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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
What do you make of the great oral sex scandals of the late '90s? Suddenly every newspaper seemed to have a headline story about oral sex, or sex parties, or how kids today look at oral sex differently than their parents' generation did. I'm sure a lot of this had to do with Clinton, given that they all came out around the same time.
Do you see evidence that children's sexual behavior is shifting toward having more oral -- and some reports even say anal -- sex than previous generations? And if so, is this a response to a fear of sexual intercourse?
The little research that we have shows that kids are doing oral sex, and sometimes anal sex, more. It's still a tiny statistical minority of kids who have claimed to have anal sex, but in the case of oral sex, not only do they do it more than intercourse, and maybe more than previous generations, but to me the interesting part is that they assign a different meaning to it than their parents' generation did.
In my generation, oral sex was something you did with someone you were intimate with. For them, it's less intimate, and vaginal intercourse means more. I remember even in the '70s, in cultures that valued vaginal intercourse very highly, you would hear anecdotes about young women who had anal intercourse and believed that they were still virgins. I think those rumors were highly exaggerated. They didn't come from any real data.
As for the idea that younger and younger teens are engaging in oral sex, there doesn't seem to be any research that shows it's actually happening. It's usually presented in the context of this "one private school" where one 13-year-old girl said that this other girl had oral sex.
Sexual behaviors do change throughout history, and AIDS has had an impact on sexual behavior. It makes sense. If teens are engaging in oral sex mutually, that is, boys doing it to girls, as well as girls doing it to boys, and they were using a latex condom, then it's not necessarily a good thing or a bad thing. My concern is more whether people are doing things that they really want to do, and are not doing it because somebody else said they should. If teens want to have pleasure in sex, it's crucial that they have a repetoire of safe sex behavior.
Of course, girls have a much higher risk of AIDS transmission through oral sex than boys do.
Yes. At the very least, they should use a condom.
Recently, I ran across a story on the wires about a group of 9-year-old boys who were performing oral sex on one another in a public school classroom. Does that test the limits of what you would consider to be normative sex play?
Well, I don't think kids should be having sex in class. Yes, I would say that I am definitely against oral sex in the classroom.
Fair enough. I suppose the more nuanced question, which you deal with in your book, is how do you deal with that? Do you criminalize it? Do you treat them as deviant?
The word "deviant" just means different from the norm. I would say that, in general, criminalizing sexual behavior that is consensual is a bad idea. The thing that I say in my book is that it makes perfect sense to me that if a person is going to act violently in our culture, that sex might be the means with which they do it. We live in a culture in which sex is the lingua franca of just about everything -- of the market, of love, of hate, of everything.
Futhermore, it's very important for kids to learn not to push anyone to do anything they don't want to do. To me, sex is not a separate category of that: You don't hit people, you don't take their toys, you don't force them to give you a dollar, and you don't force them to touch your penis.
If we are trying to teach kids to respect each other, to get along in their community, those are values that we need to inculcate in them in every realm of their lives. I would hope that the sexual would just naturally flow from those values of how you live with, and how you treat, other people.
Some critics have called your book "not parent-friendly." How do you respond to that?
Parents understand that their job is to be able to send their kids out into the world. While they want to protect their children, they are also thrilled with their children's independence. There's no more exciting moment than when your child toddles off on his tricycle for the first time and doesn't look back. It's sad, but it's also exciting. If they feel that they can't do that in the realm of sexuality, I think that's a sad and difficult thing.
I would hope that I'm being helpful to parents, not only in sorting out the real perils from the exaggerated ones, but also in giving them some ideas of the ways in which they, and other people in their community, can help to guide their kids into a happy and safe sexuality.
