BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

The sexual identity of youth: Oxymoronic?

  
 
Hieronymus
11:16 / 04.04.02
I'm sure this'll be like blood in the water for the Greenland Posse but....

A month before its publication, a provocative book about children’s sexuality is being denounced by conservatives as evil and prompting angry calls for action against the University of Minnesota Press.

In “Harmful to Minors,” author Judith Levine argues that abstinence-only sex education is misguided. She also suggests the threat of pedophilia and molestation by strangers is exaggerated by adults who want to deny young people the opportunity for positive sexual experiences.

Is American commodifying the sexuality of young people while at the same time angrily denying young people possess their own sexual identity? What age is too young for a young person to make their choices about their sex lives?

I wish my questions were more thought-out than that but I'm hammering this out on my way work. Better thoughts later.
 
 
The Monkey
13:35 / 04.04.02
I think this lady is on to something - young adult (12 to majority) sexuality is a non-topic in the US, one of those things that we go all ostrich about (stick our head in the sand) and go for the "Just Say No" line. Abstinence-only sex ed, both in school and out, is basically a form of denial...some when the kids do start fooling around, they do all of the wrong things...it's not a coincidence that serious STDs are on the rise again over here. And the wealth of ignorance about basic safe sex is incredible....

The pedophilia fear in this nation is very strong and irrational, too, and has been since the 80s and the McMartin Trial.

I wonder, in toto, what she would define as "positive sexual experience"? Is she referring only to the physicality, or also the emotionality/sociality? I would assume the latter, resulting in a healthy outlook overall about sex and partnering.

The structure of American sex consumption, especially that of American youth, is grounded in illicitness...the appeal of the furtive. How would that change, and what would be the product?

Also, as she is dealing with the idea of younger-older, Bosie-and-Oscar pairings, isn't she assuming that age corresponds to some degree of sexual/emotional maturity and responsibility? This, to me, would seem to be the biggest reach...that an "adult" chronologically will behave like an adult (responsible, caring individual) in the sexual sphere, thus generating that positive sexual experience she postulates. Furthermore, how is the young person supposed to be able to discern a "good" partner, whether older or of an age, and how is this process interfered with by subjetive and shifting cultural norms of criteria such as attractiveness and peer approval?

I would say this is a particularly hazardous position given the sexual construction and ideation of males in this nation at the moment, and also given that the commoditization of youth sexuality is not only targetted at the youth demographic, but at these young dirty old men. I'm thinking specifically of the sexual depiction of the young woman-teenage girl in media.

[edited to chop a cluster of nonrelevant analyses of pornographic imagery and culture...shit, my head stills hurts....]
 
 
Morlock - groupie for hire
15:43 / 04.04.02
For ref, some more on the Dutch laws quoted.

Here

Looks to me like the basic idea is to allow sex between 12 and 16 as long as the child, the parents and an independent council all agree no funny business is going on. Any suggestion of abuse, and the legal deck gets stacked heavily against the adult, effectively making it the responsibility of the adult that it's all kosher.

Have yet to find any significant holes in this, although the link does recognise some gray areas.

BTW, does anybody else find it amusing that the director of Concerned Women for America’s Culture and Family Institute is a bloke?

In any case, the whole argument seems pretty moot to me if the book has been vetted as closely as they claim it has been. If it's good science, the responsibility for it's use devolves from the author to the reader.
 
 
grant
15:47 / 04.04.02
Check out this Laboratory topic.

Rising levels of estrogens and estrogen-like compounds in the environment have been linked to early puberty (and the development of breasts on young boys).

We're becoming a more sexual society, but we're not a homogenous society, so there's gonna be a lot of problems with repression meeting libertarianism head on, with all them reactions (like "barely legal" porn imagery vs. National Miss PreTeen beauty pageants vs. creepy underwear ads) in between.

Didn't Freud run into a lot of trouble for his "infantile sexuality" theories back in the day?
 
 
m. anthony bro
23:13 / 04.04.02
America is the strangest place ever. While producing most of the pornography the western world sees, and internally spending more money on it than it does on performing arts, it also has a huge repressive streak that demands that anything that feels remotely nice be witheld until a legal sanction has been attained.
The underlying message I can get from all this is "we don't trust our youth", which is actually going to cause a whole lot more harm than "hey, you can fuck and feel nice". It also implies that if you're under say eighteen, that you're incapable of making sexual decisions. So, we've got a movement that says "I don't trust you, stupid."
The repression train keeps a-rollin', in the name of a God who makes design flaws and gives you stuff you're not allowed to use, perfectly natural things like sex become overblown. Sex isn't really a big thing: you get naked, you play about for a bit, make a mess and that's it. The more we sit on a high horse and go "filthy shameful dirty", the more it becomes a huge thing, the more a group of kids who don't feel trusted will try and use it as some sort of shock tactic.
What are we worried about? Disease? Pregnancy? Yeah, those are pretty rank things, but we can always tell people how to avoid them. Are we worried about our teens getting emotionally screwed? If so, how is demanding that they treat sex like leprosy going to make them whole people? People have sex for some strange reasons, one of which is the confusion of it with love, or the use of it to gain esteem. Hang on! This is a society which is actually amazingly horrible to people. I don't know a single person who hasn't experienced incredible depression at some time. Tell me this needs to happen.
I know. It doesn't.
If we weren't so certain that the only thing a man can stick up his arsehole is his head, maybe we wouldn't have to argue about any of this. Sex is dirty because we make it dirty, but there's no reason why we can't turn around and say "this is sex. It feels good. Like all things, it's up to you how much you consume, or don't consume. Don't let people push you around."
My penis still feels the same as it did when I was fifteen. When I lost my virginity ten years ago, sex was pretty much the same as it is now. Sex has never been the issue, the interpretation of it is what's caused all the fuckups. All things considered, ice hockey is more dangerous.
Remember Jocelyn Elders (?) saying American kids should be told that it's okay to whack off? remember the palava? That's what's going to fuck up the kids of the nation, not free access to it, but the stigma, distortion and repression.
 
