Sunday: Versus Pretending and Wishing

The temperature has fallen a little bit, there's a cool breeze out there, PFW is interviewing an atonal bass player, the coffee is bubbling, my house is quiet at the moment. The seventeen-year-old read the whole Harry Potter book yesterday -- man, we don't have a day that quiet very often, he grabbed that thing and holed up in his room all day long. He seemed stunned afterwards. He says he doesn't know how they'll make a movie out of this one, there are no details that you could leave out, and he says every single page has important stuff on it, stuff you wouldn't believe. Especially, I think, he said the third chapter from the end is amazing. We had a bit of a family stand-off, three people wanted to read it at the same time. Think we got it sorted out. We had UPS deliver the book, just like the earlier ones, and mom got to it first, but in classic magnanimous, Altruistic Mom Style she let the younguns read it first.

I see a front page Washington Post article this morning, called Teen Sex Rates Stop Falling, Data Show.

The long decline in sexual activity among U.S. teenagers, hailed as one of the nation's most important social and public health successes, appears to have stalled.

After decreasing steadily and significantly for more than a decade, the percentage of teenagers having intercourse began to plateau in 2001 and has failed to budge since then, despite the intensified focus in recent years on encouraging sexual abstinence, according to new analyses of data from a large federal survey.

The halt in the downward trend coincided with an increase in federal spending on programs focused exclusively on encouraging sexual abstinence until marriage, several experts noted. Congress is currently debating funding for such efforts, which receive about $175 million a year in federal money and have come under fire from some quarters for being ineffective. Teen Sex Rates Stop Falling, Data Show

We are a strange society in that we live well into adulthood before marrying -- median age 25 for men, 27 for women at marriage. You hit puberty, say, in your early teens, you're sexually mature, all of nature motivates you to have sex, and then you wait. All of this is rather recent, people never used to wait this long to have "legitimate" sexual relations, and our culture has not really provided a way to deal with the delay. You're supposed to just tough it out, bite your lip and go without, but nobody actually does.

A Post article last year reported that:

By age 44, 99 percent of people were no longer virgins, 95 percent reported having had premarital intercourse, and 85 percent had married at some point. Wait Until Marriage? 'Extremely Challenging'

So ... here we're talking about high school students, probably living at home, too young by old folks' standards to do the stuff they're doing, but it turns out that eventually just about everybody does it. Married or not, whatever, it happens. This is not an endorsement, this is a fact.

There was a funny story this week in the European press. Here's one version of it: US Censors Teenie Weenie. A German author had written a children's book and an American publisher wanted to carry it ... but. They had to censor it.

Of course, said publishers, Boyds Mills Press, there would be some cultural differences that would have to be addressed and possibly changed, which Berner herself was happy to consider. The publishers suggested that the inclusion of some smokers in the brightly colored illustrations would not be suitable for US children, and Berner agreed.

But when the publishers began suggesting censorship of naked artworks in the background of a museum scene, the German author couldn't believe what she was hearing.

"It was a sensation to start with," said Berner of her amazement at attracting US interest, in an interview with the German Der Spiegel news magazine. But when the suggestions for edits and exclusions started to flood in over the nude paintings and sculpture, she thought it was a joke.

Apart from a tasteful nude reclining in a slightly blurred watercolor in the background, the main offending artifact was a tiny male statue and its microscopic penis.

On the page, the sculpture stands at a very unthreatening seven millimeters tall and the appendage could, at first glance, be dismissed as a wayward brushstroke. The "little willy" as Berner called it "was barely half a millimeter in length." The sculpture is an aside in the overall museum scene and is in no way prominent to the storyline on that page, she added.

Yet, the censors spotted it and wanted it out. It seemed that the whole micro-penis affair is "highly embarrassing" to the publishing company, according to Berner, which fears a backlash from angry parents if the book is published with the tiny organ still in place. US Censors Teenie Weenie

You ought to read that article, just to see things from a different point of view. They can't believe it. It makes no sense to them, our American fear of sex, it's just a joke to them. Like sex will just go away if we shut our eyes tight enough and don't think about it. People elsewhere on the planet figure out how to live with it as a fact of life.

This is kind of off-topic, but I got a kick out of yesterday's story about the British approach to marijuana:

Eight members of Prime Minister Gordon Brown's cabinet admitted this week that they had smoked marijuana, in an unusual cascade of confessions that led to newspaper headlines such as "Parliament has gone to pot." On Pot Question, Cabinet Doesn't Blow Smoke

Most were contrite, but nobody really bothered to take a stand against it. One guy said he "did the sex and rock-and-roll, but not the drugs." Like, he didn't want to seem like an American or something, you know.

Responding to a report that an Oxford classmate said he thought Johnson had never taken drugs, Johnson said: "This is an outrageous slur . . . of course I've taken drugs."

Look, you can say they're different over there, but really, we're the ones who are different.

So now back to The Post and its page one story about teenagers. The proportion of students in grades 9-12 who have "ever had sex" has decreased from 54.1 percent in the early nineties to 46.8 percent now. That doesn't sound like much, but it's a big change, nearly eight percent.

None of us want to see teens doing things they're not ready for, but nobody really knows how to get them to decide not to. I would have to point out that probably the very least likely approach will be to ... tell them to abstain from sex. Teenagers are not known for their profound devotion to obedience, let's say. You say, "Don't do X" and you can bet X will be done. Not how it works.

Course, some people don't see it that way.

But abstinence proponents argue that, if anything, the data underscore the need for greater emphasis on encouraging youngsters to abstain from sex until marriage.

"We need to increase abstinence education and give more dollars to abstinence education. It is the healthiest program we have for young people," said Leslee Unruh of the National Abstinence Clearinghouse.

A recent study of four separate abstinence programs, conducted for the Department of Health and Human Services by Mathematica Policy Research, a nonpartisan firm, found no evidence that the programs delayed the start of sexual activity among teens, but Unruh and others said such programs need more time and wider use to counter pervasive messages encouraging teens to have sex.

I'm guessing that maybe we've reached the white-knuckle limit. Human beings are made to have sex, you have self-control but eventually it becomes an obsession, a fetish, as it has in our culture. Denial is not a workable strategy for going years and years into sexual maturity without engaging in actual sexual intercourse -- oh, there are people who can "just say no" for a long time, but there aren't very many of them, and it would be dumb for us to imagine that everybody will do that.

Here they're saying that more than half of American kids get through high school without giving in to the impulse, and everybody's lamenting that the percentage can't be higher. Because this means that about half of American teens do have sex while they're in high school. Just to say it out loud, we have to address this as a reality, we have to teach them how to deal with their sexuality, there is no benefit in pretending or wishing it doesn't exist.