had kids, I wouldn't want them to have sex with anyone until they were in at least a committed relationship. And then I still wouldn't "like" it. I don't think most teenagers know how to handle their emotions when they have sex.

But the teens in this article seem to have a non-emotional tie to sex. It's a little bizaare to me. I think it could cause them problems with relationships later on. JMO though.

[satori001]

If not for the perilously real probability of contracting a nasty disease, promiscuity would probably be the norm until, and possibly after, pairing off to raise a family.

But sex procreates, and procreation requires an environment that protects and nurtures life. It doesn't distinguish between a fertilized egg and a virus. Both thrive. Pity.

[laleo]

Mark,

When I read your excerpt, it just didn't have a New Yorker feel to it. Seemed a little too . . . trendy isn't the word I'm looking for. More like trashy. Or somewhere between trendy and trashy. Anyway, your link isn't to the New Yorker, it's to New York Magazine, which has a different agenda than the New Yorker.

For what it's worth, if you read the article, it's talking about a group of two dozen kids in a school of thousands, and then extrapolates from that sexual trends in the entire population, as if it could. Isn't that a logical fallacy of some type, like ergo something or other? Or maybe it's not a fallacy. Just a fantasy. My guess is that the "cuddle puddle" (such as it was) was shut down by the administration as soon as the magazine hit the store shelves, with the kids now back in class, and it's all a moot point who was making out with whom, because it's now a distant memory.

As far as your thread title, "the future of sexuality," it's just a guess on my part, but I predict sexuality will last into the future, even beyond the thirty years you ask about. I further predict that thirty years from now, in any given group of three thousand teenagers, chances are you will be able to find two dozen who are sexually experimental, just like thirty years ago. I think that if another magazine with a different agenda, like, say, The Journal of Chastity, sent in a reporter, they'd find teenagers to write about, too, and have an eight page spread dedicated to abstinence, complete with testimonials from two dozen kids.

Edited February 3, 2006 by laleo

[George Aar]

Yeah,

Somehow I think that sexuality and humanity in general will survive, despite the latest handwringing, legwetting bit of doggerel that this reporter has come up with.

My own sexuality OTOH, doesn't look as promising...

[laleo]

Take heart, George. I hear there is an immediate opening at Stuyvesant High for a hall monitor . . .

Edited February 3, 2006 by laleo

[Ron G.]

Here is an interesting piece that is about that queer sheepboy movie, but is germane to this thread as you'll see towards the end.

------------------------------------------------

Brokeback -

Understanding Propaganda

By Dr. R. Winfield

1-31-6

The most effective propaganda comes in under the radar, it's innocuous and appeals to our humanity and emotions. Having studied propaganda and its effects on societies for over 50 years, I can state unequivocally that the film Brokeback Mountain is one of the most blatant propaganda pieces of recent times.

In a society that is purposely and effectively dumbed down, the rarest and most valuable of commodities is discernment. Increasingly crucial, discernment is an attribute of astute acumen, and vital as your enemy uses crafty subtlety. As a people, we have lost discernment. Logic, rational and intellectual discourse, are shunned from the public square. Feelings, emotional sentiment and compassion are no longer tempered with intelligent reason. Now truth is sacrificed on the altar of "tolerance.

To even talk rationally about a film like this will endanger one of causing immediate knee-jerk reactions with slogans; "homophobe, bigot, narrow minded, etc. And God forbid you dare to insinuate that there is an agenda behind such obvious propaganda, or you will surely hear the two words designed to end all discussion or consideration of facts.; "Conspiracy Theory.

Agendas and purposes behind what we are seeing, shall be dealt with, but first, the film.

Yes, I saw Brokeback Mountain, and no I didn't spend any money to support it. An actress friend lent me her "academy consideration DVD (a crime that in many cases now carries a stiffer penalty than murder). First and foremost, I've yet to hear anyone mention how boring this film is. It's tediously long and in most parts just plain dull. But let's look at some of the propaganda aspects, shall we?

Indeed nature is beautiful, and its grandeur is depicted with majesty and uplifting music, great sweeping vistas instill a sense of awe and splendor. It is of course in this setting that the "homosexual romance blossoms. But even more significant, this is where the men discuss the deeper things of life, theology, meaning, etc.

