Not Under My Roof: Parents, Teens, and the Culture of Sex (14 page)

I wanted to know her last name and . . . her home phone number. That’s the minimum. You can’t get out the door without the minimum. The other things I would like to know are things like were her parents ever married to each other, are they still together? . . . That has everything to do with socio- economics. Things I want to know are . . . what does her father do? . . . Tif- fany was the first girl that I knew about that Matthew was truly was interested in. I hate the name Tiffany . . . because in my book you can’t get a trashier, white trash name than Tiffany.

In addition to voicing concerns about out-of-control hormones and emotions and mixing between classes, Dierdre worries about her children inadvertently becoming involved in sexual assault. When Matthew at- tended an unsupervised event, she told him:

I said let me tell you how it happens: six guys go to a motel room with three girls to get drunk, two guys leave because they need to get home, one girl leaves when she gets scared, one girl pukes her guts out in the bathroom, and one girl pulls a train (becomes the victim of a group rape), and even the guy who didn’t do anything is also culpable. I said when you smell trouble, just get out of there.

Although, she admits, it might sound strange coming from her, she thinks girls may have become more likely to fall victim to sexual violence because the sexual revolution loosened sexual constraints: “I am not sure we benefited ourselves a lot by throwing out the double standard.” There was something to be said, she believes, about the old dorm rules that made girls keep both feet on the ground. Nor does she want her children to fol- low her footsteps: “I would not like them to have as many one night stands or casual relationships as I had, because I don’t think they were valuable in retrospect. I think in many ways they were not valuable [and] in some ways they were damaging.”
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Having been permitted to spend the night with her boyfriend as an ado- lescent, Dierdre Mears is among the few American parents who say that as parents they have or would permit their own children such a sleepover dur- ing the high-school years. Dierdre also validates teenagers’ experiences of being in love more than most of her American counterparts. And yet in sev- eral notable ways, Dierdre’s language, tone, and reasoning in talking about teenage sexuality are similar to those of other American interviewees. She speaks recurrently of the overwhelming power of hormones, and she em- phasizes girls’ and boys’ antagonistic interests. Finally, although she recog- nizes the limits of her control when it comes to her children’s sexuality and romances, Dierdre uses the language and the strategies of parent-regulated sexuality. She speaks of holding a metaphoric gun to her daughter and of unabashedly intervening to prevent her son from “downward” dating.

But what stands out perhaps most from the interview with Dierdre

Mears is the ambivalence she expresses about the 1960s and their after- math. By no stretch of the imagination a social conservative, Dierdre nev- ertheless articulates the belief that the loosening of the old restrictions has done damage to intimate relations and girls’ safety. In this regard, she is hardly unique. Unlike their Dutch counterparts who, reservations about sexuality becoming too
gewoon
notwithstanding, tend to embrace the gains of normalization, the American parents speak with greater ambivalence about the changes in sexuality and society that have taken place during and since their youth. Their accounts show how the drama of adolescent sexuality in the United States, like its normalization in the Netherlands, is constituted in relation to personal and societal histories.

Several American parents welcome the greater openness they observe around sex in society. Calvin Brumfield sees an “open awareness” of things like homosexuality, Internet sex, and STDs, which used to be taboo. Look- ing back, he says, “Those were oppressive times whereas now that stuff is open and discussed.” He is open with his son about sexuality-related issues: “If he sees something or has an issue, we’ll talk about it. It’s not like you better talk to your mother about that or we don’t want to be talking about that.” Iris DiMaggio has made a conscious effort to raise her son and daughter more openly than she was: “I was not taught anything about sexuality . . . about my own, about anybody’s. I swore that that was not an area that I was going to miss in raising my kids because I got the clinical level, but not the emotional level, and that’s important.”

But others question whether greater openness about sex is a positive de- velopment. They describe the emphasis on sex in the media as disempow- ering parents and adding to the pressures teenagers face. Mark DiMaggio questions the greater exposure to sex in the media because “it puts an aw- ful lot of pressure on young people.” Frank Mast is not an “anti-media” person, but he is disturbed by the blatant sexual references in songs on the radio: “You get bombarded with it in the news, newspapers, and maga- zines.” Jennifer Reed believes more attention to homosexuality has made her sons “paranoid . . . about the idea of being gay.” Pamela Fagan sees the effect of the media on teenage girls:

The kids have learned a lot more about sex and sexuality and the emphasis on it at a much younger age than I was ever exposed to or knew about. I

think that’s very sad. [Exposure] to all these images of young, beautiful, sexy women who have boob jobs . . . just takes away from their childhood. . . . They have this pressure to have this supposed ideal that’s not real.

