Just say no

[Guest guest]

Janet Albrechtsen: just say no

 

November 12, 2003

Ours is a culture where the sexing up of young girls too often goes

unremarked. On a Thursday afternoon a few weeks back, five 15-year-olds from

a nearby private school came into my local hairdressing salon for a

Brazilian wax. For those unfamiliar with waxing fashions of the

twentysomething woman, this involves waxing off almost all pubic hair. The

Year 10 girls wanted to be ready for a school formal the following Saturday,

they said.

 

Ready for what? Is the waxing just a harmless, "I will, if you will" girl

thing - a fun kind of proxy for sex? It's unlikely given that Australian

teenagers are among the most sexually active in the world. There's something

unsettling about 15-year-old girls trying to emulate 25-year-old women who

want to look like prepubescent 10-year-olds.

 

That same week, newspapers carried the story of Romanian gypsy king, Florin

Cioaba, who married off his 12-year-old daughter Ana Maria to the

15-year-old son of a wealthy family in return for 500 gold coins, a flat and

a car. That was a breach of human rights, said EU social affairs

commissioner, Anna Diamantopoulou. The rest of us sneered at this gypsy

culture, how they married off their young, how they paraded sheets after the

wedding night to prove consummation, how they equated sexual maturity with

social maturity. How backward.

 

How easy it is to condemn a band of Romanian gypsies. Turn the lens on those

five Australian schoolgirls. Our "progressive" culture has done a splendid

job of encouraging young girls to be "sexual beings," to quote from a

national framework for teaching sexual health in Australia. A recent survey

found that more Australian students are having sex than in previous years

and they are doing so at a younger age. Nearly one-quarter of Year 10 girls

in our schools are having sex. The number of Year 10 students who had sex

while drunk or high on drugs has doubled since 1997. Many are having

unprotected sex.

 

For all the cultural leaps and bounds taken by the baby boomers on their

path to sexual liberation, they seem to have arrived (along with their now

teenage children) at a strangely similar place to those backward Romanian

gypsies in treating sexual maturity as a sign of social maturity. The

results of our "world is your oyster" philosophy of raising children -

ballet at age three, birthday parties for 50 friends plus DJ at age seven,

mobile phones at age nine, sex at age 15 - are now in. Norm-free

uber-parenting is no ticket to happiness for the children.

 

The Medical Journal of Australia recently reported that Australia has the

sixth highest rate of teenage pregnancy among OECD countries. We have one of

the highest rates of teenage abortions. Our sexually active teenagers have

poor knowledge of sexually transmitted diseases. And that is only the half

of it.

 

The emotional costs of having sex at a young age get very little air play in

our progressive, human rights-laden culture. A recent US study found that

sexually active girls are more than three times more likely to suffer

depression than girls who are not sexually active. They are also nearly

three times more likely to attempt suicide than those girls not having sex.

Using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Adolescent Health, the

Heritage Centre for Data Analysis controlled for race, gender, age and

family income, and found teenage depression was not so much linked to

socio-economic status as to whether they were having sex. Among the girls

having sex, most regretted their early sexual experiences.

 

With the mounting evidence on the devastating costs of teenagers having sex,

what do boomer parents advocate? Last month, after researchers called for a

rethink of sex-education programs in Australia, The Sydney Morning Herald's

Adele Horin had a suggestion: "Parents have a role in these times: to convey

the joy of sex."

 

The joy of sex? Only a parent from the boomer generation could say that.

 

Telling teenagers that sex feels good is about as necessary as telling them

that homework sucks. Sadly, what is missing is a greater focus on the

downside to having sex at a young age - not just pregnancy, abortion and

STDs - but the emotional costs like depression. What is missing is

engendering an understanding that sexual maturity does not equal social

maturity. What is missing is any attempt to set boundaries, make judgments.

 

Given the evidence, why, for example, are educators and parents so afraid to

suggest that abstinence should be the preferred option? It's a rhetorical

question, of course. Boomer parents, soaked in the scratch-every-itch

mentality, are so busy teaching children the art of feeling good, they have

forgotten to teach them how to be good. They have forgotten how to say no.

 

Most parents happily fob sex education off on to the schools. As Horin

noted, 86 per cent of parents prefer schools to teach their children about

sex. A decade earlier almost the same percentage of parents assumed that was

the job of parents. If parents checked the sex curriculum, they may decide

to reclaim that part of the parenting role.

 

Sex educators argue that abstinence can only be taught as one option, not

the preferred one, because that "reflects the reality of teenage behaviour".

This is not only defeatist, it is plainly wrong. Norms matter, just as the

shedding of norms has had a profound effect.