 
Kali, Queen of Kitteh
02:10 / 05.04.02
Mostly what I remember of my sexual identity as a youth was that I was walking ball of hormones directed at no particular gender--not that that has changed a lot, but still--but there was all this strangeness attached to feeling this way. It didn't come from my parents, it mostly came from people around me.

I'll elucidate when I feel smarter. Which isn't right now. So sorry.
 
 
Tom Coates
06:58 / 05.04.02
Somehow - and I have no idea how - I managed to completely not know about sex and the functionings of sex in any form until I was fourteen. And then I was informed in Biology in a fairly mechanical way about heterosexual sex. There was no preamble whatsoever, and I have to say it came as something of a shock. My family are not repressive in the sense that they don't actively forbid things, but they are in that these things simply aren't talked about. Frankly I'd much rather have known earlier. My cousin who is the age I was then, is continually talking about breaking into his aunt's cable porn...

Of the two, I rather think that the latter is healthier...
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
07:26 / 05.04.02
I think I disagree, but I disagree primarily because I can't see very much of a connection between sex and porn.
 
 
Laurelwen
15:30 / 05.04.02
I was incensed when I first read this article, primarily because it is weighted to outrage people from the very headline. Using the word "child" evokes the image of 6 year olds having sex with old guys--an image which will press buttons, thereby reducing the chance that people will read it with an open mind.

I very firmly believe that part of the problem with this age group in America is that we continue to designate them as children, when the fact is that they reach maturity at very early ages. Yet, the time in which they are considered children has been extended, thus prolonging this hazy, confusing period. While a six year old may not have very much interest in sex (with some exceptions--I know this from experience), a twelve year old certainly does, and will experiment--with himself, with his own age group, and possibly with adults--whether this book gets published or not.

It is incredibly frustrating for me that the same arguments are being used as were/are used against sex ed classes or condom machines in the bathrooms. They're frustrating because they stem from a denial of the realities of the situation--believing that kids won't know about these things if we just keep quiet about it. It's very difficult to persuade someone who has their head buried in the sand.

And I do believe that persuasion is needed. I tend to agree with the ideas postulated in the book (insofar as they have been reported). I can draw only on my own experience and that of people who have been frank and honest with me. But I can say that I was sexually curious at a very young age (at least by 5). I tend to think that this is not the exception in our society, but it is not considered acceptable to admit to such activities or thoughts, making it difficult to examine the reality of the situation.

Every day our society does the equivalent of telling the kids where the guns are hidden, then hoping to god they don't use them. What needs to be done is to show them the gun, point out the various parts, tell them which end is up, how to squeeze the trigger, and then give them some good reasons why they should wait before firing off. But in the end, you have to leave the choice up to them, or all your warnings are rendered useless, dismissed as the propanganda of "those who would tell us not to do things and then make up reasons why we shouldn't". Ignorance is far more dangerous than knowledge.
 
 
wembley can change in 28 days
01:38 / 24.04.02
I was just reading an excerpt from "Harmful to Minors.
I find it quite interesting, and I think I have a better idea of why there's such an outcry. In this section, about paedophilia, Levine asserts that actual number of cases of paedophilia in America is hugely exaggerated, and that the public fear of paedophilia is way out of proportion. The reason for this is that our society is inherently paedophilic, and that each and every one of us as adults experiences discomfort about the topic because we are all, to some extent, paedophiles. I'd say I find that very disturbing, but I'm not ready to say I don't agree, either.

"Psychologists and law enforcers call the man who loves teenagers a hebophile. That's a psychiatric term, denoting pathological sexual deviance. But if we were to diagnose every American man for whom Miss (or Mr.) Teenage America was the optimal sex object, we'd have to call ourselves a nation of perverts. If the teenage body were not the culture's ideal of sexiness, junior high school girls probably would not start starving themselves as soon as they notice a secondary sex characteristic, and the leading lady (on-screen or in life) would not customarily be twenty to forty years younger than the leading man. I asked Meg Kaplan, a widely respected clinician who treats sex offenders at the New York State Psychiatric Institute's Sexual Behavior Clinic, about the medicalization and criminalization of the taste for adolescent flesh. "Show me a heterosexual male who's not attracted to teenagers," she snorted. "Puh-leeze." "
 
  
Add Your Reply