It is not just sex that inspires nostalgia. Several parents say authority and gender relations were more hierarchical in the past, but growing up was easier and more fun. Kristin recalls growing up in a “more rigid struc- ture than exists today.” But she thinks that “in a way that was a lot easier because I knew what the expectations were.” When Frank Mast was grow- ing up in the rural Midwest, it was “Yes sir, no sir, yes ma’am, no ma’am.” Frank also had adventures that “people wouldn’t think twice about back then, but now you could go to jail [for them]. And a lot of things were harmless fun.” Calvin Brumfield thinks “the kids aren’t having as much fun” as in the past. Back in the late 1960s, “There was money, the country was flush, and so there were funds for all this extracurricular stuff.” He re- calls: “Every church, every synagogue, every school, every community cen- ter on a given Friday or Saturday night, there was something going on.”
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But there are also plenty of recollections of fun getting out of hand. Jany Kippen recalls: “My lab partner was stoned out of her mind and we flunked our project in Home Ec because she forgot to turn the oven on.” The oven incident turned Jany off drugs, but, she says: “I must admit that I was drunk more than once. I broke the rules.” The daughter of a divorced mother who worked evening shifts to make ends meet, Jany did not have a lot of supervision. “Consequently, my kids sometimes have a little more than they’d like to have.” Flora Baker had multiple abortions and does not want her daughters “to go through having to be pregnant.” Deborah Langer remembers having “really rowdy friends and growing up in the ’70s, you sat next to kids that came to class stoned.” In college she experimented a lot with alcohol and was in an alcohol-related car accident. Looking back she thinks, “Oh my God, thank God I survived.” Deborah does not tell her children about her experiences, because she does not want to give them the green light.

Several of the most conservative American parents draw implicit or explicit linkages between the excesses of the past and their embrace of a stricter sexual ideology. As we saw, Doreen Lawton, who in her own words lacked “discipline” growing up, and who was, according to her husband, a “bad girl,” opposes premarital sex even for adults. Donald Wood, who de- scribes his own background as “dysfunctional,” is relieved that the coun- try returned to a more conservative sexual ideology after the “free sex” of the past: “If you follow the trends of say the ’50s and the apple pies, in the ’60s the war protests and free love and the women’s movement and equalization from the ’50s to the ’70s. . . . We saw sex becoming free sex in the ’60s and ’70s and what came of that wasn’t very good.” In response, people started thinking: “Gee, maybe there is more to this family value or

this family unit and this commitment to one another or commitment to yourself.”

Cheryl Tober also describes the 1960s and ’70s as a chaotic period. She remembers “sitting around the family table and . . . seeing Vietnam on the TV and looking at the body count.” At that time, “there was so much unrest: The college, Kent State, with those kids being mowed down by the National Guard. People were just at odds with each other. The generations were at the furthest gap that you can possibly imagine.” About sex, Cheryl says, “Boy, I’m telling you, it was fast pace. . . . It was sleep around.” With her pro-choice position and embrace of gender equalization in the work- place, Cheryl is no social conservative. But like Donald Wood, Cheryl is glad “things are going back a little bit more conservative.” Intentionally departing from the past, she says: “With my children, I try not to be too liberal. I know that my husband had multiple partners and I did too. They don’t know that. And I don’t think they can live the same way that my hus- band and I did because of . . . AIDS and the problems there. . . . It’s scary.”

Like Cheryl Tober, the general public and researchers in the United States tend to attribute the conservative turn at least in part to AIDS.
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That in the Netherlands the epidemic deepened rather than undermined a com- mitment to normalization demonstrates that the disease cannot explain how policymakers and lay individuals respond to it.
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Instead, to under- stand the backlash against the 1960s and 1970s in the United States, we must understand how the generation that came of age during those de- cades experienced change. As Cheryl Tober and Dierdre Mears demonstrate poignantly, even many who wholeheartedly participated in the changing times came to look back in ambivalence. Having experienced the costs of change, Cheryl and Dierdre join their conservative peers like Doreen Law- ton in embracing in part the “old fashioned” rules because they lack other templates that would help them to envision restraint in individuals and safety in intimate relationships.

