Friday, May 16, 2008
Are 13-year-olds ready for "hand jobs and heavy petting"? Plus: "Weird Weekends" host talks back; it's time for minorities to rethink party loyalties.
Oct 29, 1999 | Freudian fear and cooked statistics
BY KAREN HOUPPERT
(10/22/99)
Karen Houppert's ridiculous assertions concerning "tween" sex include this: "But the teens who call themselves 'active' often have never had sexual intercourse and have no intention of doing so anytime soon. Sex, to them, is about blow jobs, hand jobs and heavy petting." I'm glad that she has decided there is no cause for alarm and that the media has blown this whole issue out of proportion: Does she think that young teens -- 13-year-olds -- are ready for "blow jobs and hand jobs and heavy petting"?
Houppert's scornful tone regarding the empty homes that so many kids come home to told me nothing except her own agenda. These so-called tweeners -- at an extremely vulnerable age -- spend too much time unsupervised and alone. It's so easy to ignore their sense of pain and abandonment by turning it into an attack on working women that needs to be shrugged off. The real issue is about parents -- both moms and dads -- needing to spend more time with their children, guiding them, protecting them, and talking with them.
Houppert's strident tone and glib recitation of studies disputing earlier studies and so on, serve as a smoke screen to the real issue. I am the mother of an 8-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl. They are exposed to a disturbing amount of sexually oriented material from many different venues -- the explosion of "girl power" catalogs and Web sites; TV shows aimed at young adults in which the characters speak of sex with a casualness and a coarseness I find degrading; magazines aimed at the young adult market which pretend to be aiming at 18- to 34-year-olds but are clearly aiming much younger. I am a mother who is exhausted from constantly screening magazines, turning off the TV when the vulgarity requires a discussion and an explanation, and wincing when -- at 4 in the afternoon, on a top 40 rock station -- my children hear commercial after commercial for erectile dysfunction tonics. I see this as a problem.
I am trying to teach my children that sex is part of a committed, loving relationship between two mature people. Everything else they see says it has the same importance as a good game of Mario Kart, and if they don't get with it they will be outcasts for the rest of their lives.
-- Frances Pelzman Liscio
As a 14-year-old girl, I was surprised by the content of the Newsweek article on "Tweens." I hadn't realized that, as a "tween," I must automatically be subject to early sexuality and frivolous emulation of maturity! It's sort of a shock to be told that you've missed that entire side of yourself and your peers.
I completely disagree with just about everything "The Truth About Tweens" had to say. I am fairly typical for my age. I go to school, fail a test every now and then, go out with my girlfriends, have a boyfriend, have not had sex, often disobey my parents, like to party and have an older brother in drug rehab. I do not know one girl who hasn't faced the prospect of sex -- and I don't know one girl who hasn't turned it down. The few girls I know that have had sex were raped, which I think is a much greater problem than growing up too fast.
But who's to judge what speed is appropriate? Even those girls that have grown up too fast aren't bad people. I'm glad that your writers could look beyond the hype and laugh at it all.
-- Abigail Bader
What a provincial world America is; we will find any statistics we can to show the danger of sexuality. Is it that these "tweens" are just a bit too tempting? Maybe if we could accept the eroticism of the young, we wouldn't be so afraid of it.
-- Stefanie Paul
It's a familiar story. A 14-year-old girl, precocious beyond her years, falls for a 25-year-old man. Even worse, he was a cousin living with the family because of economic hardship. Both parents worked long hours, coming home after dark and leaving before sunrise the next morning. The illicit pair ran away together. She was found and dragged home, but not before conceiving a child. Familiar story; surely girls are becoming sexually active way too young. The only twist is this: The girl was my grandmother, born in 1890. The more some things change, the more they stay the same.
-- Sunny Hemphill
Wenatchee, Wash.
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