Adolescent Sexuality by Dr. Karen Rayne

McCain Women’s Clinic

Another of the on-going and always-funny comparisons between sex-ed and drivers-ed. Because, as we all know, everyone ends up with a lisence at the end of both. And of course I love Zits.

My long-time, very dear friend Alice Fielding kindly agreed to share her experience around sexuality education and her evolving thoughts on pre-marital sex. She’ll be following the comments on this post, so feel free to engage her in conversation though your comments.

_______________________________

The only sex talk I ever got from my parents took place at Pizza Hut one rainy afternoon when I was twelve. My dad set his ham sandwich on his plate, leaned forward, looked me square in the face, and said, “SEX IS ONLY FOR MAKING BABIES.” After pausing for effect, he sat back, picked up his sandwich, and resumed eating.

He definitely made his position clear, although I already knew that my parents believed premarital sex was wrong, having picked up this idea from context. I was routinely shocked by what I read on the bathroom walls at my middle school. In elementary school, I had been shocked when a substitute teacher told us she had gotten married the previous month, but had a daughter who was a year old. In high school, I would be shocked when the girl who wore revealing clothes, the girl everyone whispered about, actually did get pregnant and have a baby. Even in college, when asked by a resident adviser what I believed about premarital sex, I wasn’t able to answer.

My parents weren’t religious fundamentalists. My father was a committed Unitarian Universalist; my mother attended a Presbyterian church wearing a lapel button which read, AGAINST ABORTION? DON’T HAVE ONE! I was even less dogmatic than my parents, and in my late teens felt confused about the fact that I didn’t know anyone else my age who was against pre-marital sex but not for religious reasons.

As soon as I graduated from college at age twenty, I got into a committed relationship with a family friend I’d known for several years. He wanted to have sex with me, and I felt silly saying “I can’t have sex with you because my parents think it’s immoral.” So I said yes. When the relationship turned abusive, I felt lost and alone. I didn’t think anyone else would ever want to be with me; I felt like the dirty toothbrush or licked Junior Mint from an abstinence-only sex ed curriculum. Worse, I was afraid to tell the trusted older adults in my life what was happening to me, for fear that they would stop loving me once they found out I was immoral. The only reason I ever told any of them was that months after I finally ended the relationship, I started experiencing symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder that were too severe for me to deal with alone.

My mentors and friends were loving and supportive from the moment I told them about the abuse all the way through the nine years it took me to recover from the PTSD. I wouldn’t have gotten through it without them. The tragedy here is that if I had told them much earlier, the abuse would not have escalated, and it might not have occurred in the first place. The trusted older adults in my life would have perceived what was happening and helped me, if only I hadn’t been afraid to tell them.

I’m not opposed to premarital abstinence. In fact, I think abstinence is the healthiest choice for most teenagers and many young adults, and I think anyone of any age who makes that choice should be fully supported in it. I am, however, utterly opposed to abstinence-only sex ed, and not just because it’s unrealistic or has been proven ineffective. I’m opposed to it because it closes the doors of conversation between older and younger adults, and that can be incredibly damaging to young people who want to live their own lives but still need guidance from folks who have more experience than they do.

So, go on. Take your daughter or son, or nephew or niece, or younger sibling or cousin or friend’s child out to a pizza restaurant. And don’t be afraid to bring up the topic of sex. But make it a two-way conversation. If you are the younger person in this situation, remember that prior generations grew up with different sexual norms that may be difficult to see past. Regardless of whether you are the older person or the younger, listen. Don’t shame or judge, but try to understand.

Have you ever had an honest, trusting conversation about sexual ethics or decision-making with someone much older or younger than you? If so, how did it go?

I have been thinking a lot about virginity recently.

A sex ed teacher recently asked me how I would respond to a 6th grade girl who asked for the definition of “virgin.” Does “virgin” apply to those who have done a wide range of sexual activities, but have not engaged in penile-vaginal intercourse? Or can “virgin” only apply to those who have not engaged in oral, anal, manual, or missionary-position, heterosexual sex? The essence of her question seemed to be, “Would Monica Lewinsky still be a virgin?” This teacher and her co-teacher disagreed on the answer to the Monica Lewinsky question, and they wanted my professional thoughts so they could present a unified front to the young girl who originally asked the question.

I essentially rejected the basis of the question.