Contrast this with the scenes of marriage. Every time marriage is depicted in the film, it is shot in a tiny dark squalid hovel, with screaming children and absolute pandemonium. The house is a mess, the wife never communicates on any kind of meaningful level. Wives in fact, are portrayed as a constant annoyance, and more irritating than understanding. But children receive the worst treatment in this slanted rant against family. They are usually crying, often two at a time, or smashing things, the general feeling the film presents, is that these joyless hellions are an intrusion into life, an encumbrance and a terrible burden.

Making sure it drums in its message in no uncertain terms, the film keeps switching back and forth between the two contrasts. The great outdoors, wild and free, close to nature, close to God, close to hot gay sex without any negative consequences. Back inside the dark little messy box of marriage, with horrible in-laws, demon spawn children, berating nagging wives, endless pressures and even the loveless, passionless sex has hanging over it the dread of producing more parasitic offspring.

Special note must be taken of music and lighting, how they are carefully manipulated to accentuate these contrasts in the manner outlined here, bringing a much deeper impact of the propaganda message. Marvelous tools, music and light illicit emotional responses, and penetrate the subject to effect his core values. The use of props in the juxtaposition of images adds power to the medium. There is a scene where the Heath Ledger character is saddled with his wife and children, struggling among the crowds to watch the fireworks. The opening shot depicts husband and wife, each with a child in one arm, and great square bags full of baby necessities in the other hand. The construction of this frame is identical to the earlier shots of the pack mules heavily laden with similar square heavy supplies. Marriage has turned him into a beast of burden, a theme reinforced throughout.

Another common theme these days, is of course portrayed in the film; that of "religious intolerance. Remember, the wilderness loving gay fellas are close to God, out in the high places, whereas the church folk are depicted as spouting "hellfire and brimstone. The film also shows two horrific murders, and the connection is not lost, it is precisely this type of religious thought that contributes to this sort of bloody violence. The implication is, and this is the very strength of propaganda, if you are in anyway opposed to two men "loving each other, then you must be for brutally murdering them. Do you see the way these things are subtly implied? Just like, if you are not for abortion, then ipso-facto you must be for the murdering of doctors who perform them. This is one the objects of propaganda, reduction of critical argument down into well drummed slogans, therefore removal of discourse, then total polarization of advocates and detractors into radical extremes. Of course this fits perfectly with the method of those purveying propaganda, as they have chosen Hegelian dialecticalism to divide and conquer you and I.

Earlier I mentioned that the homosexual sex was portrayed as without negative consequences, some may take objection to this. You might say, what about the violent deaths, how can you say without consequences? Think about the film again, the violence is presented not as a result of the sex, but rather the result of a backwards people, mindless ignorant hicks, who's judgmental religious intolerance killed those beautiful martyrs. See how they work it?

The film preaches quite a lot about sex, man's "need for it is apparently only surpassed by his need to breath oxygen. The lies they told about fishing demonstrate that gay sex was even more important than food. Of course the Jake Gyllenhaal character when deprived of this vital necessity has no other choice than to leave his wife and child and search out Mexican male prostitutes. When even this leaves him unable to find enough "manlove he is forced to lower his standard and carry on an adulterous relationship with some woman he has no feelings for, all perfectly justifiable because the evil society is hindering the two gays total access.

So what about the "love, is this really a film about love? Having spoken to a lot of women about this film, I can tell you, they think it is. "Oh, it's a true love story. they pine. A married woman told me, "Because it's about two men it's much more interesting, a man and a woman would be banal. What's going on? When a woman tells me it's about "true love, I ask her how she knows that? They don't have much to say beyond what the film presents. When informed of the statistics that the majority of male homosexuals are the single most promiscuous segment of the world's population, having more anonymous sexual partners per year than any other group, these women shut down. "Oh I,m not interested in the real gay sex, I just like the love story, one told me. Oh, so you,re Truthophobic, I said. You see, the facts, statistics, recorded data on a subject are not important, in fact they are rather a stark reminder of something we,d prefer to ignore. Truth is something we want to completely tune out with our escapism, hence fantasy is more to be desired than the mundane existence of reality.

