Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (13 page)

Yet, for another set of parents, self-sufficiency in and of itself is not enough. Like Rhonda Fursman, some parents say that only marriage, or near-marriage, will make it possible for them to permit their children such a sleepover in good conscience. Frank Mast says, “If they want to stay over here, there’s a couch. We’ll find a place to put you up. It would even be dif- ficult after they were married to be honest with you. You have to do it, but it’s still difficult.” Flora Baker also ties full acceptance of adolescent sexu- ality to (near) marriage. She insisted, against her husband’s wishes, that her daughters be allowed to use contraceptives. But she puts her nineteen- year-old daughter’s boyfriend on the couch. To her daughter’s protests, she responds, “You can have your intimate relationship when you want. We don’t have to broadcast it to the family. We don’t have to share in that. Should you decide to live together or get married some day, that’s a deci- sion we will respect. But when you are in my house, these are my rules.”

Three frames—like those that contribute to the normalization of adolescent sexuality in the Netherlands—form an interrelated cultural logic: young people, who cannot regulate their impulses and are prone to emotional entanglements that hinder rather than help their developmental process, require external controlling authorities. At the same time, parental control over adolescent sexuality is not, nor is it supposed to be, total. For sexual interest, springing from adolescent drives and desires, is to be expected and given some measure of leeway, as part of adolescent maturation and ex-

ploration. Consequently, even the most conservative of the American par- ents do not prohibit dating altogether, but, instead, they use rules to place parameters around the practice. Conversely, even liberal American parents exert external control over adolescent sexual exploration by prohibiting teenage couples from spending the night together at home.

At the heart of dramatization as a cultural process are notions of au- tonomy. Parents should, the cultural logic dictates, not recognize their chil- dren’s sexuality before they have established themselves as autonomous beings. At the point that children have attained such absolute autonomy— whether by way of financial self-sufficiency or by way of marriage—parents simply lose their say over their children altogether.
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It is not necessary, in other words, to find a common ground on matters of sexuality and rela- tionships, but just to recognize that, as adults, one’s children choose their own way. Until that point, however, letting children make their own sexual choices at home compromises not only the adolescent maturation process but the integrity of the family. Indeed, within the household, adolescent sexual activity and parental authority are conceptualized as a zero-sum game—the former’s presence diminishes the latter.
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Ironically, dramatization as a cultural process involves more overt con- trol than normalization but less deep control over teenagers, their sexu- ality, and their relationships. The cultural frames that they have available to discuss teenage sexuality give American parents only limited tools with which to help their adolescent children navigate their entry into sexual ex- ploration. The metaphor of “raging hormones” may explain why, in Harold Lawton’s words, “teenage boys want to get laid at all times and at any cost,” or why, as Cheryl Tober puts it, “the next thing you know it will be too late.” But the frame of hormone-based sexuality does not give parents cul- tural tools with which to understand or teach teenagers about how to pace and exert control over their sexuality. Likewise, the concept of the battle of the sexes explains why young people become burned by sex and love and teaches them to mistrust one another. It does not offer tools to form rela- tionships. “How [that] happens,” Harold Lawton admits, “I don’t know.”

Conceptualizing adolescent sexuality through the lens of raging hor- mones and the battle between the sexes makes parent-regulated sexuality appear necessary and the sleepover of a teenage couple seem like the abro- gation of one’s parental responsibilities. But the criteria that make their chil- dren’s sexual activity legitimate to parents—full financial self-sufficiency or marriage—are ones most middle-class Americans cannot meet until their mid- or late twenties, as much as a decade after typical sexual initiation. Financial self-sufficiency and marriage constitute, moreover, endpoints on

the adolescent and young adult developmental trajectory, rather than the middle point when young people are still living at home and beginning their sexual and romantic careers. During that period, the American par- ents are often at a loss about how to guide teenagers other than by issuing prohibitions and warnings against the dire consequences of sexual activity.

As we have seen, the vision of adolescent sexuality as a drama, the product of raging hormones, the battle between the sexes, and the struggle between the generations seems to leave little room for a positive conception of ado- lescent sexuality, particularly for teenage girls who lack the tacit approval to roam that boys sometimes receive from their fathers. There is, moreover, a real disconnect between the ideal life-course trajectories—according to which sexual activity coincides with the attainment of full independence— that parents envision for their children and the more likely trajectory. Fi- nally, while the cultural logic dictates parental regulation during adoles- cence, ironically, American parents have fewer tools to intervene than their Dutch counterparts. The very autonomy parents seek to foster before recog- nizing a child’s sexual activity makes it difficult for them to help teenagers navigate sexual maturation and relationships.

One way parents address these lacunae and disconnects is by draw- ing on what sociologist Robert Bellah calls “second” cultural languages.
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These might appear to contradict but in fact coexist alongside the pri- mary cultural languages. One such secondary language is that of romantic love which defies limitations of age. As we saw in the book’s first chapter, Rhonda Fursman told her teenage children that not having premarital sex as teenagers is part of her “Ten Commandments.” In threatening that they would be “in a world of hurt” if they did not abide, she applies the frame of parent-regulated sexuality. But she also says she is “enough of a romantic to believe that for sex, some love [should be] involved.” Her fifteen-year- old son could, she says, find love “in a year or in fifteen years.” Deborah Langer also believes that love could come beckoning at any time. She wants her daughter to wait for marriage to have sex:

But I’m not going to put my head in the clouds either. I’m hoping it’s some- thing that she really thinks long and hard about. . . . She’s already saying, “I don’t want to get married until I’m twenty-three or twenty-six. . . . [But in] the real world when you fall in love or you think you’re in love, I don’t know.

