Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

I am delighted to have been interviewed by Boinkology recently. Go take a read and read my (rather lengthy) answers to these questions:

• What got you interested in adolescent sexuality?
• In your writing, you stress the importance of parents talking to their kids about sex. Does it matter how parents address the topic, or is just bringing it up for discussion enough?
• When should parents start talking to their kids about sex? What kinds of messages should young children be given about sex and sexuality?
• If you could design a sex ed curriculum for America’s public schools, what would it look like?
• What’s the most common mistake parents make when talking (or not talking) to their kids about sex?
• In your opinion, has the Internet had an effect on how — and what — kids learn about sex?
• What’s the most important sex advice you can give someone?

Thanks so much to Lux for taking the time to talk with me! I look forward to catching up with her sometime soon, and picking her brain for an interview here.

There are lots of good things on Boinkology (in addition to me, of course), including a post from yesterday titled: Yes, You Tell Your Partners About Your STIs. This is just good, basic sexual protocol for teenagers to know, and it’s often easier for them to read it on-line rather than have their parent tell them - so go ahead and forward them that link. The comments are also interesting because they give a bit of a view into realistic expectations about STI prevention among young adults.

In other news, an incredibly brave and strong 8-year-old girl from Yemen filed a suit against her father for marrying her off to a 30 year old man. She showed up in court alone because she couldn’t find anyone who would agree to take her. Wow, what fabulous gumption!

And, finally, the Washington Post has done a relatively decent job of introducing the difficulties of talking with your kids and teenagers about sex in a world full of sexual mixed messages, ambiguity, and scientific amazement.

A teenager’s room is like their whole house, squished into a much smaller space.  This is where the teenager does pretty much everything - sleep, work, socialize.

Given how present the room is in a teenager’s life, it is important to let the teenager have ownership of the room.  This often means redecorating - maybe several times over the teen years because of the swiftness with which teenagers develop and evolve.  It’s good to let this happen, within your family’s financial and physical boundaries.

A friend wanted to paint his room an extremely deep purple as a teenager.  His dad said no, but let him put in a very, very purple carpet.

A teenage friend wanted to paint his room black.  Yes, black.  He and his mom agreed to paint it gray to look like a stone wall and putting up a few gargoyles.

These were both good compromises because the teenager was involved.  Another adult friend came home one day as a teenager to find that her parents had completely remodeled her room.  They had done it out of kindness, and she was able to admit years later that she actually preferred the room to her previous one, but at the time she felt like a visitor, a guest in her own room.

Teenagers have ownership of so few spaces - they need to feel ownership in their own room.  It is, in many emotional and physical ways, their cocoon and their sanctuary.  Let them fully own it while they’re living in it!  You’ll get it back eventually.

In the days since the initial police raid on the Jesus Christ Church of Later Day Saints (i.e., Mormon) ranch in west Texas, there has been and continues to be a whirlwind of news coverage.   There were many young girls forced to marry older men, and then forced to have sex with them.  The police picked up hundreds of children from the ranch, and hundreds of women choose to leave with them as well.  It’s a horrible scenario from start to finish.  I hope the police and various officials who are trying to sort out the mess are doing so conscientiously and with attention to the children and teenagers’ emotional state as well as their physical one.

The most up-to-date information on the case can be found here.

Last week I wrote the first and the second parts of this series. I apologize for the longer-than-planned interlude before this, the third part!

Here is my position: Having sex with another person is a privilege, and with privilege comes responsibility. Hence, having sex with another person necessitates a level of responsibility both to that person and to yourself.

One commenter mentioned surprise that I used the word privilege to refer to sexuality - which she understands to be something inherent to our humanness, not a privilege. I agree. However, what I am talking about is the group of activities loosely categorized as “sex” as they happen between two or more people. And I do strongly believe that engaging with another person is a privilege, and that it requires responsibility.

In my first post, I outlined three levels of responsibility that sex requires: physical, relational, and social. In my second post, I described the physical responsibilities that come with sex. Today I’ll describe the relational, and tomorrow the social.

So what relational responsibilities come with having sex with someone? It means tending to the emotional relationship as well as the physical relationship. Here are some critical points:

1. Everyone involved has to actively want the sexual experience.
2. Everyone involved has to be on the same page about the meaning behind the sexual experience.
3. If someone is not in a state where they are able to make clear decisions because of drugs, alcohol, or emotional turmoil, don’t ask them to make sexual decisions.
4. If you have an STD/STI of any sort, you must disclose that before you get close enough that there is any chance of transmission.
5. If in doubt about someone’s desire, motives, or emotional or physical wellness, don’t have sex with them at that time.

