Recent reports of a policy allowing 11- to 13-year-old students at King Middle School in Portland, Maine to receive contraceptives without parental consent elicited a storm of press coverage and shock on the part of everyday Americans, given the students' youth. Just last week, a news story from Ohio reported that three girls, two 13 years old and one who is 14, were having sex with as many as fourteen boys and men, even as the CDC announced that one million cases of Chlamydia were found in the U.S. last year -- the highest ever reported for any sexually transmitted disease. All the stories are only the latest symptom of an underlying cultural pathology – one that relies on the silence and timidity of responsible adults in order to flourish.Societies, like parents, get the behavior they expect from their children. Given the messages transmitted by our popular culture, it’s hardly surprising that even middle schoolers would conclude that developing a sex life is not only acceptable, but almost expected of them. American society has come far from the days when parents, clergy and the culture stood together to encourage young women, in particular, to resist sexual behavior that could have lifelong negative repercussions for them. Then, sexual modesty was honored, even in the breach; today, when it comes to sex, the cultural mandate is to “just do it” – and most of the time, that mandate goes unchallenged.
This is an era when sexually-charged television shows like “Laguna Beach” dominate the teen market, movies making light of unmarried pregnancy like “Knocked Up” clean up at the box office, and music with repulsively raunchy lyrics tops the charts. Especially for girls, the media obsession with celebrities like Britney Spears and Paris Hilton drives home the point that “sexiness” – all too often defined as little more than vulgar exhibitionism in dress and behavior – trumps any other quality that a girl might possess, like intelligence or character...
Excellent exhortations from Carol Platt Liebau. Read the rest of her remarks here and then zip along a copy to friends and family...maybe even and your pastor and/or youth pastor, politely inquiring of these preachers just how they are addressing these matters among the church youth.
Finally, if you've got teen or pre-teen children, a helpful exercise might just be reading this article together and talking it out.
Along those same lines, you might be interested in Liebau's new book, Prude: How the Sex-Obsessed Culture Hurts Young Women (and America, Too!).