This is a question I get a lot - I get it from parents, from children, from teenagers, from teachers, from grandparents, from non-parent-single-people. Everyone seems to want to know: What is a virgin?

But rather than answering, weighing in on this ridiculous point that carries such extreme emotional weight, I encourage the asker to look inwards and to try and identify why they want to know what sexual acts a virgin-no-longer-makes.

The answer is always this: “I want to know if _________ is still a virgin.” Please feel free to fill in the blank with whomever you so choose. Some of the more common fill-in-the-blank people include: me as I am, me as I once was, my best friend, my boyfriend, my child, my student, my grandchild.

And I scratch my head and ask: “Do you know what sexual acts they have done? Because if you don’t know, then having a definition of virginity won’t help you. If you do know, then why does it matter whether those acts can be defined as virginal?”

Or maybe they want to know the Official Definition for Virgin because one of those people told them “I am a virgin.” But if you have to head for a sex expert for the real definition of virgin, then the likelihood is that the person who said it didn’t know either. So it still won’t help if I give you the definitive definition.

And all of this conversation about virginity brings to mind the very yucky side of a strict definition of virginity, like hymenoplasty (hymen restoration surgery). Judith Warner wrote a fabulous piece about just this thing recently for the New York Times. Here is a quote:

“But there is nonetheless a kind of horror to [fathers who attend Purity Balls with their daughters] obsession with their daughters’ sexuality. There is a dangerous boundary violation contained in their vow “before God to cover my daughter as her authority and protection in the area of purity.” And there is even greater danger to the fact that this particular aspect of the nationwide “abstinence movement” has not been broadly denounced as the form of emotional violence against girls that it indisputably is.”

Warner is basically saying, as I have said in circumspect ways to parents, teachers, teenagers: “Who gives a shit?”

Why do you or anyone else care who is a virgin? Why does this single word have so much power over you? I won’t define the word for you, because I reject the word itself. And so should you.

(With thanks to the Virtual Mystery Tour for the heads-up on this one!)

RH Reality Check has a recent post about two teenagers in Iowa working for comprehensive sex education. They are encouraging Iowa to reject Abstinence-only funding from the federal government. Here’s a portion of the post:

It isn’t unusual for Iowa high school students Stacey Hoch and Venessa McDole, both peer advisors, to speak with their classmates about sensitive subjects. Thursday morning, however, they took their advocacy one step further by speaking in front of policymakers at a meeting hosted in Des Moines by FutureNet, an Iowa network for adolescent pregnancy prevention, parenting and sexual health. The goal of their talk was to request that Iowa youth be given adequate information to make informed personal decisions about sexual activity.

“[It was important to come today] just so we could keep adults informed,” McDole, a junior at North High School in Des Moines, said. “There just aren’t very many teen voices. We don’t have a voice in the community. We don’t have a voice for anything. Adults go and make decisions for us. So, coming here gives us a voice.”

Hoch, a senior at Scavo High School in Des Moines, nodded her head as McDole spoke about the importance of allowing Iowa’s youth a voice in the sex education policies that affect them.

“Also, there is so much more than just teen pregnancy prevention,” Hoch said. “We also need to pay attention to sexually transmitted infection [STI] prevention. That’s something that abstinence-only sexual education doesn’t really cover, because it doesn’t cover anything except ‘be abstinent.’ It’s important for [Iowa teens] to know that there are STIs that can be really dangerous and really deadly.”

<snip>

McDole nodded in agreement before adding, “At my school, there are a lot of teen parents, there’s a lot of freshmen coming in and not knowing — there’s a lot of everything at my school. You have some kids that will shy away from [sexual activity]. But then you have other people who are coming into this new environment and it’s a big environmental shock for them. … Many of them end up doing what the crowd does without realizing that, as a teenager, they are making very crucial decisions. It’s a decision of whether or not you’re going to get pregnant, whether or not you’re going to get an STI, or even whether you are going to college or not.

“Teens are making these very important decisions. When a wrong decision is made, unfortunately, they usually can’t go back and reverse it. For instance, if you contracted HIV, you can’t just go back and say ‘Well, I shouldn’t have done that and I take it back now.’ So, when adults make these decisions for us, when they think they know what is best for us without asking us, it doesn’t make any sense. We’re the ones who are going through this. We want our own voice.”