I’ll be honest: I think this is fairly straight-forward stuff. But if these things were always self-evident to everyone, much would be different in this world. What that means is that teenagers need to learn these things as part of their sex education. There are lots of ways for teenagers to learn how to be relationally responsible sex partners, but probably the most common is through trial-and-error over time. But this method ends up with lots of people getting hurt until everyone has learned how to be sexually kind. I hope that you take the initiative, when you are talking about sex with teenagers, to provide guidance on how these teenagers can bring responsibility to their sexual relationships.

Okay, I am diverging from this week’s regularly scheduled blog posts again. I’ll have to return to them next week.

Last night rumors swirled around a community of adults about one young woman’s theoretical, or rumored, sexual activities.

It’s unclear how the rumors got started, or whether there is any truth to them. No one knows if any of this young woman’s peers have any knowledge of the rumor. No one wants to continue to spread the rumor by asking any of her peers. No one wants to make things worse by asking the young woman herself.

The only thing that is really crystal clear to me right now is that there is one rather freaked out mom who is now mentally going over every conversation and nuance from the past three months.

I am so disappointed by all of this. All of the people who I have talked with are basically good people. They certainly don’t want to be spreading rumors, they want to be stopping rumors. But there is good reason to believe that by trying to stop the rumor, it is being spread.

Rumors about sexuality can have serious, long-term repercussions for preteen and teenage girls. Leora Tanenbaum’s book Slut! Growing up female with a bad reputation catalogues this experience thoroughly.

Almost everyone knew a “slut” in middle school or high school. Some of you may have been labeled that yourself. Others may have been saddled with other sexual labels that held little truth to them (dyke, fag, etc.). But the point that really stuck with me in Tanenbaum’s book was that many, many young women who are labeled a “slut” have had very little sexual experience - often less than their peers.

I tell other adults that young women labeled a slut often are not, and they rarely believe me. They say, “Well, that might be true for some girls, but the slut in my high school…well…you wouldn’t believe what she did!” Often these adults, long out of high school, suddenly catch themselves at this point. They wonder aloud if that girl actually did have sex with the entire football team in one night. They realize that, in fact, she probably didn’t, because anyone having sex with that many people in one night by choice is highly unlikely. They suddenly wonder about their own unintentional part in continuing false and painful rumors about an unaware and awkward teenager.

Now I wonder about the adults who are talking about the young woman I mentioned earlier. I wonder if they have examined their unintentional part in extending this rumor. There is a salaciousness in talking about adolescent sexuality, both as an adolescent and as a parent, but for different reasons. I like this young woman. She’s strong, she’s interesting, and she’s fun to be around. I hope the rumor ends without her peers hearing about it. I hope that this young woman is blessed by passing into young adulthood with no other sexual rumors marring her experience.

But if I am being honest, I have very little faith that she will be so blessed. Very few women are.

Hi folks, I was up late last night on the phone helping a client talk through some emergency family related sex issues. Thus, no content blog post today.

I do education and consulting on issues of adolescent sexuality for both parents and adolescents, so if you’re in need of some support for topics along these lines, drop me an e-mail.   (Or if you know someone else who needs to have that talk with me, forward them my blog - http://www.karenrayne.com.)  I’d be delighted to talk with you, on topics ranging from how to start conversations about sex with your teenager to how to have safe sex and pretty much anything and everything in between.

Yesterday I wrote the introduction to this series. Today I am writing about how talking with teenagers about sex as a privilege can lead to a discussion of responsibility to the physical aspects of a sexual relationship.

Once a teenager acknowledges that sexual activities are inherently different from non-sexual activities, the most obvious way to talk about these differences is the actual physicalness inherent in sexuality: sexual activities are inherently physically different from non-sexual activities and carry certain physical risks.

The question to ask:

“What responsibility does one have towards the physical well-being of one’s sexual partner(s)?”

