PARENTS should avoid trying to convince their teenage children of the difference between right and wrong when talking to them about sex, a new government leaflet is to advise.
Instead, any discussion of values should be kept “light” to encourage teenagers to form their own views, according to the brochure, which one critic has called “amoral”.
It advises: “Discussing your values with your teenagers will help them to form their own. Remember, though, that trying to convince them of what’s right and wrong may discourage them from being open.”
As I’ve mentioned before, corrupt people try to tell you that anything other than the convenient and pandering is unrealistic because it makes them feel profound.
This tendency toward twisting the truth so the individual can feel superior — morally superior, intellectually superior, or socially superior — to another is what has given morality a bad name.
Actual morality is a form of reverent attention to life. Strategies that produce optimal rewards are adaptations to reality. We create morals to enforce these on those who cannot necessarily understand them, so these people do not destroy those who do. This especially applies to breeding strategies.
Our nanny state is telling us to tell teens to “make their own choices.” We know what this is, if we think about it — it’s that ethic of convenience that says never offend another by suggesting their unrealistic assumptions are not valid. Instead, use passive aggression, and push the decision off onto them, so you can blame them later and feel blameless yourself. “The stupid kid went and got herself knocked up… I’m kicking her out! That’ll show her!”
Brilliant.
I think that forward looking attitudes on sex have been a long time coming and that perhaps this ‘mode’ of hands-off (if not at arms length) redefinition through the empirical understanding of the experiences of our children may be a first step towards acknowledging the fact that simple R-K definitions of sexual profligacy don’t hold water in a world where we are at 1.4 and dropping in replacement rate reproduction while our children are warped by notions of ‘free love’ as hesitant commitment quite beyond what they were in the 60s.
Some things to keep in mind:
1. ’10 is the new 15′.
Not simply in terms of mental age (which I’ll argue is not what it sounds) as an awareness of sex but in real terms of what body stress, high fat diets and social acceptance issues do to accelerate puberty changes in behavior and interests. Shutting that down or denying it’s awareness is dangerous.
2. The Fad Of Bad Is Mad.
An article a few years back in ‘Salon’ mentioned that kids who joined a southern Baptist churche’s efforts to ‘just say no’ until marriage succeeded in a remarkable extent (90+%) at 12. Kids who are given the same commitment speech at 15-17-19 under a similar ‘promiscuity is evil’ premise faced increasingly stiff instinctive biological and social issues until suddenly, around about 15-16 (the actual peak of the male:female sex drive and the point at which both sexes are co-plateau’d in MA maturity) you hit a tipping point. The problem being that the rebellious character of that shared developmental instinct to experiment becoms overwhelming without the associated guilt factor becoming any faddier or more intelligently moderated. Which leads to failure of discipline on an assumed punitive basis of dependence on parental acceptance. Specifically, if you are frightened of it but fascinated /by it/ you tend to have less preparation -for it-, knowing that if you are caught, it can mean negative consequences.
Using a mixed group of class and geographically separated sampled youth such lack of preparatory understanding included belief that non ejaculative penetration doesn’t make babies and anal/oral sex doesn’t transmit STDs. At the same time, the percentages which hit that tipping point flip flop so radically that the urge to do it must, at some level, exceed the partnering choices and dare I say it /courtship/ testing that might have made the choice less desperate if begun at an earlier age.
Which is why kids pushed beyond 15 went from something like 50% to 90% in less than two years and the wait-for-it marriage boundary was shattered without even such basic protections as condoms readily to hand to make a first time indulgence safe. Which is indeed utter madness because pregnancy is a 9 month disease with many adoptive or abortive early options.
But AIDS kills and syphillis cripples for life.
3. What do we fear in our children’s discoveries?
If it is a fixed terror of their growing up, it is time we did. If it is the uncertainty of their being hurt, it’s time we applied some rules, just like we did when they wanted to ride a bike, drive a car or stay up until 11 instead of 8. Here are some I have considered:
a. You will spend 2hrs a day with each other, every day, that you choose to be intimate companions. Having a consort is the practice of courtship, and continued courtship is the art of marriage. Be explicit in what this is -preparing children for-, and allow for no shirking of that reality. Do not impose rules in a void of intent as much as consequences.
b. You will maintain: good grades, mutual respect, utter loyalty and general paired emotional stability. This means that squabbles will not be tolerated if they are not resolved. Adult behavior requires more than simple attention to physical details of safe intimacy. This does not excuse a lack of physical preparation.
c. You will -persist- in this, for at least 2 months before having sex. To include whatever elements of frottage or ‘making out’ seem comfortable to both -sets- of parents and children and with a degree of accepted privacy behind closed doors as trust (a lock to be supplied upon notification of active sexual behaviors).
Upon having sex you will be further commited to a minimum period of 6 months with each other.
d. He will receive sex or it’s equivalent relief at least once a week. She will receive support and interest in activities outside the bedroom all other days.
e. All acts of intimacy will be private, if you’re caught, the parent will deny any knowledge. An unfortunate reality of our nanny state is that uniform standards will apply.
f. Any pregnancy or uncertainty of partnership safety will be -immediately- reported and a probationary status resumed, children do not raise children.
g. Schoolnights will not include any ‘sleepovers’ but weekends and holidays may, to the extent both partners display relative maturity deserving of same. Where multiple children families are involved, it will be expected that any intimacy occurs during a movie night or the afternoon or some other, prearranged, ‘safe time’ so that adolescents of the proper age do not (as is typical) inspire their younger siblings to immitation.
h. Either side may break off the association but to do so, especially with another partner inbetween, means recommiting to a given (shorter) probation. All new partners will have standard interval probations.
It’s not a perfect system. It invites accidents and broken hearts. But it doesn’t create for some population groups an endemic comfort zone separation from romantic pleasure and reproductive duty that is inherent to today’s lifestyle of college-first, marriage-maybe-never existence.
We are destroying our genetic legacy for ourselves and our posterity and the reason seems to be that we have successfully staved off if not inhibited natural drives with an excess of other social commitments that raise barriers to gender interest and create asocial impetus to wait for something that may not be practical, genetically or wise, culturally (parent imprinting is a youthful activity for both sides) later in life.
In the yon elden days it used to be a euphemism for shotgun wedding conditions between discovered immature partners that “Old enough to have sex means old enough to get married.”
I do not hold with this because we do not live in a subsistence agricultural environment where women produce slaves for farm labor.
But at the same time, I do not think we want the 21st Century to be marked by ‘brilliant above, barren below, heartless between’ as the illustration for what modern society does to such vital and humanistic needs, leaving a wasteland of immature uncertainties that prevent the proper and properly timed development of marital bonding behaviors.
KPl.