Unlike their Dutch counterparts who describe adolescent sexuality as
ge- woon
or normal—a cultural frame that dictates the behavior of parents as much as it describes the behavior of youth—the American parents have no unified narrative about the positive place of sexuality in adolescence and about parents’ role in facilitating its constitution. Instead, the Ameri- can parents view adolescent sexuality as a multifaceted drama—in which hormonal drives outdo reason, boys are pitted against girls and parents

against teenage children, and in which unwanted consequences are all too often the result. Lacking a shared cultural frame such as
normal sexuality
through which Dutch parents both describe and prescribe a positive—and controlled—place for sexuality in the adolescent experience, the American parents find it difficult within the context of the interview to speak of teen- age sexuality in terms other than the drama and its drives, divisions, and disasters.
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Thus, for most American parents it goes without saying that one does not permit a high-school-aged child to spend the night with a boy- or girl- friend. For while parents expect that teenagers—especially boys—are driven by hormones and girls pursue an often misguided quest for love, they also believe that such impulses easily lead young people astray: doubting teen- agers’ capacity to exercise self-control and common sense in sex, the Amer- ican parents are genuinely frightened for their children’s physical and emo- tional safety. Assuming that instrumentality, rather than intimacy, guides adolescent heterosexuality, they fear that teenagers will be burned by the battle between the sexes, and that an STD or an unintended pregnancy will derail them from their intended trajectories. Hence, they believe parents should sanction their children’s sexual activity only when the latter have attained—or possess the capacity for—autonomous adulthood.

At the same time, many American parents convey that taking a firm stand against teenage sexual activity is like swimming against the tide. The sources of parents’ ultimate powerlessness are multifold. The drives and desires that they imagine propel their teenage children away from paren- tal protection inspire fear and awe. Although they discuss teenage sexual- ity mainly in terms of hormones and fantasies that are mistaken for love, when parents do talk about adolescents falling in love, they suggest love could derail a child’s trajectory every bit as much as hormones could. Fi- nally, given that sexuality culturally symbolizes the drive for autonomy from parents, and that parents are supposed to recognize their children as sexual actors only when they are adults, it is difficult for them to talk with teenagers about the realities of sex and intimacy and help them acquire the psychological skills to navigate their challenges.

What makes the sexual socialization of adolescents especially challeng- ing for American parents, and what embroils the parents in the drama of adolescent sexuality, are not only the cultural frames of hormones and battles between the sexes which portray teenagers as unable to exer- cise the control and forge the intimacy to make sex safe. Also challeng- ingarethecriteriafortheattainmentofautonomyandlegitimatesexual- ity that parents seek to instill—financial self-sufficiency, and, alternatively,

marriage. Those criteria—and the definitions of adult personhood they communicate—propel young people into the world outside the parental home with gusto while cordoning off sexuality and romance as arenas in which parents have little or no actual input. These criteria, moreover, leave a lengthy gap between the time when young people start their sexual ca- reers and the time when that part of their life can be fully recognized by parents.

This disconnect is partially historically constituted. Unlike the Dutch, who responded to the sexual revolution with a normalization of ado- lescent sexuality, grounded in and predicated on a shared ethics of self- regulation and interpersonal attunement, many American parents, even those who partook in the sexual revolution wholeheartedly, seem to have emerged from the pivotal decades of 1960s and 1970s more lost than found. Amidst a society that was becoming painfully reconfigured, many American parents experienced or saw the pursuit of pleasure—sexual and otherwise—run amok. And without having apparently found a new, post- sexual-revolution basis for social bonds, they became skeptical of adoles- cent intimacy and the institutions that shape it. In the absence of faith in new forms of self-mastery, intimacy, and societal cohesion, parents draw in their moment of need—when asked about what makes sex right for youth—on narratives more suited to a 1950s biography than to the lives their children are living.
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