The promotion of gay men to women has seen a real upswing in the past 10 years or so. Every sitcom has a funny gay character, and of course he's the funniest, least inhibited and most able to communicate with women. Queer Eye For The Straight Guy tells women that gay men are superior to the knuckle dragging neanderthal you have at home. When the Queer Eye fab five went on Oprah, "normal housewives screamed and swooned like schoolgirls cheering rockstars. But the agenda goes deeper, the plan is to get women interested in gay porn as an addictive and isolating tool of division. Sex In The City, shows women sitting together giggling while watching gay porn. The biggest thrust in this wave is coming out of Japan and targeting your preteen daughters. It's called Yaoi.

Yaoi is a massive multi-million dollar subculture providing young girls with comic books and animated films depicting gay romantic love between handsome boys, culminating in explicit hard core homosexual pornography. The tide of this material represents a generation of girls whose misdirected sexuality is being warped in an unnatural direction. Traveling extensively, I warn you this epidemic is rampant throughout Europe, Russia, Asia, and now making heavy inroads into the Americas. Parents have no idea what their young girls have tucked under their mattresses, or hidden in closets and computers. Scores of websites are devoted to young girls fiction describing their fantasies of young men in popular music, tv, film, etc, all engaged in romantic "love and gay sex.

Teen girls rapidly become obsessed with Yaoi and find it an entry drug to other shows like Queer As Folk, and gay hardcore. Many discuss openly their confusion about sex, not wanting a husband or baby, or angst ridden with their own experimentation towards bisexuality and lesbianism. Of course, they're all buzzing about Brokeback.

None are buzzing more than the critics who are falling over themselves in trying to outdo one another in kissing this film's foot. Sad but so predictable, as homoeroticism has been chosen as this year's politically correct cause for film awards. Just like the year it was blacks and everything black won everything great. Never mind that Oscar winner Halley Barry is said to have a black and white parent, meaning she's as much white as she is black. You see, in the brave new world of propaganda soaked society, truth is no longer black and white. It's all gray now, everything is blurred. Or as the popular group Blur sings ...

"Girls who are boys

Who like boys to be girls

Who do boys like they're girls

Who do girls like they're boys

Always should be someone you really love

Confused yet?

Good, that's what they want.

Dr. R. Winfield may be reached at

drrwinfield@mail.com

[Galen]

Last year, I coached the fencing team at our local high-school.

There was a fair amount of teens pairing up and playing "tonsil hockey", or "sucking each other's fillings" though Idont htink any more than when I was in high-school. but it was more out in the open.

What did amaze me was that, on multiple occasions girls walked up to me [and by saying 'girls' these were each young ladies who had I seen on the street, I would have assumed they were hookers, by their state of un-dress and the manner in which they carried themselves]. But at least three times a girl would call out to me from across the hallway "Mister Young, are you Matt's dad?", "He is just so hot, I want to get into his pants". And with that they would try to start-up a conversation with me. These were different ladys, not the same one, and they were each high-school students. And each time, they would be telling me about how much they wanted to go to bed with my son [at the time a highschool Freshman of 15].

I dont talk that much about sex with my wife, and suddenly a partially dressed teenage girl is trying to have a conversation with me about how badly she wants to be sucking the chrome off my son's trailer hitch [if you understand the metaphor].

Society has changed somewhere.

By the way, we moved out from that city and are now living in a more rural area, where it is a bit closer to our more conservative roots.

[Nottawayfer]

Galen,

OMG! Where is the emoticon with the bulging eyes to express my shock!

I cannot believe that girls would approach you to tell you things like that. It seems there is a HUGE amount of disrespect girls are developing for themselves. That is a darn shame.

[excathedra]

For what it's worth, if you read the article, it's talking about a group of two dozen kids in a school of thousands

i was thinking the same thing as laleo

i recently let my son (6th grade, 11 years old) go a party of 7th and 8th graders. he was the youngest (he's also the youngest in his 6th grade class, just made the cutoff) but his friends from hockey and the girl hosting the party invited him, so he saw it as an "honor."

i went in the house with him and met the mom and dad and their daughter and many of the kids who had arrived.

the party was 2 hours long and i picked him 2 hours later.

