Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

Last Thursday morning I had the pleasure of speaking with Robert Jensen about pornography and raising kids in a sexually saturated society. I have mentioned Jensen’s newest book on pornography in a previous post. Several articles he’s written are on his website.

What is a brief description of how you see porn?

When you look at pornography, you see the perfect storm of a predatory corporate capitalism, white supremacy, and male supremacy. Pornography is not only racist and sexist, but it’s also the commodification of one of the most central part of ourselves. You can literally buy your sexuality. If you actually look honestly at that, it’s incredibly depressing.

How is it that kids or teenagers typically get introduced to porn?

Well, there just isn’t much in the way of reliable research on kids’ use of pornography, or much research on adults’ use for that matter. I always use my own experience as a baseline for understanding men of my generation, the post-Playboy generation, I’m 49. But there have been dramatic cultural changes driven by the technology since my generation. The first of those changes was the VCR, which made it much easier for people to see the hardcore stuff in their house. And then of course the internet, which ramped pornography use up by about a factor of a thousand. The fundamental thing that hasn’t changed over the years is that boys are much higher users of porn than girls.

So how should parents talk with their kids about porn?

It seems that for teenagers, boys use porn far more than girls. Not surprisingly, because the vast majority of porn is directed for a man’s imagination. And the conception of masculinity in pornography is in line with the rest of the training that adolescent boys get in becoming a man.

The one footnote to that is this “girl power” trend. And there has been some writing on this, where girls are taking on more stereotypically male sexuality, it’s called the “hook-up culture.” And so girls are taking on the perception of sexual pleasure and dominance. This is the “Girls Gone Wild” culture.

However, I still think that porn is still overwhelmingly a male genre. It is made by men, for men, and addressing the male sexual imagination. It reinforces the worst aspects of gender training, particularly around male sexuality.

What can parents, particularly of boys, do?

Well, at the obvious level, parents have to deal with their own fear of pornography first. We have to get over the feeling that if we critique porn we’re prudes.

The second thing is that I think a lot of parents in the post-Playboy world saw porn as kind of a harmless indulgence when they were growing up. So parents sometimes avoid the topic by seeing it as harmless.

Mothers in particular have to deal with their own fears in order to have good conversations with their boys about it. Most adult women have this very visceral reaction to porn, for very reasonable reasons, because it generally turns them into an object. Porn and pop culture is a very scary thing, with threats of violence, and particularly sexual violence. And add on to that, there is often a very nervous relationship with husbands regarding their own use.

Fathers, on the other hand, have to come to terms with their own pornography use. It is my experience that if you get together 10 nice, liberal men who deny using porn, at least 5 of them are lying. My experience says that men don’t step up to their responsibility in talking to their boys about porn, and particularly if they’re users themselves, they can’t.

The thing to remember is that no intervention is too early. The earlier that kids have a framework to understand the negative cultural training the better. There are two main perspectives from which sexualizing teenagers and the sexual culture is critiqued: the right-wing religious framework or the feminist framework. Those are the only people who are being vocal out there saying that our sexualized culture is wrong. The right-wing approach is rooted in a fear of sexuality and male dominance. I think we need a feminist analysis, and it is never too early to introduce that to children.

So first parents have to come to terms with these things. And if you really come to terms with pornography, it is overwhelming. It has to be. Because it’s one thing to know that Hollywood movies objectify and sexualize women. It’s another thing to know that there is this huge corporate complex out there that directly supports men having sexual power and sexual dominance over women.

We also need to remember that boys often are struggling with this too. There’s a kind of surface bravado, like when they trade images and web links on e-mail. They have this kind of jocular, surface, male bravado kind of conversation that allows them to circulate the material risk-free because it’s just joking. But what that shows is that young men are very conflicted about porn. They know there is something wrong with this, that their sexuality is reduced to 7 minutes or less of masturbating while online. It produces an incredible amount of insecurity in men.

So whatever kind of bravado parents get from boys may just be masking the terror on the inside. Boys don’t understand sexuality, they’re scared of it, they’re aware that they usually are a step behind the girls in development. That’s scary to them. And then you put that fear into a situation where they’re watching a hyper-sexualized image of masculinity, that they know they will never be able to meet. That says to me that boys are a mess, and so the more conversation with parents the better.

