Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (11 page)

THREE

American Parents and the Drama of Adolescent Sexuality

One afternoon, a few months after her daughter, Stephanie, started dating a new boyfriend, Cheryl Tober, a dental hygienist, met Stephanie for lunch in a café outside of Tremont. Their talk quickly turned intimate. Cheryl and Stephanie had always been close, and Cheryl prided herself on raising her daughter with an understanding of all her options in life. Cheryl is “pro- abortion,” for instance. “I think that every woman has the right to make that decision in her life,” she confides. “And my daughter has been raised in a household where she knows that’s one of her choices.” Her relatively liberal position on abortion notwithstanding, Cheryl was unprepared for the turn their conversation took.

“Mom, I think I’m ready,” Cheryl recalls her daughter telling her. Cheryl disagreed. “I don’t think so Stephanie. I think you’re too young. You are, I know, sixteen, but I don’t think you’re really aware of what the conse- quences will be.” Cheryl recalls Stephanie countered her, saying, “I’ve re- searched this about the morning-after pill and the birth control pills.” But Cheryl did not buy it. First of all, “Before you can go on birth control you have to go and have the exam. Are you ready to face that?”
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Second, Cheryl argued, “sex is not really important for young people. I mean I don’t think you’re going to get a whole lot out of it because you’re too young and who- ever it is you’re going to make love with is going to be too young to make it good for you either.” Cheryl did not want Stephanie to have to go through what she did when she was a young woman:

I was just in a position where by the time it happened I really didn’t even re- alize it had gone that far. . . . [I told Stephanie] “Guard yourself against being put in that position because the next thing you know it will be too late. . . .

You can’t get that close to it without having it happen. One of the times it will go further than you thought it was going to.”

Cheryl asked Stephanie to put her decision on hold for a while. But shortly thereafter, Stephanie got some unwelcome news. The previous night, when Charles, Stephanie’s boyfriend, joined the family for a weekend getaway, Stephanie and Charles had had their first sex and it was unprotected. Cheryl was glad that Stephanie confided in her, but she wanted her to face the “consequences of her actions.” She was almost “grateful that we had this experience” so that Stephanie could learn about the consequences without “getting really burned”: “[Stephanie] stood there in front of the pharmacist and she explained to them what she needed and what she had done. . . . We had a very teary-eyed girl standing there facing the music. I thought that was an important part of it.”

One of the lessons Cheryl wanted Stephanie to learn was that teenage girls and boys face different physical and social consequences when they have sexual intercourse:

[Stephanie] learned a lot from that experience because it was her, not Charles, who was facing that pharmacist and it was her, not Charles, hav- ing to take that medication and being sick from it and [having] the worry of it. . . . You’re looking at a very small town here. Everybody knows every- body . . . and I think that word does get around. And I am concerned about Stephanie’s reputation.

All in all, Cheryl has no doubt that Stephanie’s untimely first intercourse taught her several valuable lessons, including that it is “important for teen- agers to wait on sex” until they are “financially able to handle the conse- quences.” Tying sexuality to the ability to make a living, Cheryl explains how having sexual intercourse during high school is different from doing so during college: “[Then] I think that they are adults. They’ve graduated from high school. They can get a job if that’s what needs to be [done].” In keeping with this philosophy, Cheryl does not let her son spend the night with a girlfriend even though, at eighteen, he is a legal adult. Her opposi- tion to a sleepover would change, Cheryl explains, once her son is “self- sufficient.” Then he “could do whatever he wanted to do.” His sexuality would be his business: “If he comes to stay with me for some reason and he sleeps with somebody, has a relationship with someone, I don’t think I’d have a problem with that.”

Harold Lawton, a retired engineer and social libertarian, knows one thing for sure: “Teenage boys want to get laid at all times and at any cost. I cer- tainly did.” The same might be true for girls: “Traditionally they say that girls are not that interested in getting laid . . . but I’m not too sure if that is really true.” Harold draws a line between sex and relationships. “Sex is one thing, relationships another altogether. It’s kind of a strange thing . . . be- cause you’ve got sex drives in there . . . and out of it grows relationships that really need to be beyond all that . . . [And] I don’t know how it happens.”