During their public remarks, the two young women encouraged adults to trust Iowa students with the truth about a wide variety of topics.

“We deserve to have all the information we can,” Hoch told those in attendance. “We need that information — all of that information — if we are going to be able to make appropriate and good choices.”

I am so proud of these two teenagers. It takes such strength and courage to stand up and speak publicly about sex and sex education in a social and educational environment that encourages quite the opposite. Empowered teenagers who not only take a stand for what they believe in, but do so in a way that is effective and influential, are wonderful. I would love for more teenagers to get active in these ways, either independently like Hoch and McDole, or through organizations like Advocates for Youth.

(Written by guest blogger JustAnotherTeen.)
My guest blog for this month will be about 4parents.gov. I found this website through a commercial (they are all on their site) and I must say, it kind of disturbed me. On the about us page, they said this:

“4Parents.gov is part of a national public education campaign to provide parents with the information, tools and skills they need to help their teens make healthy choices, including waiting until marriage to have sex. Nothing is more important for a child, pre-teen, or teen than a caring parent. If pre-teens and teens are going to make the choices that will help them grow up to be healthy adults, they need parents to talk with them about important topics like sex and relationships. 4parents.gov is meant to give parents the information and guidance they need for having these conversations”

To me, it makes no sense. I mean, I realize it is just a further extension of the current administrations abstinence-only sex education, but seeing it so blatantly in print makes it worse. So making the choice to have sex before marriage, according to this website, is unhealthy. And apparently you won’t grow up to become a healthy adult if you don’t wait until marriage either! Don’t get me wrong, I agree with the fact that it is important to have a caring parent, but to say it is only healthy to wait for sex seems a bit over dramatic and damaging even.

“Do you know that 53% of high school students have not had sexual intercourse?”

By their own admission, almost half of high school students have had sex. I know they meant for this to bolster their case, but in my eyes it weakens is. By saying that almost half have sex, and yet also saying that there is no need for anything but abstinence only sex ed, they seem to contradict each other. I mean, is failing to tell teens the ways to protect themselves as much as possible not the same as condoning the transmission of STDs and unwanted pregnancies? Because in my eyes failing to tell teenager about contraceptives is like saying “I hope you get chlamydia if you have sex before marriage!”

“Do you know that, according to one survey, two-thirds of teens who have had sexual intercourse wish they had waited?”

According to one survey? One? With all the government funding going into this project, they could only find one survey that supported the numbers they wanted to use, huh? I’m sure with enough funding and time I could get a similar number of respondents to say that the moon is made out of cheese!

As many parts of the site as I hate, there are some good parts to. In the “What if my son or daughter tells me he or she is gay?” page, it has this good advice:

“If you believe your teenager may be gay, or is experiencing difficulties with gender identity or sexual orientation, consider the following points:

• All children, pre-teens, and teens need to feel accepted and loved. Remember, your son or daughter is probably very scared about having this conversation with you. Accepting your son or daughter can help lead to strong, life-affirming relationships in the future.
• Some teens who question their sexual orientation are at increased risk for depression, attempted suicide, or other problems
• Some parents need help in understanding and communicating with their son or daughter. You have made a great step in this direction already by visiting this website.
• Counselors and other health professionals may be helpful for both teens and parents when addressing difficult issues.”

Please look over this site and tell me what you think in the comments section! And, as always, feel free to email me at justanotherteen@gmail.com !

Last week I wrote about born-again virgins and the Silver Ring Thing. One of the reasons I said I disliked this program was that it suggested to teenagers that vaginal intercourse is some Ultimate Act, and that it is really the only act that need be promised against.

Now, as a disclaimer, I suspect that the creators of the Silver Ring Thing never meant to encourage teenagers to have oral sex. I suspect it never even entered their minds that the teenagers who decided to be “abstinent” through their program would think it was still okay to have anal sex. But it probably should have.

A boyfriend I had in high school, before the Silver Ring Thing came to Austin, said to me, “No, no, I won’t have sex until I’m married. I’m Catholic. Want to go make out in the shower?”

So by the time the Silver Ring Thing came along, there was already precedent for teenagers mistaking virginity as abstaining exclusively from penile-vaginal intercourse. Nevertheless, they continued (and continue) to promote virginity without a nuanced discussion of sexuality. This continues the focus on penile-vaginal intercourse as the Ultimate Act, and therefore the only one that counts.

