Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (7 page)

A few miles further out of town, in one of the bedroom communities south of the city, lies the home of Marga Fenning, a part-time nurse, her second husband, a small business owner, and Marga’s children Thomas

(18) and Rachel (16). A few years older than Jolien Boskamp and dressed more formally in a calf-length skirt, Marga Fenning makes a stately impres- sion. Nevertheless, like Jolien Boskamp, Marga Fenning has permitted her sixteen-year-old daughter Rachel to spend the night with her boyfriend.

When Rachel’s boyfriend visits, he sleeps on a mattress next to her bed. The arrangement is not entirely to Marga’s liking. She thinks her daughter is too young to have sexual intercourse.

Yes, last week she came to me, “Mama, I kind of want to go on the pill.” You know, I think that is sensible. I am glad about that. I say, well then you have to go to the doctor. And then we talk about that, of course. [Rachel asked] “Do you think it’s all right. I’m a little scared.” I say, “The doctor will give it to you.” “But what if he thinks I’m too young?” I say, “Rachel he’ll definitely give it to you. That is totally not a problem.” So we went over there together and I stayed in the waiting room. . . . But I did tell her that I think she is much too young.

Although Marga thinks Rachel is much too young, she did not say, “You may not do it.” The doctor, whom Marga had visited for another matter a little while ago, had strongly recommended this approach. “Never say that they are not allowed to do it,” he had told her. “Because then it will defi- nitely go wrong.” Forbidding is not Marga’s style anyway: “I don’t tell them very quickly that they can’t do something. I always try to talk about things and then usually it works out, you work it out together. And I have to say my daughter is pretty sensible.” And indeed Rachel seems to be steering a cautious course. “I am totally not ready (
er aan toe
) yet,” Rachel told her mother. “But, you know, just imagine that [at some point] I am.” To under- score Rachel’s sensibility, Marga relates a story of Thomas, Rachel’s older brother, teasing her: “When she’s about to go out, he’ll take a condom and say, ‘Here Rachel, take this just to be safe.’ And then she laughs and blushes a little and we also laugh about her, because she won’t take it with her.”

Although Marga doesn’t usually put her foot down, recently she did. Thomas asked whether a male friend and two girls could spend the night. One of the girls would sleep in his room, the other with his friend in the guest room. After thinking his request over for a few days, Marga decided: “I just don’t want to have such a go-as-you-please kind of situation in my house. So I told him, ‘No, I would not like it if you do that. I won’t feel comfortable in my own house.’” Marga added that she would feel differ- ently if the request concerned his girlfriend:

I can’t have such an old-fashioned reaction that the girlfriend has to sleep somewhere else. Then I would be fooling myself, because at night they’ll sleep together anyway. [Insisting on two bedrooms] would feel childish. But, if it’s just a girl he’s going out with and next time it’s another girl, and then another girl. No. I don’t find that pleasant. No, I don’t want that.

In permitting their sixteen-year-old teenage daughters to spend the night in one room with a steady boyfriend, Jolien Boskamp and Marga Fenning are hardly unique. Of the twenty-six Dutch parents interviewed, only two are certain they will not permit a sleepover. The other Dutch parents say that under the right circumstances, they will permit, or consider permitting, a sixteen- or seventeen-year-old teenager to spend the night with a romantic partner. Six have indeed permitted such a sleepover already. How are we to understand this openness among Dutch parents to minors’ spending the night together? This chapter starts answering this question by examining

three powerful frames parents use to understand adolescent sexuality and their own responsibility as parents—
normal sexuality
,
relationship-based sexu- ality
, and
self-regulated sexuality
.

In the process of illuminating those frames, we gain insight into the workings of normalization as an active cultural process—which involves conceptualizing, controlling, and constituting both teenagers and parents: we will see that the three cultural frames construct adolescent sexuality as a nonproblematic, non-emotionally disruptive, and decidedly relationship- based phenomenon. They help parents describe and interpret teenage sex- uality. At the same time, parents may use these cultural frames to exercise control—Marga Fenning, for instance, uses the frame of relationship-based sexuality not only to describe her children’s sexuality but also to communi- cate a distinction between the relationships of which she approves and the fleeting encounters of which she does not. Finally, the sleepover serves as a means to constitute teenagers and parents as people who rationally discuss a potentially disruptive topic and jointly integrate it into the household.