Neither Harold nor his wife Doreen have communicated much with their son Jesse about sex. “What it really boiled down to was checking to make sure he knew what . . . and he already knew all that stuff already, so it was a short conversation. But beyond that, into the dynamics of male- female relationships beyond sex, I haven’t had many discussions about that.” Nor does Harold think more talk was necessary. He believes:

As long as they can protect themselves against having children or getting dis- eases, then they’re ready to have sex. . . . How that affects relationships is something else. . . . Whether they’re ready to have a relationship, well they have to practice doing relationships. So as soon as they start practicing, that’s cool.

But Doreen, a clothing designer, has a very different opinion about sex and relationships. To begin with, she does not think teenage girls are interested in sex. Some girls, she says, “give in to having sex . . . for fear of losing a guy.” Besides, “guys don’t think much about that they could get pregnant.” But, Doreen notes, boys too can get duped. Not long ago she had an in- depth conversation with her twenty-two-year-old son Darren, who is see- ing a woman Doreen does not like: “I just wanted him to make sure,” she explains, “he was careful that he didn’t become a father before his time, by accident.”

Doreen is firmly opposed to sex before marriage. Doreen grew up, she says, “without any discipline,” which she regrets, and was in her husband’s words, “a bad girl.” When her fifty-year-old sister comes to visit with her boyfriend, Doreen assigns them separate bedrooms. “We’re at odds on the issue, actually,” says Harold. He would consider permitting a sleepover for Jesse, who is eighteen (though not when he was sixteen). Given his wife’s strong feelings, however, Harold has decided that taking an explicit

position on the matter “would only cause problems.” Hence Doreen is in charge of deciding their guests’ sleeping arrangements. And she speaks with considerable pride about the “old-fashioned” rules that she imposes in her home:

I’m adamant about it because I think that it’s very important to instill that in the kids. . . . That’s just my rule. I don’t want to project that it’s okay not to be married and sleep together. Even though I know that they’re doing that. But they’re not doing it in my house. It’s kind of an old-fashioned thing, but I think that the boys get it. They know that it’s not okay, and it just won’t happen.

There are many differences in the interviews with the American parents— between fathers and mothers, between liberal and conservative parents, between past behavior and current approaches, and between cultural lan- guages: Harold, sympathetic to teenage boys’ desires to get laid “at any cost” and not unwilling to consider sleepovers for adults, is married to Doreen, once a “bad girl” who now opposes all premarital sex. Cheryl Tober, who knows from personal experience that sexuality can easily get out of control, seeks to give her daughter tools to prevent feeling as out of control as she did. And Rhonda Fursman, who in the book’s first chapter describes teen- age sex as mere “recreation,” also embraces, as we will see in this chapter, the view that the kind of love that justifies sex can happen to her fifteen- year-old son “in one year or in fifteen years.”

But if the differences and contradictions that characterize the American parents’ conceptions of teenage sexuality and romance are easy to identify, a less apparent shared narrative of sequence unites them: adolescent sexu- ality starts early with impulses, leads to battles, but becomes only fully le- gitimate once young people have successfully navigated these trials by fire and established autonomous households, an accomplishment both deeply desired and dreaded. Three frames structure that narrative. The first is
hormone-based adolescent sexuality
. The second is the
battle between the sexes
, according to which boys and girls pursue antagonistic interests. Finally, until youth establish their autonomy—through financial self-sufficiency or marriage—the principle of
parent-regulated adolescent sexuality
applies, lead- ing twenty-nine out of thirty-two parents to respond to the sleepover ques- tion, much as Rhonda does: “No way, José.”

Ironically, while legitimating a more blatant exercise of parental con-

trol, the dramatization of adolescent sexuality is built around the premise of a more radical separation between parents and their adolescent children than is the Dutch notion of normalization. As we will see, the American parents are most at ease relegating their children’s sexuality to times (adult- hood) and places (not at home) when and where they have no say over their choices. And for now and at home, most parents have no trouble tell- ing teenagers what they should
not
do. But they are less prone and able than their Dutch peers to influence the nature of their adolescents’ actual sexual and romantic experiences—which like those of Dutch adolescents typically start during the mid-teenage years.
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More willing to accept conflict over sex between parents and adolescents, few American parents exact from themselves or from their children the emotional work necessary to create the physical and emotional space to negotiate teenage sexuality within the home.