Teenagers can, and do, have nuanced discussions of sexuality among themselves. There is often talk-ad-nauseum about what Third Base means that Second Base doesn’t include. There are even really good sexuality education programs directed at teenagers that include nuanced discussions of human sexuality. I have even been really impressed with one conservative, religious mother’s musings about appropriate sexuality education.

So I’m disappointed that a program with the funding and the reach of the Silver Ring Thing doesn’t include a more nuanced discussion of the issues. Teenagers are capable of perceiving and discussing nuanced sexuality. So are adults from all walks of life. Why not the Silver Ring Thing too?

Yesterday I wrote about the Silver Ring Thing. Among other issues with this program, I talked about the Born-Again Virgin process, and how much I dislike it. One of the reasons I dislike it is because I think it teaches teenagers (and pre-teenagers) that sexuality is something you can annul. You can deny it’s existence. And, most importantly, you can deny your own past experiences with it.

This really does the exact opposite of what I think the Silver Ring Thing folks want. By giving teenagers the adult- and religion-sanctioned ability to claim a sexual encounter did not happen, they are dis-honoring the sexual encounter itself.

Now, there are certainly times and places where a sexual experience was just bad, particularly in retrospect. And it is very appealing to think that it can be annulled - rather like a regrettable marriage. But here is a time for working on self-forgiveness, rather than denying the past. This is a time for understanding that mistakes make us, in part, the wiser people we are today. Teenagers need education in self-compassion rather than simple denial.

I remember a friend of mine from high school decided he was a born-again virgin. He had had two stable, loving, monogamous relationships with two good friends of mine. He had sexual intercourse within each of those relationships. Both of the girls were virgins before their relationship with this young man. Neither of the break-ups included much anger or animosity. After the second of these relationships ended, my young male friend decided that he would be a born-again virgin.

To me, that suggested that he was denying the closeness, both physical and emotional, that he had with those two young women. What an extremely hurtful thing to do to a past lover. They both considered that they had had sex with him - but he no longer acknowledged his part in that experience.

From that point forward, when asked, he would say he had not had sex. That was a misrepresentation to potential sex partners. It so happened that he did not have any STIs and had not gotten anyone pregnant, but he certainly had had the opportunity to do both of those things.

Now, had my friend simply said that he was not going to have sex again until marriage - that would have been different. Deciding to be sexually abstinent is a choice that I, essentially, support anyone making for themselves. But this “born again virgin” thing is ridiculous.

Several days ago I received an e-mail with this as the subject line: “Born-again virgin.” Now, I receive lots of e-mails about sex and sexuality, but this one subject line really impacted me. I even waited to read the e-mail until I felt I would be able to respond to the subject matter well.

For those not in the know, “Born Again Virgin” is a phrase that began the Silver Ring Thing movement. Here is what the Silver Ring Thing people say about themselves:

The Silver Ring Thing is a unique para-church youth ministry that promotes the message of abstinence until marriage using two avenues- an intense Live Event and the packaged SRT 434 Program.

Now, while I think that abstinence until marriage is not necessary for a happy, healthy sex life, I also think it’s a fine path for those who choose it. It does rankle me, though, when people suggest it is the only fine path, that it is a necessary path. The Silver Ring Thing people suggest this most strongly, and that’s the first problem I have with them. However, this debate is not new, and I’m sure most of my readers are relatively familiar with my side of the argument, even if they do not agree with it.

The more subtle, and less discussed, issue I have with the Silver Ring Thing program is this “Born Again Virgin” thing. There are a couple of issues here:

1. I believe we must teach teenagers to honor sexuality. And denying that a sexual interaction existed, essentially annulling the experience is not honoring it. Even if the experience comes with regret, I think it is more important to teach teenagers to deal with that regret rather than deny the event’s existence.
2. This rising of sexual intercourse to The Ultimate Act often has the unwanted side effect of okay-ing every other sexual act in the book. By promising not to have sex, far too many teenagers assume it is just fine to have manual, oral, and anal sexual interactions.

These are big, huge issues. And I’ll write in more depth on them both soon.

(Oh, ironically, the e-mail had nothing to do with the Silver Ring Thing or sexuality at all. It was about brand new, or “virgin,” stores. I also get a lot information about the newest, coolest things out that e-mail happened to fall into that category rather than the sex and sexuality category.)