In my experience it feels like there are two crowds, those who are 'cool' and have frequent sexual activity, hookups etc both in and out of relationships (or at least portray themselves as doing so) and those who are 'pure' who have decided at this point to abstain from sex until marriage, who are frequently Christian or otherwise religious. I think there's pressure to fit into one of those groups, either to go out and have lots of sex or to not have sex at all. There is stigma from both sides to each other, the cool group think the pure group are 'frigid' and boring, the pure group think the cool group are disrespecting themselves and God or something along those lines. If you're not willing to put yourself in either box then you can cop it from both sides. And if you are out LGBTQ then chances of fitting in either group are slim to none. I'm not sure if this is how it is for other people but that's how it feels to me in the last few years.
That's from Caitlin, a member of our community at the message boards who's in high school in Melbourne. This came up in a conversation the other day, and I was really struck by it, how well she put it into words, and by how many young people I've heard express similar things. But there's something else that struck me about it, which I m usually struck by when I hear those kinds of sentiments.
In a word, that whole paragraph could have come out of my mother's mouth, who grew up in the 1950s and 1960s. I mean, to the letter, this dynamic is not one I grew up with myself in the 1970s and 1980s, but which my parents certainly did. If I called my mother up right now and asked her to describe the sexual dynamics and politics she experienced while in high school, what she would say -- and has when we've talked about this -- would be almost exactly what Caitlin, in high school now, said.
We are simultaneously bombarded with two conflicting messages: one from our parents, chruches and schools -- that sex is dirty and therefore we must keep ourselves clean for the love of our lives; and the other from Playboy, Newsweek, etc., almost all women's magazines, and especially television commercials -- the we should be free, groovy chicks.
That's from Our Bodies, Ourselves, by the Boston Women's Health Collective, in the 1971/1973 edition, penned by women in their twenties at the time.
But now and then aren't the only times this has come up, either. We've had waves of these kinds of push-me, pull-mes several times in the west over the last 100 years and more, with relatively few cultural breaks in between, particularly cultural breaks which were very widespread, rather than very local or quickly fleeting.
Public discourse absorbed both currents, the condemnatory and the celebratory, and new sexual conventions grew in tension between the old (Victorian) and the new, between the sexual proscriptions of authorities who sought to control sexual expression, and the sexual prescriptions of youth, who places sexuality at the center of youth culture.
That's from From Front Porch to Back Seat, p. 78, by Beth L. Bailey, who is describing changes in sexual mores in the 1920s in that paragraph.
The increased visibility of sexuality in the public sphere disturbed middle-class Americans, especially middle-class women, who had been entrusted with the guardianship of the nation's morals. In response to the movement of sexuality outside the family, these women sought to retain their authority over sexuality by organizing moral reform and social purity crusades... Other sexual reformers responded as well. Doctors and vice crusaders such as Anthony Comstock opposed abortion, contraception and the public expression of sexuality by demanding greater state intervention in the regulation of morality. In contrast, sexual radicals of the anarchist free-love movement rejected any state involvement in personal matters. By the end of the century, diverse reformers -- women, doctors, vice crusaders, free lovers -- engaged in heated debate over who should regulate sex: the individual, the family, or the state.
That's from Intimate Matters: A History of Sexuality in America, by John D'Emilio and Estelle B. Freedman, p. 140. That passage might sound familiar, like some things we see and hear now and have over the past ten years or so.
But the authors aren't talking about the last century in that paragraph. They're talking about the one before that, describing American sexual politics not in the late 1900s, but in the late 1800s.
I'm someone, due to my age and where and how I came of age, who doesn't feel like she experienced these kinds of dynamics in my teens and twenties. They were there, for sure, but it felt fairly easy to opt out of and avoid, and it seemed, to me, a very quiet periphery, even perhaps something just kind of dangling out the window of the past as it was driving away, not an ever-present din from my peers, parents or the media. It seemed like it was the property of my parent's generation and those before them, not to my own, particularly in the punk/new wave, queer and neo-hippie subcultures I spent my teens and twenties in. I certainly never would have imagined that those politics they lived through were not static -- that there were also periods where things weren't so like that -- but also that they were so very far reaching, and that this pendulum had been swinging back and forth in the west for such a long time. And would swing back to these kinds of sexual politics yet again.
I certainly recognize it as something many young people grapple with now, as it's voiced often, and is often a part of some of the sexual choices a person is trying to make. It comes up all the time around whether a sexual choice is a right one or a wrong one, especially according to others, more than oneself. It comes up around the expectations of partners, or worries about a partner's judgment about a sexual history, or a lack of one. It comes up as a barrier in communication about sex and sexuality between young people and parents. It comes up around access to STI testing and contraception and worries about privacy with either or both of those things. It comes up a lot when people express feeling like their sexual choices are also major identity choices: they they don't just dictate if they do or don't have any kind of sex, how or with whom, but who they are as people, and who others will see and treat them as as people.
I'd love to hear some of our readers weigh in on this; talk together about if you have experienced or do now experience this kind of dynamic, and if you do, how you deal with it and how you feel it impacts you and others. If none of this sounds familiar to you, and you feel like the dynamics where you are and have been have been wildly different, I'd love to hear from you, too. So often folks hear and read older people talking about all of this about young people. Far more rarely are people able to read (or take the time to read) young people talking about it themselves. As always, we're much more interested in how you feel things like this impact you than we are in someone else's third-party interpretation of your experiences and feelings.
If you're really up for a challenge, I'd love to hear about what you think could potentially break this pattern that just seems to keep coming back again and again and again.
What do you think could get people and culture to a place where no sexuality or sex life is a right one, a wrong one, or not recognized as any kind of sexuality or sexual life at all; a place where there's much, much more room for everyone, and much more respect for everyone's diverse selves and thus, diverse choices?
After all, the times there have been cultural shifts around these kinds of dynamics, the people who tended to conceptualize and drive those changes or different views weren't usually older people. They were most typically young people. So, just like there's a historical precedent for these kinds of dynamics, there's also a historical precedent for young people being the ones who envision and start to enact a different picture.
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