we talked about the party which took place mostly in the family room upstairs and dancing in the basement. there was no alcohol of course. and the parents had the basement door open and came up and down serving chips etc. but my son did tell me that two 7th grade girls (i know them both) were "ridiculous" as my son put it. it seems they came in the front door and said hello to the parents like everyone else. but once they got downstairs they were "tipsy" (i think they had been drinking, but "acted more tipsy" once they were away from the parents) and both, while dancing and hanging out downstairs, were kissing on boys and then each other (when the parents were not there).

i asked my boy what he thought about it all and he said he thinks they were looking for attention.

i will say that things he tells me about middle school surprise me. middle school is 6th, 7th and 8th. i went to grammar school from 1st through 8th, then high school 9th through 12th. kids know a lot more and do a lot more than when i was growing up.

my mom tells me she felt the same way when we were growing up.

i don't know. i just keep trying to raise him the best i know and keep the communication going.

[laleo]

Ron, When you post articles like the one you posted above, it's not because you agree with it, right? It's to illustrate how strident, elitist, arrogant, condescending, and under-informed people from the other side of an issue can also be, right? If so, point taken.

[Ron G.]

Laleo...

Maybe you should learn about Hegelian dialectics and learn how the strident, elitist, arrogant, and condescending socialist left is achieving hegemony over our culture via the propoganda aimed at the under informed "useful idiots" of our society.

I homeschool my son using the Trivium method which is dialectics, grammar and rhetoric. We focus on Socratic dialecticism rather than Hegelian or materialistic dialecticism, although we study both.

You'll find the author of the posted article has an excellent understanding.

[WordWolf]

i asked my boy what he thought about it all and he said he thinks they were looking for attention.

Sharp fellow.

As to the handful of teens at Stuyvesant,

I might go so far as to claim it was overcompensation for being #3 in schools

behind Bronx HS of Science and Brooklyn HS of Technology,

but I don't think that's it. *snicker*

I think it's just a handful of kids that have no idea what they want, and no

idea what they're doing, and have insufficient boundaries imposed by their

parents (they can find an empty apt regularly?),

and they're trying out what they're thinking of as pleasure without consequence...

I figure sooner or later, thru hurt feelings, actual thinking or discovering they have

a disease, they'll realize there ARE consequences.

Hey-if the drugs-and-free-sex generation that attended Woodstock grew up

to be the yuppies of the 80s, I think a handful of kids with no rules won't wreck

Western civilization.

[modcat5]

Folks, please be careful about posting lengthy excerpts or entire articles, especially without any indication of the original site on which it appears. There are copyright laws.

Link to the articles, quote the points you want to make sure we get, but trust us to go to the link and read the entire article for ourselves.

Thx.

[krys]

The more crowded the living conditions, the earlier the sexual encounters of teens. But sexual encounters of these kids does not in any way mean affection. Some of them are so hungry for it, they will take it in any form it seems to present itself in.

[WordWolf]

Good point.

*checks*

The link SHOULD have been

http://www.thetruthseeker.co.uk/article.asp?ID=4115

[Ron G.]

OOps, I forgot the link...Here it is...

http://www.rense.com/general69/prop.htm

[rascal]

Well, I have 4 teenagers this year and have wrestled with sexual issues.... The problem is....there are a whole lot of really nasty diseases out there., and it doesn`t take someone being promiscuos to catch them.

My daughters best friend in karate has had a single boy friend since she was 13 ..... ONE guy...and her parents found out not too long ago that he had given their daughter then 17a raging herpies infection.

This is what one would consider a GOOD kid :(

The big deal in THESE parts is all of the white teenaged girls want to have babies with black boys.

Most don`t seem to have racial issues here......but because it was what was considered taboo in the past.....they seem to enjoy the shock factor ....I see so many of them at a particular shopping center showing off their kids....many of them look to be no older than 13.

I am sad for the children ....sometimes screaming in discomfort in the strollers while mama tunes em out to discuss the newest earrings in the window.

It is a real status symbol thing ...to have a child before leaving high school.

I think personally that these kids are no different than the generations before them...some how searching for their own identity....a way to define themselves as being better, cooler, more hip than the last generation.....it`s just that todays rebellion can bring some pretty sad consequences.

My teens watched their friend struggle with meds and a catheter bag ... and have been privy to all of the graphic details....knowing that she has it for life....They are so freaked out, at present, I don`t think they believe they EVER want to have sex....

[markomalley]

One thing to point out folks was my original question:

Is this an indicator of where society at large is going to be in 25-30 years?