Not many teenagers get asked this question, but I suspect that safe sex would be much more common if they were. This question could prove to be particularly revolutionary if teenagers responded by truly pondering the implications. While I generally suggest that adults keep their questioning to a bare minimum of one question, if the situation allows, I might try to slip in this second question into the conversation:

“What responsibility does one have towards the physical well-being of one’s own body, sexually speaking?”

I am sure that I never considered my responsibility towards my own physical, sexual health as a teenager, and I don’t think I ever overtly considered my responsibility towards my partner’s physical well-being.  What about you?  How did you conceptualize these issues as a teenager, or how have you guided your teenager in conceptualizing them?

On Friday I wrote about the importance of talking with teenagers about privilege vs. responsibility in sexual decision making. Here’s the first concrete step a parent or a teacher could ask a teenager to begin a conversation around this topic:

“How is hooking up with someone different from, say, playing a computer game with someone?”

This will, of course, lead to many different answers. Here are some:

• “I’m much more picky about who I hook up with than who I play computer games with.”
• “Hooking up can get you an STD.”
• “Hooking up can get you (or someone else) pregnant.”
• “Hooking up is more fun.”
• “You can play computer games with more than one person but you don’t usually hook up with more than one person at a time.”
• “Hooking up feels better than playing computer games.”

(If you’ve got other answers to that question, feel free to share them in the comments section!)

The parent or teacher can take almost any answer that the teenager gives and turn it into a supporting point for the deeper nature that being sexual with someone implies over non-sexual activities.

By acknowledging that sexuality is inherently different from the majority of activities that a teenager could potentially engage in, the doorway has been opened to talk about the inherently different responsibilities that come with it.

There are three areas of sexuality that stand out as needing bringing particular responsibilities with them: physical, relational, and social. We’ll talk about these three areas of responsibility and how to talk about them with teenagers over the rest of the week.

(Written by Guest Blogger JustAnotherTeen.)

Let’s face it, my girlfriend and I are far from the poster children of safer sex practices. Sure, we are not that bad, and try to use two forms of birth control, but no one could argue that they are the safest ways to go. When we first had sex, she had already been on the pill for awhile to regulate her cycle after she lost an ovary. That was at least one line of defense, but I was adamant that we have two. So at first we used condoms. But, unfortunately, no matter how thin the condom, there is still a difference. Sure, not enough that it should have stopped us. So instead we switched to pulling out as the second line of contraception. And yes, I know, horrible is it not? Pre-cum has semen, it is hard to pull out in time, sometimes you lose the will to, etc etc. But it was just the second line of defense so I did not worry about it too much. Fortunately, we got lucky and never even had a scare. Now she is off the pill for a bit and we have started using condoms with spermicide. Not as much protection as I would like, but definitely better than just pulling out! And lets face it, condoms are some of the most accessible and most effective forms of birth control.

That said, I don’t think teens know enough about them. Can they become less effective if kept in your pocket or a warm car? Do the cheap ones in bathrooms work as well as any off the shelf in your local drug store? Honestly I do not know for certain the answers to these two questions (if I had to guess I would be pretty confident saying yes and no, respectively.) But some teenagers know far less than I do about them, and that is just sad. Furthermore, some teens probably don’t have access to condoms, and that is even more sad.

What forms of birth control do you/have you used in the past? Had any failures or scares? Comment back and let me know. Oh yeah, and feel free to berate my bad second line of defense!

With every privilege should come increased responsibility.

For example, my 6-year-old daughter has increased freedom at every birthday.  She is able to stay up later or walk alone to our neighbor’s house.  But her responsibilities also increase at every birthday.  Last year she started getting ready for bed without our prompting or help.  Maybe this year she’ll start putting her own clothes away or rinsing her dishes.

Teenagers too often have an imbalance of privilege and responsibility.  What I mean by this is that parents are too often willing to provide their teenager with a cell phone or a car (a privilege) without requiring the teenager showing an equivalent increase in responsibility (like paying for a portion of the on-going costs or running household errands).

Sexuality is too often talked about with teenagers in terms that have everything to do with privilege and very little to do with responsibility.  In sex education classes, either at home or in schools, adults are far too likely to assume responsibility for teenagers’ sexuality decisions without putting the onus of safe sexuality squarely where it belongs: on the shoulders of the individuals availing themselves of the privilege of engaging in sex.

Next week I’ll write about what it looks like in concrete terms to ask teenagers to fully step up to the responsibility of safe sex if they are choosing to engage in the privileged activity of sex.