Thursday, July 17, 2008

That Takes Me Back

Observation first made in my psychology-major undergraduate days: the more titillating the subject of an academic paper, the drier and more intensely academic-sounding the paper will be. The homework reading was entitled, "The Secret Source: Sexually Explicit Young Adult Literature as an Information Source."

Beyond the academic-speak, however, the article was interesting, though it didn't say much beyond what seemed intuitive to me. Teenagers get information about sex from novels they read--not necessarily (or maybe even primarily) biological or anatomical information, but info on the nature of people as sexual beings, what's okay, what's "normal" to feel and to want, and how to deal with it.

I can hardly remember not knowing about sex, possibly because my mother was always very eager to keep me informed of things, even when I REALLY didn't want to talk about them (thanks, mom, and I don't mean that sarcastically), and partly because I was reading "grown-up" novels from a pretty young age. I remember my father suspecting that The Mammoth Hunters was maybe too mature for me, and my reassuring him by showing him the page I was on, all about cave paintings--including, in the next paragraph, a pretty straightforward description of a stylized depiction of female genitalia. My parents are really pretty cool.

I have a lot of thoughts about this--about how awkward it is to talk about these things as teenagers, and how we avoid that awkwardness as adults by letting school handle it, or assuming that they understand the jokes in the TV shows we're watching together, or the subtleties of the love scenes in the movies we're watching. I was fascinated by the questions quoted from the book Letters to Judy, which I'm going to have to run out and read. I would have asked Judy Blume, when I was that age, too.

This topic also brings up what I think is a flaw in the Developmental Assets list, which is that restraint from and resistance to the temptation of sexuality is a necessary part of being a healthy teenager. Not that I think teenagers should be having sex, but Just Don't is not a healthy description of teenage sexuality, and it's such a one-dimensional one. Teenagers aren't adults, but they're practicing to be. So the issue isn't NOT to have sex, sexual thoughts, or sexual feelings. The question for all of us to ask is: what does "practicing" a healthy attitude toward sex look like?

No crude jokes, please. I'm working on this one.

1 comment:

JMLC said...

Actually, this is what I do for a living-- I work with kids who have "touching problems" and the majority of my work is in sexual education. I admit that my group of kids have an extremely skewed sense of "normal" but it never ceases to amaze me how misinformed the general adolescent population is about sex. I still think the power to change this lies in open, honest conversations- knowledge really is power.

On a different note, it sounds like we have very similar parents (and teen-age reading lists-- I loved the Ayla books and I must have read "Letters to Judy" a zillion times).