What Teens Want

What Teens Want May 18, 2010

Caitlin Flanagan asks in the June issue of The Atlantic why girls are today looking for “the kind of super-reactionary love stories that would have been perfectly at home during the Eisenhower administration?”  Her answer is that teenage behavior is shaped by “the mores and values of the generation (no, the decade) immediately preceding their own.”  Teens want to do something new, but are too young and inexperienced “to make anything new – or even to recognize what might be cliched.”  The only thing they know “is the world they began to take notice of when they turned 12 or 13; all they can imagine doing to put their mark on that world is to either advance or retreat along the lines that were already drawn for them.”

The key moment at Woodstock, she suggests, was when “Sha Na Na took the stage in gold jumpsuits and confused everyone by playing ‘At the Hop.’”  They knew that “right in the middle of Woodstock, the next new thing was already struggling to be born.”  Music set the course, and Hollywood followed: “Only four years after the orgy in the New York mud bath, George Lucas gave the next crop of kids American Graffit i . . . . What else could have followed Woodstock . . . other than a full embrace of the supposedly most sexually boring and intellectually repressed time and place of the 20th century, 1950s America?”

The heart of Flanagan’s review, though, is a sobering meditation on the sexuality of contemporary teenage girls.

She reflects on her mother’s generation, one that “helped build an infrastructure not just of attitudes but of medical services” supported by the assumptions that girls are capable of sexual desire, that these desires shouldn’t ruin education or life, and that the “infrastructure” of medical services (contraception, abortion) were designed to assist girls in integrating sex into normal teenage lives.  Behind all this, though, was an abiding belief in the “Boyfriend Story.”  Her mother’s generation “wasn’t in the business of providing girls and young women the necessary information and services to allow boys and men to use and discard them sexually.  Their reaction to the kinds of sexual experiences that so many American girls are now having would have been horror and indignation.”  Perhaps, but it should hardly have been surprising that the whole infrastructure would have been turned to the advantages of boys and young men who were now liberated to believe they could have sex without danger of serious consequences.

Flanagan notes that in the aftermath of this supposed liberation of girlhood sex, two “cultural tracks regarding girls and sexuality have developed in this country.”  The first is the resurgence of traditional Christian chastity; once the unspoken norm, chastity has become a minority value, and is reinforced by innovations like Purity Balls, Love Waits campaigns, etc.  On the other hand are the many girls “growing up with scant direction or guidance about their sexual lives, other than the most clinical.”  Flanagan asks the obvious question about this latter group: “Is it any wonder that so many girls are binge-drinking and reporting, quite candidly, that this kind of drinking is a necessary part of their preparation for sexual activity?   . . . These girls aren’t embracing sex . . . . They’re terrified of it.”

Flanagan finds the rites of evangelical courtship “unseemly,” and she ends up endorsing teen sex, provided it takes place within the context of the Boyfriend Story.  But there’s little doubt who’s gotten the worst of the sexual revolution.  It’s not the girls at Purity Balls, certainly not the boys.  It’s the pitiable girls getting themselves drunk enough to endure another meaningless hookup.


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