But if the normalization of adolescent sexuality involves conceptions, control, and the constitution of individuals, it does not constitute a seam- less cultural process. Implicit and sometimes explicit in the Dutch parents’ efforts at normalization are references to “other” times and “other” social circles in which sexuality was or continues to be not approached normally. And as Jolien’s account of her husband’s initial protest and eventual acqui- escence illustrates, parents can disagree with one another and with their children. Even when they agree to permit the sleepover, they may be left, as is Marga Fenning, with mixed feelings. Nor is there a perfect fit between cultural language and people’s actions and experiences. Indeed as we will see, parents struggle when they run up against situations for which normal- ization does not provide adequate frames—instances of adolescent sexual- ity that are not the product of self-regulation or embedded in egalitarian relationships, and other instances in which teenage sexuality has become
too
normal.

Contestation and contradiction notwithstanding, the normalization of teenage sexuality in middle-class Dutch families—and in the institutions of education and health care that support them—runs counter to the man- agement of adolescent sexuality, as described in the American scholarly lit- erature. Not only do Dutch parents generally articulate an acceptance of adolescent sexuality, under the right conditions. They underscore that boys
and
girls must develop and use their inner resources and relationships to determine their readiness and sexual identities. They describe teenagers as moving along a continuum of sexual and emotional development, not as

categorically different from adults. Although this generation of parents was, for the most part, raised with a very different dominant sexual ethic, they can normalize adolescent sexuality because they have both the cultural and material resources to do so: they possess the ideal of an interdepen- dent individualism, which recognizes self-determination as a key feature of modern life—but always within cultural practices that maintain continuity, connection, and control—and they can rely on economic safeguards that have made changes in adolescents and society less threatening.

Like Jolien Boskamp, Marga Fenning, and Karel Doorman (in chap. 1), most Dutch parents make an effort to demonstrate both their capacity to talk normally about sexuality with their teenage children and their capacity to regulate the emotions of shame or discomfort that sexuality might evoke between family members. The word
gewoon
communicates this ca- pacity. The dictionary translates
gewoon
as commonly, normally, simply, or plainly. It is important to note, however, that “normally” in this context means “ordinarily” but also contains an intensely, if obfuscated, normative component: to say something is “normal” implies that it is acceptable and right.
2
Moreover,
gewoon
used in relation to sexuality denotes especially the absence of its antonyms: friction, discomfort, anxiety, secrecy, or con- flict, as well as the capacity to exert self-regulation over potentially unruly emotions.
3

Hannie and Dirk de Groot, parents of seventeen-year-old Elizabeth, have been talking with their daughter about sexuality in a
gewoon
manner ever since she was young. As Hannie puts it, “If I can talk
gewoon
about playing at a girlfriend’s house, then I should be able to talk
gewoon
about sex. It should happen the same way as other things that you talk about with each other. You should not think: ‘Oh that is scary’ or ‘I don’t dare to talk about that’ or ‘I have to make a special time for that.’” To underscore her point, Hannie adds, “Yes, it should be
gewoon
to talk about it during dinner.” Why? “Because it is
gewoon
,” Hannie explains. “Because it is natu- ral, isn’t it,” Dirk adds. Similarly, Anneke Schutte thinks that sex should be a
gewoon
topic of conversation in school: “I think that it is good that they don’t only talk about it in the home, but that it becomes very
gewoon
to talk about it and that the school is an excellent institution to promote that.”