If American parents do not exert as deep a control as their Dutch peers, they are also more constrained in the support they can offer by cultural templates that construct sex as a battle between parents and teens, girls and boys, and different parts of the self. Such battles have been amply noted by American gender and sexuality scholars, who often mistakenly assume that these experiences have been shared across nations.
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In fact, elements of the dramatization of adolescent sexuality, like the missing discourse of teenage love in parental accounts as well as in education and health policy, suggest a particular experience of the transition between the pre- and post- sexual revolution orders:
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An adversarial individualism, according to which people must struggle with one another and with themselves to attain au- tonomy and intimacy, has left parents uncertain about the basis for self- restraint and social bonds—intimate or societal—in post-1960s America.

“Raging hormones” metaphorically represent the notion of teenage sex- uality as an individual, overpowering force that is difficult for teenagers to control, a notion present throughout the American interviews.
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“Hor- mones” was one of the first words that the Tremont high-school sex edu- cator mentioned when she heard about this study comparing adolescent sexuality in the United States and the Netherlands. “I am sure,” she said, “Dutch teenagers have as many hormones as the American ones.” Indeed, for many American parents, adolescent sexuality brings to mind first and foremost hormones. Sometimes, parents connect hormones and sex drive to a young person’s zest for life, as does Harold who speaks with glee about

the insatiable urges of teenage boys. But as often, hormones are associated with dangers youth cannot fully protect against.

Rhonda Fursman can see her son’s “testosterone bubbling.” That does not surprise her. She expects teenagers to be interested in the opposite sex, and to want to date as soon as they are allowed to—which in her son’s case is not until he is sixteen. Thus, it concerns her that her daughter, a high- school senior, has not thus far shown much interest in boys. Fathers like Harold Lawton may go further than assuming sexual interest in boys. They may actively sympathize or identify with their sons’ hormones. Calvin Brumfield had no doubt that his son Adam’s hormones were “kicking in early.” But Calvin also has his concerns, as Adam is somewhat overweight and has trouble finding dates. By the time Adam turned sixteen, Calvin was hoping his son would have a chance to have a sexual relationship because “the poor kid, his hormones were just raging, they’re still raging. I was hop- ing that he would because his friends were dating.”

Yet, if raging hormones propel youth outward toward the opposite sex—no American parent mentions observing same-sex desires in their teenage children—those hormones can also lead the young to inadver- tently go further sexually than they should. Like Cheryl Tober, several par- ents believe that teenagers have difficulty controlling their own sexual pro- gression, and that they must therefore guard against things getting out of control. In fact, to prevent sex, Jennifer Reed does not allow her son and his girlfriend to be home alone. “Maybe it would never happen, maybe they’re just good friends but I just think ‘raging hormones syndrome.’” She remembers being that age and worries things will go too far: “Kissing is all right but I think it can get carried away. It can lead to other things. That’s the hard part. . . . Fondling is starting to get a little, it gets mistier because it’s harder to stop what you’re doing and have it lead to something else.” The something else is not sex as much, says Jennifer Reed, “as what could happen, the babies and all that.”

Deborah Langer too fears the “raging hormones” that have taken her daughter into “the dark ages” because of the possibility of pregnancy and its repercussions. Like many American parents, Deborah is intimately fa- miliar with those repercussions, having seen her two nieces make “some poor choices in life” and have babies in high school. Accounts of lives seri- ously disrupted through the consequences of sex haunt the American par- ents’ discussions of teenage sexuality.
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“Pregnancy you can live through, some of the STDs you can’t,” says Donald Wood. But Frank Mast views pregnancy as almost “life-threatening.” He believes that early pregnancy is one of those “huge mistakes” that can result from “the decisions you see