Sometimes parents describe love as so powerful that it wipes away ratio- nal consideration. Other times, they talk about falling in love as a state of being so difficult to attain that one might have to settle for lesser forms of relating. Flora Baker wants her children to “know themselves” before hav- ing sex “because it is a commitment.” They “need [not] be truly in love” to be ready, she explains. But they do need to “care for that person deeply and trust them and not to take it lightly.” Iris DiMaggio says “commitment of some sort” is necessary. And it has “to be a commitment to the other per- son. It has to be a mutual commitment. It would be nice if there was love, but there isn’t always.” Like love, mutual commitment can, Iris explains, happen “at any wide variety of ages.”
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A second cultural language is that of “staying safe.” While the question of the sleepover elicits parents’ disapproval and prohibition, questions about conversations parents have had with teenagers about contraception and condoms tend to elicit their pragmatism, especially among Corona and Norwood parents. The topic of sexual safety—how and where children should receive sexual education and access to contraception—brings out most clearly regional differences in sexual culture. Iris DiMaggio is among the most committed to an atmosphere of openness. She has “had some re- ally interesting dinnertime conversations” with her children. “We’ve been very open. . . . Because nowadays with AIDS and a lot of the STDs . . . they have to know that a condom is something you use, not something you carry in your pocket.” And Flora Baker explains how her realism led her to go against her husband’s wishes and provide her children with contraception:

There is no reason in this world for you to have a child at your age, and there is no reason for you to contract any STDs. . . . Even though deep down, in a perfect world, you would want everyone to choose your mate and that would be the person you decide to lose your virginity to, I think that is unrealistic.

Relative to their generally more liberal Corona and Norwood coun- terparts, Tremont parents tend to approach the topic of contraception in a more tentative fashion and with more misgivings. Jany Kippen’s son “probably knows more than he should: He has a good knowledge of the mechanics” from sex education at school. Jany discussed contraception and condoms in the context of a nephew who has AIDs, but “not maybe as much as I should.” And Carole and Donald Wood, social conservatives, have not broached the topic. Discounting that contraception and condoms might protect their daughter against pregnancy and disease, Donald Wood explains the message he has communicated: “You need to think about it

because if you make this decision now and you get pregnant, this is where you’re going. If you make this decision and you get a venereal disease, this is where you’re going.” Were her daughter to have sex before marriage, Carole’s position would be:

She would have to support herself. I would not be able to support her finan- cially, maybe emotionally but not financially. . . . If she decided that she was going to have a child or she was going to take the risk of having a child, I wouldn’t be able to have her live here and have the child and just have a free ride. I couldn’t do that because my warning to her was . . . the consequence for doing it is probably the worst. You’re on your own. You make a decision and you live by it.

At the other end of the political spectrum from the Woods is Dierdre Mears. Having come of age in the San Francisco Bay area during the 1960s and still a Northern California resident, Dierdre remains more radical than many of her friends. Her parents were pretty liberal. “We were in Planned Parenthood,” explains Dierdre’s mother, Molly, who lives with Dierdre’s family today. When Dierdre became sexually active at sixteen, Molly wasn’t thrilled about it, but, she says, “I didn’t freak out like my friends were.” When Dierdre’s boyfriend got kicked out of his own house, he even moved in with the family: “He had the room upstairs. And the way I was looking at it, at least she was getting some needs met, and at least they could fo- cus on their studies. They didn’t have to do this silly adolescent stuff.” The good thing about the arrangement, says Molly, is that her daughter was not running around and that at least she knew where she was.

Dierdre feels the same way and would permit her son and daughter a sleepover: “I think that parents frequently live in an illusion that they can control their kids’ behavior and certainly they can influence it, and I be- lieve that they should. But it is actually extremely difficult to control.” She knows her experience and position are not common: “It was extraordinarily unusual then, but it is still unusual now. . . . I think that parents are terri- fied of their kids’ sexuality, mostly because they realize how little control they have over it. I think that adolescents really are completely hormon- ally driven.” Dierdre opposes sexual intercourse during the early teens, but she is more approving of teenage sexual relationships “somewhere around sixteen or seventeen, somewhere around junior or senior year . . . [when]

people kind of start pairing up and have a steady relationship and kind of start practicing those skills, [then] it is not necessarily a bad idea.”

Dierdre also gives more credence than many American parents to teen- agers’ feelings of being in love. She knows they “absolutely believe they are in love” and they are “capable of phenomenally intense feelings.” And she says, “their direct experience is unbeatable and ungovernable and a riot in the heart.” At the same time she wonders whether these feelings are hormone- based. She thinks that “culturally we cloak [hormonal forces] within the context of the romantic, so we dress it up and I mean, the question is, is love really biochemical?” She is, moreover, wary of teenagers’ relationships with each other: “I think that is very easy for girls to manipulate boys and vice versa.” She also sees costs: “You got a girl who’s sixteen, seventeen, and is kind of doing okay, makes going to the JC, doesn’t have any really good plans, and then she gets a boyfriend. And then they fall in love and then her life becomes his life. . . . Why do I know that? Because I did that.”

Nor is it just girls she sees being easily derailed by their hormones and emotions. Like Doreen Lawton, who was concerned about her twenty-two- year-old son becoming a father before his time with a girlfriend she did not like, Dierdre is more concerned about her son than her daughter. Were the latter to come home pregnant at sixteen, Dierdre says, “I could put a gun to her and say you don’t want to continue this pregnancy, though I mean that only emotionally.” But what really frightens her is that, she admits, “I can- not exert that same kind of control over whoever Matthew interacts with.” She is acutely aware that whether or not teenage girls become mothers has to do with their educational opportunities and aspirations. Therefore, to exert as much control as she can, Dierdre would not let Matthew go on a date without answers to the “who, what, where” questions. As she explains the questions she asks, she is more upfront than any parent interviewed about her concern that romance could take her son over to the wrong side of the track: