Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (3 page)

The situation could hardly have been predicted in the 1950s. Then, women
and
men typically initiated intercourse in their early twenties, usu- ally in a serious relationship if not engagement or marriage.
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In a national survey in the late 1960s, the Dutch sociologist G. A. Kooij found that the majority of the Dutch population still rejected premarital sex if a couple was not married or was not planning to be married very shortly. After re- peating the survey in the early 1980s, he noted a “moral landslide” had taken place in the interim, as evidenced by the fact that six out of ten of those surveyed no longer objected to a girl having sexual intercourse with a boy as long as she was in love with him.
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Dutch sociologist Evert Ketting spoke of a “moral revolution”: Not just a reluctant acceptance of sex out- side of the context of heterosexual marriage, this revolution involved seri- ous deliberation among medical professionals, the media, and the public at large—the result of a widely felt need to adjust the moral rules governing sexual life to real behavior.
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Many groups in Dutch society played a role in this transition. In the 1950s and ’60s, Dutch religious leaders had begun questioning traditional definitions of morality. The Dutch Catholic Church—which represented the nation’s largest religious group—was early to embrace the use of oral contraception as a method of birth control.
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The Dutch media played a key educational role.
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With television and radio time partially funded by, and divided among, groups with different religious and political perspectives, discussions about sexuality were widespread.
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Remarking on such discus- sions throughout the 1970s, researchers for the Guttmacher Institute noted in 1986, “One might say the entire society has concurrently experienced a course in sex education.”
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From these public deliberations resulted, Evert Ketting has argued, new moral rules that cast sexuality as part of life to be governed by self-determination, mutual respect between sexual partners, frank conversations, and the prevention of unintended consequences.
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Notably, these new moral rules were applied to minors and institution- alized in Dutch health-care policies of the 1970s, which removed financial

and emotional barriers to accessing contraceptives—including the require- ment for parental consent and a pelvic examination.
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Indeed, even as the age of first sexual intercourse was decreasing, the rate of births among Dutch teenagers dropped steeply between 1970 and 1996 to one of the lowest in the world. With their effective use of oral contraception, what dis- tinguished Dutch teens from their Swedish counterparts, for instance, was that in addition to a very low fertility rate they also had a low abortion rate. Despite the AIDS crisis, by the mid-1990s—just when American policy- makers institutionalized “abstinence only until marriage”—Dutch funding agencies were so confident that, in the words of demographer Joop Gars- sen, youth were doing “wonderfully well,” they decided that further study of adolescent sexual attitudes and behavior was not warranted.
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Dutch researchers at that time noted similarities in boys’ and girls’ expe- riences of sexuality. Ravesloot found that the boys and girls she interviewed were equally as likely to feel controlled by their parents. Large-scale surveys from the early and mid-1990s found that boys and girls were approximat- ing one another in combining feelings of being in love and lust as they pursued romantic relationships and initiated sexual experimentation.
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At the same time, researchers found evidence of the double standard and sex- stereotyping—including the notion that boys were supposed to be more active and girls more passive in sexual interactions.
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To counteract these “traditional” gender beliefs and roles, researchers recommended teach- ing negotiation or “interaction” skills, including the expression of sexual wishes and boundaries.
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A 2005 national survey found high levels of such skills among both girls and boys, which include “letting the other person know exactly what feels good” and not doing things that one does not want.
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Indeed, the same study, which surveyed youth aged twelve through twenty-four, suggests Dutch adolescents feel more in control of their first sexual experiences and decision-making than their American peers, or al- ternatively, that the former feel more entitled or obliged than the latter to describe themselves as empowered sexual actors: four out of five Dutch youth described their first sexual experiences—broadly defined to include different activities—as well timed, within their control, and fun. About their first intercourse, 86 percent of girls and young women and 93 percent of boys and young men said, “We both were equally eager to have it.” At the same time, there were some notable gender differences. For instance, girls were much more likely to report having ever been forced to do some- thing sexually. They were also more likely to regularly or always experience pain (11 percent) or have trouble reaching orgasm (27 percent) during sex

than were boys. Nevertheless, the vast majority of both Dutch females and males were (very) satisfied with the pleasure and contact they felt with their partner during sex.

Emphasis on the positive aspects of sex and relationships—within the context of respect for self and others—is a key feature of Dutch sex educa- tion. Although they set national “attainment targets,” Dutch policymakers avoided political controversy over sex education by delegating the task of reaching agreements on the content and delivery of sex education to pro- fessionals.
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Sociologists Jane Lewis and Trudie Knijn have argued that like Dutch policymakers, Dutch sex educators have accepted teenage sexual ex- ploration, viewing it as the result of societal changes. They teach students to view such issues as sexual diversity and diverse family formations in broader societal contexts as well. Sex education typically covers anatomy, reproduction, STDs, contraception and abortion. But in addition, sex ed- ucation curricula often interweave the emotional and physical aspects of sex, emphasize relationships and developing mutual understanding, and openly discuss masturbation, homosexuality, and sexual pleasure.
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The previous sections show how across an array of social institutions, ad- olescent sexuality has been viewed as a problem to be prevented in the United States, while in the Netherlands it has been accepted as part of teenage maturation to be guided by new moral rules. Why do adults in the two countries have such different approaches? This question is espe- cially puzzling given that, in both countries, the generation in question lived through an era when attitudes toward sexuality outside the confines of heterosexual marriage changed rather dramatically. Indeed, of the two, the country in which it had been more common for teenagers to engage in sexual intercourse during the 1950s became, several decades later, the country in which teenage sexuality remained controversial.