Indeed, Dutch sex education curricula encourage teenagers to talk in a
gewoon
way about sexuality, including topics such as masturbation, homosexuality, and pleasure.
4
These topics are integrated into a broader

discussion of the emotional, relational, and larger societal forces that shape experiences of sexuality. One textbook explains, “Your own experiences with sex start with yourself. . . . Thus, you can have sex with yourself, but also with others. You make love because you and the other person enjoy it.” But, it continues, “There are valid reasons not to make love to some- one yet,” including not wanting it, not being ready, or one’s religion.
5
An- other textbook addresses same-sex experiences in a chapter entitled, “With whom would you like to wake up?”
6
And a third textbook states that “mak- ing love takes patience. Your whole body is full of places that want to be caressed, rubbed, licked, and bitten softly.”
7
Notably, this passage teaches that self-restraint is a prerequisite for the enjoyment of the full range of sexual pleasures.

For parents, one marker of being able to normalize is the lack of bodily shame in the household. Some Dutch parents seek to demonstrate the nor- mality of bodily matters by noting, often with a certain amount of pride, that nudity among family members has always been a matter of course, even if culturally it is a relatively recent phenomenon.
8
Corinne van Zan- den explains, “When [the children] were younger, they also went under the shower with us. So as far as that is concerned, we have few secrets here.” Anne van Wijngaarde echoes a similar sentiment. She explains, in response to questions about the sex education her children received, that discussion of reproduction and contraception “start[ed] at an early age, not unusual at all. They know everything.” Communicating the cultural significance of bleaching bodies from their potential to embarrass, she continues:

Everyone always walked around in their bare bottoms and went to nudist camps if we wanted that. They still walk around in their bare bottoms and we are very grateful for that. Because then it is so childlike and innocent. You think, as father and mother, ‘We did a pretty good job’ . . . that they turned out so candid.

Parents like it when their children give evidence of being able to talk about sex in a normal, nonconflicted way. Loek Herder’s younger son Paul is quite open. “It’s not that he is always talking about it, but. . . . Well, when [Paul] sees a cute girl on the television, then he immediately says, ‘Oh, that’s a good-looking girl.’ And then he talks about her beautiful breasts and so forth. . . . Yes, he definitely notices all of that.” How does Loek feel about the way he talks about sex? “The way he talks about it? I think that is fine, I quite like it.” Anne van Wijngaarde says she knows exactly how far

her son has gone: “Harm tells me, ‘now I French-kissed’ and then we be- come weak with laughter because he tells me what he did with them. That is nice. It’s so innocent and open.”

In illustrating the normality of sexuality in their family, Dutch parents often make an explicit comparison with the way they were raised them- selves. Doing so, they demonstrate that normal sexuality is as important for what it is not as it is for what it is. Normal sexuality is
not
secretive (
stiekem
). Marga Fenning thinks it is a very good thing that young people these days “ask and tell everything at home”: “You know, I did not think that was good at all about the way it used to be, that everything had to be done so
stiekem.”
Hannie de Groot agrees: “I experienced it as very unpleas- ant in the past, that it was all so impossible and that it was all so mysteri- ous (
geheimzinnig
). It was really something dirty, disgusting. That is how it was conveyed. I don’t think that was conscious, but that is how things used to be.” It is a good thing, Karin Meier believes, that sex is becoming more “
gewoon
, less secretive.”
9
In Dutch society today, “there are very few taboos you know, in that area,” says Trudy van Vliet. “It is very open.”

But parents are not always as at ease with talking about sexuality as the mandate to make sexuality
gewoon
suggests they ought to be. Indeed, Ada Kaptein was reluctant give her daughter Madeleine sex education: “About condoms and stuff . . . we haven’t really talked about that.” In fact, when her daughter went on the pill to regulate her menstruation, Ada told her, “I hope you don’t yet see the pill as contraception.” But when it came time to educate Madeleine’s younger brother, her daughter took the lead. In doing so, she cajoled her mother into a more normalized approach. Madeleine explained menstruation to her brother and then called over her mother to tell him “the rest.” So, “there I sat telling him the rest,” Ada recalls. And in spite of having given evidence to the contrary, she concludes saying: “Re- ally it never was a problem. We can talk
gewoon
about that.”