Of course, all of this assumes a healthy communication between the parents, which is why I always say that the first step is for parents to get together and deal with their own fears.

That addresses boys, but what about girls? What can parents do to help their girls survive in this pornography-saturated, hyper-sexualized society?

If you’re a young woman, and you see the outline of the sexual culture that you live in (male dominant, hyper-sexualized, etc.), and you think it’s not going to change, many girls have the not unreasonable response that if you can’t beat it, join it. They take as an assumption that men are going to set the terms of sexual dominance as a form of pleasure acquisition (i.e., not intimacy). If you’re a woman, or a girl, you may not believe that is what sexual encounters should be. But nevertheless it seems to be the way things are, and if you don’t have any counter-cultural way to see the world, you may assume that if you can’t change it, you can take control of it. That’s where this hook-up, Girls Gone Wild culture comes from. So girls trying to use their sexuality as power may just be making the best of a bad situation. But the problem is that it still doesn’t meet teenagers’ deeply felt need for intimacy and love.

So what do you do as a parent in this culture? It’s mostly trying to provide an alternative when there aren’t many alternatives out there. Some teenagers take this into their own hands, and decide as a group that they are taking sex off the table and interact as a group, as close friends who don’t date, making a safe space for themselves. The problem is that as a kid, you can’t do that alone.

The reason we have to pay attention to pornography, and the reason we have to talk with our kids about it, is because we have to talk to them about their sexuality and we have to talk with them about what kind of people they are becoming. This is really just part of that broader question of what kind of people they want to be.

So I don’t have any great insights about helping kids worth through the issues inherent in pornography, just that it’s something as parents we have to talk to our kids about. And part of that is coming to terms, and talking with them, about our own struggles with the issue.

With teenagers, as with toddlers, parents should try to say yes as often as possible. There are so many, many things to say no to (drugs, alcohol, sex, the bad friends, the wrong date, buying a new car, wearing too much make-up, dropping out of school, going to that concert/party/drag racing event, and the list goes on). But teenagers have a really, really hard time hearing “No.” and respecting it. They are on a relentless drive to make their own mistakes.

So what to do? Try your hardest to find something - one little, tiny part of what they want - to say yes to. An easy example is preteens’ desire for wearing make-up. One solution may be to allow them to wear only eyeshadow (or whatever), but nothing else. And only after school.

The most common problem situation that parents have trouble saying yes to is that person your teenager wants to date. Something in you responds to something in that person, and you know that they are up to no good. Now, some teenagers will be able to hear you when you say that. Some teenagers might even appreciate some dating advice from their parents. But let’s be honest: there aren’t very many who feel that way. Most teenagers will do whatever they can to get together with someone who their parents have forbidden them to meet. The point is not to forbid your teenager from meeting someone. But do frame the parameters within which your teenager can meet someone.

Here are some examples of parameters you might find useful:

1. They can meet only at your house, when you are home.
2. They will stay in the living room.
3. They can talk on the phone all they like, but they cannot meet in person.
4. They can go public places together, but only if you are present at the same place, and they must stay within your line of site (if not listening range). The object of your teenager’s affection doesn’t even have to know you are there watching over them.

The point is that you are creating a situation which you feel like you can live with. You may not be happy about it, it might not be a situation you would ever consider to be best. But the point is that you can abide the situation until the relationship subsides. And your teenager is much less likely to throw him/herself into the arms of his/her beloved simply because you have forbidden it.

The NY Times published a short piece on Sunday called The Myth, The Math, The Sex. It discusses the impossibility of large differences in numbers of sex partners between men and women. Here is their statement of the problem:

One survey, recently reported by the federal government, concluded that men had a median of seven female sex partners. Women had a median of four male sex partners. Another study, by British researchers, stated that men had 12.7 heterosexual partners in their lifetimes and women had 6.5.

This is a statistical impossibility. In a given population, with a set number of sexual encounters between men and women, the average number of sexual experiences between men and women must be equal.

So where are all of those other sex partners coming from? Two ridiculous suggestions by Dr. Sevgi O. Aral, associate director for science in the division of sexually transmitted disease prevention at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, are that those extra partners are made up of foreigners and prostitutes.

