Learning from Jamie Lynn and Juno

Ruth Marcus of the Washington Post tries to sort out her confused feelings about the recent revelation that Briteney Spears' younger, cleaner sister Jamie Lynn is pregnant at age 16. I don't think Ms. Marcus realizes quite how much she reveals about herself and her own confusion in this article. Her younger daughter, aged 10 is a candidate for the next installment of Wendy Shalit's Girls Gone Mild Wendy Shalit (see my earlier post here) reports that many younger women are rejecting the sexual excesses of their Baby Boomer Mothers (BBM's) who are trying (too) desperately to appear hip. Listen to Ruth Marcus' report of her conversation with her daughters and you'll see Shalit's theory in action.

Okay, Teachable Moment Alert. But what, exactly, to teach?

Mom: So, what do you think the lesson is here?

Ten-year-old Julia, brightly: Don't have sex until you get married!

Uh, um, is that the lesson? Did I hear Daddy's car in the driveway? Anybody want more peas?

No, Ms. Marcus does not want her daughter to draw that particular lesson, even though her daughter is only 10 and has plenty of time to change her mind. She doesn't seem to see that her daughter wants her to set limits. Little Julia is receptive to the romantic idea of saving sex for marriage. She illustrates that again in this exchange:

A few weeks ago, the girls and I were watching "Gossip Girl," the odious television series about overprivileged Upper East Side teenagers. (In a bad parental bet, I okayed this show at the start of the season, thinking it might offer some cautionary tales about wretched excess. Turns out the kids consider it more of a roadmap. But that's another column.)

In this episode, one high school girl was about to have sex with her boyfriend.

Insert maternal throat-clearing:

Mom: I'd like to point out, for the record, that I don't approve of this behavior.

Emma, 12, with an air of worldly sophistication: Oh, Mom, don't be ridiculous! How old were you when you had sex?

OMG, as the kids say. Is there a parental equivalent of the Fifth Amendment?

I am saved by Julia, who announces that I am so irredeemably dweeby -- Emma, she was in the chess club, for goodness sake-- it is inconceivable that I had sex with anyone before Daddy.

Julia wants to believe that her mother and father were virgins to each other. What is so wrong with a 10 year old holding that belief, even if it is a fantasy? The child wants more purity than the mother can stand.
But even the conversation with the "sophisticated" 12 year old could have taken a different turn. I'm prepared to believe that Ruth Marcus started her sex life in high school, like the Gossip Girls character. I find it hard to believe she was sexually active at her daughter's age of 12. What would be so wrong with pointing out that fact? Baby Boomer Mom could say: "I certainly didn't have sex at age 12, young lady, so forget it."
The sad truth is that Baby Boomer mothers get stressed over anything that points to problems with the sexual revolution that we did so much to institutionalize in this society.

This is the conundrum that modern parents, boomers and beyond, confront when matters of sex arise. The bright-line rules that our parents laid down, with varying degrees of conviction and rather low rates of success, aren't – for most of us, anyway – either relevant or plausible. When mommy and daddy didn't get married until they were 35, abstinence until marriage isn't an especially tenable claim.

But wouldn't you like to see them wait until the end of high school? By they way, they don't have to postpone marriage until age 35. You were one of the lucky ones, who waited until 35 and still was able to have two children. Not everybody is so lucky. There is something seriously squirrely with a society in which adults can't bring themselves to tell kids to postpone sex until the end of high school but they want kids to postpone marriage until they are nearly menopausal.

Nor is it one I'd care to make. Would I prefer – as if my preference much matters – that my daughters abstain until marriage? No; in fact, I think that would be a mistake. But I'm not especially comfortable saying that, quite so directly, to my children, partly because that conversation gets so complicated, so quickly.

Actually, Baby Boomer Mom (BBM) your preferences DO matter. Studies here and here, to list just a few, show that parental expectations and discussions of good behavior are a protective factor against early sexual activity.
Be brave BBM's! Tell your kids to wait for sex. There is plenty of time. Steer them toward other activities, and away from Pop culture like Gossip Girls. Some of your daughters want you to set these limits for them.

Girls Gone Mild- Censored!

Wendy Shallit, author of Girls Gone Mild, recounts her story of being censored by Dr. Phil. Her book is about the generational disconnect between Sexually Liberated Baby Boomer parents and their more reticent daughters.

On several occasions in recent years, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy has found that twice as many adults as teens answered "yes" to this question: "Do you think it is embarrassing for teens to admit they are virgins?" I now have a whole email folder filled with tales of this generational disconnect. A 19-year-old wrote to me after her mother pressured her to go to bars during the workweek. When mom packed her off with 12 condoms on a trip to India, the girl wondered: "Am I really going to have so much sex in the Third World?" I heard from a 16-year-old whose parents think she is "Victorian" because "excuse me if sex is not my favorite dinner topic."
And then there's my favorite email, received in October: "When I was about 12," reports a 23-year-old woman, "my baby boomer mother came up to me one day after school, and appraising my typical baggy t-shirt and jeans said, 'you really ought to start wearing smaller shirts. That's what the boys want.' I of course just blushed and mumbled something like 'OK, mom.' Now that I'm older I realize that instead of just being embarrassed, I could have said, 'what about what I want?' "

Dr. Phil had originally invited Wendy to come on his show and talk about her book. Ultimately, he stood her up, with a lame excuse. But Dr. Phil's recasting of the program actually proves Wendy's major point: the young are not necessarily demanding recreational sex. Their parents are foisting it on them, talking them into it, enabling it, all for reasons of their own. Here is Wendy's account of Dr. Phil's show.

Recently, the episode "Mild vs. Wild" finally aired. As it turned out, all the teenage role models that I had recommended were nowhere to be seen. The show was instead presented as a war between "wild" young'uns who wanted to look provocative and their "out of touch" parents.
I lost count of the number of times that the children portrayed their parents as clueless, frumpy or "just old." It's "just two different generations," the viewer was told again and again. One young woman suggested that her elders were "jealous" because their wrinkly bodies were no longer attractive. Finally, stepping into this catfight of his own making, Dr. Phil mused that the kids feel that the grown-ups "need to get with the times." He compared Megan, one 11-year-old girl who favored microminis, to his own college-age son, who sports a mohawk--and even instructed Megan's parents to "lighten up" and give "her more leeway" since "she is a straight-A student."

But by omitting all the younger, more wholesome role models from his show, Dr. Phil unwittingly revealed how much distortion is required to prop up this media-stoked controversy. The dichotomy between prudish elders and wild young'uns turns out to be, on closer examination, largely adult dogma. Yes, many young people are rebelling--but today they rebel, increasingly, by upholding high standards in the face of the low ones promoted around them.