Noli Irritare Leones

So, it’s time to point to another celebrity as an object lesson in morality, and either praise her for taking responsibility* or shake your head about how she is trailer trash. Scott smells a double standard, and this leads to a lengthy thread in which his commenters engage in heated debate over whether it’s a bad thing for a sixteen-year-old to have sex.

And, you know, I really don’t think it’s bad and wrong and repressive to want your sixteen-year-old to postpone sex. I don’t think it’s advice that’s doomed to failure. Well, maybe it is doomed to failure if you expect every sixteen-year-old to follow it, or anywhere close to every one, but not doomed in the sense that your own son or daughter is fated to have sex young and ignore your advice. In fact, when I myself was sixteen (really and truly sweet sixteen and never been kissed), my mother had given me what I considered good reasons to wait, and I listened to her, and I never regretted it.

And, yes, part of this was that I was a geeky social misfit, but lots of my friends waited, and they weren’t all socially awkward. In fact, many students arrive at Harvard and MIT still virginal (blog not work safe) and stay that way well into their undergraduate career.

There are plenty of good reasons to postpone sex (and especially full intercourse) till after high school. Getting some experience under your belt having friends of the opposite sex makes it easier to communicate once you are having sex. It also makes it easier to figure out if that other person is someone you actually like, aside from the part where he or she makes you really horny. And, waiting even till college before having sex ensures that you’re already invested in the education enterprise before you risk getting pregnant – no surprise that parents who have only college to offer to ensure their children’s economic future want to be sure their kids are really going to invest in that opportunity. And that’s not even getting into any of the faith-based stuff about waiting for marriage.

Where I get off the train is where people start shaking their heads about sex at sixteen as if it’s some highly unusual aberration, a sign that there’s something terribly unusually wrong with Jamie Lynn Spears, or with the mother who didn’t manage to restrain her. Is it a sin? Then it’s an incredibly common sin. Is it, if not a sin, imprudent? Then it’s an incredibly common imprudence. Millions of not otherwise imbalanced or irresponsible people have sex at sixteen, and, of those who don’t, in many cases it’s not for lack of trying. Scott does rather have a point here.

My question: how many of the men attacking Spears weren’t having sex at age 16? OK, well, probably a substantial number. To be more precise, how many of the men attacking Spears wouldn’t have had sex if they actually knew someone with the misfortune to be a willing partner? Given that I suspect the answer is somewhere in the order of “none,” all of these people need to shut the hell up.

Now, I don’t go so far as to say that all the people who had sex at sixteen, or all of the people who would have had sex at sixteen if they could, need to shut up about not having sex at sixteen. But what I think is that we need to be honest. For some people, honest may be that we really weren’t having sex at that age, and don’t regret it. For others, it may be that they were, and did OK, but feel they dodged a bullet they don’t want their children to risk. For still others, it may be that they did have sex at that age, and didn’t do OK, and want others not to repeat their mistakes. But I have trouble believing that many of us really honestly think we live in the world where only trailer trash ever have sex young and unmarried, or where only really dysfunctional parents have teenage daughters who are no longer virgins. I think people speak that way because sex is both risky and really, really appealing, and so we ratchet up the rhetoric about other people’s mistakes. It’s still dishonest. It’s not all about those trailer trash over there.

* Links are to bloggers criticizing the morality lessons, rather than to the actual remarks themselves.

This entry was posted on Friday, December 21st, 2007 at 8:21 am and is filed under Sexuality. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.