Two factors immediately spring to mind when considering why adults in these two countries who lived through the sexual revolution—in which many themselves participated—would embrace such different approaches to the sexual socialization of the next generation. The first is religion. Amer- icans are far more likely to be religiously devout than their Dutch counter- parts, many of whom left their houses of worship in the 1960s and 1970s. As Laumann and colleagues found, Americans who do not view religion as a central force in their decision-making are much less likely to categori- cally condemn sex among teenagers. By the same token, devout Christians

and Muslims in the Netherlands are more likely to hold attitudes towards sexuality and marriage that are similar to those of their American counter- parts. That a larger proportion of the American population than the Dutch population can be categorized as religiously conservative explains some of the difference between the countries.
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A second factor is economic security: as in most European countries, the Dutch government provides a range of what sociologists call “social rights” and what reproductive health advocates call “human rights.”
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These in- clude the rights to housing, education, health care, and a minimum in- come. These rights ensure youth access to quality health care, including, if need be, free contraceptive and abortion services. Such supports—from universal children’s allowances to college stipends—also make coming of age less perilous for both teenagers and parents, and they might make the prospect of sex derailing a child’s life less haunting. Ironically, it is the lack of such rights in the United States, along with rates of childhood poverty that exceed those of most of Europe, that contributes to high rates of births among teenagers. Without adequate support systems or educational and job opportunities, young people everywhere, not just in the United States, are much more likely to start parenthood early in life.
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And yet, as Karel Doorman and Rhonda Fursman illustrated at the start of this chapter, there is more to the story: both parents are economically comfortable and neither attends church regularly, yet their answers to the question of the sleepover could not be more different. To understand why parents such as Rhonda and Karel reached such opposing conclusions about the sleepover, and how their different household practices affected teenagers, I interviewed one hundred and thirty members of the American and Dutch white, secular or moderately Christian middle classes—fifty- eight individual parents or couples, thirty-two boys, and forty girls, with most of the teens in the tenth grade. To avoid only studying professionals, I included a spectrum of lower- and upper-middle-class families, and inter- viewed parents and teenagers living in households where the breadwinners ranged from salespeople and bank clerks with little or no postsecondary education, to nurses and managers with four-year degrees, to psychothera- pists and doctors with advanced degrees.

In both countries, most interviewees came from one of two locations: In the Netherlands, they lived in or around the medium-sized cities of Western and Eastern City, which are located in the more cosmopolitan, densely populated Western region and in the less cosmopolitan, less densely populated Eastern region respectively. In the United States, most interviewees lived in and around Corona, a medium-sized city in north-

ern California, and Tremont, a small town in the Pacific Northwest. An additional group of American interviewees resided in Norwood, a New En- gland suburb.
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Avoiding the most cosmopolitan urban centers and liberal hotspots, as well as the most conservative regions and remote rural areas, the two samples represent what I would call the “moderate middle” among the white middle class in the two countries. Comparing these population segments cannot illuminate important cultural differences
within
either nation—between classes, races, regions, ethnicities, and religions. But the comparison does illuminate differences between the two countries in the family cultures of two particularly influential groups—differences that are not accounted for by our prevailing theoretical perspectives on adolescent sexuality.

In the United States, the prevailing perspective in the field of public pol- icy and health has been that teenage sexual intercourse is a health risk—a potential sickness, which is to be ideally prevented altogether.
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The pri- mary focus of research in this field is on the various factors that increase and decrease the risks of adolescent sexuality—defined narrowly as acts of intercourse. This risk perspective is corroborated by one view from de- velopmental psychology which sees adolescents as inherently risk-prone and subject to impulses that they are not yet able to handle, given their stage of cognitive development.
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Classical developmental psychology also conceptualizes sexuality as part of young people’s separation process from parents.
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This process, however, produces discord—between teenagers’ im- pulses and their brains’ capacities, between early onset of sexual feelings and their later proclivity for emotional intimacy, and between teenagers and parents whose job it is to communicate their values and to monitor and limit their children’s opportunities for sex.

These perspectives from medicine and psychology do not explain the puzzle posed by the differences in approach to and experience of adoles- cent sexuality in two developed nations. If anything, the puzzle challenges their assumptions. While Dutch teenagers, like their American counter- parts, must certainly navigate the potential health risks of sex, the variation between the two nations in negative outcomes of sexual activity shows that neither the level of sexual activity itself nor adolescents’ inherent biological or psychological capacities are responsible for such outcomes. The normal- ization of adolescent sexuality in Dutch middle-class families challenges, moreover, the notion that teenage sexuality—and adolescence as a phase of

life—causes a schism between parents and teenagers that is often assumed in the United States to be an inevitable part of development. Indeed, nor- malization suggests an alternative model of adolescent development, one in which parents and teenagers remain more closely connected and able to negotiate the potential disruptive elements of adolescent maturation.

A third perspective comes from American gender scholars who argue that adolescent sexuality—conceived broadly, to include feelings, actions, and identities—is a premier arena for the expression, transmission, and challenging of gender inequality. While some scholars see girls gaining power vis-à-vis boys in heterosexual relationships,
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others have pointed out the myriad factors that impede an empowered sexual development in girls—including the sexual double standard that, according to Karin Mar- tin, results in “antagonistic gender strategies” between girls and boys.
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Es- pecially troubling to many American gender scholars is what Michelle Fine has poignantly called “the missing discourse of girls’ desire.”
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Without rec- ognition in sex education curricula, the media, and the social sciences that girls have their own sexual desires, it is difficult for them to develop “sexual subjectivity”: the capacity to feel connected to sexual desires and boundar- ies and to use these to make self-directed decisions.
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