(BTW, thanks, Laleo, you are so right: New York mag rather than New Yorker...apologies)

I fully recognize that this is a clique in an exclusive school in New York, not the behaviors of the school population in general at a county-wide high school in rural Kansas (if you read my comments at the bottom of the article I extracted in my opening post, you'll see I acknowledged that already)

I ask this because it seems like the trends for the rest of the country's youth seem to flow out of the New York and Los Angeles areas to the rest of the country. I posted this article and solicited comments because I was curious to see if you all thought that this 'fashionable behavior' that existed in this clique would start to spread and become commonplace and accepted throughout the country in 25-30 years.

There have been some tremendous comments on this thread:

If not for the perilously real probability of contracting a nasty disease, promiscuity would probably be the norm until, and possibly after, pairing off to raise a family.

I dont talk that much about sex with my wife, and suddenly a partially dressed teenage girl is trying to have a conversation with me about how badly she wants to be sucking the chrome off my son's trailer hitch [if you understand the metaphor].

Society has changed somewhere.

i asked my boy what he thought about it all and he said he thinks they were looking for attention.

i will say that things he tells me about middle school surprise me. middle school is 6th, 7th and 8th. i went to grammar school from 1st through 8th, then high school 9th through 12th. kids know a lot more and do a lot more than when i was growing up.

my mom tells me she felt the same way when we were growing up.

I think it's just a handful of kids that have no idea what they want, and no

idea what they're doing, and have insufficient boundaries imposed by their

parents (they can find an empty apt regularly?),

and they're trying out what they're thinking of as pleasure without consequence...

The more crowded the living conditions, the earlier the sexual encounters of teens. But sexual encounters of these kids does not in any way mean affection. Some of them are so hungry for it, they will take it in any form it seems to present itself in.

I think personally that these kids are no different than the generations before them...some how searching for their own identity....a way to define themselves as being better, cooler, more hip than the last generation.....it`s just that todays rebellion can bring some pretty sad consequences.

The sexual revolution happened either during, or shortly before, most of our own high school days (my High School days were in late 70s). Of course, that sexual revolution was really made possible by the marketing of the birth control pill and was popularized in the 'pop culture' of that era.

Even so, in my high school (in suburban Mpls/St Paul MN), girls were very coy (in mixed company at least) about if/when/with whom they had sexual relations, sl uts were shunned, homosexuals kept very, very, very quiet about their preferences (anybody who is familiar with Mpls knows that it has always been a very liberal, gay-friendly town), and pregnant girls tended to disappear for a few months (they'd magically return about 6 months later after recovering from an illness) -- and were talked about. I'm certain that abortions happened regularly, but they, too, weren't talked about at all. Keep in mind, this was not a conservative Catholic high school: this was a large public school that had a reputation for partying. Ten years after I graduated, the school had a daycare center in it.

Fast forward 5 years. I have friends whose daughters are getting close to menarche. They promise me that the girls will be on birth control within weeks of their first period. And not just one set of friends, either.

Fast forward 15 more years. My wife, who was a 5th grade teacher until her disability retirement, was required to allow in her public school class sensitivity training for homosexuality (to reduce the incidence of homophobia in elementary school) and the old condom on cucumber training session. 5th grade, mind you. And if you question the necessity of this: out of four 6th grade classes, there were 3 pregnant 6th graders one year. Of course, we have no idea how many abortions...likely many, many more.

On a lark sometime, drive around your suburban high schools: look to see how many of them have daycare centers for children of students. Try middle schools (yes, they exist). You don't even have to ask the question: if you see a fenced-off area with some preschool-appropriate playground equipment next to the school, you've found the answer.

Don't get me wrong, this is not hand-wringing. It is what it is. Things have changed. What was socially unacceptable to our generation is now commonplace and accepted as a fact of life. DSM-II listed homosexuality as a disorder. DSM-III had it as "Sexual Orientation Disturbance." DSM-IV doesn't list it at all. Now homophobia is considered the mental disorder (it's likely to be listed as such in the next DSM revision). High school kids having sex was considered risque. Now it's accepted that elementary school kids do it all the time. Things change. That's part of life.

This group (this clique) of kids in this school consider themselves polysexual. Or just sexual in general. This is not the the only clique in the only school where this is the case. What was considered risque in our days is now passe to most kids these days. The question is: is this trend going to spread and become the norm? Or is this going to die out?

