The cute little couple looked as if they should be sauntering through Great Adventure or waiting in line for tokens at the local arcade. Instead, the 14-year-olds walked purposefully into the Teen Center in suburban Salt Lake City, Utah. They didn’t mince words about their reason for stopping in. For quite some time, usually after school and on weekends, the boy and girl had tried to heighten their arousal during sex. Flustered yet determined, the pair wanted advice on the necessary steps that might lead them to a more fulfilling orgasm. His face showing all the desperation of a lost tourist, the boy spoke for both of them when he asked frankly, “How do we get to the G-spot?”
Whoa. Teen Center nurse Patti Towle admits she was taken aback by the inquiry. She couldn’t exactly provide a road map. Even more, the destination was a bit scandalous for a couple of ninth-graders in the heart of Mormon country. But these kids had clearly already gone further sexually than many adults, so Towle didn’t waste time preaching the gospel of abstinence. She gave her young adventurers some reading material on the subject, including the classic women’s health book Our Bodies, Ourselves, to help bring them closer in bed. She also brought up the question of whether a G-spot even exists. As her visitors were leaving, Towle offered them more freebies: “I sent them out the door with a billion condoms.”
G-spots. Orgasms. Condoms. We all know kids say and do the darndest things, but how they have changed! One teacher recalls a 10-year-old raising his hand to ask her to define oral sex. He was quickly followed by an 8-year-old girl behind him who asked, “Oh, yeah, and what’s anal sex?” These are the easy questions. Rhonda Sheared, who teaches sex education in Pinellas County, Fla., was asked by middle school students about the sound kweif, which the kids say is the noise a vagina makes during or after sex. “And how do you keep it from making this noise?”
There is more troubling behavior in Denver. School officials were forced to institute a sexual-harassment policy owing to a sharp rise in lewd language, groping, pinching and bra-snapping incidents among sixth-, seventh- and eighth-graders. Sex among kids in Pensacola, Fla., became so pervasive that students of a private Christian junior high school are now asked to sign cards vowing not to have sex until they marry. But the cards don’t mean anything, says a 14-year-old boy at the school. “It’s broken promises.”
It’s easy enough to blame everything on television and entertainment, even the news. At a Denver middle school, boys rationalize their actions this way: “If the President can do it, why can’t we?” White House sex scandals are one thing, but how can anyone avoid Viagra and virility? Or public discussions of sexually transmitted diseases like AIDS and herpes? Young girls have lip-synched often enough to Alanis Morissette’s big hit of a couple of years ago, You Oughta Know, to have found the sex nestled in the lyric. But it’s more than just movies and television and news. Adolescent curiosity about sex is fed by a pandemic openness about it–in the schoolyard, on the bus, at home when no adult is watching. Just eavesdrop at the mall one afternoon, and you’ll hear enough pubescent sexcapades to pen the next few episodes of Dawson’s Creek, the most explicit show on teen sexuality, on the WB network. Parents, always the last to keep up, are now almost totally pre-empted. Chris , 13, says his parents talked to him about sex when he was 12 but he had been indoctrinated earlier by a 17-year-old cousin. In any case, he gets his full share of information from the tube. “You name the show, and I’ve heard about it. Jerry Springer, MTV, Dawson’s Creek, HBO After Midnight…” Stephanie , 16, of North Lauderdale, Fla., who first had sex when she was 14, claims to have slept with five boyfriends and is considered a sex expert by her friends. She says, “You can learn a lot about sex from cable. It’s all mad-sex stuff.” She sees nothing to condemn. “If you’re feeling steamy and hot, there’s only one thing you want to do. As long as you’re using a condom, what’s wrong with it? Kids have hormones too.”
In these steamy times, it is becoming largely irrelevant whether adults approve of kids’ sowing their oats–or knowing so much about the technicalities of the dissemination. American adolescents are in the midst of their own kind of sexual revolution–one that has left many parents feeling confused, frightened and almost powerless. Parents can search all they want for common ground with today’s kids, trying to draw parallels between contemporary carnal knowledge and an earlier generation’s free-love crusades, but the two movements are quite different. A desire to break out of the old-fashioned strictures fueled the ’60s movement, and its participants made sexual freedom a kind of new religion. That sort of reverence has been replaced by a more consumerist attitude. In a 1972 cover story, TIME declared, “Teenagers generally are woefully ignorant about sex.” Ignorance is no longer the rule. As a weary junior high counselor in Salt Lake City puts it, “Teens today are almost nonchalant about sex. It’s like we’ve been to the moon too many times.”
The good news about their precocious knowledge of the mechanics of sex is that a growing number of teens know how to protect themselves, at least physically. But what about their emotional health and social behavior? That’s a more troublesome picture. Many parents and teachers–as well as some thoughtful teenagers–worry about the desecration of love and the subversion of mature relationships. Says Debra Haffner, president of the Sexuality Information and Education Council of the United States: “We should not confuse kids’ pseudo-sophistication about sexuality and their ability to use the language with their understanding of who they are as sexual young people or their ability to make good decisions.”
One ugly side effect is a presumption among many adolescent boys that sex is an entitlement–an attitude that fosters a breakdown of respect for oneself and others. Says a seventh-grade girl: “The guy will ask you up front. If you turn him down, you’re a bitch. But if you do it, you’re a ho. The guys are after us all the time, in the halls, everywhere. You scream, ‘Don’t touch me!’ but it doesn’t do any good.” A Rhode Island Rape Center study of 1,700 sixth- and ninth-graders found 65% of boys and 57% of girls believing it acceptable for a male to force a female to have sex if they’ve been dating for six months.
Parents who are aware of this cultural revolution seem mostly torn between two approaches: preaching abstinence or suggesting prophylactics–and thus condoning sex. Says Cory Hollis, 37, a father of three in the Salt Lake City area: “I don’t want to see my teenage son ruin his life. But if he’s going to do it, I told him that I’d go out and get him the condoms myself.” Most parents seem too squeamish to get into the subtleties of instilling sexual ethics. Nor are schools up to the job of moralizing. Kids say they accept their teachers’ admonitions to have safe sex but tune out other stuff. “The personal-development classes are a joke,” says Sarah, 16, of Pensacola. “Even the teacher looks uncomfortable. There is no way anybody is going to ask a serious question.” Says Shana, a 13-year-old from Denver: “A lot of it is old and boring. They’ll talk about not having sex before marriage, but no one listens. I use that class for study hall.”
Shana says she is glad “sex isn’t so taboo now, I mean with all the teenage pregnancies.” But she also says that “it’s creepy and kind of scary that it seems to be happening so early, and all this talk about it.” She adds, “Girls are jumping too quickly. They figure if they can fall in love in a month, then they can have sex in a month too.” When she tried discouraging a classmate from having sex for the first time, the friend turned to her and said, “My God, Shana. It’s just sex.”
Three powerful forces have shaped today’s child prodigies: a prosperous information age that increasingly promotes products and entertains audiences by titillation; aggressive public-policy initiatives that loudly preach sexual responsibility, further desensitizing kids to the subject; and the decline of two-parent households, which leaves adolescents with little supervision. Thus kids are not only bombarded with messages about sex–many of them contradictory–but also have more private time to engage in it than did previous generations. Today more than half of the females and three-quarters of the males ages 15 to 19 have experienced sexual intercourse, according to the Commission on Adolescent Sexual Health. And while the average age at first intercourse has come down only a year since 1970