Is she serious?? Before I can go on, I have to stop and have a really good laugh at this one. This suggests that the US average man has had sex with three (3!!) female foreigners or prostitutes. Oh, but not British women, clearly, because they’re not having sex as much as their men either, so they’re not skewing the American data. It must be women from a nation full of sex-craved, American-huntresses like Canada or Tunisia that are throwing our data.

Okay, but Dr. Aral does go on to make one decent suggestion addressing this statistical anomaly. She suggests - gasp! - that both men and women might exaggerate (i.e., lie) about the number of sexual partners they have had. This seems pretty likely. Men probably increase the number and women probably decrease the number.

However, this same analysis cannot be used for adolescent sexual partners. Adolescents have sex with non-adolescents with some regularity, so a difference in average number of sex partners may be more legitimate.

However, the only real statistically significant difference in number of sex partners between adolescent girls and boys is that boys apparently start having sex younger than girls. Again, let’s think about this more closely. For that under-13 group, boys report having had sex more often than girls. Who on earth are those boys having sex with? It’s just so unlikely that high numbers of girls who are older than 13 are deciding to have sex with boys who are under 13.

So the summary is that people, regardless of their age, lie about how many people they have had have sex with. We should accept that, and start labeling these statistical charts and graphs “Reported Number of Sexual Partners.” It’s more honest, and it explains the statistical impossibility.

Thank you for reading this short public announcement on analyzing statistical data. Let’s end on this note: Think about what you read! Just because our government or any other organization published a study doesn’t mean the numbers or the theories based on those numbers make sense!

Dear Readers, I know that some of you have very strong, emotional reactions to pornography. I describe one pornographic image in the third paragraph. In my last paragraph, I ask for your comments on and personal experience with porn.

This post is in preparation for my interview on Thursday with Robert Jensen, author of Getting Off: Pornography and the End of Masculinity. This is a really fascinating book. It prompted me to examine my personal relationship with pornography for the first time.

I was maybe 11 when I saw my first porn picture. I was walking on a street near my house alone, and there was a piece of paper on the ground. It was maybe 4 by 6 inches and seemed to be torn out of a small book. So of course, always the avid reader, I picked it up. What stands out in my memory is a naked woman, bending over, with only the top of her thighs to her lower back showing. It was extremely lurid and disturbing. There were at least two other people in the picture, both naked, but all that I remember of them is what seemed to be vast acres of naked flesh. I did not really understand what I saw, but I was horrified, dropped the paper, and ran off. I was afraid someone would see me and think the picture was mine. I would have been able to describe the image in some detail, but I don’t think I could have identified the body parts I was seeing. It was only years later, looking back, that I was able to identify the subject of this image that still stood so clearly in my mind.

The next porn pictures I saw were maybe six months to a year later. A friend and I were in a neighborhood pharmacy. The staff knew me well. My friend and I peeked inside the blocked-out plastic cover on a Playboy and saw the picture on the front cover. We also peeked inside at a few pages. I remember the event more than the images. That we were clearly doing something illicit was delightful. We giggled and jostled for a better view. We may have also picked up a Playgirl and peeked inside. The pictures were not nearly as searing or painful as the one I picked up off the street. They seemed to be from completely different genres, and I did not connect them in my mind.

None of the men I dated in high school or college were particularly interested in porn. At least they didn’t admit to me that they were, and I remained blissfully ignorant. I probably would have thrown a complete fit and used it as grounds for a break-up had I discovered otherwise. I probably would not have been able to articulate why I was so distressed by my boyfriend using porn. Pornographic pictures became, while still uncommon, at least not-shocking over my college years. They continued to make me feel slightly ill, in an undefined, unexamined kind of way.

I am interested in hearing about your early experiences with pornography, both as a child and as an adolescent. Were they positive or negative? How did they shape (or not shape) your current perspective on porn? What kinds of experiences are common for boys versus girls? I would also love to know what place you think porn has (or does not have) in the adolescent mind?

In case you missed the first or second part in this series, we are discussing the recent NY Times article on adolescent sex offenders. This is the last post in a three-part series.