And if this becomes the norm or even passe, what's going to be the shocking sexual behavior when these kids have their own teenagers to deal with?

[laleo]

By the way, Mark, I realized after I posted that you already acknowledged it was only a small group at the school. Sorry.

The public high school my girls attend doesn't have a daycare center. Like the high school you attended, the pregnant girls take a leave of absence or quit school altogether. In all the years of having my girls in that school, I can only think of two who were pregnant. They both quit. I don't know that they get a reputation, like the girls did when I grew up, but they have babies to care for, which doesn't leave much time to indulge other passions. In the high school, there are drugs -- of course there are drugs -- and there is sex. (One thing that surprsied my oldest daughter when she went to college is that drugs are in the mainstream among the kids who went to boarding schools, and elite public schools on her college campus; at our public high school, it's still the "losers" who are into drugs.) Here, there is a heavy-handed administration that only tolerates its expression within bounds. In the hallway, outside of the cafeteria, if you walk by you'll find a few kids making out. You'll also see a hall monitor, with a whistle around his neck, calling time out if things get too . . . expressive. The kids are into sports. I'm sure they think about sex, but the practice schedules for the sports teams are grueling, and keep them too exhausted to do much more than think. The school doesn't offer as much as I would like as far as the arts, but the community does. Many kids take ballet, and gymnastics, and karate, and ceramics, and a lot of other things that don't come to mind right now. The community does not offer support services for single or teenaged moms. There is a limited food bank that is community supported, but no soup kitchen, no subsidized or free daycares, no job training programs, no life-skills seminars. Young girls who are pregnant have their families and boyfriends, and not much more, to help them out. When my oldest daughter graduated from high school, within a year about a half dozen of her friends were pregnant or had babies. They struggle now, but they're making it.

The school participates in a program called "Think it Over Baby." My youngest daughter recently brought home one of those mechanical babies that has a computer chip in the back which records how it's being treated. If the neck goes back, if it is exposed to cold temperatures, if it is left to cry for extended periods of time, the computer print-out records all that. Before the student gets the baby, they have to sign a commitment form that they will do twenty community-service hours if they mistreat the "baby" in any way. If the baby is damaged, it costs $300 to replace it. There are three categories of babies: high need, medium need, and low need. You don't know which one you have until you bring it home. My daughter's doll woke up at 12, 2:30, and 4 on the first night. On the second day, it cried for three hours while she was trying to get ready for school. The computer chip in the back records how much the baby is rocked, and unless the baby is "asleep" (which is never often enough) it needs to be rocked. When the baby cries, there is a checklist (a "care session"), and the student goes down the list, performing each activity, until it stops crying. Sometimes they get to the bottom of the list and the baby is still crying. You get the idea. Just like real life. Except, just like "real life," my daughter fell in love with her baby, and was sad to have to turn it back in.

If the "cuddle puddle" at Stuyvescent High becomes a trend, it is because of the trashy publicity like the article above, which seems to get some sort of voyeuristic satisfaction in publishing pieces like that, and pushes the limits on making it the norm. I don't think it is. If the school admin comes down hard, it won't spread.

I agree that pop culture now includes too much sex, and too much perversion. But I don't know the solution to that. Do you?

[Raf]

WordWolf,

By what standard did you say Stuyvesant was number 3 behind Bronx Science and Brooklyn Tech? It was the toughest of the three to get into (Science was second, Tech was third).

[Abigail]

There is no solution to "pop culture", per se. There is, however, a solution in how we raise our kids. The moral values we teach them, the supervision, guidence, and boundaries we provide for them. And equally important, our ability and persistence in having honest communication with them.

Even with all of that, there are no guarantees our kids won't at least experiment at some point in time. But at least they will have a good foundation and a loving family to fall back on when they are done with their experiments and ready to really grow up.

Personally, I think ExC's son hit the nail on the head. It's about attention and shock value. But most kids who come from loving homes and have good relationships with their parents won't need that kind of attention either at all, or for very long if they do seek it out.

And Laleo makes some valuable points too. Keeping them occupied with other activities. Kids who are bored or often kids who end up in trouble.

Edited February 4, 2006 by Abigail