The Neo Barbarians

As I write this my spouse is in the other room watching the movie “The Good Mother”. Beside the fact that it stars two of my all-time favorites Diane Keaton and Liam Neeson, it was quite controversial in that it depicted a divorced mother and her sexual relationship with her boyfriend. I recall when it came out in 1988, NPR did a piece on the controversy. What, looking back, is significant is that it was then, the end of the 1980’s that America made a cultural shift from moral people only have sex only in marriage as the cultural norm, toward the current notion that good and moral adults have sex in and out of marriage.

In today’s prime time, there are few cases of married people shown in bed and there is nothing controversial about shows like one of favorites “Grimm” where the star just happens to live with his doctor girlfriend. I say ‘just happens’ because it is not a plot point, any more than the brand of car he drives.

So, it would seem this issue is dead and gone. However, it seems that from time to time this issue keeps coming back. Of course it comes back. It’s no wonder, it’s been drilled into Western society since the St. Augustine’s day. OK, it’s not all his fault, it has been a staple of most civil communities as far back as written records go.

It was thought, back in the giddy days of the sexual revolution that oral birth control would end this cultural expectation; however, in some ways American’s are more anti-sex than we were forty years ago. I would suggest that while unmarried adult sex has become normalized, unmarried teen sex has increasingly become seen as pathological. During the late 60’s and early 70’s, the hippy movement was very much a teen and early 20’s movement. When one reads of the Haight-Asbury community, or communes, there was a high percentage of teens. Interestingly, there was little or no separation between the fact the Free Love lifestyle was about free sex and the fact that there was regular participation by minors. At that time, there was the more historically traditional idea that teens who physically have gone through puberty and no longer live under the roof of their parents can be treated as adults in sexual relations. I can think of no cases in which hippies were prosecuted for underage sexual relations in communes or flop houses. Compare that to today. Given the same circumstances, the police would move in, arrest everyone and put all those who were 18 or older on the sex offender’s registry for life.

Now, as a former social worker, and therapist for sex offenders, I have no tolerance for child molesters. None. However, it concerns me that kids who share naked pics of themselves are arrested for distributing child porn and called sex offenders. I am concerned that what is entirely normal behavior for teens of 16 and 17, has been officially deemed deviant. I did some checking into the research literature, and found that all the literature views teen sex as destructive. The studies are set up to link teen sex with negative attributes, and yes teen who have sex are more likely to drink, use drugs and drop out; however, there press makes the unfounded leap to suggest that teen sex causes drinking, drug use and drop outs. The fact is that the same factors that lead some teens to self-destructive behaviors like drinking, drug use and dropping out also lead to fucking around. What the researchers didn’t bother to consider is that most teens who have sex don’t become alcoholics, addicts or drop-outs. A headline that says Bad Parenting Leads To Early Drinking And Drooping Out And Early Sexual Activity would not sell as well as Teen Sex Linked to Drug Addiction.

Most teens who have sex do finish high school and never become chemically dependent. In America we have pushed back marriage now until people are in their late 20’s and our kids are reaching sexual maturity younger than ever. So we have social maturity coming later, and sexual maturity coming earlier. Sex is normal and healthy for sexually mature people. Sex is risky for socially and emotionally immature people. Thus we have an ever widening gap between social and sexual maturity. Is vilifying teen sex while normalizing 20 year old sex logical or productive. I say no.

I suggest that we as a society need to help our young people act out their sexual maturity responsibly and safely, rather than putting them in a dilemma with which they do not know how to cope. Doing so will make us more credible as guides to the teens and make their lives less dangerous and stressful.