The primary focus of the law as it relates to adolescent sex offenders is how to keep potential future victims safe. This is, of course, appropriate. However, assessing whether an adolescent is likely to commit a second sexual offense is difficult because of adolescents’ rapid social, emotional, and cognitive development. However, research suggests that only about 20-25% of adolescent sex offenders commit a second sex offense. This is a much lower rate than adult sex offenders. Even fewer of these adolescents will grow-up to become rapist or pedophiles - perhaps only 10%.

Nevertheless, the laws that address adolescent sex offenders, both on a state and federal level, are becoming increasingly punitive and stringent. Researchers and experts, however, suggest that a less punitive approach produces the best possible outcomes for adolescent sex offenders. New federal legislation called the Adam Walsh Child Protection and Safety Act will, among other things, mandate that over the next two years all states include adolescent sex offenders 14 years and older in community notification laws. As I alluded to on Wednesday, this means that for the first time in over 100 years, a minor’s records will be accessible to the public. The Times article says this:

The theory is that children are less responsible for their actions, and thus less blameworthy, than adults and more amenable to rehabilitation. But by publishing their photographs and addresses on the Internet, community notification suggests that juveniles with sex offenses are in a separate, distinct category from other adolescents in the juvenile justice system – more fixed in their traits and more dangerous to the public. It suggests, in other words, that they are more like adult sex offenders than they are like kids.

The that adolescent sex offenders are more like adult sex offenders than like children is directly contradicted by what we know about adolescent sex offenders. Their cognitive, emotional, and social development are on trajectories much more similar to other adolescents. Their recidivism rates are much lower. Even the way they commit the offense is quite different. Sex offenses perpetrated by adolescents tend to be committed on an impulse or a whim, while adult sex offenders are much more likely to groom specific children for some time before they commit an offense.

Sex offenders are a highly inflammatory issue. No doubt some politicians believe throwing out the term “Tough on Sex Offenders” in election year commercials will get them votes in the up coming elections. No doubt some politicians believe they are actually doing the best thing by cracking down as hard as they can on all sex offenders, regardless of age. Because, after all, the victim’s experience is the same. But the offender’s experience is not the same across age groups. And pushing everyone into one category is a severe disservice to the adolescents.

A dad I spoke with recently, we’ll call him Tony, is having trouble with his 14-year-old daughter, who we’ll call Sara. Sara wants to go to the Austin City Limits Music Festival this year with a gaggle of her 14-year-old friends. If you are unfamiliar with the ACL festival, it is a three day, outside concert with several stages and lots and lots and lots of people (see above picture, taken at the 2004 festival). Also, cell phones often don’t work because of the crush of people trying to use them. It’s fabulous fun if great, live music is your thing.

Tony feels Sara is too young to go without adult supervision. His primary concern is that there will be drugs at the festival (he is, of course, correct), and he doesn’t want Sara exposed to drug use. Sara pointed out that she has seen people using drugs before (primarily smoking marijuana), and has no interest in doing them herself. Tony and Sara’s tentative agreement is that she can go with her friends for one day. When Tony made that agreement he was not aware that Sara’s cell phone might not work at the festival.

But it is totally appropriate for Tony to put his foot down on this one. Sara is getting close to an age when she can go to the ACL festival with a gaggle of girls and no supervision. But she’s not there yet. Fourteen-year-old girls need a chaperon at an event this big and unruly. They don’t need a constant chaperon - but one of the parents (or a particularly cool aunt or uncle) who would enjoy going to the festival anyway needs to be on-site. The girls need to check-in with that adult at specified times and places. This gives the girls the most freedom at the least trouble. There are too many contingencies where then girls would benefit from an adult being available - including just getting tired and wanting to go home before they thought they would. In two more years, one of the girls could drive the whole group, and by then they’ll be old enough to go without any supervision.

In case you missed the first part in this series, we are discussing the recent NY Times article on adolescent sex offenders. This is the second post in a three-part series.

Adolescent social, emotional, psychological, and cognitive development is quite rapid. Almost every aspect of an adolescent is, for those few years, almost always changing. This complicates matters for adolescent sex offenders particularly because the individual who commit a sex offense may be a very different person even just two years later, and may pose no threat of a repeat offense. Indeed, the recidivism rate for adolescent sex offenders is much lower than for adult sex offenders, and research suggests that only about 10% of adolescent sex offenders will become adult rapists or pedophiles. But the stigma of having committed a sexual offense does not wane as an adolescent changes.

Sexual offense, in some states and soon to be nationally, is the only offense in which a minor’s legal records are not sealed. I will discuss this legal issue in more depth on Friday, but for now it is enough to know that an adolescent sex offender’s peers and their peers’ parents can find out that an adolescent has committed a sex offense by looking through on-line registries of sexual offenders. Additionally, all potential employers for the rest of the individual’s life can find out that they committed a sexual offense as a minor.

In other words: (1) adolescents are ever changing, and are at a relatively low risk of repeat offenses and (2) sex offense records are not sealed. The implication of these two pieces of information are that there are serious hurdles for this population to re-integrate into society to the fullest extent they are capable. School mates and their parents, future employers, and just about anyone else can discover that these adolescents have committed a sex offense in on-line registries. This can severely impede adolescents’ ability to make and keep friends, jobs, or any of the relationships that form communities that support pro-social behavior.

What does all this really mean? Is it appropriate that a sexual offense that a young person commits at age 11 follows them through the rest of their lives? What about a 13-year-old? A 17-year-old? The crux of the problem is that there is not one good answer for those questions. Adolescents can develop too quickly and go in too many directions for blanket statements about how to respond to them, based either on age or offense. This statement applies more strongly to younger adolescents, because they have even more time for dramatic personal changes.

People in our society, children and adults, have the right to be protected from sex offenders. But the other side of that coin is that it is inappropriate to ostracize adolescents because of a sex offense, and regardless of their response to treatment. Indeed, this may increase the likelihood that they will not have the opportunity to become fully functioning adults.

So what we need are not arbitrary, fear-based responses to adolescent sex offenders. Rather, we need professionals who are able to sit with these young people, lead them toward appropriate self-monitoring and boundaries, and support them in building healthy relationships. These professionals need to be able to see the signs of a likely repeat-offender. But they also need to be able to see the signs of unlikely repeat-offenders. I am much more comfortable thinking about these very troubled young people being perceived and treated as unique individuals in unique situations by highly skilled professionals.

What do you think? Should adolescent sex offenders be treated differently than adult sex offenders? As I mentioned in the first post, the victim’s experience is the same. Why should the way we treat the perpetrator be different? I believe it is the nature of the adolescent that demands the difference. But I am interested in hearing other people’s perspectives.

I am on a continuing search for information about adolescents and anal sex. I recently ran across an article that suggests 25% of adolescent relationships include anal sex, with 10% including anal sex on a regular basis (Baldwin & Baldwin, 2000). Another article reports that 10% of the study participants (who were 18 - 21) had engaged in receptive anal intercourse, while 27% had engaged in insertive anal intercourse (Ompad, 2006).

What to think about this information? Well, more than anything else it suggests that the tried-and-true method of keeping adolescents from having anal sex (i.e., not mentioning it because then they won’t know about it) isn’t working. Adolescents are having anal sex, folks. Not as much as they’re having oral or vaginal sex, but nevertheless we cannot ignore these numbers. Anal sex can be dangerous and have serious long-term health implications. In addition to the high risk of STD transmission, there is a real risk of injury if care and lots of lube are not used.

So, while I know that in the current sex education climate getting educators to mention condoms in relation to vaginal intercourse is an uphill battle, I am stating my position here and now that we also need to talk to teenagers about safe anal intercourse. Not in over explicit ways, and not to 10-year-olds. But anal-sex information has its place in age-appropriate, information-based sex education. Because teenagers are already doing it.

References

Baldwin, J.I. & Baldwin, J.D. (2000). Heterosexual Anal Intercourse: An understudied, high-risk sexual behavior. Archives of sexual behavior, 29, (4): 357-373.

Ompad, D.C. (2006). Predictors of early initiation of vaginal and oral sex among urban young adults in Baltimore, Maryland. Archives Of Sexual Behavior. Archives of sexual behavior, 35 (1): 53-65.